The end of the Cold War was marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later. The Crude War's birth was marked by Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent, first Gulf War.
But in the background of these two events, another kind of conflict was being born, the one that would plague the UN throughout the 90s and beyond. So far the UN had functioned as a political forum, an economic improvement forum and a peacekeeping service. But with the outbreak of civil war in Yugoslavia in 1991, an old ghost came back to haunt the world: genocide.
In 1992, the UN gained a new Secretary General: the Egyptian diplomat Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who's first order of business was the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO).
In January of that year, the Security Council had called on the UN to strengthen its capacity for peacekeeping operations and Boutros-Ghali responded in June with his famous Agenda for Peace. This basically elevated peacekeeping forces to act more or less as combatants to enforce cease-fires and peace agreements.
In between the two, the Security Council deemed the food crisis in Somalia a threat to international peace and security. The UN sent 500 troops to secure the aid lines. The Pakistanis arrived 5 months late, with no equipment and almost no training and the peacekeeping force as a whole found itself pinned down in the airport compound by the local warlords who used the profits from stolen foreign aid to buy arms. In December, in a final act of loyalty to the UN, the defeated George Bush sent 37,000 US troops to improve the situation; troops who were almost instantly recalled over a period of 15 months by the new Clinton administration. This was quickly picked up by the warlord, Aideed, resulting in an attack on the Pakistani troops, resulting in 26 deaths. The subsequent reprisals saw US troops killing innocent civilians and mistakenly attacking UN officials. On October 3rd, the call "Black Hawk Down" went out and the US "retreat" began in earnest, with Clinton vehemently pointing the finger at Boutros-Ghali and the UN.
The DPKO soon found itself working on sixteen different peacekeeping missions, headed from February 1993 by the man who would later head the UN as a whole: Kofi Annan. Annan's work at the DPKO included successfully completing elections in Cambodia, and the first peaceful handover of political power in the country's history. He similarly negotiated a peace agreement with UNITA in Angola, and the return of deposed President Aristide to Haiti.
But parallel to this, the slaughter of the Croatian people for their declaration of independence was well under way, with safe areas declared around four cities, manned by a paltry 7,600 man peacekeeping operation. At the same time, Milosevic (who would ultimately be tried at the Hague for crimes against humanity) found himself able to push his lines of attack and then allow the UN to "defend" them. He similarly learned that the constant threat of air strikes was nothing more than a bluff that the Security Council had never expected him to call. And once he realised his call was correct, the safety zones being slaughter zones.
As the slaughter continued in the area of Yugoslavia and Croatia, the final US troops prepared to leave Somalia in March 1994. Days later, on April 6th, the Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana's plane was shot down, and the genocide started.
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