FORCE 7F HOPE

  

FORCE INVESTMENTS A Platform to Support Responsible Sourcing, Peacebuilding, and Community Development

Abstract

LES^SENCE swiss sustainable group is a platform that supports companies, civil society organizations, and governments working together to responsibly source minerals from regions experiencing conflict where market access is limited by opaque supply chains. 

CHALLENGE

Responsible sourcing from conflict-prone regions is challenging, particularly for downstream companies and stakeholders. Yet in many regions responsible development is an essential part of a post-conflict transition strategy. Differentiation of conflict-free commodities from these regions typically requires proactive and collaborative supply chain interventions that align downstream companies’ needs for compliance and risk management with regional stakeholders’ needs for development. While government regulations can enhance supply chain transparency, a purely regulatory response can lead to unintended consequences. For example, without a parallel in-region development strategy, a regulatory approach to conflict minerals could discourage downstream companies from sourcing minerals from the very regions the policies are meant to assist.

With additional regulatory action anticipated in the minerals sector, and with increasing consumer pressure on global companies to go beyond legislative requirements to ensure conflict-free sourcing, there is a need to learn from and expand existing voluntary initiatives to bolster capacity for verified conflict-free sourcing across the globe.

BENEFITS 

LES^SENCE Solutions opportunities for dialogue and shared learning across geographies and across minerals. By building shared knowledge, a LES^SENCE platform helps to identify those challenges that are consistent across minerals, geographies, and political contexts. By developing a catalogue of potential solutions to these challenges, such a platform can fast-track solutions in new contexts by jumping to discussions about how to adapt existing models, rather than starting from scratch. Similarly, in developing an index of unseen challenges that arise in each new location, this platform will build an ever-improving set of guidance, expediting and enhancing the development of each new supply chain.

A common platform also creates opportunities for streamlined administration and sourcing. As FORCE program expands within regions, there may be opportunities to consolidate auditing, shipping, training, and administrative expenses across minerals from each region. As these supply chains grow globally, a broader umbrella brand can offer a “one-stop shopping” approach to companies seeking to source any of the 3Ts or gold. A broader FORCE program also offers opportunities for increased reporting efficiency and streamlined implementationof due diligence policies across minerals and other commodities.

CONFLICTS

The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers believes that more than
320 000 children under 18 years of age are currently participating in armed conflicts throughout Africa. Some of these children are no more than seven or eight years old. The countries most affected by this problem are Algeria, Angola, Burundi, Congo-Brazzaville, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Uganda.

In these countries, children are recruited by government armed forces almost as a matter of course. Some children do volunteer to join the armed forces, but tens of thousands are forced to join, sometimes at gunpoint. In situations of armed conflict, wherever governments have recruited and used children as soldiers, so have armed opposition groups. Just as certain African governments have chosen to violate national laws, so opposition groups have flouted public declarations and pledges not to recruit and use children in combat.

DISARMAMENT CHALLENGES IN AFRICAN PEACE MISSIONS

The ready availability of light weapons in post-conflict societies is widely recognised as a primary contributor to violence, violent crime and even a return to war. Arms management and micro-disarmament have therefore been recognised as key dimensions in all contemporary peace missions.

All weapons in circulation are seldom collected at the end of an armed struggle. The conditions of insecurity that prevail in countries in transition (which are either entering the final stages of a collapsed state, or emerging from anarchy and war) are fertile ground for the maintenance and acquisition of light weapons and small arms by the community at large. Physical security and economic needs are the fuel that keeps the trade in small arms moving. This trade no longer requires a new influx of weapons to be destabilising; there is a constant movement of massive existing stocks in ever-widening circles of distribution.

In states emerging from conflict, the ownership of weapons not only has a security and primacy motivation, but also one based on economic imperatives. Impoverished groups of people, insecure about their own potential for economic development and survival, utilise weapons as if they were cheque books: robbing to cover basic needs and/or exchanging guns for money or goods. Many regions in Africa are now awash with illicit weapons — in some cases, even after extensive international peacekeeping efforts that are considered both successful and unsuccessful.

The success story of new generation peacekeeping in Africa is undoubtedly that of Mozambique. Estimates of weapons imported to this country during the civil war range from 0.5 million to 6 million. During the United Nations peacekeeping operation (ONUMOZ, 1993-1995), nearly 190 000 weapons

were collected. However, most of these weapons were not destroyed and soon found their way back onto the streets of Maputo or into neighbouring states.6 This obviously has very serious implications for regional security, and great efforts are being made by Mozambique, in collaboration with regional partners, to clean up the mess.

CONGO TOWARDS A MORE EFFECTIVE DISARMAMENT REGIME? 

