The turning point for the United Nations, as for the world, occurred when Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985. It became clear -- first to the European leaders and UN officials, eventually to Washington -- that Gorbachev not only wanted to disengage from Cold War contests (and costs), but also wanted an activist United Nations to pick up the slack and neutralize regional disputes and tensions. He put his money where his mouth was by paying $200 million in past peacekeeping debts. (At about the same time, under the Reagan administration, Washington began withholding peacekeeping dues and other UN obligations, fueling a new UN financial crisis that persisted through the organization's 50th anniversary.)

Those who were involved look back on the years 1988 through 1991 as the golden age of UN problem-solving and peacekeeping. Whereas only three peacekeeping operations (in the Sinai, Golan Heights and Lebanon) were initiated between 1966 and 1988, 17 were launched between 1988 and 1995.

During this era, Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar pressed for United Nations mediation in Central America, Cambodia, the Iran-Iraq war and Afghanistan. At a press conference in January 1987, he went a step farther, pushing the ambassadors of the Council's five permanent members to meet privately and map out their common ground on those issues. In so doing, he restored the system intended by the founders of the United Nations, who foresaw a global hegemony of the major powers exercised through the UN Security Council, to impose solutions on disputants and thus maintain or restore international peace.

The first mediation to bear fruit was the complex package of agreements that extricated the Soviet army from Afghanistan. It was patiently negotiated by the flamboyant, Havana-smoking Ecuadorian Under Secretary-General, Diego Cordovez, and was signed in April 1988.

Perez de Cuellar took the lead in ending the long war between Iran and Iraq. When the fighting began in 1980, the Security Council adopted a series of pro-Iraq resolutions, impairing the UN's ability to mediate. To compensate for the Council's tilt toward Iraq, the Secretary-General listened to both sides; he then issued a report substantiating Iran's claims that its soldiers were victims of poison gas attacks and negotiated a halt in the use of ballistic missiles against civilian populations. He lined up the Big Five to support his own balanced peace terms. Finally, in July 1988, when Washington and Moscow tacitly signaled Iraq that it could postpone a truce for several months to press on and seize Iranian territory, Perez de Cuellar got Saudi Arabia (the main banker of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein) to warn Iraq to end the fighting. 

During Perez de Cuellar's tenure, too, Namibia, which South Africa had governed for decades in violation of UN resolutions, won its independence through negotiations conducted outside the United Nations. When factional fighting broke out and the election process was in danger of collapse, the UN Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG) played a crucial role in assuring a fair and safe election in 1989. 

The UN role in Namibia, as earlier in the Congo, went beyond peacekeeping. The Transition Assistance Group, in which the UN deployed about 4,500 troops, 1,500 civilian police and 2,000 civilian administrators and monitors, set the pattern for future UN operations of similar complexity in Cambodia, El Salvador and Mozambique, where mediation led to nation-building.

The Reagan administration actively opposed a UN role in Central America, but Perez de Cuellar and his deputy, Alvaro de Soto, persevered. They played a peripheral part in Nicaragua but were crucial in negotiating the agreement between the Salvadoran government and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front on December 31, 1991, at the very moment Perez de Cuellar left office. It was de Soto who drafted the text of the final agreements and overcame deadlocks, using innovations such as the creation of a civilian police force and the establishment of a UN team to monitor human rights. 

Cooperation among the Big Five, plus other "players" such as Japan, Australia, Vietnam and the six members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, was responsible for the agreement on Cambodia, signed in October 1991. Once again, the United Nations was responsible for running the country during a transitional period. Between March 1992 and the end of 1993, the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia deployed 22,000 soldiers and civilian workers to supervise elections and provide training and humanitarian assistance. One armed faction, the Khmer Rouge, opted out of the coalition, but most of the country was stabilized by the time the United Nations left.

By: Michael J. Berlin (excerpt from Keeping the Peace), from: A Global Affair: An Inside Look at the United Nations, published by Jones & Janello, copyright 1995, all rights reserved.