Background

General Rikhye, welcome to Berkeley. I thought I would begin by asking you how you originally chose a military career. What led you to that decision?

This is the colonial history of India, pre-independence India. It was a very challenging a career, very difficult to get into. A very small number of Indians were being taken, and certainly the number being taken from universities was even smaller. Therefore, it was highly competitive. There was an all-India competition and every six months, only fifteen were taken from the universities. I was very lucky to be one of the fifteen.

We normally associate the military with nationalism, but your career represents the movement to work in the military for international purposes. How did that transition come about?

I did start working for the military as part of my own national aspirations and my desire to serve my own country, particularly when we anticipated that we would be moving toward independence and that I would therefore be able to play a suitable role in a free India. I'm very glad that I did have the opportunity to do that. But my move into international affairs was again, strictly a part of India's own foreign policy. India has three major roles for its armed forces: the defense of the nation; aid to civil power; and support for the United Nations. As part of that, the Indian army troops were sent to the Middle East after the Suez War in 1956, and I was sent in command of the Indian contingent. Shortly thereafter, I was very fortunate in being appointed the chief of staff to the force, and that gave me a beginning in my international career.

In the course of your career in the UN, you were involved in many of the historic missions of the UN -- Cyprus, the Middle East, and so on. Which was the most difficult peacekeeping effort in retrospect?

Generally speaking, I thought the Congo operation was the most difficult one from a management point of view. I was then the military advisor to Hammarskjöld, and, after his death, U Thant kept me on as his military advisor. Not only did my position as military advisor make me responsible for the overall conduct of the operations, I was asked to carry out several special missions, both by Hammarskjöld and by U Thant. For instance, I was the major negotiator with Moise Tschombe after he had seceded the province of Katanga. I was the main contact with Joseph Mobutu, who is now the President of Zaire.

There were a number of other special assignments. I found each one of them challenging, very difficult. Sometimes we were successful and sometimes we were not.

My second assignment, which I thought was a most difficult one, was that I was in command of the UN Emergency Force [UNEF] in Gaza, and out of the blue I received a request from the Egyptian government to move my troops out of the Sinai as the Egyptians had decided to bring their forces into the Sinai, to get close up to the front with Israel. This, as you know, eventually led to the withdraw of the UN Emergency Force. Some 3,800 men had to be evacuated in the middle of battle. We lost quite a few, we suffered heavily in human casualties. We lost all our equipment. The evacuation presented enormous problems.

What was even more difficult was the ability to sustain the morale of my force when we were being attacked by everyone. We were being attacked by the Palestinians, the Egyptians, and the Israelis. Nobody paid the least attention to the fact that we were there. They were fighting a war for their very survival. They were not interested in what was happening to us. In that period, commanding was made even more complex because our troops had the capability to fight. It was not intended that we should fight. Certainly we could defend our certain positions, but that would have been contrary to the spirit of the United Nations. Therefore, we had no other choice but to remain nonviolent and hope for the best. So I was glad when we were finally able to get the troops out of the area.

A key element from this incident, from this experience, would seem to be the fragility of the legitimacy of a peacekeeping body. In other words, you're embedded in a political context in which you have to maintain the legitimacy in the eyes of all the parties who are involved.

Exactly, as long as we understand that the role of any peacekeeping force is another tool in the diplomatic process. Peacekeeping, as we define it, (and you could find that in our book, The Thin Blue Line) is about creating conditions where fighting stops and it is possible to resume diplomacy. Peacekeeping is not the end of a problem, it is only the beginning of the end. Peacekeeping does not succeed if that time which it makes available is not used to the best advantage to resolve the political aspects of a conflict.

Peacekeeping may be done by the United Nations or regional organizations like the OAS in the Dominican Republic, or the Organization of African Unity in Chad. And now we have two examples of multinational forces outside the United Nations arrangements. The one in the Sinai, which has had a very quiet period because it is simply observing a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt -- both countries are committed to peace. This peacekeeping unit was introduced was to give a degree of confidence for a specific period, until the two countries are able to arrive at complete normalization of their relations. It assures them that there is another third party present, and that nobody's likely to take advantage of it. So it gives them time when they can settle down and arrive at their new relationship.

The peacekeeping force introduced in Beirut is no different from the peacekeeping force which has been supplied by the UN in southern Lebanon, because you have seen already, you have already witnessed, that violations do take place. You heard about the incident of the Israeli tanks attempting to go through the Marine positions. They were not stopped on the basis of the fact that there was a military presence of United States troops, they were stopped by political reservations.

The whole crux of peacekeeping is that it is not made any safer when it is done outside the UN, it is not made any stronger when it is done by the great powers. All we are doing is bringing together the will of the nations who want to support that particular political action, the willingness of the parties involved in the conflict to cooperate. If the willingness of the parties to cooperate is absent, it doesn't matter who is providing the troops.

Next page: Civil Wars