Armed Intervention: A Key to Bosnia Aid? : Relief: Mediators believe help for thousands of hungry may have to be delivered at gunpoint.

As the limits of a humanitarian airlift to Bosnia-Herzegovina become apparent and pressure builds for a secure land route into the embattled state, aid workers and foreign mediators are fast coming to the conclusion that further help would have to fight its way in.

Despite innumerable cease-fire agreements and mounting casualties, there has been no letup in the deadly Bosnian conflict or any indication that relief convoys would be granted safe passage through the expanding war zones.

An international airlift has ferried in 2,200 tons of food and medical equipment in the three weeks since U.N. peacekeeping troops pushed their way into the Sarajevo airport to break a Serbian siege that was slowly starving the Bosnian capital’s 350,000 holdouts.

But even operating at breakneck speed, handling 15 to 20 flights a day on the single runway, the U.N.-protected airlift brings in less than one-third of the city’s daily food needs and does so at great expense and personal risk to those involved in the delivery.

Moreover, the high-profile Sarajevo mission has done nothing to relieve the suffering of hundreds of thousands of Bosnian residents trapped in other war-ravaged areas of the republic that are inaccessible to aid convoys because of roadblocks and shelling.

At a diplomatic impasse, the mediators are now weighing calls for armed intervention--a step no Western power seems prepared to take.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that there are at least 400,000 displaced and destitute Bosnians just in the western Herzegovina region that lies between Split and Sarajevo. Kaspar Gaugler, the U.N. refugee office’s logistics chief in Split, notes that one large truck can ferry in as much aid as a fully loaded Hercules C-130 transport plane, and deliver it to a wider range of reception points.

“Certainly only a fraction of the needs can be met this way,” Beat Bruderer, Split director for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said in reference to the Sarajevo airlift. “It’s obvious something more has to be done.”

But international relief agencies like the U.N. refugee office and the Red Cross are not equipped or authorized to negotiate the accords they would need with all the warring factions to secure and protect an overland aid route.

European Community mediators have been struggling for more than a year to get the combatants to work out a peaceful solution to Yugoslavia’s violent breakup, which has already cost at least 17,000 lives and driven 3 million people from their homes.

The United Nations has also thrown its diplomats at the Yugoslav crisis, coming up with an increasingly unpopular peacekeeping plan for Croatia but failing so far to make any progress in deterring the wider conflict in Bosnia.

“I thought the Middle East was complicated!” said an exasperated EC diplomat at the monitoring mission’s office here in Split. “Our job is to help people solve their problems without resort to violence, but that presumes that all sides want to avoid the shooting. We don’t find that consensus in Bosnia, and we can’t help them if we have to fight our way in.”

EC and U.N. mediators say the only means of getting sufficient food and medicine to Bosnian civilians is through a massive ground operation, which they say is impossible without compliance by all warring factions.

Both the Red Cross and the U.N. refugee agency were forced to suspend operations in Bosnia in May after repeated attacks on their aid convoys, in which several relief workers were killed and dozens of trucks or their contents hijacked by Serbian guerrillas.

“We would like to go to areas farther north, where the number of displaced is thought to be enormous and the food situation even more dramatic than in Sarajevo,” said Gaugler of the U.N. refugee office.

“But that all depends on a green light from those in a position to negotiate such an agreement. We’re just here to execute the relief missions. We’re like a transport company.”

Another cease-fire was agreed to in London on Friday by representatives of all three ethnic communities in Bosnia. But few who have faced the unruly bands of guerrillas fighting in Bosnia are confident that they will heed any agreement by the political leaders.

With uncertain prospects of a peaceful settlement, aid agencies say that the mounting disruption of industry and farming inflicted by the spreading war will make land access to the isolated communities all the more important.

Those who have traveled the 220-mile corridor from Split to Sarajevo admit to pessimism about the chances of winning reliable commitments to allow humanitarian missions safe passage because of the passions arising from so much death and destruction.

That leaves open only the possibility of armed intervention to secure the land bridge, something no foreign military force has shown any inclination to undertake.

U.S. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney has said the United States is prepared to use its Air Force and Navy planes to provide cover for overland aid missions into Bosnia. But he has made clear that no U.S. ground forces would be involved.

The 16-nation North Atlantic Treaty Organization has sent warships to the Adriatic Sea to ensure that an oil embargo and other U.N. sanctions are enforced against Serbia, which the international community has accused of fomenting the violence in Bosnia.

However, as British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd observed during a visit he made Friday to Sarajevo, no foreign country has expressed any interest in executing a military strike against the Serbs’ gun nests that threaten the roadways and any chance of long-term relief of Bosnia’s hunger.