U.N. Truce Force, With Superpower Support, Takes On a Big One

The date is set. In a few days it will be D-Day in Iran and Iraq. Javier Perez de Cuellar, the secretary general of the United Nations, is cranking up the rusting machinery of international peacekeeping and preparing to send in a 25-nation force of 350 observers to watch and monitor the implementation of the peace.

It will not be the largest U.N. peacekeeping effort, but it will be the one most broadly supported by the big powers and the one with the most diverse makeup of contributing armed forces.

In the past, one or other of the superpowers has only grudgingly acceded to sending in the United Nations. Often, as with the U.N. force that was rushed in to separate the Egyptian and Israeli armies in 1973, when both sides were calling in their superpower patrons to help them, it was the Third World and neutral Western nations that pushed a peacekeeping resolution through. The superpowers went along with it mainly because they were cornered, frightened of the consequences of further involvement, and wanted an out.

This time around it seems different. Mikhail S. Gorbachev has revamped the Soviets’ habitual self-serving circumscribed attitude to U.N. peacekeeping. And Ronald Reagan has come to terms with an organization that he has preferred at best to ignore, at worst to undermine.

Gorbachev and Reagan had better have thought this one through. The Iran-Iraq peace-force commitment could easily last 10 or 20 years or more, given the deep enmity between the two warring nations.

In Cyprus a U.N. force has been in place since the out-break of serious communal fighting between the Greeks and the Turks in 1964. It could well be that the U.N. observer force now planned for the Iran-Iraq border will evolve into something rather like the Cyprus one, responsible for policing a buffer zone to keep the antagonists well and truly apart.

In Cyprus there are 2,600 U.N. troops. Every day the U.N. soldiers drive down the narrow road that separates the opposing sentries. Every day there is some incident. The job of the U.N. officers is to liaise with their local counterparts on the rival sides and attempt to diffuse the tension. In most cases they succeed. It is often humdrum, low-level stuff. But it does dampen the chances of conflagration that can ignite too easily when the tinder is so dry and the nerves so stretched.

But when all else fails it’s down to soldierly grit. One officer told me that the most terrifying moment in his life was when the U.N. soldiers were pinned down at Nicosia airport by Turkish paratroopers. The U.N. force, although underarmed, was prepared to fight to the last man. And their determination did stay the Turkish hand. The Austrian general who was commanding the Cyprus contingent told me that “the U.N. troops are a human tripwire.To cross it means raising the political stakes for the contending forces.”

But this works only when the opposing sides understand that they can’t get away with pushing the United Nations aside. The trouble with the U.N. force in southern Lebanon was that when the Israelis in 1982 tore right through it on their way to invade Lebanon, Israel calculated correctly that the United States would at least tolerate what they had done.

With Iran and Iraq it will be critically important that the belligerents are under no illusions that if they push the United Nations around, the big powers will prevaricate or turn a blind eye.

This is what the Security Council is for: so that the big five--the United States, the Soviet Union, China, France and Britain--once they’re of a mind, can react in unison to any assertion of contra-authority.

Once the U.N. observers are in place, if Iran or Iraq decides to reopen hostilities, a peacekeeping force a la Cyprus must be rushed into place with the numbers and the military might to face down the truce-breakers. But if the big five are willing--and this week’s unity of purpose has been quite impressive--there is little that the United Nations can’t do.

If the U.N. big five truly hang together on this one, then later in the year they can, it is hoped, take on the equally arduous task of getting the United Nations to monitor a Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia and to hold off the murderous Khmer Rouge while a new government gets established. There is also the chance this year of a Cuban-South African withdrawal from Angola and the introduction of a U.N. peace force to supervise elections in, and the withdrawal of the South African army from, neighboring Namibia.

Never in its history will so much be demanded so quickly of the United Nations. We are perhaps at a historic steppingstone, when the United Nations is coming alive to do what its war-weary founders, meeting in San Francisco in 1945, dreamed of: Settle disputes through international mediation and peacekeeping rather than by individual nations pitting themselves against each other in combat.