Pity The Peacemakers

By J.F.O. McAllister/Washington

A U.S. Marine raised on John Wayne movies and bloodied in Desert Storm's armored romp through Iraq might be perplexed by last week's action in Mogadishu. Under the command of a Turkish general who was advised by a retired U.S. admiral, U.N. Special Envoy Jonathan Howe, troops from five countries set about destroying the power base of Somalia's most notorious warlord, General Mohammed Farrah Aidid, beneath a hail of missile fire and cannon bursts from helicopter gunships overhead. Troops from the U.S., Pakistan, Morocco, France and Italy searched for Aidid. Prodded by Washington, the U.N. wanted to punish him for ordering an attack June 5 that killed 23 blue-helmeted U.N. peacekeepers from Pakistan. By last weekend, under authority of an arrest warrant issued by Howe, the U.N. forces had not caught Aidid despite house-to- house searches, but were satisfied they had him on the run. Five U.N. troops, four Moroccans and one Pakistani, were killed, and more than 100 Somali militia died during the raid.

Even if the operation badly crippled Aidid's forces, it thrust the U.N. back into Somalia's chaos. It also underscored the immense difficulty of the U.N.'s new role -- not only in Somalia but in Yugoslavia and Cambodia -- in trying to make peace before the warring parties are ready.

Not many of the U.N.'s recent undertakings can be called unalloyed successes: Cambodia is still locked in political rivalry; Somalia remains a violent, lawless land; Bosnia is shattered for good. Asked by the world to take over as Globo-cop, the U.N. has gone further than ever before, breaking its precedents and stretching its mandate to repair the ravages of war and internal breakdown. The role hasn't worked very well, in part because the U.N. lacks the money and men to do the job. But the main difficulty is with the job itself. The U.N. has been asked to patrol war zones, create governments from feuding factions, supply humanitarian relief -- even as U.N. members lack the political will to impose peace on belligerents.

The results were visible in the tracer fire illuminating Mogadishu's sky. This time the U.N. was one of the combatants. For four nights the Somalian capital echoed with deafening explosions as U.S. AC-130H ground-support planes and Cobra attack helicopters pounded the capital. Aidid's compound, arms caches and other locations took withering fire. Before U.N. ground forces advanced on his main base, a loudspeaker truck gave his gunmen several warnings to surrender. But soldiers came under fire as they moved in, provoking heavy retaliation from the air.

Howe called the operation "very surgical," but Somalis were not convinced. Trust in the U.N.'s motives and skills was badly strained in the first days of the anti-Aidid campaign when at least 20 Somalis in a crowd of demonstrators, children included, were killed by Pakistani peacekeepers. Many Somalis and foreign journalists at the scene say the Pakistanis opened fire from behind sandbagged fortifications when the crowd was still 100 yds. away.

Even Somalis happy to see Aidid punished were terrified by the U.N.'s ferocious firepower and repelled by the civilian casualties that resulted.

Such sentiments were widespread in Aidid's Mogadishu neighborhoods, which meant the U.N. was winning the battle against the warlord but losing the war to coax a workable society out of Somalia's anarchy. At the White House, the . motive for intervention was simple: to restore respect for the blue helmets.

But many foreign-aid workers and Somalis thought targeting Aidid was dangerously simplistic: other thuggish warlords are waiting to take his place. The U.N. action may have tipped the balance of power toward Aidid's enemies, rather than improved the chances for a political settlement. The peacekeepers inflicted more damage on Aidid than his opponents ever did, and they gleefully cheered the blue helmets on. The ferocity of the intervention may also have cast the U.N. as one more faction in the conflict.

As a relief worker noted, "This is a political problem that is being treated with a military solution." Fear of bogging down in the country's primitive politics is exactly why first Bush and then Clinton tried to limit the mission to narrow military objectives, insisting that the U.N. take over the hard part of restoring the country as soon as basic security and aid deliveries were in place. Washington refused the job of disarming the warlords. Nor did the U.S. leave behind enough equipment to make sure the peacekeepers could decisively outgun the local thugs. The U.N. and the U.S. tacitly ratified the warlords' power by granting them a dominant role in all- party talks on Somalia's future.

