Journal of Third World Studies: UNITED NATIONS, DECOLONIZATION, AND SELF-DETERMINATION IN COLD WAR SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA, 1960-1994, THE

FindArticles > Journal of Third World Studies > Fall 2005 > Article > Print friendly

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

O'Sullivan, Christopher

The history of the United Nations since 1960 is very much a history of Africa's postcolonial struggles. Prior to 1960, the UN played little role in sub-Saharan Africa (as separate from many General Assembly resolutions critical of the white-ruled state of South Africa), and until 1960 it could count only four members from the sub-Saharan region: Liberia, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Guinea. After 1960, increasing African representation enlarged the General Assembly, so much so that by 1965 the United Nations had 29 members from sub-Saharan Africa. Africa has engaged the UN more than any other region, and since 1965, African representatives to the UN have comprised the largest bloc from any continent.

The UN's involvement with Africa grew parallel to the process of decolonization. In sub-Saharan Africa, the United Nations would face some its greatest Cold War-era challenges and endure several stunning failures. It would struggle with the consequences of colonial maladministration, underdevelopment, and exploitation, beginning in 1960 in the former Belgian Congo, where the United Nations embarked upon a massive, unprecedented, undertaking of peacekeeping in the midst of heightened Cold War tensions, amidst weak state institutions, in the face of a violent, unforgiving, secessionist crisis, and a predatory former colonial overseer. In South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, and South West Africa (now Namibia) the United Nations confronted the ongoing legacy of white colonial settlement and the struggle for self-determination during decades of white minority rule and Cold War geopolitics. In Angola and Mozambique, the UN faced the challenge of reconstituting societies shattered by the Cold War and, in post-Cold War Somalia, the United Nations sought to respond to a massive humanitarian crisis, but soon confronted the limitations of peacekeeping and nation-building in the face of a meltdown of local civil institutions. In Rwanda, perhaps the UN's greatest failure to date, the international community's passive response, attributed to the "humanitarian fatigue" spawned by Somalia, resulted in the deaths of an estimated 800,000 people, damaging the UN's credibility in Africa and beyond. And, finally, in the Great Lakes region of Africa, the unhappy precedents of the Congo, Somalia, and Rwanda impeded an international response to a crisis involving multiple states and resulting in the deaths of perhaps as many as 2 million people - one of the worst examples of human suffering since World War II.

AFRICAN DECOLONIZATION AND THE ERA OF DAG HAMMARSKJOLD, 1953-1961

The longterm problems stemming from colonial domination in Africa, the complicated nature of decolonization, and the devastating consequences of the Cold War ensured that sub-Saharan Africa would become the United Nations' major area of involvement after 1960. The slave trade and the violent exploitation with which the European powers dominated Africa contributed to Africa's postcolonial crisis on a number of levels. The European presence in Africa was a brutal example of imperial violence, as the colonial powers often ruled Africa through the harshest of means, employing strategies of enslavement, economic exploitation, social engineering, and, at times, genocide. This violence became integral to the process of human exploitation and resource extraction employed by the European powers. Forced labor and the destruction of indigenous societies became commonplace in the quest for riches and arable land. To maintain their hold on Africa, the colonial powers created exploitative hierarchical social systems and Europeans encouraged a rigid ethnic categorization among Africa's many peoples. These systems of control persisted well after decolonization, providing many postcolonial African regimes with institutionalized systems of repression and exploitation, and many postcolonial regimes merely maintained these exploitative legacies.1

Decolonization in sub-Saharan Africa confronted the United Nations with unique problems, as the end of colonial power came relatively late to most of the region. By contrast, much of colonial Asia and the Middle East had already enjoyed at least a decade of independence when Africa began to emerge from colonialism. By the time the "winds of change" swept through Africa, the European powers had already abandoned most of their colonial enterprises elsewhere. In Asia and the Middle East, the Europeans departed after decades of repressing well-organized indigenous societies and political elites. In sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, European colonial power often began to recede before the emergence of organized indigenous political movements. In many areas the resulting postcolonial chaos occurred because the European powers did little to prepare the local populations for independence. Furthermore, colonial contact often exacerbated African problems, leaving behind legacies of arbitrary borders, underdeveloped infrastructure, economic exploitation, ethnic and racial divisions, and over-dependence on the production of raw materials.2

