O'Brien ordered UN peacekeeping forces into the breakaway Katanga province, and the resulting scandal forced him out of office.
A12 U.N. Troops Prepare for Battle The United Nations ordered its peacekeeping troops in Sierra Leone to take up defensive positions and prepare to fight rebels advancing toward the capital, Freetown.
There is no question, for instance, that the genocide in Rwanda, which was made possible in part by the refusal of the US and other Security Council members to order UN peacekeeping forces to intervene, badly damaged the credibility of the international legal regime.
In the end O'Brien, apparently acting on what he thought was a UN resolution, ordered the UN peacekeeping force into action against the mercenaries and against Katanga's secession.
Mr. Annan, a former head of peacekeeping who moved into the top job just as the United Nations was floundering over its role in the post-cold-war era, has ordered reviews of peacekeeping debacles in Rwanda and Bosnia and of the overall functioning of the department.
Military officials say that requirement has become increasingly onerous as American forces have been committed to an array of other missions -- from patrolling so-called no-flight zones in Iraq, which President Bush's father first ordered, to the peacekeeping missions that President Clinton ordered in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Too often, she added, peacekeeping operations are ordered too small for the sake of "political expediency".
The French troops, supported by helicopters and working alongside an African peacekeeping force, have ordered all militias and rebels to hand over their weapons.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan seized the moment and all but ordered Washington to muster a peacekeeping mission, and within days European and African leaders had joined in the chorus.
It strikes at the military, and subverts the forces of order and peacekeeping".
