CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

and optimism that followed successful collective security action in the Gulf, it was to be
the UN’s most ambitious intervention to date, effectively placing Cambodia in a state of
UN trusteeship. The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978, though bred more of
Vietnamese strategic interest than humanitarian concern had, nevertheless, rescued the
country from what has been termed the ‘auto-genocide’ of Khmer Rouge rule 69 .
Although Vietnamese withdrawal had been brokered in 1989, civil war had continued
until a cease-fire in May 1991 made possible agreement at Paris in October between the
four principal protagonists: The People’s Republic of Kampuchea (official government
in Phnom Penh), the Khmer Rouge, Prince Sihanouk’s Funcinpec, and the Kampuchea
People’s National Liberation Front. UNTAC was established by UNSCR 745 70 of 28
February 1992, and the mission began formally to deploy on March 15. It was to
comprise 15,000 - 20,000 UN personnel.
In the eyes of many observers UNTAC was flawed from the outset because it involved
agreement with the Khmer Rouge as an equal partner in the peace process instead of
seeking to bring them to account for the atrocities committed during their period of rule
from 1975-1978. The ‘realpolitik’ of affording such moral equivalence to those who
have committed heinous crimes was to recur in Somalia, and in protracted negotiations
with the Bosnian-Serb authorities, in particular, in Bosnia; it is an inevitable
consequence of interventions based on consent from all parties. Although UNTAC
may be regarded as a qualified success in that the planned elections were held before the
mission was wound up in 1993, it left Cambodia still a dangerously unstable state. 71
Moreover, the experience of UNTAC was to expose failings of the peacekeeping model
that have since become all too familiar.
Whilst no insult is intended to the bravery and sacrifice of the 2247 UN peacekeepers *
who have given their lives on the Organisation’s missions since 1945 72 , it has become a
recurrent theme that mission-success is endangered, if not rendered entirely impossible,
by over concern about the safety of the peacekeepers. Mary Kaldor 73 has argued that in
intervention operations the ethos must be that of the policeman – prepared to put
* All fatalities in UN peacekeeping mission service to 10 Apr 06, including accident and illness as well as
enemy action. Figure includes military and civilian mission personnel and local employed.
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