U.N. Forces Mull How to Finesse a Bosnia Pullout

Sometime in late autumn, if Bosnian Serb gunmen are still resisting the quest for peace here, 20,000 blue-bereted U.N. soldiers may begin surreptitiously pulling out of this country.

The troops deployed in the middle of the worst conflict in Europe since World War II will find themselves between a rock and a hard place, if a U.N. arms embargo is lifted so the underdog Bosnian government can defend itself against the heavily armed Serbian nationalist forces.

If they stay, the U.N. troops risk being taken hostage and used as human shields by angry Serbian rebels who count on their superiority in weapons to keep hold of the 70% of Bosnia-Herzegovina they have conquered since launching their deadly land grab 29 months ago.

If they decide to leave, the U.N. soldiers could be blocked by desperate Bosnian civilians fearful of being abandoned to intensified artillery assaults before their defensive armaments could be brought in.

And if they delay the decision until the debate over the arms embargo is concluded, the peacekeeper-captives are likely to be overtaken by events.

The dilemma has forced U.N. commanders to draw up contingency plans for a preemptive withdrawal and set nerves on edge throughout the ranks of the U.N. Protection Force as senior officers ponder how, whether and when to depart hurriedly.

“Any withdrawal is one of the most difficult military operations you can do,” said British Maj. Dacre Holloway, a spokesman for the U.N. Protection Force, known as UNPROFOR. “If we wait until there’s a decision to lift the arms embargo, it will be too late.”

Bosnian Serb rejection of yet another internationally mediated peace proposal has intensified pressure in the U.S. Congress to exempt the Muslim-led government from a 1991 U.N. Security Council ban on arms sales to former Yugoslav republics.

While the embargo was intended to shackle all potential combatants, it has in practice hampered only the Bosnian government. Serbia, the dominant partner with Montenegro in the rump Yugoslavia, produces its own weapons and shares them generously with Bosnian Serb proxies, and Croatian gunrunning has proved impossible to stifle because of that country’s 400-mile-long seacoast and unmonitored borders.

After the Bosnian Serb parliament in July scuttled a partition-for-peace plan drafted by a five-nation “contact group,” President Clinton vowed to get the arms ban lifted so the Bosnian government could fight on an even battlefield. He gave the Serbs until Oct. 15 to capitulate to the settlement or face a revitalized government army.

That deadline now looms over the U.N. mission, as senior officers and officials from the largest troop-contributing nations have repeatedly warned they cannot maintain their stance of impartiality if U.N. member states intervene to arm the government.

British Lt. Gen. Michael Rose, the commander of U.N. forces in Bosnia, has predicted a “nightmare scenario” if the arms embargo is lifted and the more than 20,000 troops deployed in Bosnia are forced to leave.

Gunmen loyal to Bosnian Serb nationalist leader Radovan Karadzic have vowed to step up attacks on the surviving free areas of this country in the event any outside power sides with the embattled government. The rebels also have an established track record of targeting U.N. soldiers.

The dilemma confronting the mission is how to leave in time to escape the wrath of either the government or the rebels without formally acknowledging that the troops are in retreat.

Even the U.N. special representative for the Balkans, Yasushi Akashi, concedes the withdrawal would have to begin before a final decision on the embargo if it were to be effective in getting troops out of harm’s way.

“We certainly need lead time to extract ourselves from the theater and to do it with the least danger,” Akashi, who also serves as mission chief, told British journalists late last month. “We may have to do it prior to the lifting of the embargo.”

Some sources at the U.N. command center here say a relocation of the most exposed forces is more likely than a full retreat, with peacekeepers moved to the relative safety of central Bosnia from the eastern enclaves of Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde, and possibly from Sarajevo.

British forces maintain a massive peacekeeping base in the central Bosnian town of Vitez that could take in the evacuees on short notice. The official U.N. headquarters for Bosnia is actually in the town of Kiseljak, 20 miles west of here, which would allow a swift transfer of command and control to an area outside the immediate range of Serbian artillery.

The forward headquarters in Sarajevo, by contrast, is in sight and shooting range of Bosnian Serb gunmen who control the surrounding high ground and separated from the capital’s population by little more than a few sandbags and a barbed-wire fence.