At the time of African decolonization, the Cold War was already in the process of being thoroughly globalized. Throughout Africa, decolonization frequently became entangled with the East-West conflict, further contributing to the already heavy burdens of the post-colonial development. Considering the violence with which the Europeans long pursued their colonial aims in Africa, and the relative lack of benefits Africans accrued from contact with Europeans, the process of decolonization would have been difficult under even the best of circumstances. That much of Africa became a focus of superpower competition shortly after independence further exacerbated an already difficult process of decolonization and state building.

African decolonization had a profound impact on the United Nations. During its first decade, the UN was largely western-dominated. The security Council reflected the views and interests of the western world, with its permanent membership consisting of four largely white states with European cultural ties and one Asian state, Nationalist China, or Taiwan, essentially a western-created client. Of the original 51 member states, only two, Liberia and Ethiopia, came from sub-Saharan Africa (excepting white-ruled South Africa). At the end of the UN's first year, 39 of the 51 member states, or 75 percent, came from western, European, or Latin American cultural backgrounds.3 At its tenth anniversary in 1955, UN membership stood at 60, with only Liberia and Ethiopia still representing sub-Saharan Africa. Roughly 42 of the 60 member states, or 70 percent, came from western, European, or Latin American backgrounds. Thus, despite the East-West Cold War divide, the western powers, their allies and client states, could still depend upon healthy majorities in the General Assembly to promote their interests at the UN.4

The freeze on UN membership was lifted in 1955 and, in the years after, a massive increase - particularly of African members - occurred throughout the tenure of secretary General Dag Hammarskjold.5 By 1965, the beginning of the UN's third decade, the General Assembly was undergoing a transformation. In the preceding decade membership had nearly doubled, to 118, with a majority of 63 states from non-European backgrounds - including 30 from Africa. The West was losing control of the General Assembly and, with it, many of the other institutions of the UN. In 1970, as a sign of things to come, the United States cast its first veto on the security Council, the first of what would subsequently total more than 70 over the next two decades.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, as newly liberated peoples of Africa joined the United Nations, a sense of optimism grew that the international community would begin to address many of the problems of those societies held back by colonialism. But, rather than resolving these, decolonization brought with it a host of new problems the United Nations would have to contend with in the decades ahead. The arbitrary boundaries of many African colonies, often bearing little relationship to underlying cultural, societal, or linguistic patterns, frequently contradicted historical relationships and economic realties, making the prospects for postcolonial progress bleak.

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

The UN peacekeeping mission in the Congo soon grew into a large multinational force of 20,000, but disagreement arose between Lumumba and Hammarskjold.11 Whereas the secretary General, seeking to remain within the mission's mandate, sought to focus on the maintenance of peace and avoid having the UN play an overtly partisan role, the Congolese Prime Minister, his leadership increasingly under duress, saw Hammarskjold as too responsive to western economic and Cold War objectives in the Congo and not sufficiently interested in the removal of the Belgians or stopping the secession of Katanga.12 Lumumba's position became increasingly difficult after he split with his erstwhile counterpart, President Joseph Kasavubu, and was placed under house arrest, under UN protection, by Army Chief of Staff Joseph Mobutu. In New York, Hammarskjold faced his own crisis, perhaps the greatest of his tenure. In the midst of the Congo crisis the USSR became increasingly contentious on the Security Council, resulting in the General Assembly holding an emergency session on the Congo and the Soviet Union subsequently withholding a portion of its UN dues and calling for the removal of the Secretary General and his replacement with a committee of three, or troika.13

