U.N.’s peacekeepers

Press, 13 September 1988, Page 12

U.N.’s peacekeepers

- ? ■ From the “Economist,” London

.THE United Nations is not fam- ■ 'oiis for preventing international i-conflicts; blit its forces and 6bj servers have: limited or ended a £ surprising number of wars in the ; past 40 years. A vanguard ar- : rived in the Gulf on August 10. ' Eventually the inelegantlynamed 350-strong UNIMOG, the Iran-Iraq Military Observers’ Group, will be spread along the belligerents’ 740-mile border to watch for violations. The first United Nations observers were posted in Greece in 1946, to discourage that country’s northern neighbours from meddling in its civil war. Since then several hundred thousands soldiers from more than 60 countries have risked and sometimes lost their lives serving the United Nations in areas as far apart as the Caribbean, Sinai and Papua New Guinea. Only once has a fighting force , been mustered under the United Nations flag to rescue an invaded country; that was in the very special circumstances of the Korean War of 1950-53. Other United Nations operations have been more limited, although large forces have sometimes been assembled; at one point almost 20,000 men were on duty to help the former Belgian Congo (now Zaire) through its troubles of 1960-64. Broadly speaking, the orders of the “blue helmets’’

are to prevent fighting, not to fight. The simplest of the complicated tasks assigned to them is the supervision of a truce agreement in which two combatant armies promise to respect a clear dividing line or buffer zone. The United Nations forces in Cyprus and in Syria’s Golan region has policed buffer zones since 1974; the observer group in Kashmir has watched over a ceasefire line ever since 1949. For the teams now' being assembled in Iran and Iraq, the first task will be to see that the two countries’ forces do not advance from the positions held at the moment of the ceasefire; next, to supervise the evacuation of salients in each other’s territory; then to ensure that the international frontier remains inviolate. Unfortunately, there is an unresolved dispute about where the frontier actually runs along the Shaft al-Arab waterway, so for the first time the United Nations peacekeepers will need a small naval unit. An extra complication is that irregular fighters from both Iran and Iraq may break the ceasefire, showing less respect than the regulars for the United Nation’s people and their rulings. The worst predicament for peacekeepers is the one they

face in Lebanon, in an area without effective government and infested with irregular forces. The United Nations, itself a club of Governments, has always had difficulty dealing with private armies, tribal-based guerrillas and the like. Although United Nation soldiers can sometimes provide vital support for a weak regime, the Governments which control them from back home seldom _ show the will to risk having their ’ men killed in order to establish order in a troubled region. That bleak prospect will face the soldiers who, if the latest negotiations about Angola and Namibia bear fruit, will be expected to police a vast territory while rival factions, and maybe outsiders too, struggle for supremacy. The United Nations plan for Namibia, drawn up when the Security Council adopted its Resolution 435 in 1978, envisages a 7500-man force to hold the ring until a free election has produced a new government for the territory. Fair enough; if the voters prove content with ballots. But what if some resort to bullets? The commander of the projected international force could find himself with one of the nastiest jobs a peacekeeper has ever been handed. Copyright — The Economist