The maxim goes that few plans ever survive the first shot fired on the battlefield. The same appears to be true for the murky area between war and peace as the military plan in Cambodia got bogged down almost as soon as UNTAC crossed the starting line. Its leaders therefore had to either abandon the mission or improvise and change it drastically. However, a decision was postponed for several months. This left UNTAC's military to muddle through from August 1992 onwards, while hoping the Khmer Rouge would join the peace process after all. Parallel to the limited cantonment activities some of the peacekeepers had become involved in civic action, but when it came to ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of the people, no amount of humanitarianism by the soldiers would compensate for the lack of security that persisted for many Cambodians as a result of the surge in banditry and political violence. UNTAC's official approach to ending the violence in Cambodia was twofold. Violence resulting from military conflict was a matter for the military component to monitor and negotiate. Criminal violence was a matter for the UN Civilian Police (CivPol) under the Agreement. This model, based on the rigid distinction between ‘military security’ and ‘public security,’ did not match reality in Cambodia and certainly not in Banteay Meanchey province where the Dutch Marines went far in improvising ways to establish a secure environment. Their experience would prove to be an early indicator for the expanding role of peacekeepers in the field of public security during the 1990s.

Police Monitors

One of the most obvious problems related to the gap between police and military operations in peacekeeping proved to be that in areas ravaged by civil wars the local police were often hard to distinguish from military forces. The strict segregation of the two occupations, firmly established in Western democratic societies in the twentieth century, was not as clearly defined as the drafters of the Paris Peace Accords had envisioned. Although CivPol was tasked to monitor all four factions’ police forces, the only distinguishable police apparatus was that of the State of Cambodia. The UN estimated SOC police at 47,000 in number, but this was a largely untrained and poorly equipped force that lacked standardized procedures and a functioning criminal code.