If a settlement is reached, NATO plans to send 30,000 peacekeeping troops to Kosovo.

As anticipated, the death of the ten Belgian peacekeepers prompted the withdrawal of most peacekeeping troops from Rwanda, effectively clearing the way for slaughter.

In addition, the Security Council has already started discussion of a plan to send 14,000 peacekeeping troops force to Yugoslavia at a cost of $634 million a year.

And the organization of West African countries announced plans to send 1,000 peacekeeping troops to Liberia in two weeks.

In one sense their reasoning was purely practical: Europeans, including the Russians, have peacekeeping troops in harm's way in Bosnia, and Americans do not.

Their hit-and-run attacks have pinned down 18,000 peacekeeping troops in virtual internal exile.

That would raise the specter of renewed civil war and put pressure on the United Nations to keep 15,000 peacekeeping troops in Cambodia longer than planned.

The United Nations is sending peacekeeping troops to East Timor.

Under the Rambouillet approach, NATO was to send 28,000 peacekeeping troops only after the Serbs and the ethnic Albanians had accepted the autonomy plan.

The United States announced today that it would send 300 peacekeeping troops to Macedonia in about a week to help contain the Bosnian war.