U.N. Envoy Going to China in Effort to Save Conference : Dispute: Women’s groups protest isolated site for parallel meeting. Diplomat’s mission to Beijing is not announced.

Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali is sending a trusted trouble-shooter to China in hopes of dissipating a controversy that could endanger the U.N. International Conference on Women in Beijing this August and September, diplomatic sources said Wednesday.

The secretary general acted after China turned down a request by private women’s groups that their forum be located near the site for the official conference of government delegates.

The private groups--called non-government organizations, or NGOs--have threatened to pressure their governments to cancel the women’s conference or transfer it to another country if China persists in isolating the NGO forum.

The issue is so delicate that Boutros-Ghali has not announced his dispatch of Ismat Kittani, a former Iraqi diplomat, to Beijing.

But sources said Kittani, after conferring with leaders of private women’s groups, is to fly to Beijing within two weeks.

Kittani, one of a group of diplomats the secretary general relies on for special assignments, took over the U.N. mission in Somalia in 1992 after Boutros-Ghali quarreled with its chief.

Leaders of the NGO Forum on Women were upset in March when China announced that it was moving the site of the forum from downtown Beijing to the resort of Huairou, 40 miles north of the capital. The women’s groups said the new site was inadequate and too distant from the site of the official conference.

Deluged by hundreds of letters and faxes of protest from NGO groups globally, the All-China Women’s Federation, host of the planned U.N. conference, responded this week with an open, testy letter to members of the forum.

The federation told the women’s groups that “the information you have is not in conformity with the facts, and the criticism against China is entirely unjustifiable.”

The All-China Women’s Federation seemed especially annoyed that the Huairou site had been rejected, even after a committee had come to China to see it.

“We deeply regret that the sincerity and cooperative attitude of the Chinese side could not be understood by some organizations and individuals,” the federation said in its letter.

The Chinese offered little hope that they will change their minds.

“Huairou is the only available site with necessary conditions,” the Chinese letter said.

The private NGO forum has become a mainstay of U.N. official conferences, acting to pressure government delegates to do away with cant and face the world’s problems fully and openly.