Hammarskj old's problems mounted when Lumumba was subsequently assassinated and Hammarskjold, facing mounting criticism after Lumumba's murder, the further disintegration of state institutions, and the emergence of multiple factions laying claim to civil authority, responded by announcing that United Nations peacekeepers would seek to remove the Belgians by force. But the Secretary General, increasingly absorbed in the crisis in the Congo, lost his life in September 1961 when his plane crashed en route to a meeting with the Katangan secessionists.14

The United Nations peacekeepers departed the Congo in 1964, leaving behind a fractured nation increasingly dominated by the brutal kleptocratic regime of General Mobutu, who maintained the Belgian model of exploitation and repression and provided the West for the next three decades with the Congo's resources and an important Cold War ally in strategic central Africa. The Congo debacle demonstrated the ease with which UN operations could be hijacked by the politics of the Cold War and called into question the very efficacy of peacekeeping. It also demonstrated the complexity of the process of decolonization when multiple outside powers had interests in its outcome. For these reasons, and others, the Congo intervention would be the last large UN peacekeeping operation during the remaining decades of the Cold War.15

Four decades later the United Nations returned to the Congo. The end of the Cold War removed the West's remaining rationales for supporting Mobutu, who was subsequently overthrown in 1997 by a coalition of neighboring states utilizing forces led by the former Lumumba ally, Laurent Kabila, who proceeded to follow Mobutu's - and, reaching farther back, Leopold's - model of extraction and exploitation. But several of the neighboring states who had aided in "liberating" the Congolese from the grip of Mobutu had their own designs on the resource-rich region and, after falling out with Kabila, launched a coordinated attack on the Congo.

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.

In neighboring South Africa a bitter clash between British imperial aims in the region and Afrikaner, or Boer, nationalism, had given way to an equally violent struggle between blacks, who constituted the vast majority of the population, and whites, who comprised a small minority but ruled through the brutal system of apartheid. Few issues received more attention from the United Nations during its first five decades, and the urgency of its condemnations increased as the composition of the General Assembly changed in the wake of decolonization. The brutality of the apartheid system led the General Assembly to address the controversy during more than 200 debates since first addressing the question, at the request of India, in 1946.19

The South Africa controversy also exposed the disagreements between the West and the developing world at the United Nations. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s a majority of the General Assembly sought to impose stricter sanctions against South Africa but found that path frequently blocked by the United States, Britain, and France who, concerned with South Africa's pivotal role in Cold War Africa, argued that sanctions violated South African sovereignty.20 Of the more than 75 vetoes by the United States from 1970-today, 20 were deployed to block resolutions critical of white-ruled South Africa or Rhodesia (1973-88) (several of these vetoes sought to block sanctions on the grounds that sanctions violated South African sovereignty). Britain has cast 32 vetoes, of those 25 were to block resolutions critical of white-ruled regimes in South Africa or Rhodesia between 1963 to 1988. By the late 1980s intense international focus on the controversy had made South Africa an isolated pariah and in 1990 President F.W. de Klerk allowed the release of African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela - who had long been proscribed as a terrorist in the West - after almost three decades of confinement.21 The UN's role in South Africa expanded in 1992 with the dispatching of an observer mission to oversee the ongoing process of peace and reconciliation and to aid in the transition leading to the first open elections in South Africa in 1994, which resulted in a sweeping victory for Mandela and his party.

The crisis in neighboring South West Africa was linked to the question of South Africa. Germans began colonizing the region as German South West Africa in 1884, reducing the local population - made up mostly of the Herero and Nama peoples - by an estimated seventy-five percent. After the World War I the region became a class "C" League of Nations mandate administered by neighboring South Africa which, after many decades of rule, introduced its repressive apartheid measures and sought to formally incorporate South West Africa into its territory. The UN General Assembly responded by accusing South Africa of maladministration, calling for an end to South African rule, and declaring Namibia to be the direct responsibility of the UN. In 1971 the International Court of Justice declared South Africa's occupation of South West Africa illegal. Its future became a hostage to the broader regional crisis during the Cold War, with strife in the territory exacerbated by South Africa and neighboring Angola. After the shattering defeat of South African forces at Cuito Cuanavale in Angola (a victory for Cuban forces introduced to the region by Fidel Castro) in May 1988, Pretoria relented, opening the way for the establishment of the United Nations Transitional Assistance Group (UNTAG) in Namibia.22 UNTAG became an early example of the new era - or "second generation" - of peacekeeping operations, as its mission expanded well beyond traditional peacekeeping to monitoring the 1989 elections, aiding refugee populations, and repatriating 40,000 exiles. Having accomplished this mission, UNTAG departed Namibia in March 1990.23

