ated settlement.“The first mistake was the premature recognition of Croatia and Bosnia, which had the effect of dropping a lighted match into a can of gasoline,” Urquhart says. “The second mistake was to try to whitewash the thing by putting in a U.N. peacekeeping force when there were no conditions for it to function in.”U.N. SUCCESSESAmid the finger pointing and the recent disaster in Bosnia, it is easy to lose sight of the U.N.’s considerable achievements, even in recent years. “Though everybody keeps hanging on about Bosnia, which nobody has managed to resolve for the last five hundred years, if you will look at the operations that the U.N. has undertaken since the end of the Cold War,” Urquhart says, “a large majority of them have been rather surprisingly successful.”Under U.N. monitoring, combatants in Mozambique’s thirty-year civil war have shifted their skirmishes from the battlefield to the legislature. The U.N. mission oversaw the cease-fire between Frelimo, the ruling party, and Renamo, the formal rebel movement, and monitored the country’s first democratic elections, held in October 1994.The U.N. Transitional Authority in Cambodia, launched in 1992, helped end hostilities between the government and Khmer Rouge guerrillas in one of the bloodiest civil wars in modern times. Before withdrawing in November 1993, the U.N. mission monitored elections in which ninety percent of the people voted – despite threats by the Khmer Rouge – and handed control over to the elected Cambodian government.Angola, where a “proxy” civil war between the Soviet-backed government and U.S.-backed UNITA rebels raged for two decades, is the site of another potentially successful U.N. peacekeeping mission. Although UNITA forces, led by Jonas Savimbi, renewed fighting after losing national elections in 1992, they later agreed to a power sharing arrangement with ...
