What lies under the blue berets?

Susan Carruthers is led through the dark heart of a world at war.

"How does a good man deal with devils?" Thus William Shawcross quizzes Kofi Annan, a deft wielder of long spoons, in his 38th-floor dining room at the United Nations. It is the question that animates Shawcross's volume, as he flits from one site of conflict to the next, musing on the inadequate resources with which one "good and uncommon man" confronts the myriad personifications of evil that bedevil the post-cold war world.

Chronicling the UN's patchy record of "humanitarian interventions" during the 1990s, Shawcross presents a mosaic of human suffering, from Kurdistan to Kosovo. His canvas, spanning ten years of travel and 400 pages, is Dantesque: an underworld peopled with grotesques - whether the mutilated amputees of Sierra Leone or the "warlords" responsible for inflicting such senseless cruelty. As Shawcross continues his odyssey, he seems increasingly convinced that the violent ruptures of the past decade stem from individual venality that has flourished in a permissive environment, unshackled from the inhibiting constraints of superpower bloc politics. But if the cold war represented a 45-year hiatus during which lesser conflicts were subsumed by East-West competition, subsequent years have not witnessed a resumption of politics as normal. Certainly, so far as Shawcross is concerned, the emergent breed of "warlord" is little concerned with politics but preoccupied with profiting from the anarchic state of stricken fiefdoms.

All his characters - angels and devils alike - are engaged in the protection business, of one sort or another. As the "international community" vainly struggles to extend protection over the needy, "thugs" find ample opportunity to redirect the flow of humanitarian aid into their own, well-lined pockets. Refugee camps quickly turn from sites of sanctuary to places of perdition, as gangs regroup and racketeering flourishes. Fragile democracies are nurtured, only to be betrayed by the greed and corruption of feckless politicians or the machinations of unruly militias. Unfortunately, those in blue berets and white vehicles turn out to be little better on occasion. Shawcross turns a scathing eye on those peacekeeping troops who organise prostitution rings and black-marketeering under the mask of humanitarian mandates. He is little kinder to some highly placed (and usually desk-bound) UN officials who seek what is in effect lack-of-protection money: exorbitant per diems from depleted UN coffers as the price of their willingness to assist UN missions in dangerous locales.

For the endangered who lack a means of escape or compensatory inducements to endure insecurity, the UN often affords precious little protection. Shawcross repeatedly juxtaposes the seemingly greater readiness of western states to engage in muscular humanitarianism with their unwillingness to jeopardise their own forces' lives in the self-imposed duty of rescuing innocents and bombing barbarians. The gulf between proclamations of cosmopolitan universalism and the practice of parochial self-preservation became particularly visible after President Clinton's administration rescinded its promise to "restore hope" to Somalia in the face of mounting US casualties, and thereafter refused to recognise the mass slaughter in Rwanda as genocide.

In assessing the record of the UN's recent militarised interventions, Shawcross finds much to criticise. His targets are many and familiar. In accounting for the emergence of this "new humanitarianism", the author implicitly praises and explicitly blames television. Echoing well-worn (but questionable) wisdom, Shawcross notes television's greater attentiveness to suffering but regrets its fickle "something must be done" effect among fleetingly discomfited western viewers. He takes sterner issue with recalcitrant Security Council members who bestow impossible mandates on forces painfully mustered for UN operations but are often loath to contribute their own people. Worse still are those members who volunteer troops but then insist on their premature evacuation, leaving indigenous UN personnel to confront a perilous fate, as in Rwanda. And he is duly critical of successive American administrations for withholding long-overdue dues to maximise their political leverage over the organisation.

However well made such criticisms are, the book offers less trenchancy than one might have hoped. Many of the journalistic techniques begin to grate, such as Shawcross's fly-on-the-wall recreations of meetings between Annan and his various nemeses. He trades on his own closeness to the secretary-general, yet fails to deliver many revelations derived from this privileged insider status.

The "attentive public" at whom the book is aimed will accordingly learn little they had not already gleaned from the press. But more disappointing is the lack of acuity displayed by a journalist whose reputation has been built on exposure of western complicity in internecine strife, and indeed genocide, in countries such as Cambodia, that are here revisited as fragile recipients of UN-imported democracy.

In the absence of superpower dissemblance on a grand scale, the cold-war liberal appears to have exhausted his enthusiasm (or capacity) for probing the fissures between legitimation and practice in contemporary international politics. Gently interrogating the motivations and consequences of western "humanitarianism", Shawcross turns more insistently to questions of "evil" - and how it might be dispatched - eliciting only generalities. As the author flies across Africa in the Nigerian presidential jet, he ponders how many "really bad people" have sat there before him, lapping up the "dictator-chic style". Traversing the strife-torn continent, Shawcross uncomfortably evokes symbolism that could come straight from Conrad. Here, however, the heart of darkness is not (even by implication) a function of colonialism or the workings of capital. For Conrad, the demon was Mistah Kurtz - a monstrous creature of bloated Belgian imperialism. Shawcross, on the other hand, reviles Mistah Kabila (renegade head of a reconstituted Congolese republic as he then was) and his ilk, but fails to anchor their "darkness" in context and circumstances in which the West itself is implicated. Evil lurks "out there" - endemic yet embodied - in a Manichean world of warlords and peacekeepers. Shawcross seems guardedly optimistic that the blue berets will prevail. But perhaps such hopes are easier to nurture when "evil" is so readily identifiable, so human in its manifestations and, as such, ultimately so frail.

Susan Carruthers is senior lecturer in international politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.