Next Step : U.N. Mission Epitaph: ‘We’re Back to Zero’ : Commanders admit that their troops’ yearlong deployment in Croatia has been a failure. Can they begin again?

MIHOLJSKO, Croatia —  In a fitting tribute to a mission U.N. commanders admit has been a failure, Polish peacekeeping troops here post a 24-hour patrol around a barbed wire-enclosed munitions depot from which every piece of heavy artillery has already been stolen.

The lightly armed U.N. soldiers were roughly pushed aside by Serbian rebels who reacted with panic and anger last month when Croatian government troops attacked Serbian positions 70 miles to the south.

“They took everything. We couldn’t have stopped them,” explained one of the young Poles, a defiant lower lip tipping his cigarette skyward and a shrug silently asking, “What’s a fella to do?”

Here and at dozens of other weapons storage yards patrolled by the United Nations, rebels grabbed the guns they had reluctantly surrendered to U.N. monitoring only a few weeks earlier, then headed south for the reignited Serb-Croat war.

“We’re back to zero,” lamented U.N. commander Lt. Gen. Satish Nambiar, a candid admission of failure that raises the question of whether it is worthwhile for U.N. forces to begin all over again.

The one-year mandate issued to the largest peacekeeping mission in U.N. history expires Sunday although both U.N. officials and the Zagreb leadership seem amenable to extending it to the end of March.

But the U.N. mission is held in growing distrust by Serbs caught off guard by the recent Croatian offensive, and Croatia’s leadership is attaching new demands to the mandate’s renewal. These developments engender little hope of more success over the next year and even pose some risk that the U.N. troops will pick up and leave the republic. A U.N. withdrawal from Croatia would also raise serious questions about its humanitarian mission in neighboring Bosnia.

Collecting and warehousing the tanks and guns of Serb rebels in the disputed Krajina region was only one small part of the daunting mandate conferred by the U.N. Security Council on the soldiers of UNPROFOR--U.N.-speak for the ever-expanding deployment in the former Yugoslav federation now numbering nearly 25,000 troops.

The stationing of “blue helmets” in Serb-occupied parts of Croatia was supposed to have prevented further outbreaks of ethnic conflict, hustled Yugoslav federal forces out of the now-independent republic, disarmed the combatants and helped hundreds of thousands of refugees return to their homes.

The objectives were hammered out by U.N. special envoy Cyrus R. Vance, a former U.S. secretary of state whose name is now irrevocably linked to the mission that has been thwarted by Serbs and Croats at every juncture.

Fighting eased to a tense standstill once the peacekeepers arrived--not due to a sincere commitment to peace by the warring factions, but because both sides waited to see whether U.N. intervention would serve their cause.

Serbian rebels, armed and instigated by the nationalist leadership of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade, expected the U.N. presence to prevent retaliatory Croatian incursions into the one-third of Croatia they had conquered and occupied during a deadly six-month war in 1991.

Croats focused on provisions of the Vance plan that promised restoration of Croatian authority over the occupied territory and U.N. assistance in demilitarizing the region so those expelled by Serbian gunmen could return home.

Western diplomats in the Croatian capital of Zagreb are in widespread agreement that the peacekeepers’ presence worked to the Serbs’ advantage, preserving the territorial status quo and freeing Serbian fighters and hardware for a similar land-grab still raging in neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Yugoslav federal army troops were formally compelled to withdraw, but Belgrade-based paramilitary units continue to provide the armed muscle behind the rebels’ proclaimed but unrecognized and ill-delineated, roughly hook-shaped, state--the Republic of Serbian Krajina, encompassing Serb-held lands from the border with Serbia to the Adriatic Sea.

While U.N. troops and unarmed civilian police officers carry out daylight patrols of four vast U.N.-protected zones in Krajina, the Serbian militants continue to drive out non-Serbs with nightly exercises of terror and intimidation.

Serbian nationalists in both Croatia and Bosnia are opposed to independence for those republics because it politically severs them from Serbs in Serbia--a cutoff they’ve come to fear, in part because of an intense propaganda campaign run from Belgrade.

Croatia’s separatist movement was cast as a return to the fascist aims of the 1941 bid for Croatian independence conducted by a Nazi puppet government. In the case of multiethnic Bosnia, a rare Balkan bastion of integration and tolerance, the specter of Muslim fundamentalism was raised by Serbian nationalists who portrayed the republic’s secular Muslim Slavs as the foot soldiers of Islam.

The Serb rebellions that have conquered a third of Croatia and 70% of Bosnia have gone a long way toward fulfilling Milosevic’s dream of an ethnically pure Greater Serbia uniting all Serbs in the Balkans.

