The recent death of U.N. aid workers in Timor was a tragedy. The reprehensible action has rightly drawn international condemnation. The perpetrators will hopefully be caught, tried and punished.

But the criminal act also flows from the intersection of three sets of false and woolly premises whose consequences put U.N. workers at growing physical risk. The United Nations is increasingly being seen as the enemy by forces engaged in brutal civil wars; outsiders demand impossibly exacting standards from Third World troops; and nongovernment organizations are not answerable for the consequences of their pressure tactics.

The U.N. was designed to keep world peace, if necessary by going to war against aggressors. The transient Cold War hostility and the more enduring structural realities of diverging major power interests put paid to the rhetoric of indivisible peace. As the system of collective security proved elusive, but conflicts did not abate, creative solutions were found to inject a stabilizing U.N. presence through unarmed and impartial U.N. peacekeepers who conducted holding rather than military operations.