Baby-Sitters in Blue Berets, Peacekeepers Ease Tensions : U.N.: Relying on moral authority rather than arms, eclectic force calms combatants in the world’s war zones.

A young Turkish soldier, his nerves frayed from hours of unrelieved boredom, peered across the buffer zone from his sandbagged sentry post at dawn and spied a figure racing down a dilapidated, dust-caked street in what was once the heart of old Nicosia. The soldier fired but missed.

The intended victim was a Canadian soldier assigned to the U.N. peacekeeping force on Cyprus, taking his early morning jog. The Canadians swiftly lodged a protest with the Turkish commander. Within hours, a Turkish officer dragged the offending sentry into full view of the peacekeepers, picked him up high, banged him against a wall and flung him aside.

The Canadians shook their heads in wonderment. The thrashing was the most dramatic incident encountered by Lt. Col. Michael Capstick and his Royal Canadian Horse Artillery battalion during their first three months of peacekeeping duty in Cyprus, and it illustrated one of Capstick’s favorite admonitions about the work.

“A lot of people arrive and say, ‘You guys are glorified baby-sitters,’ ” Capstick tells a group of visitors from the private U.N. Assn. of the United States, “and sometimes you feel that they are right. Except that the people you are baby-sitting are armed.”

U.N. peacekeeping forces are doubtless the most eclectic military force ever assembled: nearly 50,000 men and women, representing 40 countries, wearing different uniforms, observing different customs, speaking different languages. Known as Blue Helmets or Blue Berets, peacekeepers make up a motley army of individuals who seem to have little in common but the color of their U.N.-issued headgear and their reliance on moral authority rather than arms.

But it is an army whose importance and stature are rising rapidly in a world that has discarded its Cold War compass and increasingly looks to the United Nations to contain nationalist and ethnic conflicts in far-flung lands. And for some of the soldiers assigned to U.N. units around the world, peacekeeping has become a way of life.

The many faces of peacekeeping are on full display at U.N. deployments around the world: a Falstaffian Polish general in the Golan Heights with enormous girth and sprouting eyebrows. A dashing Spanish major in El Salvador with the two top buttons of his shirt open. A Finnish commander in the Golan Heights with a sauna at his headquarters. An American ranger in Cambodia with his head as closely shaven as Michael Jordan’s.

The diversity, while exhilarating, breeds problems. Communication is a constant challenge. Bureaucratic confusion sometimes prevails. Allegations of waste and extravagance are heard from time to time.

But the difficulties pale when compared to the immensity of the achievement of forging an effective military operation from so many different traditions and languages and styles. To paraphrase the 18th-Century writer Samuel Johnson: Peacekeeping may not always be done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.

As the 20th Century draws to a close, it is being done with increasing frequency. The United Nations currently oversees 12 active peacekeeping operations: Cyprus, Cambodia, El Salvador, Somalia, Croatia/Bosnia, Iraq/Kuwait, India/Pakistan, southern Lebanon, the Golan Heights, various Israeli-Arab border zones, Angola and the Western Sahara. Soldiers make up the bulk of the forces, although some police officers and civilians also work as U.N. peacekeepers.

Some soldiers and civilians find the work suits them so well that they volunteer for another U.N. adventure after the first is over. Lt. Col. Paul C. Filler of the British army served in Cyprus in 1976 and 1977. When he heard about the need for military observers in Cambodia, he volunteered. “I had worked with the U.N. before, and I thought that Cambodia was a challenge,” he says. “It was worth a go.”

Filler, 41, a tall man with a bushy mustache and a happy smile, heads a small group of observers in Phum Ku about seven miles from the Thai border. The area looks as Cambodian as a picture book. Lines of women, their conical hats silhouetted against the sun, snatch at the rice in flooded fields. Water buffalo snort in the water. Men and boys bathe themselves in soft mud. The earthen roads, rutted and ravaged, whip into sludge in the rain.

Filler and the other observers--an Austrian, an Indonesian, a Chinese and a Pakistani--patrol the border crossings with Thailand to deter smuggling, monitor cease-fire violations in the north and meet often with the military leaders of the various factions of Cambodia, including the Khmer Rouge. For the first six months, they had no electricity in their barracks, and thus no pump to provide well water and no fans to cool the incessant heat. Generators finally arrived in May.

