COLUMN ONE : Mission Impossible for U.N.? : Peacekeepers have been sent at a record clip to international hot spots. But the ambitious ventures are far more prone to failure than the glorified sentry duty of the past.

Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the wily, elfish, traditional ruler of Cambodia, has invited U.N. officials, diplomats and visiting Americans to celebrations in a tiny northern village on the Thai border so he can lecture them.

Gesturing dramatically, churning his hands continually, laughing in a high-pitched giggle, Sihanouk embarks on a 20-minute monologue, edged in irony. As he speaks, servant girls gracefully crawl on their knees past the 70-year-old leader to serve drinks to the guests.

“Cambodia is no longer sovereign,” Sihanouk insists. “Before, we were a protectorate of France, but we had only one master. Now, we are again a protectorate. The difference is that we now have many patrons, many masters. . . . But I am not unhappy with our status as a protectorate of the U.N. I know next year we will be independent again. The U.N. will not have enough money to stay.”

Yasushi Akashi of Japan, the U.N. bureaucrat who is running Cambodia, says nothing and smiles enigmatically. Later, he confides, “I do not appreciate the term protectorate , but I do not know how to describe this unprecedented situation.”

The encounter with Sihanouk illustrates the expanding scope, as well as the increasing risk, of U.N. peacekeeping. In the past, peacekeeping operations were generally limited to the patrolling of cease-fire lines. But in Cambodia and El Salvador, the United Nations has undertaken far more ambitious assignments. Today, “Blue Berets” and “Blue Helmets”--the peacekeepers wear their own national uniforms but sport U.N. headgear--attempt to disarm belligerents, supervise elections, instill democracy, even function as surrogate governments. These operations are not simple military exercises but highly charged political actions, far more prone to failure than the glorified sentry duty of years past.

In its first 43 years, the United Nations mounted a total of 13 peacekeeping operations. In the last four years, it has mounted another 13, at enormous cost. Many politicians and U.N. boosters herald peacekeeping as the military wave of the future, marking the dawn of the 21st Century the way NATO and nuclear deterrence marked the last half of the 20th Century. From Somalia to Sarajevo, hardly a week passes without some country or province in turmoil crying out for peacekeepers.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, no one can count on the United States or what is left of the Soviet Union to keep client states in order. Many analysts see the United Nations as the only feasible mediator when ethnic and nationalist conflicts erupt. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali envisions a United Nations with military units pledged to its use, ready to intervene wherever political, ethnic or religious tensions threaten the peace. But it is still not clear whether the United Nations has the authority, the will and the experience to make and keep peace in such a feverish and unstructured world.

Both the promise and the peril confronting U.N. peacekeepers are evident in war-torn El Salvador.

After 11 years of death and cruelty, it is an exquisite shock to find a former guerrilla commander on the guest list for cocktails in the massive U.S. Embassy compound in San Salvador. A complex of ugly, brutish buildings surrounded by concrete walls like a prison, the compound was opened only a few months ago. Its huge proportions were deliberately designed to intimidate the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, also known as the FMLN, by driving home the American might that stood behind the Salvadoran government.

One of the guests at the party is Juan Ramon Medrano, also known as Comandante Balta of the FMLN. Cleanshaven, neatly combed and sipping a soft drink, he does not look intimidated. Under the terms of peace accords being administered by U.N. personnel, Comandante Balta has returned to Salvadoran political life. Perhaps peace will come to El Salvador.

But the spirit of constructive engagement seems to evaporate in Las Marias, a remote area hidden by thick forest and guarded by volcanic mountains in eastern El Salvador.

Once a guerrilla stronghold, Las Marias is now the site of a U.N. internment camp, officially known as a “verification center,” on the grounds of a coffee plantation. Thirteen Blue Berets from Spain, Brazil, Venezuela and Canada serve as resident peacekeepers.

