Suddenly, in the summer of 1988, the United Nations was in the news. Positively. The process had got under way earlier in the year with the little-noticed (at the time) provision of UN military observers to watch over the Afghan-Pakistani agreements and the associated withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Then it was discovered that, after a ten-year hiatus, the UN might soon be called upon to implement the plan for its involvement in the accession to independence of Namibia, as South Africa seemed to be preparing to leave. There had been too many false all-clears on this particular front for it to be confidently assumed that the South Africans would in fact go.