Insider : From Peacekeepers to Peace Enforcers? : Long accustomed to serving as impartial referees, U.N. troops may have to become more involved. Somalia could be a test case.

U.S. Ambassador Edward J. Perkins is a tall, quiet man not given to flights of eloquence. But he caught the mood of the chamber with a few words last week when he told the ambassadors around the enormous, horseshoe table of the U.N. Security Council, “The post-Cold War world is likely to hold other Somalias in store for us.”

Like Perkins, many diplomats at the United Nations believe a historic precedent was set when the Security Council approved the resolution authorizing a U.S.-led military mission of mostly U.S. troops to force food and medicines past the warlords and their young marauders into the hands of the starving of Somalia.

But there is a good deal of confusion about the nature of the precedent. Most of the confusion has been caused by the theatrics of President Bush’s plan to dispatch 28,000 Marines and soldiers, with even more in reserve, to wrench Somalia out of its misery. This hardly sounds new. It smacks of Operation Desert Storm with Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf dislodging Saddam Hussein from Kuwait by unleashing an army of more than half a million troops and a hail of terror from the most sophisticated air force in the world.

Yet, as British Ambassador David Hannay--an urbane diplomat who likes to treat U.N. correspondents with both wit and contempt--told a reporter who asked him to compare Somalia and the Persian Gulf War, “That’s like comparing chalk and cheese, quite frankly.”

The historic precedent is far more subtle and complex. By passing their resolution Thursday, the Security Council for the first time set in motion a new kind of U.N. peacekeeping operation. This new U.N. operation--far more like peace enforcing than peacekeeping--will not take form until the Americans leave. For the United Nations, it will be a blatant and unprecedented, though surely welcome, interference in the internal affairs of a member state.

“It will take some time for the precedent-setting value of this resolution to filter into the system,” said a thoughtful Western diplomat. “Perhaps in two or three months, the great importance will be understood.”

Six months ago, Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, in a remarkable paper called “Agenda for Peace,” proposed that the world body consider the occasional use of peace enforcers to impose order on chaotic situations. By tradition, U.N. peacekeepers do not try to push anyone around; they usually serve as impartial monitors invited by belligerents to patrol cease-fire lines. Their orders are to fire their weapons only when others fire on them first.

While many governments heaped praise on Boutros-Ghali’s proposal, they were too wary to seize it. Only a couple of days before the U.S. offer to send a division of troops galvanized the United Nations into action, Boutros-Ghali described the Security Council as hesitant about sending enforcers into Somalia.

Asked about the prospects in an interview with The Times, the secretary general had replied that there would be “a great preoccupation among member states” who would fear setting “a precedent to intervention in internal affairs of other member states in the future.” Yet the Security Council did exactly that a week later.

Until then, the Security Council had dithered over Somalia. In the absence of a Somali government, U.N. officials whiled away a good deal of their time cajoling the various warlords into accepting the arrival of 500 Pakistani peacekeepers and the future dispatch of 3,000 more. But the combination of mercurial warlords and impotent peacekeepers turned the operation into a fiasco, and much of the food--some say most of the food--was looted.

Under the terms of the new resolution, the U.S.-led troops are charged with pacifying the country and then, in what may be the resolution’s most significant provision, withdrawing in favor of a new U.N. peacekeeping operation. The new peacekeepers will have to be enforcers, not referees. It is inconceivable that the U.N. peacekeepers would revert to their old ways and allow the warlords and their young bandits to pick up their weapons again and resume looting and terrorizing.

On top of this, a future peacekeeping operation will surely encourage the Somalis to fashion a new, viable government. This would take time, and many diplomats foresee a long period in which the U.N. peacekeepers supervise Somalia as if it were a trusteeship or a colony. The world body is doing much the same thing in Cambodia--although with the approval there of all former belligerents.

Many U.N. diplomats and analysts believe that the Bush Administration is sending in far more troops than needed. The prevailing view at the United Nations is that an augmented force of U.N. peacekeepers--10,000 at the most--could pacify Somalia easily.

But there is general agreement as well that the Security Council might still be arguing if it were not for the dramatic U.S. gesture. The offer to send U.S. troops forced the Security Council to accept them swiftly. Otherwise the United Nations would look like a callous debating society content with blowing air.

The U.S. gesture did something else. The Americans, as usual, demanded that they and not the United Nations have full command of the multinational force of mainly Americans. This annoyed ambassadors from both industrialized and Third World governments. They had felt humiliated during the Persian Gulf War when Bush ignored them once he had won the U.N. resolutions he needed to engage in battle.

To prevent a similar humiliation this time, the Security Council resolution provided for U.N. monitoring of the U.S.-led military operation and for a U.N. force to take over once the Americans and the other troops leave. In the long run, these provisions inserted to keep the Americans in check may be more important than the immediate dispatch of the U.S.-commanded troops.

Some diplomats look on Somalia as a unique case that will not be duplicated. But others agree with Ambassador Perkins that more Somalias lie in wait. They point to fermenting chaos in Zaire and the southern Sudan. Other U.N. officials such as Brig. Gen. Hussein Abdel Razek, the Egyptian commander of the peacekeepers in Sarajevo, believe a Somalia-style intervention must be mounted to save Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The United Nations’ ability to mount peace enforcement operations regularly in the future will probably depend on three issues:

* U.S. participation. If the United States continues to insist that it will not take part in a U.N. intervention unless it is a massive one with a U.S. general in command, there are not going to be very many such operations. The United States cannot intervene massively everywhere at the same time. Yet a U.N. enforcement operation is not likely to get off the ground without some kind of U.S. participation.

* Secondly, to make these operations work, the United Nations must shake off its peacekeeping mind-set and feel comfortable with using force. Many peacekeeping operations work because the belligerents need an impartial outsider to stand between them. U.N. peacekeepers are so used to this role that they may have difficulty getting tough.

* Finally, the United Nations must put its reputation for inefficiency and bureaucratic backbiting behind. The Somalia case probably showed the world body at its worst. Many humanitarian workers felt despair several weeks ago when Boutros-Ghali removed his highly regarded official on the scene, Mohammed Sahnoun of Algeria, after Sahnoun went on U.S. television and castigated Undersecretary General James Jonah of Sierra Leone for moving too slowly on Somali relief. The situation deteriorated even more after Sahnoun left.