Postscript : Millions of Land Mines Leave a Deadly Legacy in Balkans : * The U.N. Protection Force is dedicated to removing the devices planted by warring armies. But the process is slow and expensive.

Hands on hips, Lt. Patrick Goue, a diminutive officer of the French army, paced behind three soldiers who knelt in the dirt stabbing mounds of crabgrass with small sticks, probing for land mines left behind by a retreating army nearly three years ago.

So painstaking is the work of Goue’s 17 men that it takes them two hours to clear a 65-foot strip. In one week, in a rain-soaked field on the outskirts of the airport here, three mines were unearthed. One newly discovered antipersonnel mine--a hockey-puck-sized disk--fit in the palm of Goue’s hand.

“It’s small,” the Frenchman said. “But it’s enough for one foot.”

The work of the French force and others in the U.N. Protection Force in clearing mines here emphasizes the lasting crisis that hangs over much of the former Yugoslav federation.

Even if the conflict stopped now, this land could be uninhabitable unless thousands of hours and millions of dollars were poured into mine removal efforts, said Kenneth Anderson, an official with the private Human Rights Watch. The U.S. State Department estimates that 3 million mines have been planted in the Balkans.

The warring parties “could kiss and make up tomorrow, and they’d be facing a humanitarian disaster,” Anderson said. “We think the problem in the former Yugoslavia, taken as a whole, is massive.”

Its deadly nature was demonstrated May 1, when two American journalists were killed by mines. Brian Brinton, a photographer for Magnolia News, a Seattle weekly, and Francis Tomasic, a translator, were killed when their vehicle hit at least two mines on the road to Salakovac Dam north of Mostar.

The problem is particularly dangerous in the former Yugoslav federation, Anderson says, because the combatants have mined territory indiscriminately--even when they anticipate returning to it later. Although the warring parties may be trying to keep track of where they leave their mines, there are inevitable, lethal errors in their minefield maps.

This means that the Balkans will join Cambodia and Afghanistan in grappling with a murderous legacy of mines for decades to come. Human rights workers say one of every 200 Cambodians has been injured by a mine in three decades of conflict there.

“Here we’ve got a situation with back-and-forth fighting in a very shortsighted way,” Anderson said. “Shooting themselves in the foot is the wrong term. They’re blowing their feet off down the road.”

The prospect has prompted human rights groups to campaign to ban the devices outright; some opponents of mine warfare want to see them outlawed like chemical and biological weapons. Preliminary talks on a ban will be held in Geneva this month, Anderson said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross estimates that there are 65 million to 100 million active mines buried in fields, forests and beaches worldwide, said Johanne Slakmon, an official of the organization’s anti-mine campaign.

“The problem is that mines are used against civilians as a weapon of terror, as a psychological terror,” she said. “We have proof that more and more mines are not used for military necessity, but against civilians.”

Military uses, meanwhile, are unusually cruel. For instance, antipersonnel mines, some no wider than saucers, are meant to injure as much as to kill, slowing advancing armies by forcing them to treat their wounded.

Western arms manufacturers have suggested that mines could be built with self-destruct mechanisms so they would be eliminated at a set time. But the mechanism would make mines more costly, and the key reason armies use them now is that they provide a cheap defense. Some mines can be made for less than $20 each, and Balkan regimes have their own factories to produce them.

The Yugoslav government of Josip Broz Tito stockpiled the weapons to protect the country against anticipated onslaughts by either the former Soviet Union or North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries.

Ridding the land of mines, in contrast, is costly--about $300 to $1,000 for each device, if experts include the expense of training sapper crews and safeguarding them against the risks of their jobs. The cost quickly soaks up aid from international agencies to rebuild war-torn areas.

U.N. military experts--such as Danish Maj. Paul Nedergaard--shudder when they consider how long it could take to clear Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia of mines. More likely, much of the affected land will simply be sealed. “There will be lots of places here where you won’t be able to walk in the woods anymore,” he said.

Local authorities are working with international aid organizations such as the United Nations Children’s Fund to try to educate children not to play with mines or other relics left by retreating forces.

Although military engineers for the U.N. forces here have lent their expertise to local units clearing mines from the heavy Croatian-Serbian fighting of 1991, the United Nations officially clears mines only in territory used by its own personnel.

So far in the conflict, mines have killed 12 U.N. troops and injured 128.

But the U.N. sappers, Nedergaard said proudly as he watched the work of Goue and his troops, have never had a casualty. That fact, though, does not remove caution. “If we had very good maps, we could do it much quicker,” the Danish officer said. “But we can’t rely on them. We have to treat (everything) as an unknown area, an unknown minefield.”