The Congo Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

The Congo - Essay ExampleThe independence did not solve each(prenominal) the problems of Congo, and problems started arising in the country of Katanga, which was enriched with mines. The province was under the control of Moise Tshombe, who in July 1960 supported the Belgium mercenaries and the Belgium Mining company named Union Minere. After having this support, he declared Kantanga independence. Due to this treachery to the Congo government, Lumumba demanded United Nations to look into the matter and resolve all the upcoming issues and probable Civil War.The Lumumbas government requested UN military assistance to protect the national grease of the Congo against the present external aggression which is a threat to international peace. There was no request to restore internal stability. However, Secretary-General Hammarskjold recommended to the trade protection Council the establishment of a peace-keeping force to assist the government of the Congo in maintaining law and order un til, with technical assistance from the UN, the Congolese national security forces were able to meet these tasks. The Security Council authorized the Secretary-General to take the necessary steps for this purpose and called on Belgium to withdraw its troops from the territory. Thus began what, until the public presentation in Cambodia, was the largest UN peacekeeping operation (reaching a peak of 20,000 troops plus a large noncombatant corps) and one with a profound influence on internal developments in a member state. The Secretary-General was in full aware of the sensitivity of the action that the UN was undertaking in the Congo, both in terms of the attitudes of the foreign countries having a strong interest in the course of events in the Congo, and of the resistance of the Congolese government to any seeming.UN stay Keeping Mission in Congo -Congo Crisis (MONUC)The secretary-general thus faced a government clearly desperately searching for assistance, and the possibility th at outside powers might fill the resulting vacuum if the UN did not. Acting under Article 99 of the charter for the rootage time in the organizations history, the secretary-general called for a Security Council meeting to discuss the issue. In doing so, Hammarskjold furbish up in motion the UN involvement in the Congo. That involvement took the form of an operation that, until the 1990s, was the largest UN peacekeeping operation on record. It was also an involvement that prompted a crisis so deep and an come across so devastating for the United Nations that at once the UN operation in the Congo was officially over the UN did its best not only to put the experience behind it but also to forget it altogether.The willingness to use force in the Congo was a first for the United Nations and it came in the early days of UN experience with peacekeeping. Some of the logistical and communication problems associated with the operation, therefore, can be attributed to a general lack of exp erience and procedures. Command and control problems, for example, such as those associated with the final unanticipated push into Jadotville that surprised UN headquarters, fall into this category. It remains possible, though, that the Jadotville example, like the murky background to Operation Morthor, is an example of a disconnect between decision making in the field and decision making at UN headquarters, either