Give peacekeepers your support, just don't ask why

I ONCE met a young Irishman on a plane back from the Continent. His face was sunburned to a crisp and his hair cropped. It turned out that he had been serving with the French Foreign Legion, but had left somewhat summarily. He had not been discharged, but had decided he had done enough as a mercenary, so had crept away. All his belongings were in one plastic carrier bag.

"And what do you do in the Foreign Legion?" I asked.

He looked surprised.

"Kill people," he said, patiently. Boy, he must have been thinking, this one's innocent!

It's not an answer that a British serviceman would ever give, if he were asked what he does. They, after all, do myriad things, including training for an eventual civilian working-life. In the front-line, they can undoubtedly fight and defend - but whatever their activity, they will always be ambassadors for their country. Occasionally, they will serve as peacekeepers, which in a way is what they are doing in Sierra Leone. The role of the Royal Irish Regiment in Sierra Leone is, we are told, to train that country's army to do everything better.

You may find a Royal Irish regiment a puzzling concept. It is the largest infantry regiment in the British Army and was established in 1992, by merging the Royal Irish Rangers and the Ulster Defence Regiment.

The troops' present moment of glory involves all the mental and physical skills they've learned, including teaching the local men to stick with it when the going gets tough, and not to defect. This can be challenging for the Sierra Leoneans, since so many of their erstwhile colleagues are now enemies - or kidnappers. As the latter, some of them have recently made life difficult for the British servicemen there, by abducting 11 of their number and effectively holding them to ransom. Six remain in captivity. One rumoured price of the release of some of them was the possibility of the kidnappers rejoining the Sierra Leonean Army, and being trained by the British.

Well, "our boys" are the world's favourite army. Sure, their equipment doesn't always work but you can't blame the men themselves. They're trained, as we have seen on television recently, to obey. There's a third official army in Sierra Leone at the moment - United Nations peacekeepers. Their Nigerian acting commander absolved the UN of all responsibility for the kidnap of the British. If he had known what they were planning and where they were planning to go, he said, he could have helped them, or discouraged them - but he did not, he says.

This, of course, leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Exactly what were the kidnapped doing, and where? When British troops initially went into Sierra Leone we were told they were going to help British nationals who wished to leave the country. As for the UN, there being no real peace in Sierra Leone to keep, their role is somewhat ambiguous.

I dared to speculate last week about the association between a TV camera-crew incarcerated in Liberia and the melodramatic shooting script the security-forces found in their room. Channel 4 was most upset, and phoned and wrote to insist that I tell you that whereas some broadcasters do commission programmes according to the sensationalist promises that they are offered, Channel 4 would never do that and are utterly committed to international affairs coverage.

The commissioning editor for news and current affairs said: "The new television marketplace has put increased pressure on international coverage but TV producers have been slow to meet the challenge of finding new forms of seeing the world. Leave that to the experts. Many of them are meeting tomorrow in London to debate the future of the United Nations. Whether any of them will be as forthright as the American Permanent Representative to the UN Richard Holbrooke (the Dayton architect of a post-war Bosnia), remains to be seen. Last month, he was called before the US Senate's Foreign Relations Committee.

Not known for refining his language, Richard Holbrooke told it like it is. "The financial structure for peacekeeping is a mess ... the operations in the field in Sierra Leone ... are in disarray. We have to decide whether it is worth our national interest ... to make peacekeeping more effective. I submit to you that it is, but it is going to be a tremendous effort."

Two thousand years since the concept of peace on earth was a new and modern idea, peacekeeping in any form is indeed a tremendous effort. Each individual involved in it requires our support. It is too much for us lesser mortals to understand fully what we are supporting and why.

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