General Aims at His U.N. Commanders : Balkans: Ambitious peace plans aren’t backed up by enough troops, military leader complains.

The French general in charge of 26,000 U.N. troops in the Balkans on Saturday issued an unusually blunt criticism of his commanders on the U.N. Security Council, saying they have deployed him on a mission with too little muscle.

U.N. Protection Force commander Gen. Jean Cot also expressed dissatisfaction with what he views as halfhearted commitments offered by the United States and NATO to send up to 50,000 troops to enforce a possible peace plan in embattled Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Cot said in an interview at the sprawling mission headquarters here that last week’s extension of the U.N. peacekeeping mandate for the former Yugoslav republics bowed so much to Croatian interests that it had alienated and agitated the Serbian insurgents who occupy one-third of Croatia.

Security Council Resolution 871, passed Monday, appears to make the lifting of U.N. sanctions on Serb-run Yugoslavia contingent on resolving the armed standoff between Serbian rebels and Croatian government troops here.

Serbian authorities in the occupied territory that has been proclaimed the Republic of Serbian Krajina have denounced the resolution as “an option for war.”

“In tone, this resolution is favorable to the Croatian side, as evidenced by reports in the Croatian press which have presented it as a great victory,” Cot said of the resolution. “Consequently, we have already been able to observe a hardening of the Serbian position.”

Cot criticized what he described as “an extraordinary paradox” in the sheaf of Security Council resolutions that have saddled the U.N. mission with ambitious peacekeeping goals while failing to provide the troops to perform them.

He has appealed for 4,000 more soldiers to patrol the conflict areas of Croatia and “a very minimum of 7,500” more for deployment in Bosnia in advance of any attempt to implement a peace plan in the ravaged republic.

NATO officials have said they are prepared to send up to 50,000 troops--half of them U.S. soldiers--to police an agreement if it has the support of all three warring factions in Bosnia and proves durable enough to allow the safe deployment of NATO peacekeepers.

President Clinton has made U.S. participation further contingent on a congressional vote of approval.

“We do not expect to see any NATO arrival before one month” after a truce is signed, Cot said, predicting that the bulk of the promised peacekeeping force will likely need at least two months to deploy into Bosnia.

“My greatest fear is for the period immediately after the signing of an agreement and what could happen to the population,” the general said. “We could see massive population shifts” spurred by an accord that designates separate states for Bosnia’s Serbs, Croats and Muslims.

U.N.-mediated negotiations on a peace plan for Bosnia broke down in late September, when the Muslim-led Bosnian Parliament rejected a formula for division drawn up by Serbian and Croatian nationalists who together hold 90% of Bosnia.

No further talks are scheduled, and U.N. officials say they hold out only slim hopes of a halt to the fighting and civilian displacements before winter.