Europe Moves to Curb Ethnic Wars : Peacekeeping: Actions on Balkans and Karabakh change the role of the 52-nation conference.

The 52-member Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, faced with spreading ethnic conflicts, took its first major steps Thursday toward preventing new nationalist wars on the Continent and restoring order.

In addition to supporting U.N. peacekeeping forces in former Yugoslav republics, the European leaders agreed to send observers to the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan in an effort to establish a cease-fire in the four-year conflict there.

The action at a European summit meeting in the Finnish capital transforms the Conference on Security and Cooperation from a discursive forum into an organization that can call on military forces for peacekeeping efforts and that will oversee disarmament.

The Nagorno-Karabakh observers, as many as 100 drawn from eight countries with an Italian diplomat at their head, will attempt to fix a cease-fire as a preliminary to placing peacekeeping forces in the war-torn region. Christian Armenians there are pitted against Muslim Azerbaijanis in a conflict whose roots are centuries deep.

European leaders are also discussing during their two-day summit whether to send peacekeeping forces to Moldova, another former Soviet republic divided by ethnic conflict.

“Let us decide right here and now,” President Bush told the conference, “to develop a credible Euro-Atlantic peacemaking-peacekeeping capability.”

The Helsinki summit, only the third such meeting since World War II, marks the first time since the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe was created in 1975 that it has been given the authority and the tools to help settle European conflicts, which have grown in number and intensity with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

It will now have the authority to call on established security groups for military and logistic backup, including the 16-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the nine-nation Western European Union and the new peacekeeping unit established by Russia and other former Soviet republics in the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Bush and the other leaders plan to adopt a declaration today strengthening the loose organization to intervene in ethnic and other disputes before they turn into full-fledged civil wars. The plan calls for streamlining decision-making so that the group, which from its outset has operated by consensus, can move faster in crises to act against transgressors.

Under the peacekeeping plan, the group will draw on troops and resources of NATO members and the Commonwealth of Independent States to monitor cease-fires, supervise troop withdrawals and ensure that humanitarian aid reaches refugees. Such missions would be undertaken in cooperation with the United Nations.

However, U.S., British and other officials were quick to point out that no ground troops were being earmarked for duty in the Balkans--or in regions farther east in the former Soviet Union. They have warned against an open-ended commitment of ground forces, even as peacekeepers, in civil wars.

The summit will also appoint a so-called high commissioner for minorities to ward off ethnic conflicts. According to American diplomats, this role could eventually turn into a secretary general of a strengthened Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

As Secretary of State James A. Baker III put it after Thursday’s working sessions: “We’re trying to address these new conflicts in this new era at the prevention stage, at the mediation stage and at the resolution stage.”

Addressing the conference, Bush portrayed the challenges posed by ethnic strife in the Balkans and elsewhere as testing European resolve to work for peace and prosperity in the post-Cold War era.

“During the Cold War, we saw the denial of human rights as a primary source of the confrontation that scarred Europe and threatened global war,” Bush declared. “Now, a new ideology--intolerant nationalism--is spawning new divisions, new crimes, new conflicts.”

In a five-point proposal to make the organization more effective, Bush called for a commitment to make democratic change irreversible; an agreement to punish with economic and political sanctions nations violating conference declarations; a pledge to attack “the root causes” of conflict; conciliation and arbitration services, and the development of a peacekeeping capability.

Bush said NATO’s offer to fill the peacekeeping role was “vital,” but he did not exclude similar activities by the Western European Union, the Commonwealth of Independent States or neutral nations.

Originally established to improve East-West relations during the Cold War, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe now comprises all European countries, the former Soviet republics across Central Asia, and the United States and Canada.

With the collapse of communism, the group has become a key political vehicle for managing the emerging partnership between Western nations and the former Soviet Bloc.

Yugoslavia, represented only by Serbia-Montenegro, has been suspended for 100 days from the organization.

The Thursday round of speeches and meetings took place against a backdrop of rising ethnic conflicts in Europe, particularly in the former Yugoslav republics, and they reflect widespread sentiments that somehow democratic nations must act to end the bloodshed.

The tone was set by the opening remarks of Finnish President Mauno Koivisto, the host, who said: “Here today, we are deeply concerned about the relentless violence against civilians in conflicts in our region.

“Our first duty is to cooperate in getting humanitarian assistance to innocent victims. In the name of humanity, we appeal to all those responsible to agree to credible and lasting cease-fires.”

Canada’s minister of external affairs, Barbara Jean McDougall, took an equally urgent tack, declaring that Canadian forces are now back in Europe--as they were in World Wars I and II.

“That’s why a Canadian battalion is in Sarajevo, protecting the airport, so that children and old people, women and men, of all ethnic groups, can survive in the midst of a tragic, evil and destructive war,” she said.