U.N. outlines proposals to beef up peacekeeping office

The plan stems from a report last August by a panel of experts who said the United Nations risked suffering peacekeeping failures like the ones in Rwanda and the Bosnian "safe-haven" of Srebrenica unless it creates the equivalent of a ministry of defense.

In a report Monday, Secretary-General Kofi Annan issued the first recommendations to implement that report, suggesting 249 jobs be added to the U.N. payroll in the next year to substantially beef up the military and civilian police coordination units at U.N. headquarters.

In addition, the report envisages shifting some 24 jobs from other U.N. departments to help create a systemwide coordination office for peacekeeping activities.

The head of the U.N. peacekeeping department, Jean-Marie Guehnno, noted that currently only 11 police support staff at U.N. headquarters try to coordinate more than 7,000 civilian police officers around the world.

"That is a ridiculous number when you think of the complexity of police operations," he said. He called the proposed increases an "emergency package" to address the "most critical needs of peacekeeping operations."

The United Nations is currently involved in 15 peacekeeping operations involving nearly 38,000 civilian and military staff. The United States has pressed the United Nations to keep a zero-growth budget for the past several years as part of its demand for a reformed and streamlined organization. But the United States has also been at the forefront of demands for an enlarged and more efficient peacekeeping department to cope with the new peacekeeping challenges in Kosovo, East Timor and Sierra Leone, among other places.

The deputy U.S. ambassador in charge of management and reform, Donald Hays, said Annan's report "appears to be in the ballpark in terms of positions and in terms of dollars." But he said in an interview that Washington needed a more thorough review of precisely where the money and positions would be used before determining if the recommendations would pass muster.

The U.S. Congress, he said, was "interested in doing what was necessary and appropriate to improve and strengthen the peacekeeping operations." He said he was particularly pleased to see that the report recommended shifting some jobs from other U.N. offices into peacekeeping operations, particularly from the Department of Public Information, which Washington has said is sorely in need of streamlining.

Jean-Pierre Halbwachs, the U.N. controller, said an additional report, to implement other recommendations from the August peacekeeping report, would be forthcoming. That report will include calls to deploy peacekeeping forces faster than the four-to-six months it normally takes now.

The report issued Monday now goes to the 189-member General Assembly, which must decide whether to authorize an initial dlrs 22 million for 2000-2001 the new positions, including salaries, office expenses and other administrative costs.

The report envisages an additional budget of dlrs 71 million for the years 2002 and 2003, but that figure may change with the additional recommendations in the second report

(AP)