tical institutions in the war torn country. “Somalia demonstrates what happens when there is confusion between a clear direction in U.S. foreign policy on one hand, and mushing it all together with the U.N. on the other,” Bolton says. “A lot of that political confusion was reflected in military confusion on the ground.”The result of waning American support for the U.N. peacekeeping was painfully evident when violence broke out in Rwanda in 1994 between ethnic Hutu and Tutsi. Although nineteen governments had standby arrangements to provide troops to peacekeeping missions at the time, Urquhart says, none actually provided them in time to prevent the carnage that cost the lives of some 500,000 Rwandans, mostly Tutsi. “Not one government would send troops until it was much too late,” he says. “Five months after it started they sent some people staggering in, but that was hopeless.”As it prepared to withdraw from Rwanda in December of 1995, the six thousand strong U.N. peacekeeping mission was the object of little more than hostility by the Rwandan government, which accused the U.N. of enabling the genocide to occur and of violating the country’s sovereignty by its continued presence. (17)Nowhere have the U.N. member states encountered a greater challenge to their ability to define peacekeeping goals than in the former Yugoslavia. As successive regions of the country broke away and declared their independence from the Serbian-dominated government in Belgrade, Western countries were quick to recognize the nascent governments of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. But when fighting broke out, first in Croatia, and then in Bosnia, between government forces and well-armed Serbian minorities, the West got cold feet. Instead of intervening militarily to aid the newly independent countries, they opted for a neutral intervention by U.N. peacekeepers in hope of encouraging a negoti...
