U.N. Approves Dispatching of Peacekeepers

The United Nations Security Council on Tuesday approved the dispatch of 1,440 peacekeeping observers and soldiers to the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border to cement peace in a war zone where more than a million allied and Iraqi troops clashed a few weeks ago.

The U.N. deployment, scheduled to begin later this week and to be completed by April 19, is expected to allow the United States to press forward with the withdrawal of all its troops from southern Iraq and all but a small Air Force contingent from Saudi Arabia.

The Blue Helmets, as the peacekeeping troops are known, are expected to move thousands of Iraqi refugees into the 75-mile-long U.N. buffer zone that will straddle the border six miles into Iraq and three miles into Kuwait. More than 25,000 refugees, victims of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s repression of the Shiite Muslim rebellion, currently are huddled within the American zone of occupation.

Diplomats at the United Nations said that Gen. Gunther Greindl, an Austrian who has headed peacekeeping operations in Cyprus and on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, will command the peacekeeping force on the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border.

In other developments:

* Iraq rejected a proposal by European leaders to make areas of northern Iraq into a U.N.-guarded enclave for Kurds to protect them against Hussein’s military. However, the idea was welcomed by Turkish President Turgut Ozal as well as Kurdish rebel and opposition leaders.

In an interview with the British ITN television network, Iraqi Prime Minister Sadoun Hammadi said the European proposal to set up such an enclave was a “CIA plot.” “Iraq absolutely rejects it and will resist it with all means,” Hammadi said in a separate statement released by the official Iraqi News Agency.

* The U.S. military said that about 214,000 U.S. troops, more than a third of those sent to the Persian Gulf, have gone home, but their rate of departure has not accelerated with Iraq’s acceptance of U.N. cease-fire terms.

A spokesman for the U.S. Central Command in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, told the Reuters news agency that there were about 326,000 U.S. soldiers in the area, compared with a peak of 540,000 before the war with Iraq was halted at the end of February.

* A New York City public health expert, just returned from a fact-finding visit to Baghdad and southern Iraq, warned that civilian casualties are likely to “increase enormously” over the next six months because of the destruction of the nation’s electricity, water, sewage and transport systems.

Dr. H. Jack Geiger, a professor at the City University of New York and president of the Boston-based organization Physicians for Human Rights, said that during his five-day visit, he found evidence of the onset of starvation and “thousands of cases” of severe diarrheal disease and dehydration, particularly in children. In some hospitals, he said, 7% of all children admitted are dying of these ailments. Many of the cases may be cholera, but laboratory facilities are inadequate to make a precise diagnosis, he said.

* Turkey said it has asked the United States and 22 other countries to admit some of the hundreds of thousands of Kurdish refugees from Iraq who have massed at the Turkish border.

Times staff writers Rone Tempest in Nicosia, Cyprus, and Robert Steinbrook in Los Angeles contributed to this report.