Harassed U.N. Force Plans for Difficult Pullout

In testimony to the U.N. Protection Force’s increasingly untenable position in the Balkan conflict, Bosnian Serbs took three U.N. officers captive, bound their hands and feet and laid them out like lumber on a rebel airstrip as human shields against NATO bombing.

That incident in the rebel stronghold of Banja Luka last week, coupled with an unrelenting campaign of hostage-taking, beatings, gunfire and other harassment, has prompted the peacekeeping mission here to review its evacuation plans “with a new sense of urgency and reality,” one U.N. official disclosed.

And what the military and civilian chiefs discovered Monday when they talked through their detailed withdrawal proposals is that they were designed in expectation of a massive infusion of North Atlantic Treaty Organization ground forces that the peacekeepers now realize will never happen.

“We’re looking at a withdrawal by which we can’t count on any support from the United States or NATO, with the possible exception of air cover,” said the U.N. official, who is privy to the evolving pullout plans.

No decision has been made yet about whether or when to move the 24,000 U.N. peacekeepers in Bosnia-Herzegovina out of harm’s way, but mission officials warn that tough choices on the future of the mission are imminent.

“Without a political breakthrough in the next couple of weeks, the withdrawal option will loom very large,” said the mission’s chief spokesman, Michael Williams.

Mission chief Yasushi Akashi and the U.N. commander for troops in Bosnia, Lt. Gen. Michael Rose, had long fought the use of NATO air power to punish Serbian aggression for fear that getting tough with the rebels would expose the U.N. force to retaliation and brinkmanship like the Banja Luka incident last week.

But the virtual removal of the threat of NATO air strikes--apparent now with the international community’s concession that it is helpless to stop a Serbian onslaught against the Bihac “safe haven”--has failed to have the expected effect of reducing harassment and pressures on the U.N. troops, Williams said.

More than 400 Canadian, British, Russian, Dutch and Ukrainian troops remain hostages of the rebels throughout Bosnia, and thousands of others are surrounded and could easily be taken captive.

Officials at the U.N. troops’ headquarters say the mission’s failure to protect the Bihac area has spawned a creeping realization that the peacekeepers are neither out of danger nor in any position to help the Bosnian civilians they were deployed to protect.

“One lesson you could draw from it is that we cannot operate anymore,” a senior mission official said.

That no-win situation has prompted the U.N. force to accelerate plans for withdrawal and to begin contemplating a worst-case scenario of a hostile, humiliating and dangerous retreat.

Serbian gunmen have been attacking select groups of peacekeepers to encourage them to abandon their tasks of protecting the six designated safe areas and escorting food convoys to civilian victims of the war.

But the mostly Muslim Bosnian government supporters living in the safe havens are expected to try to block their protectors’ departure, say U.N. officials who conjure up images of desperate women and children lying in the path of the retreating U.N. armored vehicles.

Monday’s examination of the pullout plans formulated over the past six months by military officials from the United Nations and NATO highlighted a number of misjudgments built into the planning.

Breakout contingency plans assumed the deployment of two NATO divisions--about 20,000 soldiers, at least half of them Americans. But U.N. officials acknowledge that such deployments would require political endorsement in each member country, and that the prevailing mood in the United States and Western Europe suggests that cobbling together an assistance force of that size would be impossible.

Defense Secretary William J. Perry has made it clear in recent days that the 2,000 U.S. Marines being positioned off the Adriatic Sea coast for support in the case of evacuations of U.N. peacekeepers will not set foot in Bosnia.

The head of U.N. peacekeeping operations, Kofi Annan, told reporters in New York that it would take as much as six months to withdraw the Balkans mission unless the operation draws considerable ground support from member countries.

NATO has a rapid-reaction force specially trained for rescue operations, but because of alliance policy that requires each contributing country to sign off on its troops’ participation in foreign actions, U.N. sources say they have been cautioned that at least a month would elapse before the NATO commandos could arrive.

Britain and France have their own commando brigades, but those alone would be insufficient to ensure the safe extraction of even their own national contingents.

One source criticized the withdrawal planning as “schoolboy stuff,” noting that its U.N. and NATO drafters had expended much energy examining unrealistic contingencies, such as the circumstances for a withdrawal prompted by the U.N. peacekeepers’ mission having been accomplished.

U.N. officials warn that as incidents of harassment multiply and continued involvement in peacekeeping becomes more difficult for the participating governments to justify to their citizens, unilateral withdrawal moves are likely to further undermine a safe conclusion of the mission.

Russia threatened Monday to withdraw its two battalions from the U.N. mission unless Western allies begin heeding Moscow’s voice.

Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev accused “a certain country” of unilateral actions in Bosnia--a reference to the U.S. decision to stop enforcing an arms embargo that bars weapons shipments to the Bosnian government.

“If things go on like this, the question of withdrawing Russian ‘blue helmets’ from former Yugoslavia would go from words to deeds,” he told reporters in Moscow.

France cut its contingent by 800 troops in October and plans to draw down the remaining 5,500 by another third by the end of the year.

Officials involved with the withdrawal plans say they are having to ponder degrading options for extricating troops in the most vulnerable positions, such as those deployed in the Serbian-encircled enclaves of Srebrenica, Gorazde and Zepa, as well as the 6,000 effectively trapped inside a rebel cordon around Sarajevo.

To evacuate those forces, one official said, the U.N. peacekeeping mission may have to negotiate a safe-passage agreement with the dominant rebels, by which Serbian gunmen would cover the U.N. troops’ retreat.

“A lot of people are saying withdrawal is simply not possible,” the official said. “Maybe (the U.N. peacekeeping mission) will be forced to stay because it cannot get out.”

Times staff writer Richard Boudreaux in Moscow contributed to this report.