FIRST UN TROOPS WENT TO MIDEAST IN '48

Author: By Mary Curtius, Globe Staff

Date: Friday, September 30, 1988
Page: 2
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN

"We just shared a bottle of wine," said a delighted Tony French, an Australian who is spokesman for the UN Truce Supervision Organization in Jerusalem.

"We can't drink, we can't congregate, but we are very pleased," said Timur Goksel, veteran spokesman for the UN Interim Force in Lebanon.

"This is a welcome and very strong encouragement to all those men and women who serve" in peace-keeping forces, said Martin Vadset, a Norwegian who is the UNTSO chief of staff. Vadset said he thought it would take two days for his Jerusalem headquarters to inform all its far-flung staff members of the award and to congratulate them.

"I am particularly happy to see this happen in 1988, when I believe that the United Nations has been revitalized and has been more active than in years," Vadset said.

Vadset said UNTSO will celebrate winning the Nobel Prize when it celebrates its 40th birthday on Oct. 24 -- United Nations Day.

"We will have a big gathering here at Government House in Jerusalem. We will do the same in Egypt, in Jordan, in Syria -- and, to the extent possible, in Lebanon, to remember 40 years of active duty in the Middle East," Vadset said.

It was to the Middle East that the United Nations sent its first peace- keeping troops, and it is to the Middle East that it has sent its newest force.

UNTSO was the maiden effort, established in June 1948. Headquartered on the Hill of Evil Counsel in Jerusalem, its unarmed military observers supervised the first truce between the new Israeli state and the Arab nations after the first Arab-Israeli war.

The mission of the peace-keeping forces gradually expanded from that of unarmed military observers to the armed forces of UNIFIL in south Lebanon.

Today, there are four UN peace-keeping missions in the Middle East. In addition to UNTSO and UNIFIL, there is UNDOF, the UN Disengagement Observer Force stationed on the strategic Golan Heights between Israeli and Syrian troops, and the newly created UNIMOG, the UN Iran-Iraq Military Observer Group formed in August.

UNIMOG is to observe the cease-fire between the warring Persian Gulf states, monitor their withdrawal of troops to the international border and help implement an exchange of prisoners.

UN officials invariably single out UNDOF as the most successful peace- keeping force in the region. Its 1,330 troops moved onto the heights in June 1974 as part of the disengagement process between Israel and Syria after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Both nations wanted it to be there, and UNDOF has recorded few violations by either side over the years.

The UN's least successful -- and largest -- peace-keeping mission also is in the Middle East. For 10 years, UNIFIL has been bogged down in the political quagmire of South Lebanon.

UNIFIL's 5,800 troops have been shot, shelled, kidnapped, held hostage, simply ignored and disparaged by the warring forces that have turned rural southern Lebanon into a region of despair.

Dispatched to Lebanon in March 1978 after Israeli forces thrust deep into the south, UNIFIL was supposed to deploy its forces down to the international border between Israel and Lebanon. The Israelis never allowed UNIFIL to deploy fully, and in 1982 the Israelis swept across UNIFIL positions in their march north to Beirut. Israel withdrew most of its troops from Lebanon in 1985 but still retains control -- along with the South Lebanese Army militia -- of a self-made security zone north of the border.

Relations between UNIFIL and Israeli forces often are strained. UNIFIL charges that Israel and its client militia increase tensions in the south and act as a magnet, drawing attacks by militant Lebanese groups and Palestinian guerrillas. UN Undersecretary Marrack Goudling, and before him Undersecretary Brian Urquhart, tried to persuade the Israelis to withdraw from South Lebanon and allow UNIFIL to police the area.

The Israelis refuse to budge. Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin has repeatedly said the UN force is inadequate to keep the peace in the factional south. In the past, Israeli officials even have accused UNIFIL of failing to stop infiltrators heading for Israel's northern border.

UNIFIL soldiers in general have gotten along well with the various Lebanese factions, but not always.

Last February, an American, Lt. Col. William Richard Higgins, serving as an UNTSO liaison officer with UNIFIL, was kidnapped in south Lebanon. Higgins, believed abducted by pro-Iranian militants, is still a hostage. French members of the force have been attacked by Lebanese gunmen, and Fijians were killed by a car bomb.

But Goksel said the nearly defunct Lebanese government, and many of the people of the south, cling to the force as a source of stability and a symbol of international concern.

TOLBER;09/29 NIGRO ;09/30,12:11 UNIFIL30