CAIRO: Fifty years ago, the UN s first peacekeeping force was deployed in Egypt in a bid to end the Suez crisis that erupted when Britain, France and Israel launched a concerted assault on the canal zone.
Since then, around a million men and women have served and some 2,000 have died in 60 UN peacekeeping operations around the world, such as those currently active in East Timor, Lebanon and other countries on all five continents.
Three months after Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez canal, the Jewish state and the strategic waterway s former British and French administrators attacked Egypt.
The blitz to recapture the canal was initially a military success but turned into a political disaster for the invaders when it was abruptly halted by a vote at the UN General Assembly.
What was dubbed the tripartite aggression in Egypt was stopped in its tracks under pressure from a Russian ultimatum, a US administration then in favour of multilateralism and the UN chief of the time, Dag Hammarskjoeld.
The United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) was created on Nov. 5, 1956 with the adoption by the UN general assembly of resolution 998, put forward by Canadian foreign minister Lester Pearson.
Prior to 1956, a UN mission of military observers was deployed to monitor the ceasefire following the 1948 Israeli-Arab war but they were unarmed.
The establishment of this first peacekeeping force in United Nations history was a task of great complexity. The concept had no real precedent, the UN says on its website.
Down to the color of the headwear the UN soldiers would be wearing when they arrived on the shores of Port Said, the deployment was a contentious issue that sparked endless debates at the world body s New York headquarters.
In order to differentiate them from other troops, an idea was put forward for helmet covers to be spray-painted with the UN colour, Canadian political scientist and historian Charles Letourneau wrote.
British troops mocked the UN peacekeepers on their arrival in Egypt in mid-November.
We noted vehicles marked with U on their sides … Then there were small numbers of troops wearing pretty blue helmets to be seen, recalled Peter Gallagher, a former member of the Buckingham Tofts who wrote an account of the Suez crisis on the britains-smallwars.com website.
They were rapidly named the bluebells and shortly would be taking over Anglo/French position, he said.
While the commander of UNEF was a Canadian general, Eedson Louis Millard Burns, Egypt initially refused further troops from Ottawa on its soil because Canada belonged to the Commonwealth.
Nasser, who was in 1967 to ask UNEF to leave, had also initially opposed the inclusion of troops from Denmark and Norway in UNEF on the grounds that both countries were members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The nationalist leader eventually caved in and the 6,000-strong contingent that was deployed around the canal and in the Sinai peninsula ended up including troops from Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, India, Indonesia, Norway, Sweden and Yugoslavia.
Their recruitment was sometimes haphazard.
Dane Anders Tholle was working for a company tasked by the UN with salvaging some of the merchant ships whose sinking Nasser had ordered when hostilities broke out.
The general in charge of the operation offered him a position as field service radio operator on one condition: that he pass a local driving test.
I passed an Egyptian driving test with the kind help of a Port Said taxi driver and a police officer, both of whom were rewarded with some baksheesh, Tholle wrote decades later in one of the UN s internal staff magazines.
