14 - The Role and Performance of UNTAC: An Australian Perspective

Summary

The UN intervention in Cambodia was an important, if flawed success. Many people these days, with the benefit of hindsight, tend to see the mistakes made by UNTAC (the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia) during the operation, and the subsequent somewhat slow pace of consolidation of democracy in Cambodia, as indicating that the UN intervention was a failure. In doing so, however, they are confusing what was intended by the international community in the 1991 Paris Agreements with a ‘wish list’ of popular expectations which could never have been realistically met. It was never, for example, the expectation of those directly involved that a full-fledged, Western-style democracy could be created in the less than two years that the whole UN operation lasted. Similarly, it was simply never realistic to contemplate that 15,000 widely-scattered international troops could, if the need arose, defeat the Khmer Rouge militarily, when 200,000 battle-hardened Vietnamese troops had not achieved that after ten years in Cambodia; nor that the 10 million mines strewn across Cambodia's countryside could be removed during the operation. Neither was it possible that the Cambodian economy and infrastructure — weak even in its heyday — could be rebuilt in so short a time.

Rather, the ultimate aim of those countries involved in negotiating the Paris Agreements had always been the simple proposition of creating conditions whereby the Cambodian people could for virtually the first time in their existence have a direct say in their own governance and future, and to that extent the whole exercise should be judged a success.

And let there be no doubt about it: UNTAC certainly succeeded in achieving many of the major objectives set down for it:

1. • It succeeded in the then relatively new function for the UN of organising and conducting free and fair elections despite the far from ideal conditions.

2. • It also made a genuine, and hopefully lasting, improvement in the human rights situation in Cambodia.

3. • UNTAC also achieved the logistically daunting task of repatriating more than 365,000 displaced Cambodians from camps on the Thai border, thus removing a situation which had of itself become a source of regional tension.