Blue-Helmet Blues

By MARGUERITE MICHAELS

This time the desperate nation was Burundi. Vicious fighting erupted in the central African state when military officers from the Tutsi tribe murdered President Melchior Ndadaye, a member of the rival Hutus. As the attempted coup collapsed, both tribes massacred thousands of people and put hundreds of thousands to flight. Please, government officials begged the United Nations, send us peacekeepers.

Last week the U.S. said no. James Jonah, Under Secretary-General for Political Affairs, had warned Burundi not to expect any help because the Security Council "has shown no inclination to take on any new operations." In embattled Angola a recent request for an increase in U.N. military observers has gone unanswered. And in Somalia grudging participants are pressing Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to rethink that faltering operation.

Strapped for cash, short of manpower, criticized for its performance, the U.N. has reached the end of its capacity for settling global disputes. "We are at a critical stage," says Kofi Annan, Under Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, "because we have been asked to do too much with too little." In 1988, when U.N. peacekeepers won the Nobel Peace Prize, their numbers totaled just over 10,000. This year almost 80,000 blue helmets are deployed around a post-cold war world in which peace has only been achieved piecemeal. Troops still patrol truce lines, but now they also monitor elections, protect human rights, train local police, guard humanitarian relief deliveries and take up arms against those who get in their way.

The burgeoning operations have not been accompanied by any serious reassessment of the U.N.'s capability to manage them effectively. Jonah acknowledged that the peacekeepers have become "bystanders" in Somalia. An internal report states that "the U.N. lacks the technical, administrative and logistical tools required to implement effectively the peacekeeping agenda."

Mistakes and miscues made in the field bear out that assessment. In Mogadishu a lack of proper equipment has cost scores of lives. Pakistan sent 5,000 troops who did not have telephones, walkie-talkies, flak jackets, tear gas and even batons. Gear was eventually provided by other countries, but not before some of the poorly protected troops died in ambushes, and Somali civilians were killed when soldiers without riot gear fired their guns to dispel angry crowds. The U.N. has yet to organize an efficient communications network or stockpile enough rations. At one point food and water for the peacekeepers dropped well below a week's supply; someone had miscounted the number of troops. "That's a court-martial offense in my country," says a U.N. military adviser.

Yasushi Akashi, who ran the U.N. mission in Cambodia, looks back on that $1.5 billion operation with some skepticism. "The quality of personnel was not uniformly outstanding," he says. "Civil administration was an area in which the U.N. had no experience." The peacekeepers were supposed to create a neutral political environment for elections. U.N. officials acknowledged that no adequate control over civil administration was ever established. Materiel was routinely stolen from the airport before being logged in. Cambodian cleaning women stripped the mission of at least 10 computers before they were caught. The wait for official supplies of pens and paper drove desperate staff members to the local market. "When we start up in a new place, everything is wrong," says Denis Beissel, acting director of the U.N.'s Field Operations Division. "I don't have enough of anything to respond quickly. No staff, no stock, no money."

Countries that contribute troops insist on commanding them from afar. Soldiers from Bulgaria, a hapless lot recruited through local newspaper ads, scandalized the Cambodian provinces with their drinking and womanizing, but the U.N. could not discipline them. A U.N. task force has been created to investigate alleged black marketeering by peacekeepers, as well as charges that blue helmets regularly visited a Serb-run brothel outside Sarajevo whose "prostitutes" were in fact Muslim and Croat prisoners.

Management at headquarters is on overload. The quality of the New York City staff is hostage to the U.N.'s policy of hiring for geographic and sexual balance rather than expertise. There are more jobs than people with experience to fill them. It takes an average of 120 days for a supply request from the field to be answered; the U.S. Army, by comparison, generally responds in 14 to 21 days. Eight procurement officers were suspended from duty in July, accused of favoring a helicopter company in letting bids; they say they were just trying to act with dispatch. Budgets languish in a labyrinth of competing bureaucracies, and once expenditures are approved, the U.N. rarely receives more than 30% of peacekeeping assessments from member states within six months of fielding an operation. When the Yugoslav mission expanded to cover all of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the U.N. was under such financial pressure that it could not pay for the quick deployment of troops from Western Europe. The contingents had to cover their own expenses.

No amount of improved management will make up for the shortfall in money. The lack of resources is chronic: this year's estimated $3.2 billion peacekeeping budget is more than $1 billion in arrears. Congress has just cut the U.S. share of new bills from nearly one-third to one-fourth. The shortage of funds results from a lack of political will. "Somalia was reality therapy for the international community," says the U.N.'s Annan. "Intellectually we were ready for it. Emotionally we were not."

Annan uses the word frantic to describe the effects of Washington's planned withdrawal from Somalia by the end of next March. The first U.S. soldiers depart in December, along with most of the French; the Belgians are leaving this month. The Germans have said they will withdraw in April; the Italians have suddenly decided to "reevaluate" their continued presence. "If all these people leave," says a U.N. official, "it will be total anarchy."

Given the frequency with which member states are turning to the U.N. to police world conflicts, Annan hopes they will start thinking seriously about how to do it better. Boutros-Ghali's call for the creation of a standby force has mostly been ignored. If some more effective mechanism is not created, he fears, the U.N. will go out of the peacekeeping business as quickly as it has gone into it.

With reporting by Andrew Purvis/Nairobi