In 1992, the UN embarked on the most ambitious peace operation in its history. The United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) was more than a peacekeeping operation. Not only was the aim to put an end to over two decades of civil war, it intended to place the country under virtual trusteeship and give the Cambodians a crash course in democracy. For the first time in the United Nation's history, a peace mission was supposed to take over the administration of an independent member state. UNTAC was an early example of a new type of ‘complex peacekeeping’ that moved far beyond the mere separation of belligerent parties along a status quo line, and was hoped to be a model for future settlement of civil wars. With almost sixteen thousand troops and some six thousand civilian personnel at its height, it was the biggest and most expensive operation under UN command up to that time. UNTAC had two principle missions to accomplish in merely eighteen months’ time. The military was to observe the cease-fire and demobilize and disarm most of the four belligerent parties, while the civilian components had to control the four factions’ civil institutions and eventually organize democratic elections. As the military and civilian components deployed in mid-1992 and set out to perform their separate missions, they discovered that, faced with obstructionism from the two main factions and with the means, organization and mandate provided to them, it was impossible to perform either mission as planned. Nevertheless, eighteen months later, UNTAC had successfully held elections that resulted in a democratically elected government. The following three chapters explore how the civil and military sides discovered how their missions – which had been envisaged and planned as sequential and largely segregated – were intricately entangled.

Peacekeepers in the Post-Cold War Disorder

In late May 1992, a small group of Dutch Marines assembled on the Thai border with Cambodia. As part of one of the UN peacekeeping force's twelve infantry battalions, the Marines were tasked to deploy in one sector in the western region of Cambodia. The largest part of their assigned sector was jungle area controlled by the Khmer Rouge, the most notorious of the four belligerent parties in a country that had been involved in war for most of the previous twenty years.