The Cold War confrontation impacted other parts of Africa with ruinous effects which persist to this day and had profound implications for the role of the United Nations in Africa. Independence came late to the former Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, for example, where both emerging postcolonial states immediately became entangled in the geopolitical struggle of the Cold War. In Portuguese, or Lusophone, Africa the crisis of decolonization became inseparable from the Cold War as nowhere else, spawning civil wars in both nations with profound humanitarian consequences and challenging the United Nations on numerous levels.

Angola's experience of European contact and colonialism helped set the stage for its postcolonial crisis. Europeans subjected Angola to one of the most disruptive of slave experiences, the consequences of which are still felt today. Even by the standards in Africa, the Portuguese colonial experience was particularly harsh and backward, so much so that Portugal refused to ever report to the UN on the status of its colonies. Portugal left behind a colony in economic and political turmoil when independence was achieved in 1975, precipitating a civil war which became a theater of the ideological objectives of the superpowers. The divisions of tribal society in Angola were intensified by the politics of the Cold War, with the three largest tribal groups allying with various factions backed by either the Soviet Union, Cuba, South Africa, or the United States. The United Nations mounted four missions to Angola in the 1990s to verify the departure of foreign troops, monitor the implementation of peace accords, and promote reconciliation. But, by 1999, with the UN's work only partly accomplished, Angola asked the United Nations to depart, leaving behind only a rudimentary UN presence to liaise with the various combatants. Angola remains one of the most tragic legacies of Cold War Africa.24

In Mozambique, civil war erupted only a few years after independence in 1977, when a postcolonial Marxist government faced a growing resistance movement backed by the white regimes in neighboring Rhodesia and South Africa. The war raged for more than a decade but, by 1992, much progress toward peace had been achieved when the security Council authorized the deployment of more than 7,000 military and civilian personnel as part of an effort to implement a peace agreement, monitor a ceasefire among the factions, oversee the withdrawal of all foreign forces, and establish and observe the fragile electoral process.25

CHALLENGES IN THE POST-COLD WAR PERIOD: "SECOND GENERATION" PEACEKEEPING AND HUMANITARIAN EFFORTS

The end of the Cold War fundamentally changed international politics, but also offered the possibility of a new role for the United Nations in Africa, one removed from the zero-sum framework of the East-West conflict. The paralysis which had plagued the Security Council seemingly disappeared overnight, inspiring much optimism for the UN to play a greater role in a new, post-Cold War, Africa. But, this initial optimism was not completely justified. The United Nations would indeed face new opportunities, but also a host of new challenges, as the end of the Cold War provoked unanticipated crises, new demands, and a reprioritization of the many missions of the UN in Africa.

Although the East-West conflict had receded, the UN would confront new challenges and a resurgence of nationalism, separatism, and ethnic conflict, which would demand innovative responses, particularly in the area of conflict prevention, peacekeeping, and nation building. Furthermore, NorthSouth tensions over trade and economic development continued as before and in some ways were exacerbated by globalization and the breakdown of the Cold War international order.

