UNITED NATIONS, DECOLONIZATION, AND SELF-DETERMINATION IN COLD WAR SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA, 1960-1994, THE

In part because of their pursuit of Cold War aims, both the United States and the USSR missed opportunities to build relationships at the United Nations with African representatives necessary to muster support for their international objectives. From the emergence of the Nonaligned Movement (NAM) in the mid-1950s, the United States remained uncertain about how to approach the decolonizing world. Meeting for the first time at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, delegations from 29 nonaligned nations, including six from Africa, gathered to discuss matters of common interest and concern. The Bandung conclave resulted in the establishment of the nonaligned caucus, which became the largest caucus at the UN and increased the pressure on the United Nations to expand its membership. In 1960 alone, seventeen newly independent states joined the UN, sixteen of them from Africa. By the end of 1960 it had become clear that the decolonizing world would soon be ascendant in the General Assembly. Hammarskjold's whirlwind tour of Africa that year, where he visited 21 nations, seemed to further demonstrate the growing importance of that continent in a rapidly decolonizing world.6

THE UN'S FIRST TEST: DECOLONIZATION, THE CONGO CRISIS, AND THE COLD WAR, 1960-1964

The Congo, during its short history as an independent state, has twice been a focal point of the United Nations. The UN's 1960-1964 intervention became a major test of so-called "first-generation" peacekeeping, one of the earliest and most complex, and certainly one of the largest, challenges the UN faced over decolonization. The first Congo intervention confronted the UN with a monumental crisis, one leading to the death of its secretary General and, ultimately, to a financial crisis from which it has never fully recovered.7 The second Congo crisis, also known as the Great Lakes crisis of 1997-2001, the first large-scale African regional war of the postcolonial and post-Cold War era, drawing in the forces of nine nation states and at least twelve rebel factions, presented the United Nations with a different set of challenges. Coming only a few years after crises in Somalia and Rwanda, the international community's timid response, and the international community's almost total neglect of the conflict, underscored the sense of "humanitarian fatigue" that plagued discussions of sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s.

When the Congo became independent on June 30, 1960, little had been done to prepare the path to independence and the prospects for its postcolonial future remained bleak.8 Colonialism utterly failed to prepare the Congo for eventual independence and self-rule. The Belgians repressed the emergence of an indigenous elite, fearing it might challenge their rule. Beyond the obvious lack of economic or political development, the Congo remained at independence little more than a large conceptualized state, more a collection of unintegrated ethnically diverse regions than anything even remotely resembling a nation state. When fighting broke out between the new Congolese Army and its Belgian officers, Brussels swiftly dispatched 10,000 Belgian paratroopers, an event, similar to the Anglo-French intervention in Egypt in 1956, many suspected had been planned well in advance as part of Belgium's neocolonial strategy.9 Within days, a secessionist movement, backed by Belgian mercenaries and supported by Belgian-owned mining companies, declared the independence of the resource-rich Katanga province. The Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba appealed to the United Nations for assistance. secretary General Dag Hammarskjold arranged for the security Council to call upon Belgium to remove its troops and, at the request of Lumumba, Hammarskjold launched the United Nations Operation in the Congo to keep the peace and restore order.10