Rebel Serbs Mock U.N. Mission in Croatia Zones : Balkans: Guerrilla bands keep peacekeeping troops from restoring civilian control to four ‘protected areas.’

Just a few miles south of the official crossing into U.N. Sector North, three unshaven guerrillas present a rival welcome committee.

Decked out in blue camouflage in an unconvincing attempt to look like policemen, the Serbian rebels guarding the entrance to what they consider the Republic of Serbian Krajina have dragged lawn chairs and wooden sawhorses onto the roadway to create their own checkpoint.

They greet all comers with the muzzles of their machine guns.

“No entrance today,” barked one guerrilla, spewing a cloud of brandy breath and dismissingly waving away a U.N. press pass. Sector North, on this particular day, is closed “for technical reasons.”

Although the Krajina vigilantes are stingy with their explanations, radio reports of Serbian air attacks on Muslim villages across the nearby Bosnian border are likely the technicalities prompting them to peremptorily seal off access to what is supposed to be a demilitarized buffer zone under U.N. control.

U.N. troops have been patrolling four designated “protected areas” in Croatia for nearly five months, yet their authority appears to extend only as far as the nearest Serbian barricade. On occasion, the roving guerrilla bands even block U.N. troops from moving about, mocking the international mandate to restore civilian control and the prewar order.

“It’s like Wyoming in the 1880s,” complained Cedric Thornberry, chief of civilian affairs for what is now the largest peacekeeping mission in U.N. history. “The situation is so bad in Sector East that we believe civil authority has basically disintegrated. Courts do not sit. Police do not investigate. Sectors South and East are descending steadily into conditions of anarchy.”

While Thornberry singles out the regions closest to Serbia and the coveted Dalmatian coastline for criticism, conditions in the other two zones are also woefully short of the objectives set out by U.N. special envoy Cyrus R. Vance in the deployment plan he drafted with Serbian and Croatian officials nearly a year ago. Menacing of motorists, looting, armed assault and the practice known as ethnic cleansing are the pattern of daily life here, too.

The lack of U.N. progress in disarming paramilitary forces has prompted anger and impatience among non-Serbs driven from the region who have been pinning their hopes on the peacekeepers to make it safe enough to go home.

Croatian officials, who accuse U.N. personnel of protecting Serbian warlords who rule over one-third of the republic, are threatening to shepherd masses of refugees back into the volatile area.

Marko Kvesic, deposed mayor of Beli Manastir in the Baranja region of Sector East, has given the peacekeepers until the end of the month to fulfill their pledge to help refugees return to their homes.

Noting the need to begin the school year and prepare neglected farmland for winter, Kvesic plans to lead a mass return to Beli Manastir on Wednesday, whether the United Nations assists him or not. The Croatian government has promised support.

“We have asked them (U.N. forces) to show in at least one village their good will to assist the refugees in returning to their homes. If they are not able to do this, then you can draw your own conclusions about how we will respond,” said Damir Zoric, deputy chief of the Office for Refugees and Displaced Persons in Zagreb, the Croatian capital.

Asked how he would bring refugees back to Baranja over U.N. objections, Zoric replied: “We will march.”

Thornberry says he has no intention of bowing to the ultimatum.

“It is the height of irresponsibility of Croatian government officials, knowing full well what the situation is in Baranja, to incite the hopes of desperate people and lead them into a situation that, unless they are very fortunate, will be one of violent confrontation,” Thornberry warned.

But the threatened showdown has put the United Nations in the awkward position of having to forcibly drive away the very people whose return they were charged with arranging.

“We will seek to prevent their re-entry. We’ve warned that conditions are not secure and that we will put our troops there on the border . . . to protect them from the lunatics inside Baranja who are wanting to shoot themselves a few Croats,” Thornberry said.

U.N. troops are doing what they can to disarm the guerrilla bands throughout the Krajina, he said, “but there is no answer except the unexciting one of gradually trying to restore tranquillity.”

While none of the 600,000 people forced to leave their homes in the Croatian war zones have been able to move back as a result of the U.N. deployment, U.N. spokeswoman Shannon Boyd claims that the mission has achieved some successes.

Fighting that killed 10,000 people last year has dropped off dramatically, although Croats tend to attribute the fall in casualties to the fact that Serbs now enjoy almost exclusive control of the regions after having driven out the Croats, leaving no enemy to fight.

U.N. forces took over control of the Peruca Dam in Sector South in mid-September, opening one of the floodgates to avert an impending disaster. Serbian radicals who had been holding the dam for more than a year had been amassing water to a dangerous level with the intent of rupturing the structure and flooding the predominantly Croatian lowlands around the city of Sinj.

Boyd also claimed that U.N. mediators had achieved a breakthrough in clearing mines and roadblocks from the Belgrade-Zagreb highway and that a limited reopening of the 250-mile route was imminent.

Only humanitarian aid convoys and the few foreign travelers venturing into the region would be allowed to use the road that skirts some of the worst battlegrounds of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, but Boyd described it as “a first step.” Currently, all traffic between the respective Serbian and Croatian capitals has to detour through Hungary, tripling what would normally be a four-hour drive.

The small advances toward restoring public services and a sense of normalcy to the U.N. zones have been overshadowed by what U.N. officials concede is a stalemate in disarming and dispersing the guerrilla bands.

Conditions have actually worsened in recent weeks, the U.N. officials report, with Serbian guerrillas becoming more “assertive.”