Africa would not top the post-Cold War agenda. With the end of the Cold War there would be new regions of UN concern, including parts of the world where the UN had been largely excluded previously, such as the Balkans, Central America, the Caribbean, and the former Soviet republics. There would be new challenges thrown up by globalization and, after 2001, an increasing trend in the United States in favor of unilateralism and intervention would threaten once again to marginalize the United Nation's role in the world. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet empire and the revolutions in Russia, central Europe, and much of Latin America, ushered in a new era in the relations among states. But the opportunity to utilize the UN to address African problems subsequently passed. With the dissolution of the USSR no other power remained but the United States to lead the way, and Washington met the challenge with remarkable shortsightedness.

The 1990s nevertheless witnessed an explosion of United Nations activity throughout Africa, including peacekeeping, humanitarian relief, and conflict prevention. The UN's seventh Secretary General, Kofi Annan of Ghana, sought to focus the world's attention on poverty, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and child combatants in Africa. As the former head of UN peacekeeping, and the first secretary General from sub-Saharan Africa, he has articulated an "Annan Doctrine" positing that states cannot commit atrocities while hiding behind a veil of "sovereignty" and that outside powers should reconsider humanitarian intervention in Africa.

Throughout the post-Cold War era, UN peacekeeping operations have become most active in Africa, achieving successes in places such as Namibia and, to a lesser extent, Mozambique, but also suffering several well-publicized failures, most notably in Somalia, which had a profound impact on thinking about the capabilities of UN peacekeeping operations and contributed to the UN's more muted response to both the Rwandan genocide and the subsequent Great Lakes crisis. UN peacekeeping has nonetheless expanded into areas such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, Western Sahara, and the dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea.

The crisis in post-Cold War Somalia, for example, engaged the United Nations like nothing before. In this, the first large-scale African crisis of the post-Cold War era, the UN confronted the challenges of providing humanitarian relief on a massive scale compounded by the widespread collapse of the institutions of state. The UN found itself overwhelmed by the anarchic conditions in Somalia, where as many as 15 armed factions vied for power, and by the difficulty of coordinating a multinational peacekeeping force of nearly 40,000 from more than 20 nations, the largest and most expensive UN operation to date. That the United States began to evolve different priorities and aims once in Somalia further complicated the UN's mission. One factor in the Somali crisis of the 1990s lay in the legacies of the geopolitics of the Cold War on the horn of Africa. The postcolonial state became entangled in the politics of the Cold War, as both Washington and Moscow sought control of the region with its strategic location on the Horn. Both superpowers contributed to making Somalia's army the largest in Africa. The colonial-era effort to create a modern nation state proved disruptive to traditional society, where most Somalis looked to their clans for political identity, not a centralized state.26

The crisis in Somalia was very much the consequence of decolization and the Cold War. When the Cold War regime of the Somali dictator Said Barre was overthrown in 1991, Somalia descended into chaos. Clan identities and loyalties had long been more important than loyalty to the postcolonial Somali state, contributing to the fractured nature of Somali society. The civil war and the subsequent famine had already taken an estimated 300,000 lives and another 4.5 million faced starvation, at the time of the UN intervention in 1992. The United Nations Operations in Somalia (UNOSOM) sought to aid in the distribution of humanitarian relief and to establish a secure environment for the delivery of further aid.27 But the chaotic conditions made the UN's humanitarian efforts difficult and, with U.S. encouragement, the UN's mission in Somalia began to increasingly focus on political and security problems as the root of the humanitarian crisis. The UN forces, and particularly the U.S. troops within them, became increasingly obsessed with political matters such as regime change, seeking to capture the clan leader Mohammed Farah Aidid. Efforts to disarm or capture Aidid resulted in the deaths of 24 Pakistani peacekeepers in the autumn of 1993, followed by bloody street-to-street fighting in downtown Mogadishu which left 18 U.S. peacekeepers dead. President Clinton announced the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Somalia, thus decapitating the UN's larger mission there.28

