Bosnian Official Pleads for U.N. Intervention : Yugoslavia: Foreign minister of republic urges peacekeeping troops while there is still peace to keep.

United Nations peacekeeping troops should be sent immediately to the ethnic tinderbox of Bosnia-Herzegovina while there is still peace to keep, the republic’s foreign minister insists.

Voicing the disappointment that has beset his countrymen following a failed U.N. attempt to intervene in the Serbian-Croatian war, Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic declared this week that his republic is being sacrificed to make settlement of the Balkan crisis more palatable for the extremists who started it.

U.N. Undersecretary General Marrack Goulding returned to New York, his plan to deploy peacekeeping troops in tatters after two Serbian warlords refused to support it and Croatian leaders raised new objections to the formula for ending seven months of war.

“They have been drawn in by petty Balkan threats,” Silajdzic said of the U.N. diplomats who have put off their intervention effort. “What kind of peace mission is this if it can be threatened so easily?”

Silajdzic, other Muslim and Croatian officials and many Western diplomats in Belgrade charge that the United Nations botched its own mission by anointing guerrilla leaders with veto power.

“Who elected these guys?” one senior Western envoy asked incredulously, referring to Milan Babic, self-proclaimed leader of Serbian rebels in the southeastern Croatian region of Krajina, and Goran Hadjic, who was dispatched from Belgrade to run eastern Croatia after Serbian forces conquered and occupied it.

Babic has said he will shoot U.N. troops if they enter the territory he controls, and Hadjic has insisted on revisions to the plan that Goulding brought to Balkan leaders for final approval this week.

The leaders of Serbia, Croatia and the federal army approved the U.N. deployment plan here on Jan. 2, which those warding off war in Bosnia say should have been sufficient for moving in the so-called Blue Helmets--U.N. troops.

Muslims and Croats, who make up more than two-thirds of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s 4.5 million people, have reacted fearfully, even angrily, to what they see as mishandling of a mission that might have spared them from war.

Bosnia-Herzegovina is geographically trapped between Serbia and Croatia, the two largest Yugoslav republics whose conflict has so far killed 10,000 people.

Officials and ordinary citizens fear that the United Nations’ failure to intervene could encourage the combatants to settle their fight over territory by dividing up what lies between them.

About three dozen countries, including most of Europe, recognized the independence of Croatia two weeks ago but left Bosnia-Herzegovina in a political limbo by saying the time for accepting its statehood is not yet right.

With no international recognition and Serbian-controlled forces eyeing its territory, the republic is virtually defenseless against a potential attack.

Security concerns have been heightened by a recent clandestine meeting between a local Serbian leader and Croatia’s president, by the massing of Yugoslav federal army troops in the republic and by repeated bomb blasts that mirror the army’s creeping assault on Croatia last summer.

“This is the army I’ve paid for all my life. I served in that army. Now it is destroying the house that we built for it,” said a 41-year-old cab driver named Rudi, who gave his nationality as “human.”

Echoing the sentiments of most people in this thoroughly integrated city, the driver said he fears no problems from any citizens of the republic, only from the tens of thousands of federal troops biding their time here.

“The U.N. troops would help, but they would need to come in fast,” he said. “We can’t last with this tension for very many more days.”

Mixed marriages are common in this republic that is 44% Muslim, 32% Serbian and 18% Croatian. Those relationships have bound much of the population in an anti-war alliance that many hope will transcend political radicals’ attempts to push them into war.

“I was shattered to learn that the Blue Helmets would not be coming,” said a Muslim government official married to a Serb. “No one here wants war, but that doesn’t mean we won’t be forced into it.”

Colm Doyle, an Irish army major who has spent four months as head of the European Community monitoring mission here, said he has detected broad support among all ethnic groups for U.N. intervention, as well as tremendous fear of the ubiquitous and undisciplined army.

Many now fear a four-week-old cease-fire could collapse, since it was imposed as a condition for the U.N. deployment now indefinitely on hold.

“In Croatia there was never a real cease-fire, and there will not be one for a long time,” said the commander of republic police forces, Interior Minister Alija Delimustafic. “That can happen only if they move all the Serbs to outer space.”

Unlike Croatia, which has its own national guard, Bosnia-Herzegovina has no organized republic defenses.

Serbian politicians in Bosnia-Herzegovina have laid claim to two-thirds of the republic’s territory and vowed to annex it to Serbian-controlled regions of Croatia and the truncated remains of Yugoslavia if Muslims and Croats succeed in getting the republic recognized as a separate state.

On the advice of the European Community, the republic Parliament voted last week to hold a referendum on independence at the end of February, which is expected to win the approval of voters despite a boycott by Serbs.

Serbian Democratic Party chief Radovan Karadzic has warned repeatedly that any move to separate Bosnia-Herzegovina from Yugoslavia would trigger an ethnic war.

Because virtually every town, street and apartment block houses an inseparable mixture of nationalities, it would be impossible to divide Bosnia-Herzegovina into ethnic pieces, and any attempt would likely spur violent clashes.

“The best protection for us would be if the United States recognized us first,” said Silajdzic. “If they truly support the ideal that led to the creation of Yugoslavia--that various ethnic and religious groups could live together in harmony and to each other’s mutual benefit--then they should immediately recognize Bosnia-Herzegovina, because this is the only place left where that ideal survives.”