No problem has proved more intractable for the United Nations than that of the former British mandate of Palestine. Seventy years after the organisation first dealt with the problem, Israel occupies some of the territory of one of its neighbours, has poor relations with others, and has an unresolved relationship with the Palestinian state that was meant to have been born in 1947, but which has still not successfully emerged into the light. It is possible to argue that UN policy in the area has been wrong-headed from the start: certainly, it has not been successful. Only Kashmir can rival it for longevity on the United Nations’ agenda: seven decades after the organisation took up the issue of Palestine, there is no solution in sight.

The Security Council resolutions of 25 August 1947 had set up (or at least foreshadowed) two UN bodies to assist with the Indonesian problem. Most immediately, noting that the Indonesian Republic had requested ‘a commission of observers’, the Council asked the countries that had ‘career consular representatives’ in Batavia to instruct themto prepare jointly for the information and guidance of the Security Council reports on the situation in the Republic of Indonesia following the resolution of the Council of 1 August 1947, such reports to cover the observance of the cease-fire orders and the conditions prevailing in areas under military occupation or from which armed forces now in occupation may be withdrawn by agreement between the parties. This group of consuls, representing Australia, Belgium, China, France, the United Kingdom and the United States, came to be known collectively as the Consular Commission. Their task was an immediate one: to report to the Council on the situation, and was to begin immediately.

By June 1964, Unficyp had done much to contain military action and prevent a recurrence of open fighting. In addition to its traditional military functions, which were meant to deter a resumption of hostilities, it had also performed non-traditional roles: helping to restore public services, including the courts, and assisting trade and commerce by reopening factories and enabling agricultural work to continue. Moreover, it escorted the transportation of food, essential material, and people on the island’s roads, constructed shelters at refugee camps and reduced fortifications across Cyprus. In spite of this good work, however, its presence had not yet stopped communal violence between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, nor had it made any progress towards disarming civilians.

In June 1967 the Arabs and Israelis fought a war that lasted for just six days but changed the face of the Middle East. For the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (Untso), the challenges were immense. For the previous 19 years Untso’s operations, centred on the four Mixed Armistice Commissions (MACs) described in chapter 9, had plotted a more or less steady course, although there had been plenty of tensions. But in three of Untso’s four areas of operation, the 1967 war ended with radically changed boundaries between the belligerents and an entirely new geography of peace for the observers to monitor. For the next six years, Untso had to meet the new challenges unaided: it was only after the 1973 war that new UN missions were set up in the Sinai and on the Golan (see chapters 20 and 21). This chapter shows how Untso was able to reposition itself – literally as well as figuratively – to respond to the new environment after 1967 and describes the key roles played by Australians in that process.

The election of the Labor government led by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in December 1972 marked a major change in Australia’s approach to international peacekeeping. To a large extent, the change grew out of the philosophy of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). A self-declared ‘internationalist’ party, in government it was far more willing than its conservative predecessors to look to the United Nations to help solve world problems, and hence it was keen for Australia to play its part in international peacekeeping missions. This approach was championed by Whitlam, who was also Minister for Foreign Affairs in the first year of his government.

This volume has been the story of heroic efforts amid an overall landscape of failure. Problems that the United Nations in its earliest years set out to address remain unresolved today: the questions of Israel/Palestine and of Kashmir are the most obvious examples, and – a little later – Cyprus. In Cyprus at least one may say that, since 1974, there has been no war, and in recent years there have been steady advances towards a settlement. One cannot say the same about the other two. In those, the bright hopes once invested in UN diplomacy have been dashed. Only in two cases dealt with in this volume – Indonesia and Rhodesia – was the international community, whether in the form of the United Nations or of the British Commonwealth, successful in resolving a situation. In those cases a newly independent country was successfully brought into being, and in both cases peacekeepers, including Australians, played a major role.

Chapter 3 described the diplomatic efforts by the UN Committee of Good Offices (Ungoc), which led to the Dutch and Republicans signing the Renville Agreement on 17 January 1948, and the subsequent efforts by Ungoc’s military observers to help the parties establish demarcation lines and demilitarised zones, as well as supervising the withdrawal of forces stranded on the wrong side of the line, the exchange of prisoners and maintenance of the ceasefire. This work culminated with a conference of senior observers, who produced an important statement of practice and peacekeeping principles, ‘General instructions for military observers, Committee of Good Offices’.