There has been no warfare in El Salvador since the signing of the peace accords last New Year’s Eve between the FMLN and the government of President Alfredo Cristiani. The FMLN agreed to disarm in stages and send its guerrillas into U.N.-supervised camps. The government, in turn, pledged to reduce its armed forces, purge the officers most responsible for violating civil rights, abolish two paramilitary police forces, create a new civil police, legalize the FMLN as a political party and provide land to the FMLN and its peasant supporters.

So far, 168 guerrillas have come forward and turned over their weapons to the Blue Berets at Las Marias. A few guerrillas, armed with assault rifles, hang around the camp. They have not yet demobilized, and are obviously there to protect their comrades in case the accords go awry.

The guerrillas have fashioned a so-called Museum of the Revolution in the camp. It has posters of Cuba’s Ernesto (Che) Guevara, heroic paintings, homemade mortars and a huge chart commemorating their dead. The most important exhibit stands outside the cabin. It is a charred hulk--the remains of an American-built helicopter shot down during the war.

Comandante Chamba, whose real name is Herman Salvador Amaya, chats with visitors to the camp. The bespectacled Chamba, who sports a thick mustache and a few days’ growth on his chin, wears unkempt green fatigues. A small farmer with a third-grade education, he joined the guerrillas 17 years ago and is now deputy commander of the camp’s disarmed guerrillas.

Chamba says two problems are holding up the accords. The first is land. “You must remember that the root cause of this war was the vast amount of land in so few hands and the gap between rich and poor,” he said. “The government must give land to the FMLN and to the peasants who supported us all these years.”

The second is the army. A special committee has given President Cristiani a secret list with the names of officers who, in the committee’s opinion, should be dismissed because of their violation of human rights. The list reportedly includes the minister of defense, his deputy and one-third of the army’s highest-ranking officers. “The guilty officers must be purged,” Chamba said.

The United Nations has more than 650 peacekeepers in El Salvador--300 police, 250 military officers and 100 civilians. Two in five come from Spain, one in five from Mexico. But the number may be insufficient to complete the task at hand.

When the Cristiani government failed at first to come through with the land it had promised, the FMLN refused to continue demobilizing. In early October, U.N. officials presented a plan designed to resolve the impasse: The government would start parceling out state-owned land while money was sought from foreign governments to buy from private owners the bulk of the 407,000 acres needed to satisfy the rebels.

The government and the rebels eventually accepted the deal, but the delays forced the United Nations to postpone the final disarming of the rebels until December. Cristiani then upset U.N. officials and the rebels by announcing that he could not purge the army until the FMLN disarmed. The fury in the army over the size and breadth of the purge list has been so intense that many Salvadorans fear that Cristiani will never carry out the purge, although he reportedly has assured the United Nations that he will.

Despite the United Nations’ best efforts, the Salvadoran peace accords may be unraveling. Ultimately, there is little that U.N. personnel can do to force either side into compliance if gentle persuasion fails.

“We are in a very difficult situation,” said Iqbal Riza, a thin, worried-looking Pakistani who heads the U.N. operation in El Salvador. “We are walking on eggshells. We have limited sovereignty.”

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At a time when troops are protecting relief shipments against bandits in Somalia and keeping the airport open for relief flights in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, no one can doubt the demand for peacekeeping.

When British diplomat Marrack Goulding was named as the U.N. undersecretary general in charge of peacekeeping in 1986, there were five peacekeeping operations still active in the world. Now there are a dozen: Cambodia, El Salvador, Somalia, Croatia/Bosnia, Cyprus, Iraq/Kuwait, India/Pakistan, southern Lebanon, the Golan Heights, Israeli-Arab border zones, Angola and the Western Sahara.

Still more are on the horizon. The United Nations is almost sure to have a role in South Africa as it moves toward its first universal elections and black-majority rule. Just a few weeks ago, Georgia, one of the new states to emerge from the old Soviet Union, asked the United Nations for military observers to help resolve its conflict with the separatist region of Abkhazia. Nagorno-Karabakh, the predominantly Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, is another candidate for peacekeeping.

