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Sent: 28 October 2009 dawson.grant@gmail.com Paper proposal: I am a new member of BISA and of Aberystwyth University. I am planning a panel on southern Africa, conflict and the Cold War panel for BISA, and outline below my own paper for that panel. If you are interested in participating please email me with your proposal. "UNTAG Undone? Operationalizing a Democratic Transition in Namibia in the late 1970s". My paper discusses the Canadian and United Nations attempt to bring Namibia to independence in the late 1970s. The effort began as a diplomatic initiative that soon moved to the operationalization stage. The transition in Namibia from South African control to independence was to be operationalised through a United Nations peacekeeping operation, which was to monitor a free and fair democratic election leading to the establishment of a newly independent Namibian government. My paper will concentrate on the operational problems in the way of free and fair elections and how the United Nations hoped to overcome them. It will explore how the United Nations own planning problems discouraged a key player in the original negotiations, Canada, from participating in the mission. It will discuss how the democratic process had some inherent flaws that were known at the time, and, while attempts were made to address them, that were not fully resolved. The principal program was that the leading resistance movement, SWAPO, was based on the tribe that was almost half of Namibia's population. An election seem guaranteed to return a SWAPO government. Thus, although there was to be a clear change in power relations from colonialism to independence, the quality of the democracy for many Namibians would have been most unpure.
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