UN Interventions

The United Nations is an international organization founded in 1945, where it takes on issues confronting humanity, such as climate change, peace and security, disarmament, terrorism, conflicts and more. However, the effectiveness of these interventions by the UN is still in question. Intervention is the interference of one state in the affairs of another, while effective is how adequate UN is in accomplishing their purpose. On the other hand, conflict is a disagreement through which the parties involved are perceived to be a threat to their needs, interests or concerns. From case studies such as Mozambique and Angola, where an external third party was involved in their armed conflict between different parties in the two respective countries, …show more content…
Hence, for this essay, I will be examining the effectiveness of UN interventions in resolving conflicts by comparing the case study of Mozambique and Angola, where UN interventions were successful and unsuccessful for both countries respectively, taking into aspects of UN's understanding of the situation, cooperation of host countries and UN's commitment towards the peacekeeping missions in Mozambique and Angola and the …show more content…
Ethnic tensions were present long before Angola became independent in 1975, when Angola was still governed under the colonials. And when the Portuguese left without selecting a government for Angola, the two existing parties, MPLA and UNITA, a communist and nationalist party respectively fought for power over Angola, with ethnic tensions being one of the root cause for the start of the Civil war. With the lack of knowledge of this, UN established the peacekeeping missions in Angola. Without taking this into consideration, UN did not resolve the ethnic tensions between the two ruling parties and as a result, the mandates of the peacekeeping missions are not fulfilled. Ethnic tensions caused both parties to be unwilling to reconcile as they were not up for democratization, driving them to seek for power at any cost, especially UNITA. After the elections, where MPLA took victory with 54% over 34% (Concillation Resources, 2004) of UNITA voters, this in turn resulted UNITA in starting another war due to their dissatisfaction over the voting results. With more than 30 peacekeeping missions set up during the period where Angola's civil war was ongoing, Angola therefore was not the top priority of UN. Another would be the fact that the peacekeeping mission in Angola was to build on the success of the peacekeeping mission in Namibia, causing UN to fail