The Foreign Service Journal, September 2006

F O C U S 52 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 6 involvement there is by high government officials in busi- ness, the more corruption and cronyism proliferate, and the more pitfalls there are for U.N. officials. One of the objectives of the “Economic Impact of Peacekeeping” project is to measure the impact of PKO spending on host-government revenue and to explore the potential for making this influence more positive. It was primarily in this connection that I sought meetings with government officials, but I cannot say the results were encouraging. The mere logistics of setting up meetings in most of these government offices was daunting. When I did suc- ceed in talking to host-country officials, there were usu- ally a lot of complaints that the U.N. should be providing more funds and projects but, in contrast to the private- sector meetings, little in the way of constructive sugges- tions. Finding officials who could speak authoritatively about tax issues was especially challenging. One of the more forthcoming officials in the Congo acknowledged that the country’s tax collection system was largely dys- functional. There, as in other countries where the rule of law is weak, tax officials appeared to focus on harassing high-profile foreign enterprises with unreasonable demands for special payments, helping to chill foreign investment. The manager of a foreign-owned hotel doing significant business with the U.N. mission showed us a thick notebook recording his frequent dealings with host- country tax officials who showed up monthly to demand exorbitant payments. Given this reality, the issue of whether U.N. missions contribute to government revenues seems secondary to the need for international assistance to fix the broken host-country revenue collection and spending mechan- isms. A common criticism of PKOs (and of diplomatic, international agency and NGO operations in these coun- tries) is that they tend to outbid the local governments and recruit all the most able, educated local personnel, undermining attempts to improve governance. Typical was the complaint from a businessman in Burundi that the U.N. mission was “paying drivers the salaries of Cabinet ministers and casual laborers the wages of expe- rienced civil servants.” While these inflated wage levels did seem to affect local businesses, depriving them of tal- ent or forcing them to raise their own pay scales to com- pete, most knowledgeable observers did not see much effect on governments, noting that these governments were so dysfunctional that they were unable to effective- ly utilize skilled civil servants in any case. Some contacts complained that the economic impact of such missions (and again, this extended to all interna- tional entities) was merely to further enrich local elites or, even worse, to further the business interests of those associated with forces actually seeking to undermine the U.N.’s objectives. Seasoned observers agreed that, par- ticularly in regard to real estate, the need to deal with possibly corrupt local elites, many of whom immediately sent the resulting income to overseas bank accounts, was an unavoidable fact of life in these settings. Many con- tacts also pointed out that in highly polarized post-con- flict states, some with serious ethnic divisions, PKO hir- ing and procurement decisions unavoidably had the potential for political fallout. This would seem to argue for some input from the political section into the procurement process, but in most missions this was not happening. “The last thing we want to do is involve political affairs in these (administra- tive) issues,” said a very senior official at one mission. As a former mission political affairs director myself, I can sympathize with the desire of already overburdened offi- cers to avoid still another meeting or clearance process. But it would seem that if the PKOs are to improve their economic impact, there has to be an increased awareness of who is who among the beneficiaries in these societies, and how such local expenditures can serve or detract from the missions’ overall objectives. Local Personnel: A Critical but Controversial Component A significant component of PKO local economic impact is the hiring of local personnel. It was in this realm that I found the most divergence in practice and viewpoints among the various missions. Some personnel managers were actively encouraging recruitment of sig- nificant numbers of national professional officers (local personnel meeting international standards who are much more highly paid than other local personnel), while oth- ers were quite negative toward the idea. In some mis- sions local personnel were found in all sections; at others they were not permitted in the more sensitive offices. Having worked in East Timor where there was a dearth of local human resources, I found it striking that all these other missions had access to a very ample, qualified (often overqualified) pool of local talent, with dozens of