U.N. Peacekeepers Face a Crisis of High Expectations : Mission: More troubled areas need help, but officials are constrained by both tradition and a fear of failure.

Jose Maria Pardeiro does not hide his troubled mood when asked how long the United Nations must remain in El Salvador to instill respect for civil rights.

“We can stay here for one year or we can stay for 10 years. It’s the same,” he says.

Salvadoran society is so polarized, explains the 37-year-old lawyer from Madrid, that the United Nations acting alone does not have the means to change the situation. Its only goal should be to strengthen and support the weak institutions set up to deal with human rights in a country where death squads have eliminated dissidents with impunity for years.

Helen Hopps of Washington, D.C., another U.N. human rights worker in El Salvador, agrees that expectations were far too high when the United Nations took on the task of mediating peace accords between left-wing guerrilla forces and a right-wing government. But she quickly cautions, “People would be paralyzed if we left now.”

The exchange underscores one of the great problems clouding the future of U.N. peacekeeping. The world simply expects too much from the Blue Helmets and Blue Berets who are dispatched to troubled areas emerging from turmoil.

Few outsiders understand the limitations of U.N. military action under present rules and traditions. Recent proposals for expanded peacekeeping envision an enforcement role that U.N. commanders and bureaucrats seem reluctant to take on. The prospect for disappointment, even disillusionment, looms large.

Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali likes to say that the United Nations once had “a crisis of credibility.”

For years, paralyzed by the Cold War and 279 vetoes in the Security Council, the United Nations often failed to act when the world needed it most. It sometimes seemed no more than a debating society where ambassadors of Third World tyrants disported themselves by heaping scorn on the United States and Western Europe. Critics mocked the United Nations, and some New Yorkers even suggested that it pack up and leave town.

All that has changed. With the collapse of communism, neither the United States nor Russia nor anyone else has cast a veto in the Security Council since May, 1990. The United Nations can and does act. Frightened peoples in a troubled world clamor for its help. In the last four years, the United Nations has mounted 13 new peacekeeping operations, as many as it did in its first 43 years. It almost seems as if the United Nations is continually riding off to the aid of peoples in distress like the old U.S. Cavalry or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Now, says Boutros-Ghali, the United Nations has “a crisis of too much credibility.”

Internal Affairs

The frustrations are apparent in San Miguel in eastern El Salvador, where Pardeiro, Hopps and a handful of other peacekeepers recently discussed their work with a group of visitors from the private U.N. Assn. of the United States. The peacekeepers are not soldiers, but civilians charged with monitoring human rights violations under the U.N.-brokered peace agreement that is ending the civil war in El Salvador. The operation in El Salvador, like a similar arrangement in Cambodia, involves an unprecedented level of U.N. involvement in a country’s internal affairs.

Dennis McNamara of New Zealand, who heads the civil rights teams in Cambodia, says Cambodians, too, fret over the eventual departure of the peacekeepers.

“There’s a great fear in the country about the post-U.N. era,” he says. “There is a special fear in the human rights community, and with good reason.” More than a million people died under the tyranny of the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s.

Instilling respect for human rights in police, soldiers and government officials in countries like El Salvador and Cambodia is an arduous task that may take many years. But it is not clear how long the Security Council intends the human rights workers to stay in the two countries after the main peacekeeping work is completed in the next year or so. New leaders, no matter how democratic, may not welcome U.N. watchdogs looking over their shoulders.

The danger is that the U.N. human rights programs, if cut short before they have a chance to become effective, will serve as no more than a smoke screen, satisfying the consciences of outsiders while abuses continue.

Much the same can be said about U.N. operations in the former Yugoslav federation. The United Nations has sent 14,000 peacekeepers to Croatia to monitor a cease-fire line between Croats and Serbs, and 1,500 to Bosnia to keep the Sarajevo airport and some roads open for relief supplies to the beleaguered Bosnians. Another 5,000 NATO troops under U.N. command are due to join the peacekeepers in Bosnia in December.

Secretary General Boutros-Ghali has tried in vain to shy away from Bosnia. He has not hidden his annoyance at the United States and Europe for pushing the United Nations into a quagmire that they themselves have been eager to avoid.

