Peace Keepers with a Difference

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A year after the ghastly massacre of hundreds of Palestinians, heavily armed men still prowl the shanty town of Shatila on the southern fringes of Beirut. But instead of the feared fatigue uniforms of Phalangist militiamen, they wear spiffy red-and-gold scarves emblazoned with the Venetian Lion of St. Mark, and their presence inspires comfort rather than terror. They are Italian marines who keep strict watch from a ring of sentry posts and constantly patrol streets that are now as safe as any in Lebanon.

Which, needless to say, is a long way from being completely safe. Random shells fired by gunners in the Chouf Mountains explode in Shatila and virtually every other neighborhood, underscoring a cruel and dangerous irony facing not only the Italians but also the American, French and British troops in the Multi-National Force (MNF). By doing their job as peace keepers, the approximately 5,400 members of the MNF are being drawn with seeming inexorability into the country's increasingly chaotic civil war.

Simply by being there, though, the MNF has brought an unaccustomed measure of security to Beirut and its environs. That in turn has enabled Lebanese President Amin Gemayel to preserve the semblance of a central government by maintaining authority at least around the capital, and so far has probably prevented Lebanon from taking the final plunge into anarchy, partition or both. But that very fact has made the MNF a target for the many Lebanese factions determined to bring down Gemayel. Already, five U.S. Marines, 17 French troops and one Italian have been killed; 43 Americans, 41 French and 27 Italians have been wounded. As American naval shelling and French aerial strikes against guerrilla positions in the Chouf Mountains last week illustrated, Washington and Paris will not let their troops become sitting ducks.

But the MNF was sent to Lebanon in the hope that it would never have to fight, and what role it might play in a continuing civil "war is maddeningly vague. Properly speaking, it is not a unified "force" at all but a collection of four national contingents operating under separate commands that cooperate only to the extent of keeping one another informed, more or less, about what they are doing. The U.S. Marines have a liaison officer at the headquarters of each of the other three contingents, and military men from all four nations maintain links with Gemayel's Lebanese Army through officers at the Presidential Palace in Baabda. But that is just about it. The Americans have been pressing for coordinated planning to deal with a deepening emergency, so far with little result.

Nor does the MNF have a clear mandate. Ambassadors of the four countries delivered separate letters to Lebanese Foreign Minister Elie Salem, acceding to his government's request to send troops. Though the letters spoke of assisting the government in restoring its authority in the Beirut area, the four contingents interpret their instructions differently. The U.S. Marines, for example, have been the only ones to train Lebanese soldiers regularly in such skills as hand-to-hand fighting and helicopter assaults. Says a British officer: "We have defined our operations according to what each of us does best." The present division of labor: