U.N. Patrols Proposed on Borders of Nations Fearing Attack : Military: Secretary general seeks preventive troop deployment as part of stronger effort to preserve peace.

As part of a far-reaching and innovative plan for preventing war, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has proposed that U.N. troops take on the new role of patrolling the borders of countries that fear aggression by their neighbors.

The proposal--the most dramatic in a series of steps designed to deal with turmoil and violence in the post-Cold War--came in a long report that the secretary general prepared in response to a request from the extraordinary summit conference of the Security Council last Jan. 31. At that session, attended by President Bush, Soviet President Boris N. Yeltsin and other leaders, the council asked Boutros-Ghali to sharpen the United Nations’ role as a preserver of peace.

Although the report is not scheduled to be made public until Monday, copies were made available to the Los Angeles Times and other news media.

Boutros-Ghali made it clear that he believes the United Nations, which has been paralyzed in the past by vetoes and U.S.-Soviet enmity, now has a second chance to achieve what it was created for in 1945.

“This opportunity must not be squandered,” Boutros Ghali said. “The organization must never again be crippled as it was in the era that has now passed.”

The issue of stationing U.N. troops along a threatened border was raised by the secretary general in his discussion of a new concept that he called “preventive deployment.”

“United Nations operations in areas of crisis have generally been established after conflict has occurred,” he said. “The time has come to plan for circumstances warranting preventive deployment.”

Boutros-Ghali said that “in cases where one nation fears a cross-border attack, if the Security Council concludes that a United Nations presence on one side of the border, with the consent only of the requesting country, would serve to deter conflict, I recommend that preventive deployment take place.”

The secretary general also said the U.N. might consider creating a demilitarized zone on one side of a border, at the request of a fearful country, “for the purpose of removing any pretext for attack.”

Boutros-Ghali gave no concrete examples of what he had in mind. And, while his analysis sounded as if the United Nations, under such authority, might in the past have stationed troops in Bosnia-Herzegovina to ward off Serbian aggression or in Kuwait to ward off Iraqi aggression, the secretary general also made it clear that he does not expect U.N. forces ever to be strong enough to battle a major aggressor.

The secretary general also proposed implementation of the long-dormant provision in the U.N. Charter that provides for a permanent military force under command of the United Nations to restore international order when it is violated or threatened. That has never been done before. The American and allied troops that defeated Saddam Hussein in the Persian Gulf War did so under authority of the United Nations but not under its command.

“The ready availability of armed forces on call could serve, in itself, as a means of deterring breaches of the peace since a potential aggressor would know that the council had at its disposal a means of response,” he said.

The secretary general acknowledged that the U.N. force would probably not be powerful enough to take on a sophisticated army but it could deal “with any threat posed by a military force of a lesser order.”

The report also said that the secretary general’s office intends to set up a more thorough and extensive system of information gathering so that it could detect the seeds of conflict long in advance and engage in diplomacy to prevent conflicts from breaking out.

Boutros-Ghali said that he intends to increase the number of fact-finding missions he would dispatch to keep him informed in a new early-warning system.

The secretary general said that the United Nations has a role to play as well in internal conflicts, providing humanitarian assistance, offering security services and setting up a system of conciliation. But he added that this would have to be done with the consent of all parties, since the United Nations has to respect the sovereignty of a state.

When a crisis began to brew between two countries, the secretary general went on, the United Nations could offer to station troops on both sides of the border if both parties agreed to this. He then broke with tradition by suggesting that the United nations ought to be willing to send troops to just one of the countries if that country feared imminent invasion.

In his discussion of a permanent military force to ensure peace, the secretary general said: “I recommend that the council consider the utilization of peace-enforcement units in clearly defined circumstances. . . . Such units from member states would be available on call and would consist of troops that have volunteered for such service. They would have to be more heavily armed than peacekeeping forces and would need to undergo extensive preparatory training within their national forces.”

The secretary general made it clear that the United Nations would still rely, despite these innovations, on its peacekeeping forces, the famous “blue helmets,” that patrol cease-fire lines, encourage elections and foster security when a peaceful settlement has been negotiated to a conflict.

In an unusual rash of such activity, the United Nations has mounted 13 peacekeeping operations in the last four years, as many as it had mounted in its first 40 years.