UNITED NATIONS: III Wind

The khamsin is a baleful wind that flares out of the deserts, drying out the land and the people until the flesh fairly crackles. Under Ottoman Empire law, murder was held more pardonable if committed while the khamsin was blowing. Last week, as Jerusalem suffered under the worst khamsin since 1893, tempers and guns blazed along Israel’s borders. In the thick of it were U.N. observers, who, without arms, are instructed to keep the peace.

Early in the week Jordanian soldiers, roused by Israeli claims to parts of Mt. Scopus, a hill commanding Jerusalem, occupied a house in the disputed zone. When

Israelis demanded that they withdraw, two Canadian members of the U.N. Truce Supervision Organization, Major George Flint and Major Marcel Breault, went forward to investigate. Both were injured when they touched off an anti-personnel mine left over from 1948 war days. Next day shooting broke out on a nearby hillside where the Israelis had set newcomers to terracing farmland a few yards from the Jordan border. The U.N.’s Lieut. Colonel Erik Helge Thalin, a Swede, and Major Miller Envit, a Dane, jeeped forward to check on the shooting. A Jordan villager, enraged over the recent death of a near relative, opened fire with a Sten gun and seriously wounded Colonel Thalin. Three days later Svend Rasmussen, a Danish radio technician, was killed by an anti-vehicle mine laid on a frontier path used only by U.N. observers.

Oddly enough, these were the first U.N. casualties since the 1949 truce. But the lot of the U.N.’s 60 unarmed policemen on the world’s hottest frontier has never been a happy one. Lonely, unloved, powerless, they keep round-the-clock watch in border dugouts, alert for mischief and ready to radio their chief, Canada’s Major General Eedson L. M. Burns, in case of trouble. Their cars have been burned and stoned. They have come under fire that they swear was not accidental. They have been ignored. When the Israelis staged their big El Auja raid last year, they first locked up the whole U.N. Egyptian-border team at their Beersheba headquarters. But it is from the observers’ reports that General Burns has been able to judge and warn against incidents in which governments themselves might be involved and responsible. To a man, they believe that but for their presence, war would have broken out in Palestine long ago.