The command center in the heart of the city, where Rose and his senior officers work and sleep, is even more vulnerable to Bosnian Serb artillery or a potential blockade by Bosnian civilians.

“We’re looking at the kinds of questions we’ll have to face when the shells start falling again or the Muslims surround us,” said one European officer. “How much of our (armor and weaponry) would we have to leave behind to be allowed free movement? And how is that going to affect our chances of getting out unscathed from the enclaves?”

Timing is highly sensitive and premature moves could unduly influence the political decisions. For example, another European officer noted, pulling out early from rebel-encircled Srebrenica could inspire the Serbs to move in and capture the enclave, inflicting heavy civilian casualties that would strengthen the United States’ inclination to intercede.

The officer, a career artilleryman, seemed less concerned about U.N. troops being trapped in the enclaves.

“When you are under artillery threat, the most secure thing to do is to stay where you are,” he said. “We have strongholds and bunkers for protecting ourselves. If they are adequately supplied, they could just hunker down and try to wait it out.”

While some officers believe a reduced mission could be maintained once the most exposed troops are moved to safety, others argue that if a decision is made to abandon the enclaves the withdrawal would have to be complete.

“We’re not talking about a redeployment,” said Lt. Col. Jamie Daniell, Rose’s second in command. “What purpose do we serve if we pull out to some other area and leave the people in the ‘safe areas’ to fend for themselves? If we have to go, we go out all together.”

But Daniell said he doubted the arms embargo would be lifted and the U.N. forces compelled to leave.

“Why does it have to be all wrapped up by Christmas?” Daniell asked, arguing it would be better to stay 20 years if the U.N. peacekeepers’ presence would be a deterrent to renewed fighting. “You lift the arms embargo, we pull out of here and you have World War III. In my view, it’s better to keep them talking forever than to get them fighting again.”

A senior U.N. civilian affairs officer also believes the mission is here to stay because, as he put it, “we are the only alternative for preventing more war.”

The official, who according to the procedures of the mission is not allowed to be quoted by name, predicts the U.N. force will be in the Balkans for at least 20 years.

“I was involved in the planning for the Cyprus mission, and that too was expected to only last two years,” the official said. “Even on a small island like Cyprus, we’ve been stuck for 20 years, and this situation is much, much more complicated.”

But opponents of lifting the arms embargo seem at a loss to explain how the conflict-weary international community would be able to maintain an indefinite commitment to what is already the most expensive peacekeeping mission in history and arguably the least effective.

At least 110 U.N. soldiers have been killed in the Balkans since the mission began in April, 1992, and well over 1,000 others have been wounded.

Western countries that provide the lion’s share of funding for U.N. missions have long complained of the drain on resources, and successive appeals for more troops for the Balkan effort have failed to attract contributions from politically impartial countries.

A Western diplomat who has been critical of the U.N. course of intervention from the start is skeptical the troops will actually pull out this fall. But he adds that the mission is so flawed in its concept that its commanders will sooner or later have to admit failure and leave.

“It is not a gratuitous put-down of (the U.N. force) to say it is hopeless, given that it was handed an impossible, unfulfillable mandate with insufficient forces and placed at tremendous risk,” the diplomat said.

He described the ever-expanding deployment as a cover for Western reluctance to intervene militarily and put a stop to the nationalist blood bath when it began.

“For the British and the French, who have the most troops in Bosnia and have suffered the most casualties, bringing the boys back home alive has become the main objective,” he said.

Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic believes the arms embargo will be lifted, as Clinton has suggested, “because there is no other way to impose peace short of the use of massive military force, and no major power is ready to do that.”

He added that he has always believed the United States would eventually move to end the ban hampering the defense of Bosnia, even if it has to act without the support of West European allies, “because going on record in history that it kept an embargo on the victim country is incongruous with its image as a democracy.

“But that should not be automatically linked with (the U.N. force’s) leaving,” Silajdzic insisted, noting the peacekeepers were deployed here to help feed civilians cut off by rebel blockades and to protect those exposed to artillery assaults--dangers that will persist or worsen if the embargo is lifted.