U.N. Chief Fears Bosnia Could Be a Quagmire : Balkans: Boutros-Ghali warns that dispatching peacekeepers on mission impossible could harm organization’s credibility.

Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali looks on the savage communal conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina as a quagmire like Beirut’s civil war and fears that careless dispatch of more U.N. peacekeeping troops there could harm the world organization in the long run.

The secretary general’s caution could prove to be a stumbling block if the United States and its European allies, forging the new Security Council resolution on Bosnia promised by President Bush, try to lay increased responsibility on the United Nations for protecting relief supplies into Sarajevo and the rest of Bosnia.

Soon after Deputy U.S. Ambassador Alexander Watson informed him last Thursday about Bush’s intent to propose a resolution authorizing the use of force in the conflict, Boutros-Ghali asked: “Who will make up this force? That is the big question. If it is NATO, OK. But I cannot do it myself.”

Boutros-Ghali, in fact, clashed with the Security Council in mid-July when, without consulting him, its ambassadors voted their approval of a European-brokered plan for U.N. troops to take charge of all heavy weapons from all sides during a cease-fire in Bosnia. It looked to the secretary general as if Europe was trying to palm off a mission impossible on the United Nations. The cease-fire, in any case, didn’t last long enough for anyone to try to implement the plan.

In conversations with The Times in Dakar, London and New York in the last five weeks, the 69-year-old secretary general, a former Egyptian deputy foreign minister and professor of international law, has often brought up the problem of Bosnia and the rest of the remains of Yugoslavia. He evidently regards the situation as a morass that demands far more caution than theatrics.

The communal nature of the crisis makes Boutros-Ghali fear another Beirut, another Afghanistan. He is uneasy about apportioning blame and branding one side or another an aggressor.

“I fear that it will go on for many months and we will never be able to catch up with what is going on,” he says. “You may find one week that one group is acting as the aggressor against another. But, by the time the Security Council acts to punish one aggressor, the situation will have changed about who is battling whom. So we will be behind in our condemnations.”

Also, Boutros-Ghali points out, the United Nations not only has 1,500 soldiers in Bosnia trying to secure the Sarajevo airport for relief flights but also maintains a force of almost 14,000 peacekeepers in Croatia monitoring the cease-fire between the Serbs and Croats there. He believes it would be “a big contradiction in the operations” for the United Nations to act as impartial peacekeepers between the Serbs and their enemies in Croatia and as peace enforcers thwarting the Serbs in Bosnia. The Croatian peacekeeping would have to be abandoned.

The secretary general also fears that a U.N. fiasco in Bosnia--similar to the humiliating withdrawal by President Ronald Reagan of Marines from Beirut in 1983 after 241 Americans were killed in a suicide car bomb attack by terrorists--would so hurt the reputation of the world body that it would be difficult for him to call on governments to donate troops for other peacekeeping operations in the future.

“The importance of the United Nations comes from its moral value, from its credibility,” he says. “I cannot take the risk of having young soldiers killed in Sarajevo and then having the Security Council order the other soldiers out. You cannot jeopardize the many other operations. For it’s not only Sarajevo. I have the rest of Yugoslavia and Cambodia and El Salvador. I have 10 other operations.”

Boutros-Ghali also feels that the Bosnian crisis has absorbed so much of the United Nations’ attention that other, perhaps more pressing problems have been neglected. Although he says he does not recall--as his critics claim--using the expression “rich man’s war” to describe Yugoslavia during a closed session of the Security Council, there is no doubt that he has wondered out loud whether the council is more interested in the deaths of the European Muslims of Bosnia than in the far more numerous deaths of the African Muslims of Somalia.

But he mostly blames world public opinion for clamoring about Bosnia while ignoring Somalia. He says there are cases--and he obviously means Bosnia--”where public opinion is too much interested.”

“Public opinion wants to see quick results,” he explains, “and there are no quick results in solving international disputes. They take months and years of negotiations. But the public just wants quick results, and they accuse us of not doing what needs to be done.”