Fragile Resolutions

In fact, a good case can be made that the governments of the United States and Europe, embarrassed by demands from their electorates to do something about Bosnia, have maneuvered the United Nations into passing resolutions that do not mean much.

In August, for example, the Bush Administration, trying to mollify a public outcry over death camps and “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia, rushed a resolution through the Security Council authorizing all countries to use force if necessary to get relief supplies into Bosnia. Since it was similar to the resolution that led to Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf War, passage of the Bosnia resolution was front-page news throughout the United States. But neither the Bush Administration nor any other government has tried to implement the use-of-force resolution in Bosnia.

In the end, the anguish of Bosnia may count as a U.N. failure, even if the fault really lies with the United States and Europe for trying to hide their lack of will under the cloak of the United Nations.

Unrealistic expectations might not be such a problem if the United Nations had enough military power to play a significant role in maintaining peace. In a remarkable paper prepared for the Security Council in July, Boutros-Ghali offered proposals that would not only keep peacemaking operations intact but would expand the duties of U.N. troops to aggressively enforce the peace and prevent war as well.

The United Nations, according to the secretary general, has been given a new opportunity to fulfill its original responsibility as set down by the authors of the U.N. Charter in 1945: to police the peace.

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

Boutros-Ghali proposed a kind of U.N. army made up of special units set aside by various regular armies for use when needed. The proposal did not envisage a massive U.N. military base or the construction of a U.N. Pentagon on the banks of the East River in New York. The units would remain with their armies until summoned, at which time they would go into action quickly, some even becoming a rapid deployment force.

If the Security Council wanted to deter an aggressor, it could mobilize this small army. Although such deployments are authorized by the U.N. Charter, they have never been carried out. When the United Nations repelled North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, it did so by authorizing other forces led by the United States to fight in the name of the United Nations.

Even if the proposal is adopted, Boutros-Ghali’s proposed army would probably still not be able to take on a North Korea or a powerful Iraq.

These U.N. forces “may perhaps never be sufficiently large or well enough equipped to deal with a threat from a major army equipped with sophisticated weapons,” he wrote. “They would be useful, however, in meeting any threat posed by military force of a lesser order.”

While acknowledging that it might take a long time before the United Nations accepted his plan, Boutros-Ghali said the recruitment of rapid deployment units could be started sooner.

He described them as peace enforcers, forces to be assigned to tasks that prove too difficult for peacekeepers. More heavily armed than regular peacekeepers, they might be called on to restore a cease-fire that had broken down. They would not simply observe and mediate a cease-fire the way most peacekeepers do now.

Boutros-Ghali also proposed their use in what he called preventive deployment--the dispatch of troops to a country that feared aggression by a neighbor. If the United Nations had mobilized such an operation in 1990, for example, Hussein might have had to push aside a U.N. rapid deployment force to invade Kuwait.

So far, Boutros-Ghali’s ideas have proven too radical for governments to embrace whole, although President Bush promised that he and other leaders might hold a special meeting of the Security Council to discuss the proposals and “develop concrete responses” to them.

Several institutional problems stand in the way of expanding the United Nations’ military powers. Bureaucrats and force commanders would have to change a whole way of thinking to fit in with the secretary general’s proposals.

For years, U.N. peacekeeping mainly involved the laborious monitoring of cease-fire lines after two belligerents agreed to a truce pending the negotiation of a peace treaty. To do the job right, U.N. peacemakers believed they needed patience and the strictest impartiality. Looking on any show of force as a show of failure, they preferred to report transgressions rather than repel them.

More recently, peacekeepers have been drawn into a new assignment: implementing peace agreements worked out by former belligerents. In addition to monitoring cease-fire lines, the United Nations has been called on to demobilize troops, supervise elections and instill respect for human rights. The peacekeepers have tried to do this with the same patience and impartiality they brought to traditional deployments.

Three Offensives

The United Nations was not always so committed to passivity. In the early 1960s, it sent almost 20,000 peacekeepers to a Congo in turmoil. Invoking self-defense as an excuse, the Blue Helmets launched three offensives against Moise Tshombe and his secessionist state of Katanga, finally breaking the rebellion and uniting the Congo. But there was considerable loss of life. American and European conservatives excoriated the United Nations for abandoning neutrality to put down Katanga.

