Global Policy Forum

By Barbara Crossette

Proposals for a new unit for gathering information and improving planning for United Nations peacekeepers, which officials see as crucial to faster and more effective responses to crises, could be blocked by developing nations in the General Assembly in the next few weeks.

Some diplomats from the developing world, opening another fissure between rich and poor nations in the organization, say they are wary of giving the United Nations what amounts to intelligence-gathering functions. Others say that the proposed unit is redundant, since the existing Department of Political Affairs is supposed to be watching world trouble spots.

"Many delegations feel that it has not been satisfactorily explained to us why the D.P.A. has fallen short in this function," said Kamalesh Sharma, India's ambassador to the United Nations. "This is very puzzling. If the department is not doing its work, then what is it doing?" He said that this critique represented "a prevalent sentiment in the Nonaligned Movement."

The proposed policy planning staff, which would draw on expertise from several departments, was one of many recommendations in a report produced in the summer by a panel of outside experts led by Lakhdar Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister and frequent trouble shooter for the United Nations.

In an interview at the time his report was published, Mr. Brahimi said his own experience as an envoy of the secretary general, on assignments from Haiti to the Middle East and Afghanistan, had given him firsthand knowledge of the shortcomings of United Nations information collection and analysis. His proposal was widely welcomed at first as a way to give peacekeepers, who can take months to reach a crisis, a sharper operation. The Security Council passed a unanimous resolution on Nov. 13 commending the report and promising to do its part by giving clearer mandates to peacekeeping operations. The Council suggested that deadlines for fielding missions should be set at 30 days for traditional operations and 90 days for more complex deployments. It underlined the need for better analysis and planning.

But recently, as General Assembly committees have begun to consider specific recommendations, contained in a second report by Deputy Secretary General Louise Frechette, a host of objections arose, with Egypt, Pakistan and India among the sharpest critics.

Many poor nations say that more money should be spent on development, not peacekeeping. Western diplomats say that this inverts the order of things: without a stable environment, development aid is wasted. In any case, they say, the expenditure would be small because experts would be drawn from the United Nations' existing staff.

Countries that provide troops for many missions, most of them in the developing world, are also attacking the richer countries for their unwillingness to send their own soldiers to peacekeeping operations, saying that the system suffers from a kind of apartheid, where rich countries order the missions and pay the bills and poor countries send their troops to die. Bangladesh tried to set a quota of troop contributions for the Security Council's five permanent members — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — but was rebuffed.

Mr. Sharma of India, which is a leading peacekeeping participant, said that if the United Nations needed better intelligence it should listen more to people in the field. "The Security Council doesn't consult people on the ground," he said. "But the information these people have is what is required."