It was a day much like any other for Sgt. Jari Kontinen as he guarded a UN checkpoint at the Litani River in an armored personnel carrier.
He and his fellow Finnish soldiers searched every Lebanese traveler and car for weapons-rockets, grenades, AK-47 submachine guns, land mines-as each crossed the Akiya Bridge into the UN-patrolled sector of southern Lebanon.
The job is a dull one. But each Finn knew, in the back of his mind, that a fire fight could erupt at any moment among the nearby factions that have bloodied the rock-studded hills and scrub-brush valleys of southern Lebanon in a battle for Middle East control.
Suddenly, though, this routine patrol on Sept. 29 became different from all the others.
News came crackling through his army radio: He and the 8,600 other multinational troops posted in hotspots around the world had just won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize.
”At first I didn`t believe it,” recalled the burly, fair-haired Kontinen, who has lived for 10 months smack in the middle of the Middle East`s longest sustained fighting.
Grinning, the 23-year-old chauffeur in civilian life said he deserved the honor.
”I have done very hard work here,” said Kontinen, gesturing a mock pat on the back. ”When I go home, they will say, `He`s a good man.` ”
Kontinen and the thousands of other soldiers who wear the baby-blue beret of the United Nations atop their army-issue uniforms are the peacekeepers.
They are the men who stand in the middle. Between Moslem and Jew, along the borders of Israel, Syria and Lebanon. Between Indian and Pakistani. In Afghanistan. On the Green Line that zigzags across Cyprus, dividing Moslems in the north from Christians in the south.
And, most recently, between Iran and Iraq, where a determined UN Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar helped hammer out a cease-fire in the 8-year Persian Gulf War, and is now deploying UN troops to help make it stick.
”In my personal view, the prize is due to the work the secretary-general is doing,” said Irish battalion commander Maj. D.M. Bracken, as he rode along the bumpy roads of southern Lebanon in the trademark white UN jeep.
A blue-and-white UN flag fluttered from Bracken`s vehicle. Giant ”UN”
letters were painted on its side, just as they were on the jeep driven by Marine Lt. Col. William Higgins, the supervisor of UN observers who was ambushed and kidnaped near the coastal city of Tyre in February.
But the peacekeepers beat out Perez de Cuellar. And President Reagan. And Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to net the prize-$390,000 for the UN coffers and a pat on the back from the folks back home.
”Either way, the UN won,” Bracken said. ”It`s a magnificent indirect compliment to us as peacekeeping forces to be on the ground when we got it. The Irish have lost 25 people alone in the last 10 years here in the cause of peace, and I think it`s a real tribute to their families that they haven`t died in vain.”
In all, 733 peacekeepers have been killed on the job since the UN first deployed an observer force, in 1948, after the first Arab-Israeli War.
Peacekeepers arrived in Lebanon in 1978, after the first Israeli invasion, and a decade later there is no sign they will go home.
About 5,800 troops from nine nations make up the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL. They patrol a region that runs from the Mediterranean to Syria, covering a terraced landscape dotted with villages and the homes of 350,000 Lebanese citizens.
And, of course, there are the militias that seek to rule the lives of the people of the south.
There is Amal, the Shiite Moslem militia, which has been battling almost daily with Hezbollah, zealots who vow to wipe out Israel in the name of Iran`s Islamic revolution.
There are the Palestinians, who once ruled the south as a state within a state in their quest to conquer Israel. They divide their loyalties among the PLO factions and have recently been supported by Iraq.
And in a 9-to-12-mile zone north of the Israeli border, there are the troops of the South Lebanon Army (SLA), a largely Christian force whose salaries are paid by Jerusalem.
Still further south are the Israelis, who withdrew the bulk of their troops from Lebanon in 1985 after a bitter three-year invasion. They say they must maintain a buffer zone in the south to protect northern settlements.
The intrigues and ever-shifting alliances boggle the minds of analysts who have studied the Middle East for years. Finnish forces, all volunteers for UN duty, get a monthlong course in the politics of the region before they are dispatched here.
”Sometimes I don`t understand who`s fighting whom,” said Pvt. Aki Maakanen, 28, a nurse, shaking his head at the Finnish battalion`s clinic, where he treats soldiers and area villagers.
”I think all wars are crazy,” Maakanen said. ”I don`t understand war;
and I don`t understand fighting.”
Lt. Ismo Laitinen tried to explain it from the outpost where he commands 20 soldiers within firing range of an SLA force.
”The situation in Lebanon is very mixed right now,” said the soft-spoken 25-year-old who teaches English in Finland. ”There are so many different elements behind the scenes.”
”As a soldier, I do what I`ve been told. And I`ve been told to keep the peace,” Laitinen said. ”As a human being, I think that to keep the peace here is a very important thing.”
For the most part, they keep the peace as soldiers who don`t shoot.
Their main job is to find ”armed elements” trying to infiltrate the UN zone and turn them away or confiscate their weapons until they leave.
But the fighters are already there, entrenched in outposts behind huge mounds of dirt, and hidden in the homes and villages of the predominantly Moslem south.
So when the battles inevitably break out, the peacekeepers stand behind their sandbags as observers. During those times their job is to count how many rounds are fired and jot down who shot them and for how long.
For this, the most dangerous of their jobs, their weapons are binoculars and walkie-talkies to report the action to headquarters, where other peacekeepers use a telephone and diplomacy to try to halt the fighting.
”Many people ask, `How can a soldier work for peace? They are trained to wage war?` ” posed Col. Kari Hoglund, commander of the Finnish forces.
”Our main thing is negotiation, to keep on good terms with all the parties involved so you can talk with them.”
Each UN soldier, who spends no more than a year in Lebanon, learns early to flash a smile and a wave to the villagers as they whiz along the bumpy roads of the south.
Near Froun recently, a little boy stood in mock salute and shouted
”terve,” the Finnish word for hello, as a UN convoy raced past.
UN medics treat Lebanese locals during quiet periods in their clinics, and commanders make it a point to know the village leaders.
One officer at a Finnish outpost recalled the story of a Moslem man whose wedding was suddenly canceled. The bride`s father discovered the groom had no well at his house and did not want his daughter lugging pails of water.
A week later, peacekeepers dug the well in a half-day`s work, and a new date was set for the wedding.
For the soldiers, the officer said, the well-digging work was a break from the patrols and the battles. There isn`t an all-out war in southern Lebanon, but some days it feels that way.
Peacekeepers log an average of 600 incidences of gunfire per month, about 60 of which zing past or land inside UN outposts.
UN forces in Lebanon search 21,000 cars a day, turning back 60 people a month for carrying weapons. About 70 times in the course of a month, a militiaman leaves his weapon with the peacekeepers as he enters the UN zone. By UN rules, he reclaims it when he leaves.
Most of the men who serve as peacekeepers are not career soldiers. They are reservists called up for national service back home who choose the assignment, for the prestige, the thrills or the American dollars that the jobs pay.
The Finns confide that just about every one of them who serves in Lebanon uses his pay to buy a car free of the import duties that would triple its price.
Kontinen, the armored personnel carrier driver who is earning about $30,000 in his year in Lebanon, imported a tax-free Corvette from California to Israel. He parks it in a UN lot by the Golan Heights and plans to drive it home when his year`s service is done.
