THE NEW TRIBALISM: Defending Human Rights in an Age of Ethnic Conflict : Critics See U.N. Conference Doing Too Little, Too Late : World body has been bullied by abusive governments, charges Human Rights Watch.

Protecting human rights is often forgotten when the United Nations sets up large field operations to keep the peace, relieve famine or safeguard honest elections, according to Human Rights Watch, the largest such group in the United States.

The New York-based organization, which calls itself the second-largest human rights group in the world after Amnesty International, says it found a low interest in human rights abuses and ethnic conflicts in an extensive on-site examination of large U.N. field operations in Cambodia, Iraq, Somalia, the former Yugoslav federation and El Salvador.

A notable exception was the United Nations’ successful use of human rights monitors in keeping the peace and conducting elections in El Salvador, the group says in a new 173-page report.

The report charges that under Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the United Nations is preoccupied with appearing neutral, saving money and mollifying “abusive governments” who have “blackmailed” it into trading silence for help with relief shipments.

“Although the Security Council bears some degree of responsibility for the failure to promote human rights as part of the United Nations’ major field operations, I think much of the responsibility lies with the secretary general himself,” said Human Rights Watch’s acting executive director, Kenneth Roth, in an interview.

It’s not a question of a lack of authority, the organization contends. It’s a lack of political will to stand up for the values enshrined in the U.N. charter that leads instead to succumbing to the wishes of certain governments. Like Amnesty, Human Rights Watch urges the United Nations to set up a New York-based high commissioner for human rights and to step up the use of human rights monitors, political pressure on abusive governments and investigations to place blame for past abuses.

Boutros-Ghali’s spokesman, Joe Sills, said he would not comment on the report because he had not yet seen it.

Among specific criticisms in the study:

* The United Nations allegedly made no effort to penalize the warlord leaders of battling clans whose strife had created a famine in Somalia.

* The lack of a U.N. ground presence while government forces were maltreating Shiite marsh Arabs “allowed serious abuses to accelerate” in southern Iraq, in contrast to operations protecting Kurds in the north.

* In Cambodia, “U.N. officials waited months before seeking prosecution of government offenders or of Khmer Rouge forces who were murdering ethnic Vietnamese.”

* In the former Yugoslav federation, “the U.N. gave little political or financial support to efforts to investigate and prosecute war criminals” and “in the few instances in which U.N. officials took courageous stands to highlight the plight of besieged Bosnian cities . . . they were rebuked by their superiors.” In addition, “endless peace negotiations conferred legitimacy on Serbian forces--the main perpetrators of ‘ethnic cleansing’--helping them to stave off more forceful international intervention.”