Rwanda Revisited: unamir ii

In his article, John Frewen provides a first-hand account of his experience as the Australian contingent operations officer in Rwanda. In so doing he provides insight into the challenges that he and his fellow contingent members faced as they tried to conduct operations in a UN mission that was characterized as having a confused mandate, uncertain use of force authorizations, inadequate resourcing, and plagued by misjudgments as to the intentions of the main actors. A (and, indeed, the degree of respect they would afford the UN), failure of collective will, and misconceptions as to role, all played a part in unamir and unamir ii trying – often heroically – to act as ‘representatives of peace, where no true peace had yet settled