Global Policy Forum

By Barbara Crossette

United Nations - If rock-throwing mobs in Kosovo can turn their rage on well-armed and expertly trained American troops, what can be in store for United Nations police officers when they take charge? The question sends a chill through officials and diplomats here who see a roster of dangerous law-enforcement assignments that may add up to more than the organization can tackle.

The United Nations department of peacekeeping operations is scrambling for thousands of police officers for operations in the Balkans, East Timor, several war zones in Africa, Cyprus, Tajikistan, Haiti and Guatemala. And few police departments have officers to spare.

Secretary General Kofi Annan does not have the freedom to move staff members to augment the peacekeeping department of about 400 people, among them only 230 professionals and the rest support staff. The group is half the size of the organization's public information department. Furthermore, Mr. Annan can no longer accept unlimited free experts provided by governments because a lobby of developing nations decided that too many were drawn from Western military forces.

The peacekeeping office is being asked "to run operations on three continents in four difficult places -- East Timor, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and soon Congo," said Richard C. Holbrooke, the American representative. "They are not adequately staffed to do this." "The risks to the U.N. of failure are very great if they don't do it right," Mr. Holbrooke said in an interview today. "This is not a secret; it is widely understood. But the solution is elusive because of the way the U.N. system is structured."

A special General Assembly committee on peacekeeping is now meeting to consider the department's problems, many of which have been caused by a General Assembly committee dealing with budgets and allocations for new staffing.

Assistant Secretary General Hedi Annabi, the deputy director of peacekeeping, said that because of Security Council instructions, officers will be on active patrol for the first time in Kosovo and East Timor, and in Kosovo will be armed. Until now, the police officers sent on peacekeeping missions have been unarmed monitors or instructors.

The numbers of officers required for missions have also jumped. The United Nations, with no police force of its own, is required to deploy nearly 9,000 officers as soon as possible. That includes 4,718 for Kosovo, 2,057 for Bosnia, 1,640 for East Timor and other contingents for smaller missions. Governments had sent 5,122 officers by today. That includes fewer than half those needed in Kosovo, where some have been sent back as unqualified.

Cambodia was the largest civilian police mission, with 3,600 people, but even there they had "supervising or training functions but were not taking over from the local police," Mr. Annabi said in an interview today. "What was new last year with Kosovo and East Timor is that we were given direct executive law enforcement powers. We were asked to assume responsibility for law and order, apprehensions and arrests, which we had never been given before. That is a qualitative leap."

At the Council on Foreign Relations, Ruth Wedgwood, an expert on the United Nations, said that it needed help in rethinking its operations. "Every time there's been any question of where to put together a really robust police force, everybody has ducked," Ms. Wedgwood said. "It's something that the Pentagon and NATO really have to face up to. The United Nations does not have the military."

David Malone, a Canadian Foreign Service officer who is president of the International Peace Academy, an independent research group in New York, said that Secretary General Annan, a former head of peacekeeping in some of its most troubled years, needed more people. "If you think of the headquarters organizations of the national militaries, they have thousands of people, not hundreds," Mr. Malone said today. "and the complexity for the U.N. is all the greater in that they have a number of missions, some of them large, spread all over the world." Even when missions can be fielded with some urgency, said Mr. Malone, the job can be harder than expected. "Where the security forces historically have been largely repressive and unfriendly to the local population," he said, "it's extremely difficult to bring the population around to the view that the police are providing a public service and are friends."