Frustrated by UNPROFOR’s admitted inability to loosen the Serbian grip on occupied Croatia, Zagreb government forces unilaterally breached the year-old calm ushered in with the Vance plan by launching an offensive on Jan. 22, from the Adriatic port of Zadar, to retake some strategic positions.

The offensive drew international condemnation but played well on the domestic front. It won back government control of the vital Maslenica Bridge linking the Zadar peninsula with the Croatian mainland, as well as the Peruca dam that once supplied much of southern Croatia with electricity.

Croatia’s U.N. representative, Mario Nobilo, has insisted that Zagreb has wrapped up its “limited offensive.” Yet fighting continues across a 65-mile arc from Zadar to Peruca, driving even more Serbs and Croats to flee for their safety.

“Unless there is a genuine desire to find peace, UNPROFOR cannot help the people of this region,” said Nambiar, who has expressed concern that without renewed commitment to a cease-fire, the Vance plan and other U.N. initiatives “do not seem to have much of a future.”

Negotiations on extension of the mandate have been conducted in New York and largely behind closed doors. But U.N. and Croatian sources in Zagreb disclose serious obstacles to renewal.

Croatian President Franjo Tudjman is reported to be offering only a six-month extension, coupled with the demand that Croatian police be allowed to patrol jointly with U.N. troops to reassert Zagreb authority over the Krajina gunmen.

The purported government of Krajina, based in the rebel stronghold of Knin, has agreed to meet with U.N. mediators in New York today, but they refuse to negotiate with Zagreb until Tudjman’s forces comply with a Security Council resolution ordering them to retreat to positions they held before the Jan. 22 offensive.

Zagreb has scoffed at the rebels’ condition, reminding U.N. officials that Serbs have repeatedly ignored orders to comply with the Vance plan.

Although U.N. troops corralled some tanks and heavy guns left behind by the federal army, their appeals for disarmament by fierce paramilitary forces have been ignored by the gun-toting gangs now occupying the police stations and local offices of Krajina.

“We are ready to renew the mandate of UNPROFOR for several months if they will continue implementing the Vance plan, but we want some insurance,” said Vesna Skare-Ozbolt, Tudjman’s spokeswoman. “Peacekeeping forces have done nothing for us over the past year, so we will probably need peacemaking forces.”

Skare-Ozbolt said the Zagreb leadership was asking for a U.N. commitment to deploy NATO troops to recover the Krajina region for Croatia by disarming Serbian rebels and making the area safe for refugees to return.

One senior UNPROFOR official denounced the Croatian demands as arrogant and provocative, insisting “they are in no position to be putting conditions on our stay.” Without the U.N. troops, Croatia would quickly be engulfed by another round of savage bloodletting like the battles that took 10,000 lives in 1991, said the official.

But Tudjman has benefited politically from the recent military adventure in Croatia’s south. The weekly magazine Globus last month said 75% of citizens polled thought the offensive was justified.

With more than 700,000 refugees to care for and an economy devastated by the conflict, many Croats have forgotten the anguish felt nearly two years ago when sons, husbands and fathers were called off to war. Many came home mangled or didn’t return at all.

“The day’s going to come when they get tired of seeing their children die and realize they all need to sit down and work it out,” U.N. mission spokeswoman Shannon Boyd said of the Croatian combatants.

Complicating the negotiations on a new mandate, Tudjman has also insisted that the terms be worked out with his government alone, claiming that bestowing bargaining power on the rebel Krajina leadership is tantamount to U.N. recognition of the outlaw state. The original Vance plan was signed by leaders from Belgrade on behalf of the Krajina Serbs because Croatia was not yet recognized as independent from Yugoslavia.

Now “the Krajina people are telling us they expect to be consulted on extension of the mandate,” UNPROFOR civilian affairs chief Cedric Thornberry confirmed. Whether they will be considered an equal partner in the negotiations is a matter for the United Nations to decide, he said.

Some U.N. sources blame the failure of the Vance plan on the outbreak of war in Bosnia last April and on the difficulty of dealing with more than one crisis at a time.

Vance and the European Community’s chief negotiator on the Balkans, Lord Owen, have spent the past six months seeking a compromise among the Bosnian factions whose objectives for the republic are mutually exclusive. Bosnian Serbs want a separate, ethnically pure state to be joined with Serbia, while the Sarajevo government wants Bosnia restored as an integrated, multiethnic state.