The work does not help a British officer with his military career. “If you do U.N.,” Filler says, “you don’t become a general, but you have a lot of fun.”

Filler has decided to end his military career, but he does not plan to give up peacekeeping. The British army, reducing its size, has offered tempting compensation to officers willing to retire early. After 23 years of service, Filler has accepted. But he has applied to come right back to Cambodia as a civilian peacekeeper, working for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. “I want to see this through,” he says.

He is not the only inveterate peacekeeper in Phum Ku. Another officer, 35-year-old Maj. Peter Schaller of Austria, worked for the United Nations in the Golan Heights, the Iraq-Iran border zone, southern Lebanon and the Iraq-Kuwait border zone before arriving in Cambodia six months ago. “I get bored with my duty back home,” he says.

Cyprus, where Capstick’s Canadians are stationed, is a classic U.N. peacekeeping operation. The 2,100 Blue Berets assigned to the island patrol, observe, mediate and cajole to make sure that neither the Greek Cypriots and their Greek allies nor the Turkish Cypriots and their Turkish allies provoke the other side into a lethal outburst. The peacekeepers know their authority depends on the desire of both sides to have a third party present to calm them down.

The Turks do not officially recognize the U.N. buffer zone that separates the cease-fire lines in the narrow streets of the old part of Nicosia. In the dark of night recently, the Turks expanded one of their concrete sentry posts so that it pushed into the buffer zone across a narrow street, blocking the way of U.N. patrol vehicles.

The Canadians quickly conferred with the Turkish commander. A face-saving compromise was reached. The Canadians would bulldoze the sentry post out of the way, but the Turks could call it an accident. After the post was bulldozed one night, the Turkish commander announced to his men that the post had been smashed because the Canadians were such terrible drivers.

The simplest matters must be negotiated, such as persuading the Turks to pick up the garbage their sentries have tossed into the buffer zone. “We get into haggling, eh,” says Maj. Al Howard. “I can’t just say, ‘Pick up your garbage or I’ll tell your mother.’ ”

The peacekeepers run after sheep that have strayed from the Turkish area into the Greek area. They show up at Greek political marches that head northward in symbolic attempts to reclaim lost lands. Much to the relief of the Greeks, the U.N. forces always stop them before they reach the Turkish areas, where arrest and jail await.

Elsewhere in the world, peacekeepers have more than stray sheep to mind.

In Cambodia, a battle erupts one morning about 10 miles from the renowned Angor Wat temple. After the fighting subsides, Capt. John Strain of the U.S. Army Special Forces, a U.N. observer and a bit of a cynic, explains that the clash occurred in an area where the Cambodian government forces and the Khmer Rouge guerrillas are only seven football fields apart.

Strain blames “a fat government colonel” who refuses to let the Khmer Rouge cross the field and pray in a Buddhist pagoda on the government side. The colonel insists that he is concerned only about the safety of the devout. They cannot pass through the field, he says, because it is mined. But Strain brands this a lie. After 50 mortars are fired and a Buddhist monk is wounded, a U.N. peacekeeper reaches the scene, and the firing stops.

“I consider these mom-and-pop battles,” Strain says. “One colonel gets angry at another colonel and starts firing.” Generally, they are easily controlled. “When we show up,” says another observer, U.S. Army Capt. Tom Austin, “they always stop fighting and withdraw.”

If the belligerents did not stop on their own, the United Nations would not have the authority to make them do so. Peacekeepers are instructed to fire in self-defense only when fired upon, and they must rely on their skills at mediation to stop others from firing at each other.

The ability to resolve conflicts depends in large part on the degree of moral authority they wield over belligerents. In some areas, that authority is clearly limited.

Israel has never fully accepted the 5,800 U.N. peacekeepers in southern Lebanon. In February, tanks of the Israel Defense Forces, embarking on a 24-hour punitive expedition against fighters of the pro-Iranian Hezbollah group, stormed through a U.N. post in Lebanon. The Blue Helmets put up a brief struggle, some even trying to wrestle with Israeli soldiers. But the Israelis bulldozed U.N. armored personnel carriers out of the way and struck north at two villages harboring Hezbollah guerrillas.

