NEWS ANALYSIS : Aid Airdrop in Bosnia Is Sending a Message, if Not a Lot of Relief : Balkans: While some observers say symbolism of the U.S. effort is significant, cynics say the gesture may be harmful.

While international relief officials say any effort to feed the starving in Bosnia-Herzegovina is welcome, a U.S. airdrop over the war-ravaged former Yugoslav republic so far appears to have offered more symbolism than solace.

Since U.S. military cargo planes began soaring over embattled Bosnian enclaves to parachute aid to hungry and wounded civilians two miles below, Serbian rebels have grabbed more territory and have continued to block ground deliveries of food and medicine for their victims.

The high-profile airdrops have bought time for Western mediators and leaders of the warring factions to work toward a negotiated solution of the war that has left at least 150,000 dead or missing and pushed 2 million Bosnians--mostly Muslim civilians--from their homes.

But as the combatants, embittered by the war’s horrors, seem ever more resistant to a diplomatic settlement, cynics claim that the U.S. gesture is doing little more than saving doomed Muslims for the Serbian bombs and bullets that will kill them later.

Some observers even fear that the aid, scattered uncontrollably by U.S. aircraft from the safe but ineffective altitude of 10,000 feet, may be making matters worse for the Muslims it is intended to help. Many parcels are ending up in the hands of advancing rebels; a few have been used as bait to lure hungry Muslims into the sights of Serbian snipers.

“The fact that the U.S. airdrops have been successful in getting a small amount of assistance in is good. Some is better than none,” said Lyndall Sachs, spokeswoman in Belgrade for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

But she disputes the claims of some U.S. officials that the airdrop has succeeded in pressuring Bosnian Serb rebels to allow aid convoys to proceed unimpeded on the ground.

“I don’t think the American operation has affected that situation at all,” Sachs said of the ubiquitous roadblocks preventing aid volunteers from reaching civilians who have been wounded in the nearly yearlong Serbian siege or cut off by the rebels’ attempts to starve them into surrender.

Western diplomats share the aid community’s view that the airdrops are important, even if they are paltry in comparison with the vast quantities of relief goods needed each day.

At least 1.6 million residents of Bosnia--more than a third of the prewar population--depend on Western aid for their food and survival, according to some estimates. They require nearly 1,000 metric tons of relief each day.

In a report Thursday to a closed session of the U.N. Security Council, Sadako Ogata, the high commissioner for refugee relief, noted that the Bosnian economy, particularly in the northeastern Tuzla region, has collapsed.

“People are out of work, food, and other reserves are depleting rapidly, and energy shortages are to be expected,” the Reuters news agency quoted her as saying.

Consequently, the number of beneficiaries of relief supplies has now increased from 1.6 million to 2.28 million people, she said, adding: “This is a startling figure, amounting to 50% of the original Bosnia population of 4.3 million and to more than two-thirds of those having remained inside the country.”

In contrast to the great need for aid in Bosnia, the U.S. planes were able to drop only 215 tons during the mission’s first eight days.

The airdrops have been targeted at communities in desperate eastern Bosnia where non-Serbs have been refusing to surrender their besieged enclaves.

While the more recent deliveries have managed to accurately parachute bundles to the needy, the first drops fell wide of their targets, and many of the parcels are believed to have been collected and consumed by the attacking Serbs.

Both foreign and independent Yugoslav observers have ridiculed Washington’s claims to be offering aid for all the combatants as making a virtue of necessity.

“This was a transparent attempt at not admitting openly that a one-ton crate dropped in bad weather from an altitude of over 3,000 meters (10,000 feet) could fall far from its target and come into the wrong hands,” contended Dejan Anastasijevic of the respected Belgrade weekly Vreme.

He and others have noted that the long-awaited U.S. initiative is proving too little, too late for some Bosnians, like those in the recently overrun town of Cerska.

The starving, wounded Muslim Slavs of Cerska, the target of the first aid drop, were already in retreat from the Serbian onslaught when the U.S. planes delivered their goods.

Some supplies were found by the Serbs, while others, according to ham radio operators in the area, drew desperate civilians into exposed woods and farmlands to look for the packages, which became the lure for sniper traps and exposed the hungry to injury or death.

Some observers, like a Belgrade-based diplomat with long ties to embattled Bosnia, contend that the U.S. operation is making its greatest contribution in sending a message rather than feeding the starving.

“The airdrops can never be significant (in volume), and they are not intended to be a substitute for land convoys. They have been used as a last resort because the land convoys are not getting through,” the diplomat said. “What is more important is that we are demonstrating to the people conducting these sieges that we are not willing to write off the population being attacked.”

He faulted the U.S. mission only for its timidity in the face of Serbian opposition, saying: “I do think we bent over backwards saying this is not military aid. It might have been wiser to act like we’re the superpower and they’re the pipsqueak, maybe denting this delusion around here that Serbia makes the world go round.”

State-run media have consistently portrayed the U.S. reluctance to commit ground troops to the protection of besieged Bosnian civilians as evidence that Serbian fighters are so awesome as to make the Western World cower.

The parachute operation has been praised by some for keeping the most endangered Bosnians alive while leaders of the warring factions continue to haggle over a much-maligned peace plan that would carve up Bosnia into 10 ethnic provinces.

Mediators Cyrus R. Vance of the United Nations and Lord Owen of the European Community have revised their sales pitch on the peace settlement in the wake of the airdrop, lobbying the predominantly Muslim government in Sarajevo to accept the division to diplomatically isolate rebel Serbs and make clear to the international community which side stands in the way of peace.

To date, neither the government nor the Serbian rebels have accepted the Vance-Owen plan. The Muslims claim it rewards the Serbian practice of “ethnic cleansing” by deeding vanquished territory to the forces that overran it and expelled non-Serbs. Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic rejects the proposed settlement, saying his forces would have to give up nearly half of the territory they have conquered.

Western diplomats seem divided over whether the Vance-Owen formula is salvageable or whether the Clinton Administration is trying to sell it only to escape growing calls for intervention.

“As things are now, there is no reason for the side that is winning to act as though it is losing by giving up territory and the idea of a Greater Serbia,” said one Belgrade-based envoy. “I don’t see any way, even with years of isolation and sanctions, to change (the Serbs’) minds short of a credible and imminent threat of military intervention.”

The airdrop operation’s most practical contribution may be to buy time for Washington to devise a strategy for escalating intervention, a European diplomat said.

“The new Administration has been in power in Washington for less than two months. It is neither fair nor practical to expect them to hav worked out this thorniest of foreign policy problems that was ignored for so long under the previous Administration,” the European said. “The parcels may not be reaching many, but at least the new team is committed to doing something and sending a message that we’re not just going to stand back and watch while the Bosnians die.”