The period of 25 years between the deployment of Australia’s first UN peacekeepers in 1947 and the withdrawal of Australian troops from Vietnam in 1972 marks a distinct phase in Australian peacekeeping, and has been the subject of part 1 of this volume. During that time, with large relatively military commitments in the Korean War, the Malayan Emergency, Confrontation and the Vietnam War, Australia deployed only a handful of military peacekeepers, and the only large group of peacekeepers was the police who went to Cyprus in 1964. The election of the Whitlam Labor government in December 1972 and the end of Australia’s commitment to the Vietnam War, which began to wind down in 1970 and was completed in December 1972, fundamentally changed Australia’s approach to international peacekeeping, and will be discussed in detail in part 2.

By the beginning of 1990, the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (Untso) and its Australian observers were maintaining a well-established routine. On the Golan, the usual round of observation and patrolling continued, with little change in the level of activity. Observation duties in southern Lebanon were more challenging with low-level conflict between Hezbollah and other Muslim groups and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), but as the long Lebanon civil war had formally ended in 1989, fighting between the Lebanese factions was decreasing. Within Israel, the Intifada – the Palestinian uprising – was still running, but Untso had no role in trying to end or even moderate the violence. The Untso observers and their families tried to keep away from any Intifada-fuelled riots or bombings.

In early 1982, the Australian Government agreed to provide a five-man contingent as part of a 36-strong, seven-country Commonwealth operation: the Commonwealth Military Training Team – Uganda (CMTTU). The CMTTU arose from the 1981 Melbourne Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting and was tasked by the Commonwealth with training officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) in the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA), formed after the overthrow of the dictator Idi Amin. The other countries taking part were Great Britain, Guyana, Jamaica, Sierra Leone and Tanzania; Canada provided a medical team. From March 1982 to March 1984, Australia provided four teams, each of five men (a major, a captain, a warrant officer class 2 and two sergeants). Each team served for six months, and in all 20 Australian soldiers served in Uganda during this time. The Australians helped train more than 3500 Ugandan soldiers in minor tactics, field craft and weapon handling. Twenty years after the Vietnam War and almost a decade before the 1990s expansion in Australian peacekeeping, Uganda was truly the ‘only show in town’ for soldiers desiring deployment abroad.

By mid-1951, diplomatic efforts to resolve the Kashmir problem had dissolved. It was now up to the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (Unmogip) to monitor the Cease Fire Line (CFL) in the hope that some further means of resolving the problem might eventuate. There was, however, no resolution, and the observers were still in place well into the twenty-first century. The Australians, who joined Unmogip in January 1952, were to play a major role in Kashmir until 1985, when the Australian Government withdrew its contingent.

Like most of the other conflicts dealt with in this volume, that in Southern Rhodesia resulted from the process of decolonisation. Unlike Kashmir, Palestine and Cyprus, where the conflict was over control of a recently decolonised territory, in Southern Rhodesia (as in Indonesia in the 1940s) the conflict was between, on the one hand, a majority population seeking independence and, on the other, colonial masters determined to hang on at all costs. The situation differed from that in Indonesia in that the original colonising power, Britain, had more or less withdrawn from the situation, and for a decade and a half the colonialist fight had been carried on by the white minority they had left behind. But the similarities were strong, too.

‘The past week has marked one of the most difficult and potentially dangerous phases of the settlement in Rhodesia. Great forbearance – the more difficult after years of war – was called for from all sides.’ With these words, the interim Governor, Christopher Soames, opened a broadcast to the nation on the evening of 6 January 1980. In somewhat florid language, he continued by describing progress so far in dramatic terms as three acts: the withdrawal of the Rhodesian Security Forces (RSF); the dispersal of members of the Commonwealth Monitoring Force (CMF) ‘in small isolated groups scattered among the hills and in the middle of the veldt’; and finally the arrival at the Rendezvous Points and Assembly Places (APs), ‘in a trickle which has become a flood’, of thousands of members of the Patriotic Front (PF).