Since the Congo adventure, U.N. peacekeepers have wielded their authority rarely, if at all, and have labored hard to prove their neutrality. Only that kind of attitude, according to the prevailing view, will persuade outsiders to accept the United Nations as the arbiter of cease-fire lines and the monitor of elections and human rights.

As a result, U.N. officials seem ill at ease with power. Cambodia has become a quasi-protectorate of the United Nations, with several ministries under U.N. direction. Roger Lawrence, an American economist with the United Nations, is in charge of administering the finances of the Cambodian government. That government is spending twice as much as it receives in revenue, making up the deficit by printing an avalanche of money. The result is rampant inflation.

Asked if the United Nations could stop the government’s incessant printing of paper money, Lawrence demurs: “If we asked them to stop the printing presses, we would be asking them to cut spending in half. We would destroy that government. That is not in our mandate.”

Some critics believe that Yasushi Akashi of Japan, the veteran U.N. bureaucrat who heads the peacekeeping operation in Cambodia, feels intimidated by the political power of Prince Norodom Sihanouk and gives in too easily to his whims and proposals.

Similar criticism has been leveled at the U.N. operation in El Salvador. Americas Watch, a private human rights organization, has rebuked the United Nations for its timidity in reporting human rights violations for fear of offending the Salvadoran government. In a recent report, it says the United Nations “has avoided timely public criticism of the government on human rights matters even when such criticism is warranted, and even when its own investigations have pointed to state involvement in abuses.”

All in all, the report continues, the United Nations “has opted for a conservative application of its mandate, one in which human rights problems are treated with the same kind of cautious diplomacy that one might use in attempting to resolve political disputes.”

There has been talk of emboldening the peacekeepers. Marrack Goulding, the British diplomat who is the U.N. undersecretary general in charge of peacekeeping, says the United Nations is broadening the definition of self-defense, moving away from the idea that force should hardly ever be used.

Under the new definition, Goulding says, peacekeepers would have the authority to shoot their way past a roadblock set up to prevent passage of a relief truck in areas of conflict like Bosnia or Somalia. The plan revives memories of the Congo: The United Nations mounted its offensives after peacekeepers were harassed by Katangan gendarmes at roadblocks.

Peacekeeping is beset by other administrative problems. One is logistics. Every time the Security Council approves a peacekeeping operation, Goulding and his staff have to rush about patching a force together and supplying it. Each operation becomes a new emergency. “It’s real 19th-Century stuff the way these things are managed,” Goulding says.

Budget approval by the General Assembly is slow, and the secretary general is allotted only $3 million to start a project, pending final approval. It takes weeks, sometimes months, to dispatch troops where they are needed.

According to the U.S. General Accounting Office, the U.N. General Assembly fails to adequately monitor its spending once the troops are in the field. In 1991, the General Assembly’s budget committee spent only three days reviewing peacekeeping budgets, even though spending on peacekeeping is greater than the entire ordinary budget of the United Nations itself.

Some of the secretary general’s proposals could founder on cost alone. The budget for the 12 current U.N. peacekeeping operations comes to $2.4 billion this year.

Boutros-Ghali argues that peacekeeping is a bargain. “The contrast between the costs of United Nations peacekeeping and the costs of the alternative, war . . . would be farcical were the consequences not so damaging to global stability,” he wrote in his Agenda for Peace.

But the United States, which pays 30% of the peacekeeping budget, complains often about the accelerating cost. Some senators have proposed shifting U.S. peacekeeping expenses from the State Department budget, where they loom large, to the Pentagon budget, where they might seem insignificant. But this troubles the State Department, which fears that it would lose some control over U.N. policy.

Late Payments

The United States is seeking a reduction of its share to 25%. But Japan, which now pays 12.5% and would be expected to make up some of the difference if the United States paid less, is unlikely to agree to an increase unless the United States supports its bid for a permanent seat on the Security Council.

The United States is far behind in its U.N. payments. As of Aug. 31, it owed $209 million for peacekeeping. Russia owed even more--$282 million. They are not alone. In all, governments owe the United Nations $788 million in unpaid assessments for peacekeeping.

Until the United Nations finds a way out of this morass, it is hard to take seriously the plans for more expansive and aggressive peacekeeping.