Eight U.N. peacekeepers from Fiji and Nepal were wounded in the action. Altogether, 185 U.N. soldiers have died in Lebanon since the operation began in 1978.

Peacekeeping has become a major, specialized operation for some military forces. Canada now has 4,200 soldiers serving with the United Nations, or roughly one of every 20 men and women in the Canadian forces. Canada, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark all have special training courses in peacekeeping.

Peacekeeping is so important to Finns that 49-year-old Lt. Col. Kalevi Kokko delayed his retirement from the army for a year so he could command the Finnish battalion in the Golan Heights.

“I applied for four years before I was accepted,” he says. “You know, we Finnish soldiers do not have such international experience. I have worked along the Russian-Finnish border and know Russian soldiers. I wanted to know other soldiers.” Kokko and his Finnish troops now work alongside Austrian, Canadian and Polish soldiers.

According to a survey prepared by Kokko, the average Finnish soldier on the Golan Heights is 23 years old, unmarried, serves a tour of duty lasting eight to 12 months, does two shifts of four-hour sentry duty and patrols six miles every day--and takes a daily sauna.

Although British observers such as Filler in Cambodia are volunteers, the regular soldiers sent by Britain into a peacekeeping operation are not. “It’s not voluntary,” says Capt. Andrew Waller of the Royal Artillery battalion in Cyprus, which is usually stationed in Germany as part of the British Army of the Rhine. “But, quite frankly, it’s very few that don’t want to go. One battery was left behind. They were disappointed.”

The United States pays roughly 30% of the cost of U.N. peacekeeping operations, by far the largest share, but it has few peacekeepers on the ground. As of October, 122 U.S. military personnel were on U.N. peacekeeping duty: 51 in Cambodia, 30 in the Western Sahara, 20 in Middle East truce areas, 13 on the Iraq-Kuwait border, six on a preliminary tour of Mozambique for a possible future program and two at headquarters in New York.

During the Cold War, it was difficult to convince enemies that Americans were neutral. As a result, it made sense to rely primarily on peacekeepers from countries like Canada, Finland, Fiji and Nepal.

The increasing scope of peacekeeping operations is becoming a serious complication. In Cambodia, more than 20,000 military and civilian peacekeepers have descended upon a little country whose infrastructure has been ravaged by two decades of war and fanaticism.

The peacekeepers have had an enormous impact, not all of it good. Inflation is often called the fault of the United Nations. Cambodians are complaining that Vietnamese prostitutes have moved into the capital, and there have been reports of a high incidence of venereal disease among the soldiers. To make matters worse, a group of 175 civilians, mostly women who work for humanitarian organizations in Cambodia, have protested to the United Nations about sexual harassment by the peacekeepers.

For all its problems, peacekeeping has become an assignment of choice for some veteran military officers.

Maj. Gen. Roman Misztal of the Polish army commands the 1,300 U.N. peacekeepers who monitor the cease-fire between the Israeli and Syrian armies in the Golan Heights. The 60-year-old Misztal, who has served as commander for a year, is a huge man of large girth pushing out the middle of a gray uniform. His hair is gray, but thick black eyebrows point outward on each side. He is a garrulous man, well-liked by the Finnish, Austrian and Irish officers near him.

Using English with a heavy Polish accent, he speaks in cliches sometimes, but they are heartfelt. “It is an old soldier telling this,” he says to a group of visitors. “I have been with the army 42 years. This is the job that is most enjoyable and satisfying. The most important job in my life is now--keeping the peace and making the peace.”

Times staff writer Carol J. Williams in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, contributed to this story.

Next: Can U.N. peacekeepers enforce human rights?

Who Pays for the Patrols?

Financing for peacekeeping comes out of a special U.N. budget, except for the force in Cyprus, which is financed on a separate, voluntary basis. Each U.N. member is charged a fee based on its GNP. The United States pays 30% of the United Nations’ annual peacekeeping expenses.

Current U.S. involvement: The United States has made military or civilian contributions in five of the 12 current U.N. operations. They are: Cambodia, the Iraq-Kuwait border, Western Sahara, the Sinai and Mozambique.

Source: United Nations, Times staff reports