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

In April of 1999 the Security Council harshly condemned those neighboring states with forces on Congolese territory and dispatched a special envoy to the region. A subsequent UN resolution authorized the second United Nations intervention in the Congo in four decades. The Security Council called for a mere 5,000 peacekeepers but, considering the precedents, outside states remained reluctant to contribute forces and the UN found it difficult to achieve its desired force levels.16 The United Nations aided in achieving a negotiated truce, but Kabila's assassination in 2001, and the unsettled circumstances around his successor - his son, Joseph - have led many to predict that the United Nations had not seen the last of the region. Millions have died in the Congo's many civil conflicts. This, one of the worst human tragedies of the post-Cold War era, receives nary a mention in the West. Since the waning of the Cold War, the Congo has had no strategic value and with, at one time, nine national armies, a dozen rebel groups, and numerous local militias, the crisis is considered too complicated, too intractable, and too distant, for comprehension.17

THE UNITED NATIONS AND THE COLD WAR STRUGGLE FOR SELF-DETERMINATION IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

The persistence of white-dominated settlement colonies in southern Africa provoked a crisis over self-determination during the first four decades of the United Nations. White minority-ruled states such as Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, and the South African-controlled territory of South West Africa (Namibia), seemed increasingly out of place in an Africa swept by the currents of independence, self-determination, and black majority rule. Majority black populations in the region found themselves exploited and denied political, civil, economic, and human rights, as white minorities imposed institutionalized systems of segregation known by the Afrikaans word "apartheid."18

The General Assembly grappled with the issue of white minority rule in southern Africa for more than four decades. The matter devolved to the Assembly because the white-ruled regimes in southern Africa had powerful western allies on the security Council, such as Britain and the United States, who threatened to veto action against them and did so on more than 20 occasions. Like elsewhere in Africa, the self-determination question in Southern Rhodesia, South Africa, and South West Africa became entangled in the Cold War struggle. The western powers backed white minority rule in southern Africa as a bastion of anticommunism in the region, skirting sanctions, dispatching economic and military assistance, at times cooperating with policies of coercion against the black population, and branding as "terrorist organizations" those groups struggling against white oppression.

The British colony of Southern Rhodesia had, since 1953, been part of a federation including Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, where white settlers from all three components ruled over increasingly restive black majorities. After Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland achieved independence in 1964 as the black majority-ruled states of Zambia and Malawi, pressure increased on Southern Rhodesia to end white rule prior to its own independence. Instead, the white regime broke with Britain in 1965 and declared an independent state, modeled after the apartheid regime in neighboring South Africa. The United Nations took the innovative step of imposing economic sanctions on Rhodesia in 1966, the first time the UN had taken such action. Rhodesia, increasingly isolated and under the pressure of international sanctions, ultimately signed the Lancaster House Agreement of 1979, ending white rule, but granting protected status to whites and seeking a guarantee of continued white influence throughout the political and economic structure of the new state, Zimbabwe, through a system of quotas designed to give whites privileges well beyond the proportion of the population.