U.N. May Add Border Troops to Thwart Iraq : Persian Gulf: Statement comes after Baghdad fails to meet a deadline for removing disputed police posts in Kuwaiti territory.

U.N. officials said Saturday that they will consider deploying international peacekeeping troops on this uneasy frontier as a defiant Iraq failed to meet a deadline for removing six disputed police posts in Kuwaiti territory.

U.N. spokesman Abdelatif Kabbaj said the secretary general has been asked to consider dispatching peacekeeping troops to the border to supplement the contingent of 249 unarmed U.N. military observers patrolling the nine-mile-wide demilitarized zone on the border.

“The Security Council asked the secretary general to consider to send some troops to help UNIKOM (the U.N. Iraq-Kuwait Observer Mission) if needed, if there is any trouble around here, if there is a need to have protection,” Kabbaj told reporters.

The situation on the stark, sandy frontier has become increasingly tense in recent weeks as Iraqis have repeatedly defied U.N. observers in operations since Jan. 2 to remove equipment, including missiles and ammunition, from barracks within the demilitarized zone.

The latest dispute involves six Iraqi police posts, staffed with about 40 armed Iraqi security officers, located in Kuwaiti territory within the demilitarized zone. Iraq had been given a Friday deadline to remove the posts, but Kabbaj said Saturday that the posts were still in place.

“Until now, all of these posts are still manned,” he said. “We informed the Iraqis today that we asked them to remove the police posts, and they did not come into compliance.”

U.N. officials said there are three additional Iraqi police posts and two Kuwaiti posts located too near the border for which U.N. demands for removal have not been met.

The complex border dispute has become critical in recent days because of allied threats to launch a new air strike against Iraq if it is not in full compliance with U.N. cease-fire resolutions that ended the Persian Gulf War nearly two years ago.

After a new border was demarcated between Iraq and Kuwait at the end of the war, Iraq lost to Kuwait some of the territory it formerly held, particularly near the port city of Umm Qasr.

Across the rest of the frontier, the new border is as much as 800 yards away from the boundary originally marked in 1963, and U.N. officials gave Iraq until Jan. 15 to remove any equipment remaining within the territory newly allotted to Kuwait.

Kuwait in November insisted that it approve any such excursions into its new territory, and Iraqi recovery missions were proceeding in an orderly fashion with U.N. monitoring until Jan. 2, when Iraq began sending large groups into the Kuwaiti territory without U.N. monitoring, U.N. officials said.

The alleged incursions culminated last Sunday, when up to 500 Iraqi civilians, defying unarmed U.N. monitors who tried to stop them, removed a stockpile of ammunition and four Chinese-made Silkworm missiles from a series of former Iraqi bunkers located within Kuwaiti territory, materiel that U.N. officials said was to have been destroyed.

In interviews Saturday, U.N. observers said the Iraqis formed human shields that prevented the monitors from blocking the operation and in one case rammed a U.N. vehicle. “It was weird, hard to describe,” said an American representative on the U.N. force, Lt. Cmdr. Kevin Rhodes. “Sometimes it can get a little shaky around here.”

The UNIKOM force is unarmed except for 45 Danish troops deployed to guard the mission’s headquarters at Camp Khor on the border just south of Umm Qasr and at UNIKOM’s Kuwaiti base at Camp Doha. They are not allowed to accompany U.N. observers into the field.

But several members of the U.N. force said they are not convinced that armed peacekeeping troops could aid their mission, even in a confrontation like last week’s with the Iraqis at the ammunition bunkers.

“There’s not a lot that armed troops could have done, other than shoot civilians who are unarmed,” one British officer said. “And if you brought in more U.N. observers, they’d just bring in more people. It’s a no-win situation.”

Kabbaj said Iraq has notified the United Nations that it has suspended removing any additional equipment from the Kuwaiti side of the demilitarized zone until the “ambiguity” over the terms of the removal is clarified.

In a letter from Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Said Sahaf to the Security Council received by UNIKOM officials Saturday night, Iraq emphasized the need to develop an acceptable formula for removal of the remaining equipment at Umm Qasr, site of a former Iraqi naval base and port, which it stressed is “an indisputable right.”

However, Iraq had not yet responded to the issue of the disputed police posts Saturday. Kabbaj said U.N. officials Saturday informed Iraqi liaison officers at Umm Qasr that the deadline for removal of the posts had not been met. “Until now, we didn’t receive any response,” he said. “They have to report to Baghdad.”

The issue of removal of the posts became critical because it was included in the Jan. 15 deadline for removal of all Iraqi equipment from territory now claimed by Kuwait.

However, there was no such deadline established for removal of police posts that are located in acceptable territory but too near the border. The United Nations has asked both Iraq and Kuwait to remove any police facilities located less than one kilometer (about two-thirds of a mile) from the border; Iraq has three such posts, and Kuwait has two. All of them remain, and technically they are also in violation of U.N. demands, officials said.