German Party May Shift Stand on Military : Policy: Social Democratic chairman supports deployment for peacekeeping purposes.

The leader of Germany’s main opposition party Friday signaled his willingness to allow the unrestricted participation of German military forces in U.N. peacekeeping operations.

“For deployment (of German forces) as part of ‘blue helmet’ actions and all the consequences that result from such actions, we say ‘yes,’ ” declared Social Democratic Chairman Rudolf Scharping in an interview printed in Friday’s editions of the mass-circulation newspaper Bild Zeitung.

His comment was the latest in a series of recent statements by leading Social Democrats hinting strongly that the party may end its basic reluctance to see German military forces sent on missions of any kind outside of North Atlantic Treaty Organization territory.

If the party follows through with a formal policy change at its annual party conference in November, the shift would effectively remove uncertainties such as those that have plagued German military commitments in Somalia and the former Yugoslav republics.

Those uncertainties have damaged the country’s image among its allies as a reliable partner.

Such a move would also help counter critics who claim that Germany’s unwillingness to share the unpleasant and often dangerous task of maintaining global peace should disqualify the country from being considered for a permanent seat on a reformed U.N. Security Council.

After reluctantly agreeing earlier this year to back the deployment of 1,700 German Bundeswehr soldiers as U.N. peacekeepers to pacified areas of Somalia for strictly humanitarian purposes, the Social Democrats made a last-minute attempt in the Federal Constitutional Court to block the move after 24 Pakistani peacekeepers were killed in an ambush in Mogadishu. They argued that under the circumstances, the troops were not being sent into a pacified environment.

The constitutional court ruled against them.

Only weeks earlier, the same court rejected a challenge by the small Free Democratic Party to the use of German crew members on NATO’s sophisticated electronics guidance and detection aircraft, known as AWACS, that are enforcing the U.N.-imposed “no-fly” zone over the former Yugoslav republics.

The Social Democrats supported that challenge too.

The role of German military forces in the post-Cold War age has been hotly debated by Germans since their country was reunited.

During the Cold War, successive coalition governments in West Germany claimed that ambiguous constitutional wording should be interpreted as a ban on the deployment of German forces anywhere outside the NATO area.

While Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his Christian Democrats have challenged this view since unification and argued strenuously that a unified Germany must shoulder a greater global burden, the Social Democrats have stayed with the earlier interpretation.

The party’s left wing, with its strong pacifist strains, is likely to oppose any policy change despite the leadership’s recent statements, and the issue could generate a major battle at the party’s conference in November in the western city of Wiesbaden.

Scharping’s comments reflect his efforts to steer his party more toward the mainstream of German public opinion in the run-up to 1994, when 20 elections are scheduled.