Blue Helmets in southern Lebanon, caught between the gunfire and a vague mandate Israel’s demand that the mission be relocated and its army’s attacks are jeopardizing the effectiveness of the UNIFIL operation, one of the oldest in the United Nations To review United Nations peacekeeping missions with a list of successes and failures in hand would be equivalent to considering all the conflicts in the world over 75 years — to 2023 — as one. Because the conditions of these deployments have been as varied as the nature of the wars in which they have intervened or mediated: from the discreet effectiveness, despite a few surprises, of the missions in Kosovo or East Timor, to the inaction of the Dutch Blue Helmets while the Serbian forces perpetrated their genocide in Srebrenica ; the paralysis of MINURSO in Western Sahara or the anachronism of the U.N.
headquarters on the Green Line in Nicosia (Cyprus). Any example, however, pales in comparison to two current deployments, each more complex than the other: the controversial multinational security mission in Haiti, where it does not have official peacekeeping status, and, above all, the operation in southern Lebanon, the target in recent weeks of an Israeli offensive against Hezbollah. Conflict resolution experts often argue that the main reason for mission failure is often broad mandates that are difficult to execute.
This could be said of UNIFIL (the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon), which has been active for more t.
