by Lucia Mouat

About the author: Lucia Mouat reports on the United Nations for the Christian Science Monitor newspaper.

As the United Nations sends more lightly armed peacekeepers into civil wars to protect civilians and get relief supplies through, the world body is encountering a new set of practical and institutional problems.

New Challenges

With 70,000 peacekeepers deployed in 17 missions around the world [as of June 1994] (such operations cost an estimated $3.2 billion in 1993), the challenges are mounting:

•The job is getting more complicated and dangerous. Convoys often are pilfered, delayed, or blocked. In the absence of lasting cease-fires, relief workers sometimes are shot at, kidnapped, or killed. In the early months of 1994, peacekeepers have been killed at the rate of about one a week. •Warring factions tend to see the aid as a weapon...