Big guns test peace strategy in Mongolia

If there is ever a permanent United Nations peacekeeping force, its members may one day trace their origins to the vast pasturelands outside Ulan Bator in Mongolia, where Britain has organised a unique experiment in security cooperation.

Almost achieving the unprecedented feat of persuading all five members of the UN security council to join forces, UK military diplomats brought together personnel from China, the US, France, Britain and the host country for the first exercise of its kind in one of the world's most remote locations.

It was an historic event, but one with its share of teething problems, including a mysterious no-show by the Russian contingent, who were turned back by their own border guards on the eve of the exercise.

Nonetheless, the British organisers hope the three-day event, which ended yesterday, will be the first of many multinational training sessions in Mongolia.

Gordon Kerr, the British defence attaché who masterminded the drills, said: "It is a test case, but I would like to see it expanded and continued as an annual event."

At first sight, Mongolia is an unlikely venue for groundbreaking peace drills. The impoverished country's greatest hero is Ghengis Khan, whose armies created the then biggest land empire.

Today, however, it has adopted a policy of pro-active neutrality to secure its huge borders with its former patron, Russia, and China.

Looking for more help from the US and multilateral organisations, it has dispatched several hundred troops from its small 10,000-man regular army to peacekeeping missions, including to Iraq.

As one of the world's most sparsely populated nations, it also has the space to accommodate the world's armies. Yesterday, at the Five Hills training ground, a huge, barely inhabited plain an hour's drive from the Mongolian capital, about a dozen personnel from each of the participating nations jointly practised mine-awareness drills, unarmed patrol procedures, incident management skills and rules of engagement.

Britain paid £70,000 to stage the exercise - its first in Mongolia - including payment of the transportation fees for participants from China, a country that had never dispatched personnel outside its borders for a multilateral training exercise.

In a possible sign of the sensitivities of its historically nervous neighbour, Beijing decided at the last moment to send police rather than soldiers to the exercise, which meant that many of its civilian participants looked ill at ease shouldering rifles and dealing with mines for the first time. But after decades of relative Chinese isolation, their presence alone was a sign of change in north-east Asia's security environment.

How much could be read from the behaviour of the other contingents is unclear, but the British were so worried about health insurance cover that they refused Mongolian challenges to wrestle, while the US and French troops seemed a lot happier than their leaders to take turns in giving orders.