12 - An Assessment of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC)

Summary

There are divergent appraisals on the outcome of the United Nations Peacekeeping Operation in Cambodia, which took place for 18 months from March 1992 to September 1993. In my view, such divergence of views is inevitable; it arises from degrees of prior expectations, varied estimates regarding the capacity of the United Nations to deploy and implement a complex peace-keeping mandate, as well as the degree to which a UN intervention could make a serious impact upon the socioeconomic and political structure of a country within a limited time span.

Michael W. Doyle, for example, argues that, while the peace-keeping operation in Cambodia produced positive results, the subsequent peacebuilding phase was not entirely satisfactory, since the war against the Khmer Rouge was inconclusive and some opportunities to reform the Cambodian state were missed. Samol Ney, Deputy Director General for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Cambodia, said in a Tokyo workshop of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) that the UN peace-keeping in his country had achieved a great success and that the general elections in 1993 were a turning point in Cambodian history. But he added that the task of UNTAC under the Paris Peace Agreements was too ambitious and, therefore, was an impossible one to implement as the cease-fire was not honoured and demilitarization was not achieved. In his view, UNTAC was too passive vis-à-vis the Khmer Rouge resistance. He argued that the most serious UNTAC failure was its inability to “bring about the disarmament and demobilization of the Khmer Rouge”.

Despite these critical appraisals, it cannot be denied that during its 18-month mandate, UNTAC achieved many of its ambitious tasks, particularly its core objective, namely the conduct of free and fair general elections, which led to the creation of a new government of Cambodia with considerable success, although as will be noted later in this paper, there were shortcomings and defects in the operation, more particularly due to the fact that there had been little time to prepare logistically for the commencement of a huge peace-keeping operation and, most of all, UNTAC met a totally unanticipated armed resistance from the Party of Democratic Kampuchea (PDK, also known as the Khmer Rouge).