Ever since the Security Council sent its first peacekeepers to the Middle East to monitor the truce after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War--an operation that continues to this day--more than half a million soldiers and civilians have served under U.N. command in 26 peacekeeping operations. More than 800 personnel from 43 countries have died, almost all in the Middle East, the Congo and Cyprus.

In 1988, the U.N. peacekeeping operations won the Nobel Peace Prize.

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Most of the old-style peacekeeping missions undertaken by the United Nations over the years are considered to have been successful. But success can be a relative thing.

For nearly three decades, Blue Berets have patrolled the embittered island of Cyprus, patiently maintaining a cease-fire line between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots and between Greek troops and Turkish troops.

After achieving independence in 1964, Cyprus invited the United Nations to help ease tensions within its Turkish and Greek communities. The mission assumed more importance in 1974, when a coup against Archbishop Makarios by the Greek officers in charge of the Cypriot army provoked an invasion by Turkish troops trying to protect Turkish Cypriots. Since then, a cease-fire line monitored by U.N. Blue Berets has been the primary means of keeping the two sides apart.

“The truth is that feelings have not changed in 28 years, and there are some who say we are part of the problem,” said Maj. Gen. Michael Finbarr Minehane of Ireland, commander of the U.N. forces on Cyprus.

The stalemate in Cyprus underscores a fundamental paradox of peacekeeping: In the absence of a genuine commitment to reconciliation, a successful deployment may simply perpetuate a conflict rather than resolve it. Peacekeepers have been monitoring truce lines between Israel and its Arab enemies for 44 years, in Kashmir for 43 years and in Cyprus for 28 years. Critics of the Cyprus operation argue that as long as the United Nations maintains the cease-fire, there is no pressure on the Greeks or the Turks to negotiate a real peace settlement.

Minehane commands a force of 2,100 troops, made up mainly of four battalions from Britain, Canada, Austria and Denmark. They patrol a buffer zone along a cease-fire line that extends for 110 miles from Kato Pyrgos on the northwest coast to Dherinia on the east coast. Within Nicosia, the capital, the zone is so narrow that the Greek side is sometimes separated from the Turkish side by only the width of an old city street.

Under an unusual financial arrangement, the countries that contribute the troops also pay for their upkeep. Some participants are growing restive about the continued cost after so many frustrating years. Denmark has announced that it is pulling out at the end of the year.

“From the government of Canada’s point of view, this one is getting a little tedious, and we are all hoping for a political settlement,” said Lt. Col. Michael Capstick, commander of the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery battalion on Cyprus.

U.N. Secretary General Boutros-Ghali has been trying to mediate a settlement between the Greek and Turkish Cypriots. He has proposed a federal Cyprus made up of two autonomous states. The talks have snagged, however, because of the Turkish Cypriots’ dissatisfaction with the size of their proposed state.

Cyprus President George Vassiliou, the Greek Cypriot leader, calls himself a preacher of the doctrine that peacekeeping, by itself, is not a final solution.

“The duty of the world is not ended by setting up the peacekeeping force,” he tells members of the private U.N. Assn. of the U.S.A. at the sumptuous presidential palace that once served as the residence of the British governor of Cyprus.

“Peacekeeping is not peacemaking. The only reason for peacekeeping is to stop the killing and give time for peacemaking.”

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Since the inception of U.N. peacekeeping, there have been two kinds of basic missions.

The first is a classic peacekeeping operation in which U.N. troops patrol a cease-fire line between two belligerents who have agreed to a truce pending a peace agreement that may be years or even decades away. Examples are Cyprus and the Golan Heights.

Cambodia and El Salvador represent a newer, more expansive peacekeeping assignment that takes effect after a peace agreement has already been signed. In this kind of operation, U.N. soldiers and civilians implement agreements that usually pledge demobilization and disarming of troops, a solution to social problems like refugee resettlement and land reform, a human rights program and new elections.

