ABSTRACT
The United Nations first became involved in peacekeeping in southern Africa at the end of the 1980s when it took on a major role in the linked processes of the South African 'decolonization' of Namibia and the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola. The problems of Namibia, Angola and Mozambique were all too some degree a function of the increasingly desperate struggle for self-preservation by the beleaguered apartheid state. The effect of the southern African peacekeeping experience as a whole was to highlight the limitations of the United Nations as an agent of conflict resolution. The United Nations Angola Verification Mission (UNAVEM) was charged with supervising the withdrawal of Cuban forces, firstly from Angola's southern border with Namibia and then from the country as a whole. Namibia is a largely desert territory with a long western coastline on the Atlantic and eastern borders with Botswana and Zambia.
