Indeed Allden and Amer note that "East Timor is considered one of the great United Nations success stories." (Allden and Amer 2007, 7)
Of course, the onset of violence in East Timor with Indonesia's Operation Clean Sweep had the effect, in Benzing's words, of "making all planning for UNAMET successor missions and an orderly transfer of power obsolete." (Benzing 2005, 307)
UNAMET was a success to the extent that it permitted the vote to occur without undue interference from Indonesia, and managed to produce a vote overwhelmingly in favor of independence: Braithwaite notes that "in the absence of UNAMET, this democratic accomplishment could never have happened," but concedes that "even so, the election facilitation and monitoring part of the peace operation was only a partial success." (Braithwaite 2012, 287)
Jarat Chopra, who served as Head of the Office of District Administration for UNTAET, notes that "UNTAET was unique amongst experiments in transitional administration, since it was the first time the UN had assumed its role independently of any competing authority." (Chopra 2002, 984)
Because UNAMET was not structured to coordinate combat missions, there was little they could do to halt the violence leading up to the ballot and, most strikingly, to stop 'Operation. Clean Sweep'." (Pushkina and Maier 2012, 331)
and other countries were hesitant to intervene in the country is that previous missions were unsuccessful. For example, the Clinton administration and Congress watched the unfolding events in Rwanda in April 1994 in a kind of stupefied horror after they had just pulled American troops out of a disastrous peacekeeping mission in Somalia (Baldauf, 2009)
Conflict in the Congo The Democratic Republic of Congo is an important region for the world. The Congo is rich with various natural resources such as diamonds, gold, copper, cobalt, zinc, and coltan -- which is an important component in many of today's electronic devices (Bekoe & Parajon, 2007)
The country eventually slipped into turmoil when Mobutu's power began to wane in the Congo and the country fell into disarray with massive amounts of human casualties from competing factions. Since it was set up in November 1999, the then MONUC (renamed Monusco in 2010) has proved extraordinarily inept in its response in the Congo; the UN peacekeeping force that was deployed in the Congo doesn't actually engage with the militias that hold the eastern Congo in their murderous grips (Hatcher, Perry, & Perry, 2012)
Furthermore, the peacekeeping forces are not welcomed by the Congolese. In fact, earlier this year some groups have demanded the full removal of UN troops despite the region being one of the worst outbreaks of violence anywhere in the world (Kabila, 2015)
Yet, they still failed to intervene within a timely fashion before the genocide took place. "The political and diplomatic elements of the international response to most Africa conflicts have been slow and ineffective," said John Prendergast, a longtime Sudan and South Sudan activist with the Enough Project, a human rights group (Raghavan, 2014)