Ironically, both the Cambodian and Salvadoran operations are in trouble. The problems are not the fault of the United Nations. In fact, they reflect conflicts seemingly beyond its control. But some outsiders believe that these problems could be surmounted if U.N. bureaucrats were ready to wield the authority inherent in their positions.

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Most of the Blue Berets in Cambodia have little to do. At Siem Reap, not far from the great Hindu temple of Angkor Wat, Lt. Col. Khondokar Kamaluzzaman, better known as Col. Kamal, briefs visitors about the work of his Bangladeshi battalion.

Short, dark and articulate, Col. Kamal talks about the battalion’s village development activities. His forces are constructing toilets and encouraging sports. But he has rejected suggestions from headquarters that he distribute medicines. “I have a theory,” he said, “that if you give the villagers medicines and then stop later, you will weaken their natural immunization.”

The Bangladeshi officer stands proudly alongside a huge chart, labeled in lavish lettering: “Progress of Hearts and Minds Campaign.”

The performance is disquieting. It does not matter how many toilets the Bangladeshi troops build or how many hearts and minds they woo. The United Nations has sent them to Cambodia for something else. They have come to disarm the belligerents after many years of civil war.

But so far, that part of the peacekeeping operation is a sham.

On the Mekong River just north of Phnom Penh, two platoons consisting of 42 sailors from Uruguay and 42 from Chile man a tiny naval base. They have done some symbolic disarming: The Cambodian government turned over 818 sailors and a batch of weapons to the Latin peacekeepers.

Since disarmament is in limbo these days, the United Nations has given almost all of the government sailors “agricultural leave.” They have headed off from the naval base with permission to tend their farms. The weapons they left behind are old and rusted.

“These weapons are not many and not very important,” Lt. Cmdr. Roberto Saldivia of Uruguay said.

The process of demobilization has been stymied by the refusal of the Khmer Rouge guerrillas to disarm, despite the Paris peace accords of a year ago. The Khmer Rouge insists that Vietnam has not withdrawn all its troops from the country and that the United Nations is allowing the Cambodian government too much control of internal administration.

The government, in turn, has refused to undertake more than a symbolic disarmament of its own, letting some of its least important soldiers turn over some dilapidated weapons before going on “agricultural leave.”

As a result, military sources believe that peace in Cambodia is still threatened by 60,000 hard-core government troops and 20,000 to 25,000 Khmer Rouge guerrillas.

The Khmer Rouge’s intransigence raises serious questions about the United Nations’ ability to complete its mission in Cambodia, its largest peacekeeping operation ever.

At a cost of $1.9 billion over 15 months, the United Nations has deployed a force of 16,000 troops, 3,500 police and 2,000 civilians in Cambodia. It is looked on as perhaps the most important peacekeeping operation anywhere in the world, a model for the future.

The Paris accords were signed by the Vietnam-backed government of Cambodia and a coalition of insurgents made up of Prince Sihanouk followers, the Khmer Rouge and a small faction headed by former Prime Minister Son Sann. Under the accords, the belligerents gave the United Nations extraordinary, quasi-colonial powers.

The United Nations has the authority to disarm the military, supervise elections for a constituent assembly in May, arrange the return of 300,000 refugees and develop a human rights program. It performs many of the basic functions of government, controlling the country’s internal administration, foreign policy, defense, finances and information services. Sovereignty rests with a Supreme National Council comprising all four factions and headed by Prince Sihanouk. But U.N. chief Akashi acts as co-chairman of the council, sets its agenda, proposes new decrees and possesses the power to veto any actions that conflict with the Paris accords.

All this authority has fallen on a U.N. bureaucrat who has never before wielded so much political power. The frank and thoughtful Akashi joined the United Nations as a civil servant in 1957 and, except for stints as a Japanese diplomat and a university professor, he has worked in the secretariat ever since. Before his appointment to Cambodia, he was the undersecretary general in charge of disarmament.

