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huge difficulties controlling the outbreaks of violence over such a vast area. 7 Gradually, with the addition of measures to deter the trade in minerals stolen from DRC territory, UN efforts began to bear fruit and the scale of the conflict was narrowed down. But the international community has never been able to substitute for ineffective state structures: gangs of tribal fighters and murderous rebels have been able to operate with relative impunity in the more remote corners.
    The reintroduction of Council missions, an instrument abandoned for some years after the disasters of Rwanda and Srebrenica in 1994 and 1995 respectively, happened suddenly following the collapse of the East Timor peace process in September of 1999. The case will be discussed more fully in Chapter 15 . Although Indonesia had appeared to agree to a fair procedure for self-determination for East Timor, the Indonesian military failed to contain the violence which greeted the outcome of a popular referendum on 30 August 1999. The Security Council initially hesitated to become directly involved, then realized that for the UN to stay on the sidelines when its authority was being blatantly contested would be a severe setback. A mission of five members of the Council visited Djakarta and Dili in the second week of September and, coinciding fortuitously with other international pressures on the Indonesian government, helped to persuade it to respect the results of the referendum. Within twenty-four hours of their return to New York, the Security Council had adopted a resolution authorizing an enforcement operation with Indonesian consent. 8 Eight days later, an ad hoc multinational force, led vigorously by Australia, arrived in the territory. This remarkably rapid turnaround did much to restore the morale of the UN in that period.
    The Council had less success in addressing one of the rare bilateral conflicts of the modern era, the border dispute between Eritrea and Ethiopia. The first Council mission to the Great Lakes in May 2000, led by Ambassador Richard Holbrooke of the United States, was flying home from Central Africa via Cairo and passed directly over the area when the two countries were coming to the boil. A quick decision was taken on the aeroplane that the Security Council, even though not in proper session, could not ignore the imminent outbreak of war. We diverted immediately to Addis Ababa. Two days of express shuttle diplomacy was tried, but the two capitals – and in particular the two political leaders, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia and President Isaias Afewerki of Eritrea – were too far gone in their fury at each other to listen to passing diplomats. Nonetheless the fact that the Council mission had taken the trouble to intervene might have shortened the resulting war and probably made it less problematic to establish a peacekeeping operation, the United Nations Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE), thereafter. 9
I RAQ AND ITS I MPLICATIONS
     
    No issue has created a more severe division among the five Permanent Members of the Council since the end of the Cold War than the saga of Iraq. Chapter 17 goes into details. In the present chapter, it should serve as the prime contemporaryexample of the paralysing effect on the Council when the P5 cannot bridge their differences. Iraq reminds us that the UN is, on matters of high politics and security, a reflection of its member states and cannot be expected independently to remedy situations when the protagonists themselves are beyond persuasion. Saddam Hussein counted on the splits visible within the Council to ward of any effective action against his defiance of UN resolutions. When, in early 2003, several years of argument about how to deal with the Iraqi regime came to a climax, the question that exercised the majority of UN members was more how to restrain one member state from action without specific authorization than how to uphold the authority of the UN itself against the