The image of the blue-bereted UN peacekeeper earlier this year was that of a soldier in retreat, after long United Nations missions to Angola and Macedonia, but the fortunes of the blue berets suddenly have shifted.

The UN Security Council is poised to approve 6,000 UN troops for Sierra Leone, in the world body’s first major African mission since its humiliating retreat from genocide in Rwanda and anarchy in Somalia.

It is also ready now for a major peacekeeping effort in East Timor, where a UN force is expected to replace the Australian-led International Force (Interfet) about four months from now.

If the mission to provide a transitional authority to East Timor is approved, it may last three years, some UN officials believe.

Other missions meanwhile are contemplated for hot spots so risky that the possibility of obtaining Council approval for UN peacekeeping was thought to be extremely low; places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the Ethiopia-Eritrea border.

What happened? Has the reputation of the UN ‘blue berets’ – badly hurt in the mid-1990s by ineffective missions in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Angola – turned around overnight?

Not exactly. More likely, many countries have decided that, in a choice between involving the United Nations and opting for inaction, the use of UN troops is worth a second look.

In many recent cases there has been a sea change – particularly by European states who want effective UN missions, with relatively modest mandates, to take over from cash-strapped and tired regional forces.

Unlike the burst of UN operations in the early 1990s – which saw the world body mount 17 missions involving more than 70,000 troops by the middle of the decade – the recent change up in peacekeeping activity mostly involves replacing regional forces on the ground.

In Sierra Leone, several European nations – most crucially Britain – decided in recent weeks to back the 6,000-member UN force to prevent the country from sliding back to disarray when the 12,000 mostly Nigerian troops of the ECOMOG regional force pull out.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan argued that it was time to replace the ECOMOG troops, particularly after Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo decided in August to draw down the force by some 2,000 soldiers every month until December.

Faced with the prospect of a massive Nigerian withdrawal as that country tried to repair its own shattered economy, Western nations quickly changed their tune on UN peacekeepers.

Revealingly, US Ambassador Richard Holbrooke threw his support behind the peacekeepers – even though the US State Department and Pentagon reportedly still disagreed over whether to authorise such a force. US troops, in any event, will not participate.

“ECOMOG has shouldered the burden long enough,” Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy concluded. “Let us ensure that the mission this Council agrees to send to implement peace is coloured blue, UN-authorised, UN-managed, UN-funded and that they are integrated as soon as possible with remaining ECOMOG forces.”

Although Axworthy’s words sounded a ringing endorsement of the value of the blue berets, they also pointed to the financial considerations at the heart of the proposed UN deployment.

Having a “UN-managed, UN-funded” force would mean that Nigeria no longer had to shoulder the costs of monitoring the shaky peace between the Sierra Leonean government and rebel Revolutionary United Front.

At the same time, integrating the “remaining ECOMOG forces” into the UN mission would allow Nigeria to keep several thousand troops in Sierra Leone – but in an operation paid for by UN assessments, and under UN oversight.

Similar plans were expected to be drawn up for East Timor, where Australia currently bears the greatest burden of the Interfet operation, which intends to deploy more than 7,000 soldiers throughout East Timor over the course of this month.

On the one hand, a UN armed force in East Timor would remove the major financial burden on Australia and many Asian states and get the United States – which is assessed to pay 31 percent of peacekeeping costs – and European states to pick up the slack.

That in turn would address the concerns of leaders like Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad, who warned, “We cannot afford to send our troops and pay for them.”

On the other hand, the UN force for East Timor could fall prey to regional bickering, with several Asian states – notably Malaysia and Thailand – having taken Australia to task for what Mahathir called its “belligerent” posture in East Timor.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer conceded that, as more Asian troops enter East Timor, Australian forces – expected to rise to about 4,500 soldiers shortly – could withdraw. UN officials also predicted more Asians and fewer Australians in a UN force in East Timor.

Whether such a force would be more effective than Interfet, which has restored security to large chunks of East Timor in less than two weeks, is debatable.

Timorese independence activist and Nobel laureate Jose Ramos Horta publicly doubted the usefulness of some Asian troops and said, “We don’t need them.”

Yet inevitably, a UN peacekeeping operation is multinational, and many competing interests and geopolitical realities go into the shaping of the force. That is one reason why the new wave of expected UN troops may face the same problems that bedeviled the last wave.

As Annan – formerly head of UN peacekeeping – admitted about missions like the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in Yugoslavia, sometimes missions are given mandates by member states but not the resources to implement those mandates.

For many UN officials, the worst example was the six “safe areas” in Bosnia-Hercegovina, where understaffed and lightly armed troops proved no match for the Bosnian-Serb forces which overran the UN-guarded enclaves of Srebrenica and Zepa in 1995, killing thousands of Muslim civilians.

Other examples are equally troubling. The US chief of the UN Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM), Admiral Jonathan Howe, launched a futile, and immensely destructive, campaign to capture Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed in 1993.

The mission wiped out parts of the capital, Mogadishu, and led to the deaths of two dozen US Army Rangers and the subsequent dimming of US support for UN peacekeeping.

Those failures taught the United Nations to tread carefully, and to avoid the assumption that the deployment of blue berets was, in itself, the solution to a crisis.

Whether ose lessons apply once UN soldiers take over from regional peacekeepers in West Africa and the Pacific islands remains open to question.