Akashi acknowledges his power. “In a non-colonial situation, no one has ever been given such authority,” he said. But wielding that power effectively is another matter.

So far, Akashi has persuaded the Security Council to accept a plan, first broached in public by Sihanouk, to postpone the disarmament and go ahead with the May elections even without the Khmer Rouge. On the surface, the proposal seems to make a mockery of the principles underlying the peacekeeping operation. But Akashi believes that the Khmer Rouge will not renew the war because of its exclusion. “I think the tide for peace and stability is irreversible,” he said.

Akashi also is considering a proposal by Sihanouk that the United Nations allow presidential elections before the assembly elections take place. No one doubts that Sihanouk would win; he is the most revered political figure in the country.

Critics object that setting up a presidential system at this time would undercut the work of the constituent assembly, which, after all, is supposed to decide whether or not it wants a presidential system for Cambodia.

Moreover, the critics fear that Sihanouk, serving as president, would lend legitimacy to the unpopular government of Premier Hun Sen just before the May elections. Some analysts believe that Sihanouk is trying to build a coalition between his followers and the government.

Asked if he has the power to prevent the new Sihanouk plan, Akashi replies: “I don’t know. But assuming I have that power, I don’t believe I would be politically able to prevent it.”

That, of course, is the problem. The United Nations is caught in a political maelstrom that is making a shambles of the accords the peacekeepers are supposed to implement. That may not be the United Nations’ fault, but unless the political atmosphere changes, the Cambodia operation can hardly count as a success.

The outcome is far from certain, but one lesson is clear. No matter how large a role the United Nations assumes in a country’s internal affairs, a successful resolution is possible only if the political will exists to bring it about. If that will is lacking, the United Nations can do little more than serve as a perpetual police force, keeping the peace, but not making it.

Next: The many faces of U.N. peacekeepers.

The World’s Security Force

In 1948, the United Nations sent peacekeeping forces to oversee the strained peace in the Sinai Peninsula. Since then, nearly half a million troops have been sent on 26 missions throughout the world. More than 800 of them have lost their lives.

Current peacekeeping operations

Begun Location Name (authorized personnel) 1. June, Syria, UNTSO (224) 1948 Egypt and U.N. Truce Supervision Southern Lebanon Organization 2. Jan., India- UNMOGIP (40) 1949 Pakistan U.N. Military Observer Group border areas in India and Pakistan 3. March, Cyprus UNFICYP (2,100) 1964 U.N. Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus 4. June, Golan UNDOF (1,130) 1974 Heights U.N. Disengagement Observer Force 5. March, Southern UNIFIL (5,300) 1978 Lebanon U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon 6. April, Iraq UNIKOM (500) 1991 U.N. Iraq-Kuwait Observation Mission 7. June, Angola UNAVEM II (900) 1991 U.N. Angola Verification Mission 8. July, El Salvador ONUSAL (1,100) 1991 U.N. Observer Mission in El Salvador 9. Sept., Western MINURSO (3,700) 1991 Sahara U.N. Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara 10. March, Cambodia UNTAC (15,000 to 20,000) 1992 U.N. Transitional Authority in Cambodia 11. March, Croatia, Bosnia- UNPROFOR (20,500) 1992 Herzegovina U.N. Protection Force 12. April, Somalia UNOSOM (more than 4,000) 1992 U.N. Operation in Somalia

Source: United Nations

What Is a Peacekeeping Force?

Peacekeeping forces are multinational armies that resolve dangerous conflicts between nations. Traditionally, U.N. practice limits the deployment of forces to conflicts between two or more states. Civil wars and other internal conflicts normally are not conisdered appropriate for U.N. intervention. The U.N.’s first peacekeeping mission was to oversee the truce agreement after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The force, intended to be temporary, is still there 44 years later. The most recent mission: a $23-million operation in Somalia.

U.N. peacekeeping bill for 1992: $3 billion

Total civilian and military personnel: 60,000

Source: United Nations, Times staff reports