U.N. Role Changing With Global Rules : Diplomacy: Eroding borders and new importance of individual rights give peacekeepers a tough task.

WASHINGTON —  A few days after achieving independence from Brussels in the summer of 1960, the Belgian Congo fell apart. Plagued by a series of army mutinies and local rebellions and, finally, the secession of its mineral-rich Katanga province, the Congo’s young government appealed for international help.

The United Nations responded by dispatching a force of 20,000 troops from 26 member states to the large central African nation, now known as Zaire. At the time, it was the largest peacekeeping force ever assembled, its mission the most aggressive ever undertaken.

The ensuing struggle, long and violent, required two return engagements by U.N. forces, cost almost $400 million and claimed the life of U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, who was killed when his plane crashed during a 1961 peace mission. The conflict dragged on until 1964, when Katanga was forcibly reunited with the rest of the country.

Three decades ago, the world threw its weight and resources behind salvaging the Congo because sovereignty of the state was deemed supreme, borders were considered sacrosanct and territorial integrity superseded even self-determination.

Today, with a huge U.N. intervention under way in Somalia, those three fundamental principles of international relations are being redefined. So, too, are perceptions of what constitutes an international security threat and how the world should respond when one arises. While the new rules may give hope to oppressed or impoverished peoples, they present significant new challenges and risks for the United States and other global peacekeepers.

“Unfortunately, the kind of problem we’ve finally been forced to confront in Somalia is more than likely to represent one of the gravest challenges to international security in the so-called new world order,” a senior State Department official said.

American foreign policy analysts are predicting the emergence of more Somalias in the years ahead: various combinations of broken or imploding states, riddled with internal conflicts and appalling destitution, not only in Africa but in areas of Asia and Europe as well.

“There are several parts of the world that have been profoundly destabilized by recent developments,” said Chester Crocker, assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the Ronald Reagan Administration and now a faculty member at Georgetown University. “This phenomenon of rot and disorder and destabilization has many roots. The keys to it are the removal of legitimacy of governments and the status of boundaries.”

Tragically, the potential for internal collapse could present itself once again in Zaire.

A country roughly the size of Western Europe, Zaire is home to more than 200 tribes and clans and even more dialects. The nation’s boundaries were artificially created by European kings and cartographers in the 19th Century, and its legitimacy as a natural or viable state has always been questionable.

Today, the survival of Africa’s third-largest state appears even more precarious. Since shortly after the chaos of the 1960s, Zaire has forcibly been held together by the dictatorial rule of President Mobutu Sese Seko, one of the world’s longest-serving leaders and also one of the most corrupt.

Under increasingly intense domestic and international pressure to introduce democratic reforms, Mobutu now rarely dares to go to his own presidential palace from his haven on a yacht on the Zaire River.

As Mobutu’s reign crumbles, Zaire is once again disintegrating. Shaba, the former Katanga province, which has experienced two civil wars since it first attempted to secede, may again try to go out on its own. This time, several U.S. African specialists believe, it may succeed.

And this time, the international community is unlikely to expend resources to hold it together, foreign policy specialists say.

The reluctance to shore up an embattled regime or shut down a secession drive is a clear indication of the new rules of global engagement. It reflects the implications of the U.S. intervention in Somalia and the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, as well as the international community’s recognition of the breakaway former Yugoslav republics of Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“What we’re seeing in Somalia is a momentous breakthrough. For decades, the sovereignty of the individual has been submerged in the sovereignty of the state,” said Augustus Richard Norton, a former U.N. peacekeeper and political scientist at West Point.

The traditional emphasis on maintaining the territorial integrity of states rather than assuring the right of self-determination was reflected, for example, in a 1964 agreement by the Organization of African States to keep and honor all inherited colonial borders, including some that cut through the middle of existing tribes and their ancient lands.

“Up to now, there has been a reluctance, particularly at the United Nations, to intervene except when the sovereign government has given its consent. In fact, the United Nations has been the great protector of state sovereignty,” Norton said. “But in recent years, there’s been increasing attention to individual rights.”

