Intergovernmental Organ izations 221In the post– Cold War era, UN peacekeeping has expanded to address dif er ent types
of conflicts and to take on new responsibilities. Whereas traditional peacekeeping
activities primarily address interstate conflict, complex (or multidimensional)
peacekeeping activities respond to civil war and ethnonationalist conflicts within
states that may not have requested UN assistance. To deal with these new conflicts,
peacekeepers have taken on a range of both military and nonmilitary functions. On
the military side, they have aided in the verification of troop withdrawal (the Soviet
Union from Af ghan i stan) and have separated warring factions until the under lying
issues could be settled (Bosnia). Sometimes, resolving under lying issues has meant
organ izing and running national elections, as in Cambodia and Namibia; sometimes,
it has involved implementing human rights agreements, as in Central Amer i ca. At
other times, UN peacekeepers have tried to maintain law and order in failing or dis-
integrating socie ties by aiding in civil administration, policing, and rehabilitating
infrastructure, as in Somalia, East Timor, and Af ghan i stan. (This is often called
peacebuilding.) And peacekeepers have provided humanitarian aid, supplying food,
medicine, and a secure environment in part of an expanded conception of human
security in Africa. Table 7.3 lists some representative cases of complex peacekeeping
operations.
Complex peacekeeping has had successes and failures, as illustrated by the two
African cases of Namibia and Rwanda. Namibia (formerly South- West Africa), a for-
mer German colony, was administered by South Africa following the end of World
War I. Over the years, pressure was exerted on South Africa to relinquish control of
the territory, but as long as Soviet- backed Cuban troops occupied neighboring Angola,
South Africa refused to consider a change, citing security concerns. Fi nally, in 1988,
Cuba and Angola agreed to withdraw Cuban troops as part of a regional peace settlement
that included Namibian in de pen dence. The UN peacekeeping operation supervised
the cease- fire, monitored the withdrawal of South African forces, supervised the civilian
police force, secured the repeal of discriminatory legislation, and created conditions for
free and fair elections. The UN Transition Assistance Group in Namibia (UNTAG)
became the model for UN complex peacekeeping and nation building in Cambodia
in the early 1990s and in East Timor in the late 1990s.
But not all UN peacekeeping operations have been successful. Rwanda is an
example of a situation where a limited UN peacekeeping force proved to be insufficient
and where genocide subsequently escalated as the international community watched
and did nothing. Rwanda and neighboring Burundi have seen periodic outbreaks of
devastating ethnic vio lence between Hutus and Tutsis since the 1960s. In the 1990s,
intermittent fighting once again broke out. A 1993 peace agreement called for a UN
force (the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda, or UNAMIR) to monitor the cease- fire.
Yet less than a year later, large- scale vio lence erupted following the death of the Rwan-
dan president in a plane crash, with Hutu extremists in the Rwandan military and