It was just over a year ago that a Japanese scholar in Slavic Studies observed, in a paper on China and Russia, that "sober negotiation and compromise" could provide a "solid foundation for stability in relations between the two Powers". Yutaka Akino was more than a professor of this precept for peace; he was willing to try and be its practitioner in distant Dushanbe, where he journeyed this April to join the United Nations Mission of Observers in Tajikistan as a Political Officer. An e-mail message he sent to his University teacher, Dr. Takayuki Ito, which is excerpted on our cover, reflects the sense of deliberate purpose he hoped to bring towards healing the wounded political processes in that country, with victories secured at a table and not in the street. It was a hope swiftly shattered; within weeks he was dead, ambushed with colleagues from Poland, Uruguay and Tajikistan itself, while on an UNMOT patrol (story on page 49).

In a devastating year, the fiftieth since United Nations peacekeeping began, civilian casualties among international personnel in the line of duty have exceeded the already poignant numbers among the military. Theirs is a common mission, to translate into truth, and at times tragedy, the words on a plaque on the desk of Colonel William Higgins of the United States, who himself died at terrorist hands while with the United Nations peacekeeping in the Middle East:

"A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight; nothing he cares about more than his own personal safety; is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

When the Head of the first United Nations peacekeeping mission was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1948, the Security Council requested the Secretary-General to fly the Organization's flag at half-mast for three days in tribute to Count Folke Bernadotte. In the half century since, casualties on land, at sea and in the air among international personnel have outpaced the distinction of such a gesture. But peacekeeping, or peace searching, is about a different kind of recognition, a recognition "with gratitude, that one's work has a sense ... a meaning beyond the narrow and individual one".

That was the definition offered by Dag Hammarskjold, as he stood outside the United Nations Secretariat, preparing to leave on a mission to Congo from which he would not return. Like the Irish airman of Yeats' poem, and like so many international workers before, and after, him,

"Nor law, nor duty, bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove me to this tumult in the clouds."