The humanitarian missions in Somalia and Kurdistan reflect recognition that the individual has a right not to starve because of the ineptitude, incompetence or willful acts of states or local powers that be.

Equally important, they reflect an emerging consensus that the world must seriously consider intervening when such situations arise, Norton said.

“The world is now in some sort of transition from strict acceptance of sovereign jurisdiction and nonintervention to more and more readiness to undertake at least some action, up to and including military action, that would in the past have been considered intervention in domestic affairs,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former National Security Council and State Department official now at the Brookings Institution.

The new ground rules are still evolving. So, too, are the actions of individual governments and global coalitions. So far, it has taken major crises to provoke decisions.

The Bush Administration, for example, intervened in northern Iraq only reluctantly on behalf of more than a million destitute Kurdish refugees who had fled to the borders of Turkey and Iran to avoid Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s repression.

Standing up to Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait was clear-cut, in the time-honored tradition of honoring borders. But U.S. officials feared that standing up to Hussein’s equally brutal aggression against his own citizenry would contribute to the carving up of Iraq, potentially opening a Pandora’s box for other cases of major human rights abuses.

Similarly, Washington was slow to recognize the breakaway Yugoslav republics, fearful that the precedent might eventually force the United States to recognize any fragment that seceded from a traditional state on grounds of its people’s right to self-determination.

In the end, however, public pressure and the global political swing toward pluralism, with its inherent emphasis on individual rights and equality, came down on the side of intervention.

The same seems to be true in Somalia. Despite a brutal and deadly cycle of famine, political instability and conflict elsewhere in Africa over the years--in Mozambique, Sudan and Ethiopia, to name but a few--no outside party intervened on a massive or military scale.

The future implications of the new rules are significant. And they could play out “anyplace where there’s intermingling of ethnic, religious and racial groups, or bloodshed, starvation, repression, torture and so forth,” Sonnenfeldt said.

“It’s now pretty clear that those things can be brought into an international forum as a threat to peace and security or as violations of U.N. human rights conventions.”

Events in several regions of the world over the next few years are likely to be affected by this fundamental shift.

“It could affect an area as far north as Eastern Europe and as far east as Southeast Asia and as far south as you want to go in Africa, although I don’t see it crossing the Atlantic,” said Crocker, the former assistant secretary of state.

“If you look at the boundary structure in the Arab world, none of those borders are indigenous. It’s the same thing in spades in what used to be Soviet Muslim Asia,” which was divided arbitrarily into five states by dictator Josef Stalin. “And almost every member of ASEAN (the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations) has a border dispute with a neighbor.”

Virtually any country with a large and cohesive minority, foreign policy analysts say, is also a candidate for outside involvement, particularly the 21 newly democratic states of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

The evolving criteria for international action could play out in a place like Nagorno-Karabakh, the predominantly Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan claimed by both former Soviet republics. The Baltic states, all of which have significant Russian minorities, are other examples.

“What the international community appears ready to establish, in cases where there are concerns about minorities, is that the preservation of their rights should be the responsibility of the international community,” Sonnenfeldt said.

“For example, lots of people in Russia believe it’s their responsibility to look after Russian minorities in the former Soviet republics. But the principle emerging is that these are not the responsibility of the individual (home) country, but of groups like the United Nations.”

The potential for problems is significant in countries where growing domestic demands for political participation are being resisted. Zaire is hardly unique in Africa: The governments of Kenya, Cameroon, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Algeria and Liberia all have balked at democratization and face the danger of imploding.

So far, the international community has not resolved the complex issues of how far individual rights extend, and where the line on intervention will be drawn.

“You have to be careful that it doesn’t become a free-for-all. It’s one thing to have rights to be treated well, to have cultural and linguistic rights, but you don’t want to fall into the trap that every group, however small, has some kind of inherent right to break away,” Sonnenfeldt said.

Still, a threshold clearly has been crossed.

“What was unteachable five years ago about the rights of ethnic and identity groups has now become the active faith of an entire school of international affairs,” mused Crocker. “If you’d tried to sell that 10 years ago, you would have been accused of supporting apartheid.”