The consequences of the Somalia operation were immense. While the UN had scored a number of successes on the humanitarian front, the loss of more than 140 peacekeepers received most of the attention and had debilitating aftereffects, leading to a reassessment of peacekeeping and particularly nation building. Among other unhappy consequences, the United Nations had little success establishing even the most basic of Somali state institutions, provoking a debate over the UN's role in nation building beyond rudimentary peacekeeping. Somalia also undermined U.S. support for UN operations, as American public opinion, in the face of a hysterical firestorm of media coverage critical of the operation, began to question the necessity of U.S. forces being used in areas not considered vital to American interests. Somalia delivered a blow to those who had advocated that the United Nations should increasingly take an interest in humanitarian interventions.29

The debacle in Somalia was felt beyond the horn of Africa. In Rwanda, the consequences of Somalia contributed to paralysis and the phenomenon of "humanitarian fatigue" which resulted in the UN standing aside as 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered in one of the worst acts of genocide since World War II. The commander of the previously established UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR)30 repeatedly called for international support, but the United States, fearful of another Somalia, blocked further action, and the Security Council avoided the use of the word "genocide" which, under the provisions of the Genocide Treaty, might have automatically committed the Security Council to take action. In an unprecedented move, the Secretary General established an independent inquiry to investigate why the UN remained paralyzed as the Rwandan genocide unfolded. The inquiry concluded that a lack of will, compounded by diminished resources and ignorance about the ferocity of the violence, resulted in the UN's passive response. The flood of Rwandan refugees into the area around Goma, Zaire, provoked the 1997 crisis in that neighboring country, which resulted in the accession to power of Laurent Kabila, and Rwanda has been a major participant in the ghastly Great Lakes crisis which has claimed the lives of millions of Africans.31

Although the initial era of decolonization has passed, the consequences of the colonial period, the Cold War, and their aftermath continue to challenge the institutions of the United Nations. The Cold War struggle suspended the vision of an international effort on behalf of Africa for almost half a century, but today, with the potential for a greater degree of cooperation among the permanent five, multilateral approaches to peacekeeping and cooperative approaches to nation-building are more likely. However, a number of potentially destabilizing African hotspots remain where UN peacekeepers have been excluded and, in all likelihood, will continue to be excluded into the foreseeable future. Recent collaborative peacekeeping endeavors between the United Nations and the Organization of American States, the Organization for security and Cooperation in Europe, NATO, the Organization of African Unity, and the Economic Community of West African States, have demonstrated the renewed potential of regional approaches to peacekeeping and nation building, not only for Africa, but for much of the world, as well.32

At the start of the 21st century the UN is continuing to develop its role in world affairs. Africa has been a particular and persistent challenge. The United Nations has faced the consequences of decolonization, the Cold War, and the struggle for self-determination with decidedly mixed results. Although the era of decolonization and self-determination has largely passed, the crises associated with those processes remain. The African continent, particularly the sub-Saharan region, continues to confront the UN with an almost insoluble number of challenges in the areas of humanitarian relief, health care, peacekeeping and peacemaking, and economic development. With the accession of Secretary General Annan, there has been a renewed focus at the UN on the plight of the continent. However, the West appears to have little desire to become more engaged in African problems.

After independence, postcolonial Africa desperately needed investment, development assistance, relief from poverty and famine, educational reform, health care, and support for nascent institutions of selfgovernment. Yet the outside world, when taking notice of Africa at all, often seemed more interested in geopolitical gains and securing and extracting Africa's resources. Africa most needed a broad international consensus in support of economic development and democratization. Instead, the world took an increasingly narrow ideological view of Africa's problems, seeking Cold War geopolitical advantage at every turn. Postcolonial Africa became the ultimate zero-sum playing field of the Cold War. Important opportunities were lost to Africans, but also to the wider world, which would have benefitted from African development and stability.

More than a decade after the end of the Cold War, despite the United Nations' focus on these and other regional matters, and despite the increasingly globalized nature of UN operations and programs, sub-Saharan Africa remains the most marginalized and underdeveloped region in the world. More than four decades since the heady beginnings of African decolonization, the annual United Nations Human Development Index, measuring life expectancy, educational attainment, and income levels, persistently places 25 African nations at the very bottom of its rankings, including areas of substantial UN involvement such as the Congo, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Angola, and Mozambique. Few places have felt the brunt of Cold War geopolitics, and few places continue to suffer from the consequences of the East-West conflict, as do the states of sub-Saharan Africa.33

NOTES

1. T.C. McCaskie, "Cultural Encounters: Britain and Africa in the Nineteenth Century," in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. Ill, Andrew Porter, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 665-689.

