THE Suez Canal crisis of October 1956 gave birth to the first United Nations peacekeeping operations.
This historic development was made possible mainly through the vision, resourcefulness and determination of the then UN secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld and Lester Pearson, who was at the time secretary for external affairs of Canada.
Named the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), the peacekeeping unit was established on Nov 15, 1956 to put an end to hostilities, including the withdrawal of the armed forces of France, Israel and the United Kingdom from Egyptian territory.
Two countries — Indonesia and Malaysia — played a critical role in keeping peace in the Middle East.
Indonesia’s Garuda Contingent, was deployed in Egypt and Israel in November 1956 as part of UNEF, while the Malayan Special Force (MSF) was sent to Congo in July 1960 in what was called Opération des Nations Unies au Congo or ONUC.
The deployment of the Malaysian armed forces in the various UN peacekeeping operations since 1960 has earned our country international recognition, especially for its peacekeeping through intercultural peace efforts. Cultural differences can and do act as barriers to peacekeeping as demonstrated by the disastrous example of the military personnel of UNEF from Denmark, Norway and Canada deployed in Egypt in 1956.
On the first evening UNEF was deployed in Gaza, its peacekeeping troops sprayed machine-gun fire on a minaret from where a muezzin (a person who calls for prayer) was calling the faithful to prayer using a loudspeaker. The UNEF soldiers, understanding neither Arabic nor Islam’s Fajr prayer, had mistaken this as a call for illegal assembly. This disaster clearly highlighted Western peacekeepers’ very poor understanding of other cultures and their religions.
Acknowledging its mistake in the UNEF affair, the UN Security Council began sending troops from Afro-Asian nations for peacekeeping missions in Congo in 1960. And so began our MSF’s significant role in ONUC.
And it didn’t take our MSF troops too long to earn the accolade of being the most efficient among the UN peacekeepers serving in Congo.
Reasons were not hard to find. Our MSF troops were well-prepared for the task of peacekeeping at home. We had very dedicated troops and committed leadership to boot.
Our MSF was led by Lt-Col Ungku Nazaruddin bin Ungku Mohammed (later promoted to be the chief of General Staff with the rank of Lt-Gen.)
With our troops’ reputation for peacekeeping reaching the ears of people who matter in the UN, our armed forces began to be deployed in Somalia ll ( UNOSOM ll) on Dec 6, 1992 under the leadership of Colonel Abdul Latiff Ahmad.
Our troops were in Mogadishu, Somalia, to undo all the things the not-so-culturally savvy troops from the West did.
Earlier, Mogadishu was a scene of bloody war between the peacekeepers from the West and the locals. Again, our armed forces proved themselves to be culturally savvy and ready to serve wherever they were needed.
Our armed forces did not have to wait for long. On Sept 24, 1993, they was called in to rescue seven stranded American airmen after their Black Hawk helicopter was shot down by Somali militia. After a six-hour battle with the Somali militia, our armed forces rescued the Americans.
Sadly, one armed forces soldier was killed and eight injured in the long-drawn-out clash with the heavily armed militia.
Our troops have shown to the world’s peacekeepers the importance of not only being adept at using arms, but also the need to be culturally savvy in bringing peace to places very different from home.
Today, the UN, too, has become more attuned to being culturally savvy and now the world body has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards abuse by peacekeeping troops. It is not uncommon for the world body today to, now and then, issue bulletins to member countries to that effect.
Our armed forces may not want to take all the credit for making the world’s peacekeepers more culturally savvy than they were before, but it would be unjust to say that our troops had nothing to do with it.
Col Ramli H Nik (R) is a senior fellow with the Department of Strategic Studies, National Defence University of Malaysia, and former military adviser at the Permanent Mission of Malaysia to the UN in New York