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New Peacekeepers for East Timor

Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations said Tuesday that he has begun organizing plans to send a new peacekeeping force to East Timor by early next year. The new mission will replace an Australian-led multinational force of about 2,700 troops that intervened in East Timor last month to quell fighting between military factions. A force of about 7,500 U.N. peacekeepers went to East Timor in 2000, replacing a previous Australian-led multinational force.

"There is a lesson here for all of us. We had indicated that the United Nations should remain in East Timor a bit longer, but governments - some governments - were quite keen that we scale back as quickly as possible. Given what has happened, we are reassessing our own presence on the ground." Tensions erupted this spring after a group of 594 soldiers fired from the military organized demonstrations against discrimination.

The United States, distrusting U.N. effectiveness, worked to get peacekeepers to leave and the comments of Kofi Annan can probably be taken as indirect criticism of America - comments that come not long after a direct insult by a high-level U.N. official, criticism of the type not far off from Annan`s and which is banned under the United Nations Charter, which the Third World and Non-Aligned Bloc ignore themselves anyway. Whether U.N. agents helped to stir up trouble in East Timor cannot be discounted as an idea.