UN PEACE-KEEPERS WIN NOBEL PRIZE

Author: By Fred Kaplan, Globe Staff

Date: Friday, September 30, 1988
Page: 1
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN

The committee chairman, Egil Aarvik, said the UN forces have made "a decisive contribution" to peace around the world, and the award citation noted that they have done so "under extremely difficult conditions."

In New York, UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar told the General Assembly, "The award is a tribute to the idealism of all who have served this organization and in particular to the valor and sacrifice of those who have contributed, and continue to contribute, to our peace-keeping operations."

Since 1948, about 500,000 UN personnel from 58 nations have been involved in the peace-keeping forces. UN spokesmen say 733 persons have been killed over the years.

Rumors had circulated in recent months that the Peace Prize might go to President Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, who last
December signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

"They were nominated and strong candidates," Aarvik said of the two superpower leaders. "But this year we found the United Nations stood even stronger."

Asked if the US presidential election may have affected the decision not to honor Reagan and Gorbachev, Aarvik said, "Yes, we take everything into consideration; also that."

Reagan said he was not disappointed by the decision. "No, I couldn't have deserved it as much as those that got it," he told reporters who shouted the question after a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden. He called the award to the UN peace-keeping forces "an admirable decision."

A State Department spokeswoman, Phyllis Oakley, said the award "symbolizes our renewed hope that through the United Nations, peaceful solutions to disputes can be achieved."

Such sentiments, along with Reagan's tribute speech before the General Assembly earlier this week, mark a startling turnaround from the skepticism and even hostility that the Reagan administration displayed until recently in dealing with the international organization.

Only this month, for example, did the president agree to pay off, over the next two years, $467 million in debt to the United Nations that had accumulated during his time in office, including $111 million to the peace- keeping forces.

Both the Peace Prize and the Reagan administration's rosy reaction reflect -- and, some officials said, reinforce -- a renaissance of strength and respectability for the United Nations.

Of the seven UN peace-keeping forces around the world, two were created just this year: the 350 unarmed observers monitoring the cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq war and the 50 watching the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

In the coming year, three more war-torn areas may open up to UN peace- keeping: southern Africa, the Western Sahara and the border between Vietnam and Cambodia.

Supporters of the world organization have applauded its increasing involvement in settling regional conflicts. However, the growing use has left some backers worried about where money might come from to support the peace- keeping forces of the future.

UN peace-keeping costs about $230 million a year. However, if peace continues to break out as hoped, UN officials say annual expenses might rise to $1.5 billion or even $2 billion.

In Africa, for example, if a settlement is reached among South Africa, Angola and Cuba, estimates indicate that 10,000 UN peace-keeping troops might have to be sent to Namibia. Peace in the Western Sahara could require 2,000 UN observers to the region.

Brian Urquhart, for many years the director of UN peace-keeping operations and now a scholar at the Ford Foundation, said yesterday, "People have to start thinking seriously about the money situation." The winning of the Peace Prize, he said, "should serve to stimulate governmental support" for the forces as a whole.

"It's possible to envisage organizing it on a more solid basis -- to have central training, a proper logistics system and so forth, which we couldn't do before," Urquhart said.

Urquhart will accompany Perez de Cuellar and Marrack Goulding, present commander of UN forces, to Oslo Dec. 10 to receive the $390,000 cash prize, which presumably will be used to help support the forces. Dec. 10 is the anniversary of the death in 1896 of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite who established the prize.

The Peace Prize is the first of six annual prizes to be announced. The others for literature, medicine, chemistry, physics and economics will be announced next month in Stockholm.

Many officials and outside specialists say the United Nations is playing a much bigger role in settling conflicts now, as compared with a decade ago,
because of declining tension between the superpowers.

Urquhart said, "When the two most powerful countries in the world begin to behave in a highly rational and cooperative way, it begins to have an effect on everybody else," partly because smaller nations know they can no longer play the superpowers off against each another.

Similarly, because the Security Council can reach unanimous decisions more easily, the secretary general no longer has to "tiptoe around Soviet or American objections all the time, which he used to do," Urquhart said.

"I think peace is catching," Urquhart said.

However, he said, "there is an awfully long way to go. We are nowhere near out of the woods on Iran-Iraq or Angola. And we're not near even beginning on the Middle East, in some ways the most dangerous spot. It may not be time to uncork the champagne bottles just yet."

It was the fourth time a UN organization has been awarded the Peace Prize. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees got the prize in 1981 and 1954. The UN Children's Fund received it in 1965.

Under the Nobel charter, the prize is awarded "for the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition of standing armies and the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

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