The United Nations General Assembly has designated May 29 as the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers. It commemorates the establishment of the first UN Peacekeeping Mission, headed by the late Count Folke Bernadotte (Sweden) who was appointed as UN mediator on Palestine. I served as administrative officer on Bernadotte’s mission.

When the British Mandate to administer Palestine expired in May 1948, Israel unilaterally declared itself to be independent, and was simultaneously attacked on all sides by neighboring Arab countries. The UN General Assembly, in emergency session, decided to appoint a mediator in an attempt to restore peace in the region.

I was with Bernadotte when he was assassinated by Israeli extremists (know as the Stern Gang) in September 1948. He was succeeded by the then-deputy mediator, Dr. Ralph Bunche, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a truce agreement between the parties in 1949.

Since that beginning, peacekeeping activities in the United Nations have grown dramatically. At the end of last October, deployment reached 80,976 military and police personnel plus some 15,000 civilians, serving in 18 different missions around the world, at an annual budget of $4.75 billion dollars. The United States government, as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, approved each of these missions. We are getting a real bargain. A Rand Corp. report states that the UN has by far the most successful peacekeeping force in the world. The U.S. Government Accountability Office confirms that peace operations in Haiti, for example, would have cost the U.S. eight times as much money as the UN spent.

Lamentably, for the past several years the U.S. Congress has consistently appropriated less than the UN assessment, resulting in the accumulation of more than $1 billion of arrears in our dues payments. It is ironic that this is at a time when the U.S. is spending that amount every five days in prosecuting the war in Iraq.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, Sen. Joe Biden, has introduced S. 392 to “ensure payment of assessments for United Nations Peacekeeping operations for the 2005 through 2008 time period.” The ranking Republican on the committee, Sen. Richard Lugar, and the Majority Whip, Sen. Dick Durbin, are co-sponsoring the legislation that is expected to come to a vote later this month. Meanwhile, it is painful to note that our government begrudges pennies for peace while overspending lavishly for war.

R. Bruce Stedman of Westport Island is assistant UN secretary general (ret.).