News reports of indiscriminate Serbian shelling, brutal expulsions, concentration camps and organized rape have riveted Western attention to the carnage in Bosnia--at the expense of the Croatian mission, some U.N. officials complain.

But the failure of U.N. negotiators to jointly tackle the Croatian and Bosnian conflicts is at the root of their inability to effectively mediate in either crisis, complained Bosnian Vice President Ejup Ganic.

“There will be no peace in Croatia until there is peace in Bosnia,” Ganic said in an interview, describing the 1991 war in Croatia and the past 10 months of Serbian siege of his own country as consecutive Belgrade-directed campaigns to seize land for a Greater Serbia.

Vance and Owen have proposed carving up Bosnia into 10 semiautonomous provinces, each of which would be governed by its majority ethnic group. The plan is currently stalled, however, as the Clinton Administration has embarked on a new quest for a more just settlement for the decimated Bosnian Muslims.

“I do think the Muslims are being screwed. There’s no doubt about it,” observed one UNPROFOR official, who nevertheless described the Vance-Owen plan as the only option Western governments appear ready to endorse.

Bosnian Croats are happy with the partitioning suggested by Vance and Owen because they already live compactly in the two southern provinces clearly destined for Croatian control. The plan would also award them control over a third, small but strategic province in the north of Bosnia that would give the Croats considerable leverage in bargaining with the Serbs.

But both Serbs and the Muslim-led government have rejected the mediators’ division--Serbs because they would have to give up almost half of the 70% of Bosnian territory they have conquered, mostly in the north and east, and the government because the plan effectively endorses the ethnic segregation Serbs have carried out with deadly force.

About 9,000 U.N. troops and observers are stationed in Bosnia to escort humanitarian aid convoys and to keep count of violations of U.N. orders that Serbs end their deadly siege. In both Bosnia and Croatia, U.N. forces have the right to use weapons only in self-defense, because as peacekeepers--not peacemakers--they lack any authority to intervene when the combatants take on one another.

That limited mandate has stirred resentment among many in Bosnia who see UNPROFOR’s presence as an obstacle to effective foreign action to end the war. Partly out of concern for the safety of U.N. troops, European countries have rejected calls by Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic for lifting of a U.N. arms embargo on his outgunned country or for Western air strikes to knock out Serbian guns blasting Bosnian cities, for example.

But the food and medical supplies being pushed through to some areas of Bosnia are recognized by the recipients as life-saving assistance they would lose in the event of a U.N. pullout.

U.N. forces in Bosnia were deployed independently of the Vance plan, meaning they could theoretically stay on even if the Croatian effort collapsed.

However, Zagreb and Split--Croatia’s two largest cities--are the bases for the U.N. humanitarian airlift into Sarajevo and other besieged areas. Relocation of UNPROFOR headquarters and aid transfer points to some other nearby country would be expensive and disruptive, which is putting pressure on the U.N. negotiators to work out some extension with the Croats.

U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali last week threatened to pull his troops out of Croatia entirely if Tudjman’s forces and the Krajina Serbs failed to show sincere efforts to resolve their conflicts.

Although U.N. officials have often observed that their mission in Croatia is pointless if the combatants want to press on with their war, the threat was thought to have been aimed at forcing Zagreb to seriously consider the potentially catastrophic consequences of a sudden U.N. pullout.

In one indication that the world body may be considering a wholesale folding of the Croatian tent, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has already begun looking into the possibility of moving its Zagreb staging base to an airfield in Italy that would cut the flying time to Sarajevo by 20 minutes and allow relief planes to carry bigger payloads.

Both U.N. and Croatian officials expect some last-minute lease on life for the Croatian mission, perhaps as little as six weeks, as suggested Friday by Boutros-Ghali, but enough to buy time for consideration of alternatives to the controversial Vance-Owen Bosnian plan.

UNPROFOR commanders concede their mission in Croatia has been hopelessly stalled for months, but they suggest part of the blame rests with the international community and its wavering commitment to such undertakings.

“The time has come when governments will have to be as generous with the resources they provide us as they are with the mandates they confer upon us,” said Thornberry, describing the United Nations as “no more than the sum of its parts.”

Troubled Mandate

* More than 12,000 U.N. soldiers patrol four zones (S,N,W,E) in Croatia’s Krajina region, where occupying Serbs have declared a renegade state.

* Under the so-called Vance-Owen plan, Bosnia-Herzegovina would split into 10 provinces, each governed by a dominant ethnic group. Map shows the plan.

* Bosnia’s Province 3, a mixed area that the plan cedes to Croatians, is a sore spot because it lies in the way of an otherwise solid Serbian corridor.