Aid Workers Face Increasingly Hazardous Duty : Bosnia: Relief has been suspended after NATO’s ultimatum. But the deliveries were already in trouble.

After passing unscathed through the fierce battle zone around the town of Gornji Vakuf and negotiating the perilous Route Diamond passage across snowbound mountains, truckers hauling aid to starving civilians in central Bosnia were blocked by boulders strewn across the road.

Men armed with long knives leaped out of the flanking forest, slashing at the canvas sides of the trucks and looting their cargo of food and blankets.

The incident near Novi Travnik late last month was just one in an expanding volume of frightening clashes between those delivering relief supplies to Bosnia-Herzegovina’s endangered millions and the growing segment of the population that feels the outside world’s stymied efforts to feed them are not enough.

This week, NATO allies issued an ultimatum to Bosnian Serbs, threatening limited military action unless they remove their artillery from sites surrounding Sarajevo; that move led to the suspension of aid deliveries throughout Bosnia.

But, as the recent events have shown, to resume carrying out the West’s humanitarian objectives while the war rages would prove an increasingly hazardous and unmanageable undertaking for both the civilian truck drivers and the U.N. troops assigned to escort them.

More than 30 peacekeepers and 11 humanitarian relief workers have been killed in Bosnia since nationalist Serbs, armed and encouraged by the neighboring rump Yugoslavia, launched a deadly rebellion against Bosnian independence in March, 1992.

The work is also becoming more frustrating because of its declining rate of success as combatants routinely steal or turn back aid deliveries bound for rival communities.

After the slaying of a British aid worker by Islamic radicals last month and violent attacks on convoys that now occur almost daily, aid officials say it is becoming clear their work may have to end.

“We’re looking at this spring with a fair amount of trepidation. We’re winding down a bit,” John Fawcett of the International Rescue Committee said of the group’s operations.

Like other aid officials, he fears that his agency’s relief work will be endangered if a suspected offensive by all three warring factions is launched once winter ends. “We have no firm plans for pulling out, but whatever happens we might not want to be quite so big,” he said of the 270-member staff he directs here.

The New York-based agency has concentrated on making life in this nationwide war zone survivable. It has: trucked in home-repair materials to replace shell-damaged roofs and windows; helped city dwellers install alternative heating systems after gas and electricity services were disrupted by rebel sabotage or combat; imported seeds so some Bosnians could grow their own food on balconies and in victory gardens.

While the agency has been less susceptible to looting and harassment because its cargoes seldom include food, the persistent warfare has hampered operations and frayed nerves.

“What we need to do is take the initiative and not let the fear of retaliation become policy,” Fawcett said, disparaging debate within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization about the wisdom of launching air strikes. “Opening Tuzla airport is a matter of landing a few planes there. “We need to force this process and show the Serbs that the international community is going to do what it says.”

Opinions on the value of air strikes vary among the humanitarian aid workers, who are among the most exposed to potential retaliation. But most officials feel the current practice of using relief work as an alibi for inaction and indecision has to change.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees is particularly concerned that escalating calls for using force to open Tuzla’s airport or clear combatant barricades blocking aid deliveries are being issued on behalf of relief agencies that have not asked for such intervention. “We don’t feel that the (U.N. refugee agency) should be used to justify a decision one way or another” on the use of force, said Manoel de Almeida e Silva, the agency’s spokesman for the former Yugoslav federation.

There are concerns among relief workers that the use of force against any one side would endanger convoy drivers operating in territory controlled by the targeted fighters. U.N. soldiers, journalists and other foreigners in Bosnia have similar concerns about the risk of hostage-taking or assassinations.

If NATO chooses to use force to achieve one small objective, rather than in a comprehensive effort to impose peace, the U.N. refugee agency “will have to take a step back and see what effect that has on the operation,” Almeida e Silva said. “I’m not saying that we will have to stop altogether. We have to see, can we go on?”

The Geneva-based refugee agency has taken the lead in delivering vital food, medicine and other supplies since the war began and has been successful with its high-profile Sarajevo airlift, on which 380,000 residents of the capital depend.

But beyond this besieged city, in the rural areas where most of Bosnia’s 2.7 million needy are cut off by battle lines, the amount of aid getting through ranges from token to none at all. “We’ve managed to get only one convoy into Maglaj in eight months. It’s a joke,” Kris Janowski, Sarajevo spokesman for the refugee agency, said of the Serb-encircled enclave in northern Bosnia where as many as one-third of the 100,000 people suffer from malnutrition.

Besieged cities such as Gorazde, Srebrenica, Tuzla and Zepa also get only a fraction of the aid destined for their mostly Muslim populations because of Serbian rebel roadblocks and fighting between Croats and Muslims.

The execution-style shooting death of British aid worker Paul Goodall, a father of four, has shaken the relief community and given pause to those trying to feed Bosnia’s needy.

“As the situation deteriorates, so does the level of dependence of the civilian population,” said Michael Stievater, the International Rescue Committee’s director for Bosnian operations. “For the moment, we’re not thinking of leaving. But certainly, if we saw a continued deterioration, we wouldn’t be able to function.”

Only 20% of the food aid collected for Bosnia reached the civilian communities for which it was destined in December, U.N. figures show. Non-food items, such as tents for the homeless and fuel to power hospital generators, were even harder to deliver because Serbian and Croatian gunmen have deemed them “military supplies.”

“Why only 20%? Because we are stopped and turned back because of the fighting. Or because there are demonstrations and we can’t get through. Or at the checkpoints they won’t let us go through,” said Alemka Lisinski of the refugee agency’s headquarters in Zagreb, Croatia.

The U.N. refugee agency’s latest field report recorded 1,055 security incidents involving its personnel in the past 16 months.

The diminishing effectiveness of the relief mission, even with the supplement of nightly airdrops into inaccessible communities, leaves unanswered the question asked by aid officials from the start of their operation: Is it possible to ease the plight of civilians in the midst of full-scale war?

That question has left aid agencies struggling with the difficult choice of soldiering on with their dangerous mission or withdrawing and leaving the war’s innocent victims to starve.

Times special correspondent Danica Kirka in Zagreb, Croatia, contributed to this report.