Perils of Peace Keeping

A U.N. officer's plaint: "Everyone's shooting at everyone

The 3,992 United Nations soldiers on duty in southern Lebanon were supposed to be peace keepers, controlling a buffer zone between the Palestinian guerrillas and the Israeli forces, which have now pulled back to a six-mile-wide belt just to the north of the border. But last week the largest of the U.N. contingents, the 1,223 French paratroopers under Colonel Jean-Germain Salvan, found themselves caught in the Middle East's bloody cycle of violence and revenge.

The incident began without warning when a French unit intercepted four armed Arabs near Tyre, the ancient coastal city (pop. 30,000) that serves as a base for many of the Palestinians in southern Lebanon. Someone--each side blamed the other--opened fire; two of the Arabs were killed. A previously unknown group that calls itself the Popular Front for the Liberation of the South from Occupation and Fascism promised revenge. The group is believed by some authorities to be made up not of Palestinians but of Lebanese fighters allied with Dr. George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Regardless of who was responsible, the revenge came swiftly. The next day terrorists ambushed a French U.N. vehicle two miles northeast of Tyre, wounding one French soldier. Even as Colonel Salvan, a tough, one-eyed veteran of Viet Nam and Algeria, was listening to reports of the incident, another band of terrorists opened fire on his headquarters. The French shot back, not quite sure whom they were fighting, and for half an hour a firefight raged. "I have never seen such a confused battle," a French soldier said later. "Everyone was shooting at everyone."

In the meantime, Salvan, a Palestinian liaison officer and two French soldiers jumped aboard two Jeeps and raced toward the scene of the earlier ambush. Less than a mile away, they too were attacked.

With the reflexes of an old hand at guerrilla warfare, Salvan rolled out of his Jeep on the side away from the firing. Even so, he was hit twelve times, including ten times in the legs. All told, the clashes took the lives of two French troops, one Senegalese, one Palestinian and reportedly four Lebanese terrorists.

The Palestine Liberation Organization, which claims the allegiance of 90% of the estimated 14,000 Palestinian fighters in Lebanon, moved quickly to assure the U.N. that it deplored the incident and would crack down on the group responsible for it. Among the surgeons attending Salvan was Dr. Fathi Arafat, Yasser's brother; one of Salvan's first visitors was the P.L.O. boss himself, bearing flowers.

Arafat, who has been sounding unusually moderate of late, ordered Palestinian groups to keep calm, and Salvan broadcast an appeal to his men: "I am asking that no one should take revenge on my behalf." Alarmed by the rising disorder, the U.N. Security Council voted to increase the size of the U.N.'s force in southern Lebanon from 4,000 to 6,000.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.