Bosnia Convoy Deal Could Undermine U.N. Presence, Aid Workers Say : Balkans: Relief flights to Sarajevo are suspended after a British cargo plane is fired on.

French Gen. Philippe Morillon’s dramatic delivery of aid to a besieged Muslim city may have undermined U.N. operations in Bosnia by caving in to Serbian demands that convoys move without military protection, relief workers said Saturday.

Morillon, the commander of U.N. peacekeeping forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina, set what many involved in humanitarian aid operations see as a dangerous precedent in agreeing to travel without an armored escort.

Protecting aid convoys is the sole mission of the nearly 7,000 troops now stationed in Bosnia as part of the U.N. Protection Force (UNPROFOR).

“If convoys go without escorts, UNPROFOR might as well pack up their things and go out of Bosnia-Herzegovina,” said Lars Baerendsen of Denmark, leader of a Sarajevo-bound convoy blocked for the sixth day by a standoff like Morillon’s with Serbian rebels over the need for armed protection.

In a related development likely to worsen the plight of Bosnians holding out against the year-old Serbian siege, relief flights to Sarajevo were suspended after a British transport plane was fired on near the capital’s airport.

Morillon’s triumph Friday in getting food and medicine to starving Muslim refugees in the city of Srebrenica has been widely hailed as an act of courage, and the general has vowed to stay in the Serb-besieged city until the humanitarian nightmare taking dozens of lives each day is ended by further aid deliveries.

The U.N. commander also managed Saturday, after a daylong tug-of-war with the Serbian gunmen, to evacuate 99 severely wounded women and children and nearly 600 of their relatives to the Muslim stronghold of Tuzla, 45 miles northwest of Srebrenica.

The same 18 trucks that had taken aid to Srebrenica rumbled into Tuzla at nightfall laden with the evacuees, said Judith Kumin of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Some of the wounded had been injured by shrapnel three weeks ago when the Serbs stepped up their offensive in eastern Bosnia.

Nearly 600 relatives and elderly Srebrenica residents were allowed to accompany the wounded after they mobbed the U.N. vehicles in desperate attempts to escape incessant shelling and the disease and starvation rampant in the overcrowded city.

Serbian forces apparently made no objection to their departure, probably because depletion of Srebrenica’s 60,000 residents would make the city easier to conquer.

The rebels had earlier blocked the medical convoy only four miles into its journey to demand that U.N. troops forcibly relocate Serbs still living in Tuzla, which is multiethnic but predominantly Muslim.

U.N. officers declined to get involved in relocating civilians, a U.N. military observer here said.

“I don’t doubt there are some Serbs who want to leave, but we can’t just go around Tuzla with trucks picking up people,” Kumin said, adding that the U.N. refugee agency has promised to look into the Serbian claims.

A Zvornik-based rebel commander, Vladimir Dakic, refused to allow two other aid convoys to proceed on the same grounds. He demanded that Serbs in Tuzla and Gorazde first be taken to Zvornik.

As Serbian forces have swept through eastern Bosnia to rout the last few enclaves of Muslim Slavs, they have repeatedly sought to draw both U.N. military and relief crews into their quest for ethnic partitioning.

Serbian forces have closed to within a mile of Srebrenica and their heavy artillery could be heard blasting at the city every minute or two, even in this border town 20 miles away.

The two convoys that were denied onward passage by Dakic parked on the Yugoslav side of the Drina River across from Zvornik to await permission to cross the bridge into Bosnia. The 18 U.N. refugee agency vehicles and their Danish drivers joined about three dozen Canadian peacekeepers who have spent 10 days waiting at the muddy encampment the bored troops have dubbed their “dump on the Drina.”

Fatigue-clad residents of the ever-expanding encampment spent Saturday washing their laundry and sunning themselves atop their idled armor.

Some expressed concern that Morillon’s decision to travel to Srebrenica unprotected could embolden the Serbs to bar all military escorts.

“Normally when you have a convoy this size you take a military escort,” said Bill Karaktin, an American spokesman for the U.N. mission standing by in Mali Zvornik on the Yugoslav side. “Yesterday Gen. Morillon decided not to take an escort, and this may set a precedent.”

Bo Madsen, leader of a U.N. refugee agency convoy bound for Gorazde, said Serbs told him he could proceed but only if he left the military contingent behind.

“On some routes that would be OK, but not to Gorazde,” Madsen said of the Muslim enclave that, like Srebrenica, is under fierce Serbian siege.

The U.N. rules of engagement allow the lightly armed peacekeepers to use force only when they themselves are fired on from identifiable positions. Because attacks on aid convoys tend to come from well-camouflaged artillery positions in the hills overlooking convoy routes, there have been few cases of U.N. military escorts returning fire.

Even under protective escort, several relief truck drivers have been killed taking aid into Bosnia and many have been wounded.

French troops were not even authorized to use force when a Sarajevo government official was assassinated by Serbian forces while traveling under their protection in Sarajevo.

U.N. troops stationed in Bosnia complain bitterly about their mandate, which they see as handcuffing them with the label of “peacekeepers” when there is no semblance of a peace to keep.

“Let us come back as peacemakers and we might be able to do something about this disaster,” one officer said angrily as he watched his colleagues pleading before the swaggering Dakic for permission to do their jobs.

Some relief workers privately describe the U.N. armored columns as a hindrance, noting that the Serbian forces tend to react with more hostility toward the military escorts.

But others spoke angrily of Morillon’s decision to travel unprotected, asserting it jeopardized the entire U.N. operation.

Those fears appeared to be validated by the rebels’ refusal to let the latest convoys pass, and by statements from the Serbian occupational government that it wants no further U.N. military involvement in eastern Bosnia.