Any whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts; a metal chain is the sum of its links. For the United Nations - a world organization whose mission is devoted to the continuity of world peace - its parts are countries. As a chain is only as strong as its links, the UN's resolve to fulfill its mission is only as strong as the commitment of its member nations.
Writer and Director Paul Cowen's The Peacekeepers, is a documentary covering one of the UN's peacekeeping missions from 2002 to 2004. The film flips from the political struggle of UN officials, to the life and death struggles of the country they are trying to save from itself – the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Images of measured conversation in UN board rooms contrast sharply with machete-hacked corpses and children bearing guns in the failed nation-state. Peacekeepers makes painfully clear that in the Congo, while wealthy nations argue over who should take responsibility, innocents are dying.
Despite its violent imagery, Peacekeepers is less about the particular conflicts of an African nation than it is about the conflict between the desires of the First World to lift Africa out of self-destruction and its desires to invest its money and people in more pressing matters: like Iraq and world terrorism. It seems lip service to world peace is standard among the big five: America, France, Britain, China and Germany, but when it comes to action, movement is slow.
Peacekeepers opens with President Bush addressing the United Nations General Assembly at its New York headquarters. He asks, “Will the UN address the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant”? He should have asked, “Will the UN's members live up to their pledge of ensuring global peace, or will they allow war to disintegrate an African nation in desperate need of intervention, because they are too busy with their own affairs?”
Cowan's documentary makes palpable the frustrations of the UN officials charged with saving lives and ensuring peace, when the means to accomplish their mission lie with countries whose attentions are elsewhere. Where the officials could be directing troops and aid to stop the Congo massacre, they are instead shown training local police and law enforcement in effort to convince wealthier countries to contribute money.
There is some relief in the film, when the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations successfully convinces America, France and other countries to supply troops and funds. We see images of UN tanks and troops moving in to restore peace and order. One of the final shots is the reopening of the Congo parliament. It is a hopeful sight in a bittersweet ending.
The world cavalry did ride in and stop the Congo massacre before it became another Rwanda, but it took two years to get there. Peacekeepers documents every step of that tortured progress and preserves forever the images of those who could have been saved by more decisive action. YYYY1/2
