U.N. Chief Asks Japan to Boost Peacekeeper Role

TOKYO — Despite four days of rebuffs, Boutros Boutros-Ghali on Thursday wound up the first visit to Japan by a United Nations’ secretary general in 11 years by reiterating calls for Japan to play a larger role in U.N. peacekeeping missions.

“If you are an important country, you have important responsibilities,” he told reporters at the Japan National Press Club. “And Japan is a great power, a major country. My message to Japan is that we need more assistance, we need more involvement, we need more attention to what is done by the U.N.”

A greater role by Japan and other major powers, he said, also would “democratize” the United Nations by diluting the American influence in the world body. “It is true . . . that the U.N. is under the influence of one power because this power is very (strong),” he said. “But there is another reason: The other powers are not paying enough attention to the U.N.”

Earlier in his visit, he said Japan’s decision, “through its constitution and by political choice (to) opt for the path of peace and internationalism,” makes Japan’s support in a “new United Nations” all the more crucial.

Boutros-Ghali said he found Japanese leaders, including Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, generally responsive to his calls for a larger U.N. role.

Indeed, in pushing Japan’s bid to win a seat as a permanent member of the Security Council, Miyazawa reminded Boutros-Ghali that Japan’s money contributions to the United Nations exceed those of Britain, France and China combined. Those nations are permanent members of the Security Council.

But Boutros-Ghali reported receiving no positive responses to his requests for Japan to participate in U.N. peacekeeping missions in Mozambique and Somalia now, and in Latin America in the future.

Participation in peacekeeping operations in other regions of the world is needed to demonstrate that both the United Nations and Japan are projecting “an international image,” he said.

Yohei Kono, chief Cabinet secretary, told reporters Thursday that Japan needs to study further whether to send noncombat troops to Mozambique; the government and rebels there signed a peace pact last October after fighting a 16-year war.

The secretary general reportedly asked for only 60 Japanese to join a U.N. force that is expected to grow to about 7,000 in Mozambique. Kono said Japan would accept the request only if public support firmed up for its first dispatch of peacekeeping troops, to Cambodia, where Tokyo sent 608 troops and 75 civilian police officers last October.

Boutros-Ghali’s calls for greater peacekeeping contributions received such a cold advance reception from Miyazawa that the secretary general did not bring up a proposal he made before leaving New York that Japan contribute combat troops to proposed “peace-enforcing operations” in which the United Nations would act without the consent of warring factions.

Coming amid a new debate over constitutional revision that Miyazawa is resisting, and continuing suspicion of Japan by its Asian neighbors, Boutros-Ghali’s New York proposal was a major embarrassment to the prime minister. Miyazawa is known as one of Japan’s strongest advocates of retaining only minimal military strength and avoiding use of force overseas.

Boutros-Ghali, who was leaving Tokyo today to return to New York, confessed that he was “shocked” to learn that no U.N. secretary general had visited Tokyo since 1982--and promised to correct that oversight. “If there was not enough cooperation, the responsibility is not only Japan’s but the responsibility of the United Nations, too,” he said.