ABSTRACT
On 6 October 1998, in commemoration of 50 years of peacekeeping, the first Dag Hammarskjold medals were presented to commemorate three distinguished peacekeepers who had lost their lives ‘in the service of peace’. Medals were presented to the family of the first peacekeeper to have been killed in operations, Commandant Rene‘de Labarrière, as well as to the families of Count Folke Bernadotte and Dag Hammarskjold. In the past 50 years, almost 1,600 peacekeepers, military and civilian, have died on nearly 50 UN peacekeeping operations. Thirty-six of those operations, three-fourths of the total, have been deployed since 1990, and just over half the total casualties have occurred in that decade. Over 750,000 soldiers and policemen and women, from 119 of the 186 UN member states, have participated in peacekeeping operations.