Now, having turned against Aidid, the U.N. is left with more questions than answers about its future responsibilities. Should it try to disarm all the warlords? Should it prosecute them? Should it conduct national elections? Should it intervene in case of attack? Most important, is Somalia vital enough to any U.N. member state to invest the money, lives and years required to reconstruct the country?

Dilemmas even more painful hobble the big U.N. efforts in Bosnia and Cambodia. In both cases the world body has stepped far out of its traditional role of monitoring a cease-fire agreed to by the parties.

In Bosnia almost 10,000 U.N. troops help deliver relief under extremely dangerous conditions. U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has requested 7,500 more soldiers to enforce so-called safe havens around six Muslim towns under Serbian siege. But that plan was flawed from the outset: many fear the safe areas will turn into permanent refugee camps guarded indefinitely by U.N. soldiers. And it is proving nearly impossible to implement. U.N. troops are routinely refused access to Muslim areas by Serb commanders, cannot shoot unless fired upon or intervene even when they witness / atrocities. Britain and France, who supply most of the manpower, have resisted serious military steps against the Serbs for fear of reprisals against their soldiers, making the blue helmets more like hostages than enforcers of international law. Western nations could never reach agreement that Bosnian carnage affected their vital interests and so could not make a credible threat of force. Last week Clinton underscored the ultimate irrelevance of the U.N. mission in Bosnia by virtually abandoning its government. The U.S., he said, would live with the country's partition into ethnic enclaves to reflect Serb and Croat territorial gains.

In Cambodia the 18-month, $2 billion U.N. effort to hold elections and reconstitute the government has also been plagued by violence. When the Khmer Rouge and then the Cambodian government originally installed by Vietnam broke their agreement to place soldiers and weapons under U.N. control, the 20,000 U.N. personnel in the country had no mandate to levy punishment. Human-rights abuses continued, but the government would not try violators and the U.N. would not force it to do so. U.N. bureaucrats in Cambodia, veterans of corridor wars in New York, did not know how to run the day-to-day operations of a collapsed government. "We tried to make everyone happy," said a U.N. official, "and that was a mistake."

If its mission is defined solely by the elections held last month, the U.N. can count a success: 90% of registered voters turned out under perilous conditions. Despite early resistance, both winners and losers are trying to organize a coalition government. But "this is a failed state," says a senior U.N. official, "and you do not re-create a country simply by having an election." The U.N. effort is scheduled to wind down in September, and the peacekeepers will depart, leaving the country without a working civil service, judicial system, police force or economy.

Some reformers, including Boutros-Ghali, argue that the U.N. needs its own rapid-deployment force under a strong Secretariat to permit swift intervention in the early stages of a crisis. Missions would not be fatally slowed by the laborious process of soliciting troops and the money to pay for them from member states. That could be a useful step: the 80,000 U.N. troops now deployed in 13 countries are constantly running out of money.

The Clinton Administration is moving to step up its reliance on and commitment to the U.N., in pursuit of a policy its U.N. ambassador, Madeleine Albright, calls "assertive multilateralism." Washington is likely to designate specific U.S. units for quick deployment to U.N. missions.

Yet the fundamental problem of peace enforcement is not the means available; it is the will to use them. The U.N. is not an independent body but the creature of its members -- and when it comes to decisive action, dependent on the U.S. "The dilemma now is that member states are dumping on the U.N. problems more intractable than it used to face, but still not of first-order importance to them," says Steven Ratner, a former State Department lawyer and peacekeeping expert. Unless U.N. members begin to redefine the meaning of vital interests and undertake the kind of leadership Washington showed during the Gulf War, the U.N. will tend to the weak compromise and dithering so evident in Bosnia. Making peace against determined foes still demands a willingness to see soldiers, no matter what color their helmets, come home in body bags.

With reporting by Bonnie Angelo/New York, Richard Hornik/Hong Kong, William Mader/London and Andrew Purvis/Mogadishu