2. Toyin Falola and A.D. Roberts, "West Africa ," in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. IV, J. Brown and W.R. Louis, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 515-529.

3. Latin American states, while many of them of "developing" status, mostly supported U.S. or western interests in the early UN and thus, for political purposes, more or less belonged to the western bloc during the early years.

4. See "The Admission of New Members" in Yearbook of the United Nations, 1955, pp. 22-30.

5. Hammarskjold sensed the growing importance of the newly independent world, brokering the 1955 agreement that ended the membership logjam. The UN had 60 member nations at the beginning of his tenure and more than 100 at the time of his death in the Congo in 1961. His tenure coincided with a period of significant upheaval and conflict around the world, including the Suez Crisis (1956), the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962), the crisis over Lebanon (1958), the Congo decolonization crisis (1960-1962) resulting in Hammarskjold's death, and a growing American involvement in Indochina. Increasingly, after 1955, the focus of the United Nations would turn to the problems of the newly independent world, managing conflicts largely the consequence of decolonization, and addressing issues of economic development. Brian Urquhart, Hammarskjold (New York: Harper, 1972), pp. 377-388.

6. Urquhart, Hammarslgold, p. 3 81.

7. Although not perceived at the time, the Congo crisis became an important turning point in "first-generation" peacekeeping. Never again, in the three-decade duration of the Cold War, would the United Nations mount an operation on such a scale.

8. Belgium's domination of the Congo was harsh, even by the merciless standards of European rule in Africa, as the Belgians implemented a system of forced labor using genocide and systematic terrorism to maximize the extraction of the Congo's wealth, such as gold, diamonds, lumber, and coffee.

9. See "Questions Relating to the Situation in the Republic of the Congo (Leopoldville)," in Yearbook of the United Nations, 1960, pp. 52-108.

10. Norrie MacQueen, United Nations Peacekeeping in Africa Since 1960 (London: Longman, 2002), pp. 42-57. United Nations Operation in the Congo (July 1960 to June 1964), Background, at www.un.org/Depts/DPKO/Missions/onucB.htm.

11. "United Nations Force in the Congo," Yearbook of the United Nations, 1960, p. 108. See also UN documents on the Congo crisis at www.un.org/Depts/DPKO/Missions/onucD.htm.

12. Keith Kyle, a journalist who covered the crisis, recalls that Hammarskjold "did not hesitate to take action over the Congo. But it is important to bear in mind that it was not exactly the action for which the Congolese had originally asked." see Keith KyIe, "The UN in the Congo," Conflict Date Service, INCORE, at www.incore.ulst.ac.uk/home/publication/occasional/kyle.html.

13. Questions Related to the Situation in the Republic of the Congo, in Year book of the United Nations, 1960 (New York: United Nations, 1961), pp. 52-129.

14. Urquhart, Hammarskjold, pp. 588-589.

15. Stanley Meisler, in The United Nations: the First Fifty Years (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997) sees he UN's experience in the Congo as a "grand victory." Others, such as the journalist Keith Kyle believe it left something of a permanent stain on peacekeeping and, more broadly, on the UN itself.

16. The Great Lakes Crisis, in Yearbook of the United Nations, 1997 (New York: United Nations, 1998), pp. 68-70.

17. United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/missions/monuc/ index.html.

18. Christopher Saunders and lain Smith, "Southern Africa, 1795-1910," in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. Ill, Andrew Porter, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 597-623.

19. Yearbook of the United Nations, 1946, p. 144.

20. For further information on the vetoes see "Subjects of UN Security Council Vetoes," [originally from Sydney Bailey and Sam Daws, The Procedure of the UN Security Council, Third Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)] or check the website at: www.globalpolicy.org/security/membership/veto/vetosubj.htm.