In response to the above and other incidents, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1289 on 7 February 2000, acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter that:

"authorises UNAMSIL to take the necessary action to fulfil ... [its] tasks ... and affirms that, in the discharge of its mandate, UNAMSIL may take the necessary action to ensure the security and freedom of movement of its personnel and ... to afford protection to civilians under imminent threat of physical violence ..."18

Resolution 1289 thus provides the legal framework for coercive action by UNAMSIL in pursuit of its disarmament mandate. But can this be translated into assertive action on the ground? Two general conclusions in this regard were reached in an extensive series of case studies on disarmament undertaken within the peace process by the UN Institute of Disarmament Research (UNIDIR): firstly, when peace enforcement is an option (as in UN- sanctioned regional or coalition operations), significant leverage can be applied to achieve the disarmament mandate; and secondly, when peace enforcement is not an option, the UN nevertheless retains important and potentially effective sources of leverage for implementing disarmament — as long as forces are properly supported and employed.19

As part of peace enforcement, properly employed military leverage can contribute by:

1. taking crew-served and individual weapons out of circulation that pose a direct threat to the peace support and humanitarian elements; 
2. helping to limit the use of weapons that are retained by the parties (since it is wishful thinking to believe that all the weapons can be collected); 
3. providing an alternative source of security for people caught up in a conflict (a moral imperative when encouraging people to give up their weapons); and 
4. using force judiciously to coerce compliance by recalcitrant factions (the most contentious of the recommendations).20 
5. On the other hand, even in the absence of the ability to play a coercive role, UN peacekeepers have other sources of leverage, such as: 
6. a reputation for objectivity in monitoring agreements and reporting accurately on violations of such agreements (which deters would-be cheats and reassures compliant parties); 
7. the ability to elicit co-operation from a population that is weary of war and rule by the gun; 
8. the ability to solicit the support of outsiders for disarmament through putting pressure on their allies among the parties, limiting arms- smuggling across their territories, and refusing sanctuary to belligerents; 
9. playing the ‘CNN card’, or threatening to expose ill-will, non-compliance and inhumane behaviour to the ‘court of international public opinion’; and 
10. offering assets at their disposal (pecuniary or otherwise) to individual belligerents in exchange for their guns.21 
11. Daniel has warned, however, that such sources of leverage come to naught, unless peacekeepers are adequately supported and the mission properly executed. This implies that the following four basic rules must be applied: 
12. Peacekeepers must have the resources and determination to do the job and must ensure that the parties understand this. 
13. UN forces should absolutely minimise the amount of time it takes to deploy an effective monitoring and reporting capability. 
14. Peacekeepers must act decisively immediately upon arrival and respond firmly to challenges. 
15. Peacekeepers must act and respond uniformly to challenges.

CONCLUSION: SOME RECOMMENDATIONS

Beyond general recommendations on disarmament in peace missions, as covered elsewhere in this article, a comprehensive report listing very pertinent recommendations on disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration for child soldiers has been compiled by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the UN Office of the Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict.47 Often such comprehensive sets of recommendations remain nothing more than ‘wish lists’, but this report does contain some basic truths and suggestions for improving processes at a practical level, and these deserve reiteration.

For example, the report points to the fact that most formal disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration programmes are narrowly conceived as opportunities to disarm factions (one man, one gun). The requirement for weapons to be surrendered as a criterion for eligibility has often led to the exclusion of children, especially girls, from such programmes. It recommends, therefore, that child soldiers should be eligible to enter the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration process irrespective of whether they present themselves at the assembly points with weapons. It is encouraging to note that this principle has indeed been applied in the design of the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration programme for Sierra Leone.

Other recommendations of a fairly practical, though ambitious nature include:

•  preparations for child demobilisation in the midst of ongoing conflict by, for example, dispersing children or transferring them from zones under the control of their former commanders to avoid repeat recruitment or reprisals; 
• special programming for those child soldiers who demobilise as adults after having grown up within the armed group; 
• protection of children from further abuse during the time of demobilisation by separating them immediately from adult soldiers; 
• early removal (within 48 hours) of children from the formal assembly site to an interim care site or centre under civilian control; 
• systematically assessing the presence and special needs of girl soldiers, in a way that reflects their military service roles — as fighters, cooks, messengers, spies, labourers, ‘wives’ or sexual slaves; and 
• plans for tracking, documenting and supporting the high percentage of child combatants who routinely do not enter the formal disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration process.

HOW WE HELP

This project is about supply chain engagement, relationship building, developing and creating a model we can replicate. This work is about financial and social stability but it is also about feeding the world. We will take the principles of learning and apply them someplace else.”