Welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service.

Today we're going back to 2001, when the UN's first ever all-female peacekeeping unit

was deployed in the war-torn West African country of Liberia.

In 2019, Gill McGeeverings spoke to Seema Dundia and Leslie Proett.

Well, the plane is just touched down and now marching behind the Indian flag,

R103, Indian peacekeepers, all very smartly dressed in blue uniforms with blue berets

and a media pack struggling to keep up with them.

These girls are experienced, they have put in a good amount of service and they are trained

and these Liberian ladies, they'll get motivated, they'll get inspired and they'll come forward

to join the regular police.

That was Seema Dundia of India's Central Reserve Police Force,

speaking to the BBC in 2007, after arriving in Liberia, it was still recovering from its 14-year

civil war. Speaking to me from her home in Calcutta, she still remembered clearly their first

test when they were called out to deal with a mob on the streets of the Liberian capital,

Monrovia, just the day after they'd arrived.

So most of the constituents of the mob was armed competence.

We assembled our equipment and the girls were a bit tired because they had just landed there.

The mob was very violent, so we were given the task to disperse it.

How do you go about going into a violent group of people, presumably men, presumably bigger than

you are and managing to deal with them to disperse them?

We were well equipped. We have seen such kind of situations here in our country also when we are

deployed in Trinagar or nothing part of India. When you say you're well equipped, what did you

...