THE AMBASSADORS
Special Peace Issue
BOOK REVIEW
THE AMBASSADORS
Special
Peace Issue
BOOK REVIEW
Volume 2,
Issue 1
January 1999
THE
FIRST CASUALTY IS TRUTH:
The
Media, The Mission and Us
Reviewed by James V.
Arbuckle
 |
Peacekeeping
and |
 |
|
| Ingrid Lehmann |
The processing of public information about military operations, as with international affairs in general, has traditionally been a persistant problem for soldiers, diplomats and governments; how much to tell the public; what is the value of public perceptions of policies and operations; how to tell the good news; how to deal with the bad news; what is security? Bad news, from Amritsar to Srebrenica, has been especially poorly handled by governments and international organizations concerned with, but institutionally unable to manage, their public image.
Official views of these questions have so far reflected three "generations" of public policy development. It has traditionally been accepted that "the first casualty when war comes is truth," and not much can be done with an ahistorical public and media, who are equally ill-informed on international affairs, and equally impatient with complexity. This has led to passive information programmes best expressed in the slogan "never complain, never explain." Although this view is still widespread in officialdom, there has been a paradigm shift in public information policies since the Second World War, where information staffs have been created in most military and government organizations. These were and are generally special staffs, whose members might have a media or an operational background, occasionally both, and who more or less run interference for the mission or for the office, especially for their seniors, whom they represent and (if they are clever enough) shield.
This "second generation" information management concept, with which we still live, is largely passive and, in an era of increasing sources of information, and accelerating means for its dissemination, this passivity is clearly inadequate. In our obsessive rush to judgement, the truth continues to be too often the first casualty. Additionally, it is becoming clearer that misperceptions can have an unnecessary and avoidable deleterious effect on the conduct of a mission. This realization places us on the cusp of a second paradigm shift in information management, and the third modern – the post-Cold War - generation of information policies is now being born.
The need for this "shift" is perhaps best expressed in the recent encyclical of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the 1997 Renewing the United Nations: A Programme for Reform. This programme positively identifies an urgent requirement to affect "a major shift in the public information and communications strategy of the United Nations."
"Communications functions (must) be placed at the heart of the strategic management of the Organization. The success of the United Nations … is intimately related to its ability to communicate its message effectively, and a new culture of communications must, therefore, pervade the entire organization. The Secretary-General … is developing an implementation plan."
This, then, will be the next paradigm shift, and third generation information campaigns must be the direct and personal function and responsibility of commanders, managers and leaders at all levels: strategic, operational, tactical.
Lehmann’s slimly elegant volume, begun at least two years before that reform encyclical, provides an implementation plan for the peacekeeping operations that the Secretary-General of the United Nations is now calling for.
Lehmann contends "that it is the norm that public information functions, structures and processes are ignored in the mandate, may or may not be successfully added on later, and are too often relegated to specialist staff. The resultant ad hoc conduct of the public affairs of the mission leaves too much to chance and may lead to fragmented and often contradictory execution at too low a level. This portends ominously for the manner in which the operation will be perceived and eventually, as well, for the manner in which peacekeeping operations in general may be judged." She observes that "the international and the local public view of an operation may have a measurable influence on its perceived effectiveness." Furthermore, Lehmann states that images of humanitarian emergency in the media and their often negative effect on views of the conflict among public and policymakers alike, may have an impact the entire peace process. She then proceeds to postulate an unbreakable "loop," wherein policies, perceptions and performance are symbiotically connected, whether for better or for worse. She enumerates six principles which illustrate this mutual relationship, establishing a theoretical framework for this "third generation’ of information campaigning in peace operations.
Dr. Lehmann illustrates her thesis with five case studies of peace operations: Namibia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Haiti and the former Yugoslavia. These case studies are masterful and have the immediacy of contemporary history. Dr. Lehmann’s special strength is in her ability to digest and to simplify extremely complex operations. Her highly compressed and densely packed summaries of these operations are in themselves invaluable and highly readable. Her chapter on Namibia, where she served with UNTAG, has a narrative power not common in scholarly works. The chapter which compares some almost entirely passive information operations with other more proactive operations, is a compelling read. For example, the scape-goating of UNPROFOR by the until-recently-communist "host" governments contributed to international perceptions of failure which obtain still today, yet UNPROFOR did little or nothing at the time to combat this obvious disinformation by all the "parties," whereas now it is too late. In contrast, UNTAES in Eastern Slavonia created its own information environment, and was successful in telling its own story.
If I have one cavil with this otherwise excellent book, it is in the unnecessarily pedantic section on "International Communications Theory"; here are revealed the tell-tale tracks of the doctoral thesis this originally was. These are the compulsory figures which defend against the oxymoronic "political scientists" who will be her inquisitors: "I’ve read all the boring books you have, and therefore have every right to be here." The compulsory figures are not usually shown in the broadcast, and need not have been included here.
I also regret the absence of a chapter on Somalia – that was surely the peacekeepers’ Amritsar, and the real story has not yet been told, while all the wrong lessons have been learnt. "Post-Somalia" has now replaced "Post-Vietnam" as a mechanism for not even thinking of operations too complex, of accounts too contradictory, of outcomes too ambiguous, to be digested in the media and by their audiences – and it is again, at least for the time being, too late to rectify this. However, practical difficulties at the time of writing: the deadline for this work, and the progress in Canada of several Somalia-related courts martial as well an official governmental enquiry, made primary research into the Somalia mission then impossible, as her most convenient sources were at that time sub judice. It is sincerely to be hoped that Lehmann will in the near future bring her formidable analytical and narrative skills to bear on the operations in Somalia from 1992-1994.
This is an excellent book, an essential reading for those interested in and concerned with modern peace operations. As Sir Marrack Goulding said in his forward, "As one who wishes that (these) lesson(s) had been better learnt when he was in charge of UN peacekeeping, I hope that Dr. Lehmann’s work will be read widely by all those who need to know this truth – diplomats, soldiers, NGOs, academics and the media themselves."
LIEUTENANT-COLONEL (Ret'd) JAMES V. ARBUCKLE, O.M.M., C.D.
Since his retirement from the Canadian Army in 1995, Mr. Arbuckle has been a member of the Faculty of the Lester B. Pearson Canadian International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Nova Scotia. His interests are in inter alia, command and control of multi-national forces, and rules of engagement for peace forces. He also lectured at Yale and the U.S. Air Force Command and General Staff College. In 1996 he visited the former Yugoslavia to conduct research for a paper entitled The Level Killing Fields of Yugoslavia: An Observer Returns, published in 1998 by the Pearson Press. Prior to his retirement, Mr. Arbuckle was an infantry officer and a General Staff Officer, serving in Canada, Germany and on UN peacekeeping duties. He has also served on four UN peacekeeping tours in Cyprus, Serbia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Croatia. Mr. Arbuckle now resides in Athens, and has been appointed the Representative for Southern Europe for the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre.