21. According to Karen Mingst and Margaret Karns, authors of The United Nations in the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford: Westview Press, 2000), the United Nations played a large role not only in legitimizing the South African domestic opposition to apartheid, but also delegitimizing and ultimately defeating apartheid.

22. United Nations Transition Assistance Group at www.un.org/Depts/dpko/dpko/co_mission/untag.htm.

23. Its success, Stanley Meisler has argued in The United Nations: The First Fifty Years, was an important contributing factor to the end of apartheid and the eventual introduction of election monitors to South Africa in 1994.

24. William Minter, Apartheid's Contras: An Inquiry Into the Roots of War in Angola and Mozambique (London: Zed Books, 1994).

25. Report of the Secretary General on the United Nations Operation in Mozambique," January 28, 1994, S/1994/89, at www.un.org/Depts/ dpko/dpko/co_mission/onumozD.htm.

26. But, as Paolo Tipodi has demonstrated in The Colonial Legacy in Somalia, (London: Palgrave, 1999) colonialism also played its part. The Somali-speaking peoples are one of the largest linguistic groups in Africa and are scattered throughout the northeast of the continent. Precolonial Somalia was not a unified entity but rather a cluster of clan and kinship groups who largely subsisted by raising livestock. During the late-19th century scramble for Africa the British carved out a northern Somaliland protectorate, altering the centuries-old pastoral rhythms of life on the Horn of Africa. The French subsequently established French Somaliland (later to become Djibouti), and the Italians ultimately claimed southern Somalia in 1905. The Europeans further complicated the situation when they ceded the Ogaden region of historic Somalia to neighboring Ethiopia and a portion of southern Somalia to British Kenya

27. United Nations Operation in Somalia at www.un.org/Depts/dpko/ dpko/co_mission/unosomi.htm

28. Yearbook of the United Nations, 1993 (New York: United Nation 1994), pp. 293-295.

29. In William Hyland Clinton's World: Remaking American Foreign Policy, (New York: Praeger, 1999) he argues that while the humanitarian intervention in Somalia was a success - it saved thousands of lives - the Clinton administration planted the seeds of the UN's failure by expanding the mission to include the chasing of warlords and the rebuilding of the failed Somali state. Less than a decade after the debacle in Somalia the UN has recommitted itself to peacekeeping in the horn of Africa. In the summer of 2000, the UN established a peacekeeping operation to monitor the cessation of hostilities between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Numerous UN agencies also sought to relieve the humanitarian crisis in the region, exacerbated by a drought and famine, but precipitated by the conflict between the two nations.

30. United Nations Assistance Mission For Rwanda at www.un.org/ Depts/dpko/dpko/co_mission/unamir.htm.

31. "Statement on Receiving the Report of the Independent Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations During the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda," The Secretary General, December 16, 1999. A full copy of the report can be obtained at the UN's official webstie at: http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/afrec/sgreport/report.htm.

32. See B. Andemicael, OAU and the UN: Relations Between the Organization of African Unity and the United Nations (New York, 1976).

33. See "Human Development Index" at www.undp.org/hdr2003/.

By Christopher O'Sullivan*

* Christopher O'Sullivan received his Ph.D. ( 1999) and MA ( 1993) in history from the London School of Economics, University of London, and has BA from the University of California, Berkeley. His first book, Summer Welles, Postwar Planning, and the Quest for a New World Order (Columbia University Press, 2003) was awarded the American Historical Association's Gutenberg Prize. He is the recipient of a 2002 research award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as the 2003 LubinWinant Research Fellowship from the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. In 2003-2004 he was a Visiting Research Fellow with the Centre for International Study, London, working on a history of the United Nations for the Anvil Series. He spends his summers in Northern Ireland and Bosnia, where he has been investigating the issues of history, identity, and ethnic and religious conflict.