Behind the Story : Trouble-Shooters : ‘Preventive diplomacy’ is the latest buzzword at the United Nations. Its practitioners are a far cry from the Lone Ranger.

Barely 18 months ago, the president of Rwanda and leaders of a rebel army signed a peace agreement in the safari-outfitting town of Arusha in the foothills of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. The act was seen as a quiet victory for the new art of “preventive diplomacy.”

At U.N. headquarters in New York, there was a heady, self-congratulatory mood in the department of political affairs.

“We were quite optimistic, after three years of efforts,” a desk officer said. “There was a cause for celebration.”

At the State Department in Washington, officials prepared to honor the astute, experienced David Rawson, the U.S. ambassador to Rwanda, with a decoration for his part in brokering the peace accord.

If it had held, most of the world would probably still not have heard of Rwanda--an overcrowded nub of hilly, landlocked territory in Central Africa peopled by Hutus, Tutsis and Pygmies.

But the agreement did not hold.

A plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana exploded over the Rwandan capital of Kigali last April 6, killing him and the president of neighboring Burundi and unleashing the most terrifying wave of mass murder since the onslaught of the Khmer Rouge on their own people in Cambodia almost 20 years ago. Some estimates put the death toll in Rwanda at more than 1 million, most of the victims members of the minority Tutsi tribe.

The bloodshed drove a Tutsi-dominated rebel army--known as the Rwandan Patriotic Front--into a frenzied offensive. The Tutsi rebels conquered the country and forced more than 1 million people, most from the majority Hutu tribe, into relief camps in Zaire.

Rwanda is now on everyone’s lips. The swiftness with which all hopes burst into failure demonstrates just how elusive success can be in this new approach.

Preventive diplomacy is the latest buzzword in international relations. Diplomats and politicians agree that they must try to choke off conflicts before they erupt into murderous conflagrations.

U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali devoted huge swaths of his 1994 annual report to preventive diplomacy, saying the expenses are “paltry by comparison with the huge cost in human suffering and material damage which war always brings.”

The private Council on Foreign Relations, long known as the voice of the foreign policy Establishment in the United States, created a Center for Preventive Diplomacy a few months ago.

Using a similar term, “crisis prevention,” President Clinton sent J. Brian Atwood, administrator of the Agency for International Development, to countries in the Horn of Africa last June to find out why, as one Administration official put it, “they are one plane crash away from mass slaughter or one bad rainy season away from famine.”

German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel and British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd urged the United Nations last September toward more creative use of preventive diplomacy.

There has been so much talk of preventive diplomacy lately that a casual reader could be forgiven for believing that its practicing diplomats must be Arnold Schwarzenegger-types who parachute into countries just in time to muzzle guns and prevent potential Bosnia-Herzegovinas from bursting forth.

Or as one of the United Nations’ most active preventive diplomats put it: “People think that when two armies face each other, the Lone Ranger goes in.”

Thin, ascetic-looking, self-effacing 60-year-old Lakhdar Brahimi, widely regarded as the United Nations’ most successful artist of this form of diplomacy, hardly resembles or acts like Schwarzenegger or the Lone Ranger.

Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister who now heads the U.N. operations in Haiti, has served as Boutros-Ghali’s emissary to such troubled areas as Zaire, South Africa, Liberia and Yemen.

“Preventive diplomacy,” he said in an interview, “is a beautiful concept very simple to understand: You must stop something before it blows up. But, when you get down to earth, it’s very complicated. . . . In preventive diplomacy, the best that can happen to you is that no one notices what you do. . . . When a problem appears, then you have failed.”

That, of course, makes it difficult to single out success.

Only the United Nations appears to have officials with the words “preventive diplomacy” printed somewhere on their business cards. They are all members of the department of political affairs that Boutros-Ghali set up in 1992. It is now headed by Undersecretary General Marrack Goulding, a British diplomat. Perhaps 40 of his officials are heavily involved in preventive diplomacy.

One problem is that these officials--gathering information, analyzing trends, traveling abroad--function much like a miniature State Department.

“Not all member states see this as a good thing,” Goulding said. “For some it seems to threaten unwanted United Nations interference in their internal affairs or in their relations with other countries.”

Another problem, in the view of critics, is that the preventive diplomats do not always move swiftly enough.

“Too often in the U.N. system,” Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans wrote in a recent scholarly article, “the secretary general’s special representatives have been assigned too late, when escalation is so advanced that halting a slide into hostilities is enormously difficult.”

Noting that the United Nations is often too short on funds to let these officials travel much overseas, Evans proposed that the United Nations establish six regional “U.N. preventive diplomacy units” around the world with a staff of 100 and a budget of little more than $20 million a year.

An outsider can sense some of the complexities of preventive diplomacy by studying recent events in Zaire.

For the last few years, many analysts have been predicting impending chaos and mass violence in Zaire under the tyrannical and avaricious rule of President Mobutu Sese Seko. The economy is in shreds; soldiers are plundering the countryside; teachers and civil servants are clamoring for their wages; foreign aid donors have stopped spending money, and the International Monetary Fund has suspended the Zairians as members.

Andrew Young, former U.N. ambassador and former mayor of Atlanta, met with Mobutu in Zaire a year ago and advised him, in vain, to step down.

“If someone doesn’t get involved in Zaire,” Young told Times reporters recently, “it will make Rwanda look like a Sunday school picnic.”

Three governments--the United States, France and Belgium--began pressuring Mobutu more than two years ago to accept some elements of democracy and economic counsel under the theory that civil war could be avoided if the political system and the economy made sense.

But Mobutu, while acquiescing to some moves pushed by the outsiders, would not give up his throne. By the end of 1992, the Zairian political system was in total confusion. A national conference of politicians, civic leaders, priests and professors had picked Etienne Tshisekedi, a Mobutu opponent, as prime minister for the transition toward democractic government.

But Mobutu refused to recognize Tshisekedi and named his own prime minister instead. Zaire had two governments, both more or less paralyzed.

So, the three Western governments asked Boutros-Ghali to join them in trying to prevent violence. He dispatched Brahimi to Kinshasa in July, 1993.

Brahimi, of course, had neither the authority nor the power to remove Mobutu. His strength lay only in his skills as a mediator and in the moral weight of the United Nations in that part of the world.

But after three months, he brokered an agreement expanding the conference of leaders who would pick a new prime minister and promising a broad government that would encompass representatives from all segments.

But in the maneuvering that followed, Tshisekedi, the putative transition prime minister, lost out. U.N. and U.S. officials insist that he was so inflexible--he stormed out of the conference midway--that he blew his chance to remain in power.

In another African example, widespread electoral violence was avoided in South Africa’s first non-racial elections last April when Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress reached a pre-electoral settlement with Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party.

Although many outsiders, including Brahimi, tried to encourage this, analysts agree that most of the credit belongs to Mandela and Buthelezi.

But U.N. officials also believe that the 500 observers who served during the electoral campaign made a small but successful contribution to preventive diplomacy.