United Nations Peacekeeping Forces

A Belgian officer who helped lead the U.N. peacekeeping force in Rwanda last year has been charged with negligent homicide in the massacre of 10 of his men by Rwandan soldiers. Col. Luc Marchal, who served as second-in-command of the U.N. force, will stand trial in a military tribunal charged with "homicide by lack of foresight and precaution," the army said in a statement Friday.

Bosnia's foreign minister was killed Sunday when his helicopter was shot down over Serb-held territory, and Bosnian Serbs stepped up their defiance of the world's major powers by capturing yet another group of U.N. hostages, this time Britons. Serbs in neighboring Croatia, who are allied with the Bosnian Serbs, claimed responsibility for downing the helicopter carrying Bosnian Foreign Minister Irfan Ljubijankic. He was the highest-ranking government official killed in three years of war.

Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa's Cabinet completed plans Tuesday to send 1,128 Japanese troops and 75 civilian police to take part in the U.N. peacekeeping operation in Cambodia. "Now Japan can make a great contribution to world peace not only in money but in manpower," Miyazawa said after making the decision to implement the first post-World War II overseas deployment of Japanese ground troops.

Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid proposed an immediate cease-fire in his urban guerrilla war with U.N. forces Saturday, and President Clinton quickly welcomed the truce offer. Aidid, in a statement broadcast on his guerrilla faction's radio station in Mogadishu, said he wants "a total cease-fire" that would apply to his forces, U.N. forces and the growing U.S. military contingent.

The United States and the United Nations were in sharp disagreement Friday on the shape and duties of a new 5,500-strong force to protect civilians in Rwanda's bloody civil war, estimated by aid workers to have killed between 200,000 and 500,000 people. A vote on an urgent Security Council resolution, expected Friday, was delayed, and diplomats said it is doubtful that Washington will be ready to vote early next week.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday that more than 100,000 Rwandans may have been killed in the last two weeks of ethnic slaughter and called it a "human tragedy on a scale we have rarely witnessed." Powerless to halt the bloodshed, the Security Council decided late Thursday to pull the 1,700-member U.N. peacekeeping force out of the country, except for about 270 security guards and military observers. In a bleak report before the unanimous vote, U.N.

As bloody chaos engulfed Rwanda's capital and fighting swirled around the residence of the American ambassador there, the Pentagon drafted plans Friday for an evacuation of Americans from the country if U.S. citizens are unable to leave. The commander of U.N. peacekeeping troops apparently negotiated at least a partial truce between some of the warring parties in Rwanda.

When shooting starts each night at sunset on the lush, wooded hills across from 2nd Lt. Jens Karegren's hilltop tank unit, there is little the Nordic soldiers can do but settle in and watch the fight. Unless the bullets, mortars and tank rounds of the Bosnian government or Serbian troops are targeted at the U.N. forces, the peacekeepers posted on a promontory along the aid route to nearby Tuzla are forbidden to get involved. Tuzla and its surroundings are a U.N.

President Clinton on Wednesday began the task of winning public support for a deployment of American troops in Bosnia, contending that most U.S. forces would be assigned to peacekeeping operations there for "months, not years" and are unlikely ever to see combat. However, Clinton acknowledged in a meeting with a group of newspaper columnists in the Oval Office that "some very minimal force" of American soldiers may have to stay in Bosnia-Herzegovina to keep the peace longer.

A cloud of condensation billows out from the shipping container into the tropical morning air as Col. Henry Premanta Mihindu throws open the door. Inside, crates of Wenatchee Valley apples, crisp bell peppers and California carrots fill a cold storage unit the size of a train car. Beside it, another container holds cases of U.S. beef, New Zealand lamb and Arkansas chicken parts.