COLUMN ONE : In U.N., Not All Troops Are Equal : The plight of Bangladeshis in Bosnia shows inequities faced by Third World peacekeepers. Western forces would not have been so ill-prepared or neglected for so long, officials say.

Col. Salim Akhtar has the job from hell. For nearly six months, the Bangladeshi officer has guided 1,200 countrymen through the perils of U.N. peacekeeping in what has been the most menacing corner of the former Yugoslav federation.

The colonel and his subcontinental soldiers have managed to hold their own in conditions unlike anything back home. They have endured months of European winter without hot water or regular heat. Food and weapons have been rationed, and shivering recruits have burned oil siphoned from their armored vehicles to stay warm.

But in the end, the battered battalion may best be remembered not for taking on such adversity, but for inadvertently laying bare an unspoken maxim in the U.N. Protection Force, or UNPROFOR, based here: Not all peacekeepers are equal.

In the high-stakes game of peacekeeping on this splintered doorstep to the European continent, it often pays to be European or North American in order to be heard, treated seriously and sent into battle zones well-equipped.

“UNPROFOR is basically a European organization,” Akhtar said in an interview during a visit to Zagreb, the Croatian capital. “People here think that because we come from the third part of the world that we are less capable.”

In the deadly Bihac pocket in northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina, about 75 miles south of here, it is unlikely that European troops would have been deployed so ill-prepared, or neglected by the United Nations for so long, say U.N. and other officials in the Balkans.

Part of the blame falls on the Bangladeshis, who showed up unready for an arduous deployment--a chronic problem with peacekeepers from impoverished countries. Defenders of the United Nations say it is unfair to blame it for such global realities.

But UNPROFOR compounded the shortcomings of the tropical nation’s contingent by sending it to one of the war’s most volatile flash points--a place where European troops refuse to go--and by paying too little attention to its worsening plight. The handling of the “Bangbat problem,” as the battalion’s predicament is known, points to fundamental inequities within UNPROFOR, critics say.

Is there a double standard in the U.N. mission here? “There is no doubt about it,” said the straight-speaking Bangladeshi commander, a soldier for 25 years.

Only one in four Bangladeshis arrived in Bihac with a rifle, many lacked basic winter attire, and the first U.N. fuel shipment turned up two months into their posting. Five soldiers were wounded and one was killed in December when, desperate for fuel, they ventured outside their besieged camp and were ambushed by rebel Serbs.

“The Bangladeshis don’t have the clout or visibility of, say, the French, who were in Bihac before them,” said a Western aid official with extensive experience in the region. As with many current and former officials, the aid worker requested anonymity.

“What happens when the Bangladeshis go ballistic because their guys aren’t being fed or getting supplies?” the official asked. “The reaction at the U.N. is pretty much: ‘Who’s going to care?’ ”

Troops from countries such as Bangladesh, Kenya and Malaysia, while deployed alongside Europeans and Canadians because of the global underpinnings of U.N. peacekeeping, are often treated as second-class citizens by their better-paid, better-equipped and better-connected counterparts, according to current and former U.N. officials.

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When the Bangladeshis took command of Bihac from the French in October, for example, the United Nations created a new level of bureaucracy--known as the Bihac Area Command--and placed a Canadian colonel over Akhtar. The United Nations said the change was necessary because the Bangladeshis, unlike the French, were new to peacekeeping in the region.

But a recently departed U.N. official said there were other reasons, including one the official described as most telling: The United Nations recognized its own bureaucracy was not likely to respond diligently to requests from a Bangladeshi. For Akhtar, that would have made the already difficult assignment in Bihac next to impossible.

“There was a clear assumption that he would not even get his phone calls returned within the U.N. system,” the former official said. “It represents the last vestige of colonialism. Everything must go through a Westerner.”

Akhtar protested the unprecedented change in command to British Lt. Gen. Michael Rose, then U.N. commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He was told that the general preferred a “multinational command” in Bihac, Akhtar said.

“There is racism within the U.N.,” Akhtar said. “I would not cast all of UNPROFOR as racist. I don’t think it is an institutional problem. It is a problem of individuals.”

Several U.N. officials from European and other countries shared Akhtar’s assessment.

“Within the officer corps of the military here, there are quite a lot of racist attitudes,” one official said. “It is deeply disturbing and personally upsetting.”

The inequity has had repercussions beyond the Bangladeshi battalion. The Zagreb government has learned the lesson so well that it now insists that a reconfigured U.N. mission in Croatia be free of Third World participants. The Croats wanted to dump the Russians as well--the former Soviet Bloc also ranks near the bottom in the U.N. pecking order here--but realized that Russia was too powerful and influential in the Balkans to cross.

Croatian officials believe that the United Nations will react more decisively to the Croat-Serb stalemate in their country if more European necks are on the line.

“You could have the entire U.N. operation consisting of Bangladeshis, Peruvians, Western Samoans or whatever, but without the political resolve of the Europeans, there is no chance for a solution,” said Zoran Bosinjak, a Croatian Foreign Ministry official.

The Croatian position has been denounced as racist by some Western diplomats and U.N. officials. Several Croatian politicians have even framed their demands in overtly racist terms, with the mayor of one town insisting that all African and Asian peacekeepers be shipped to Bosnia. Some Croats have also demanded that the U.N. commander for Croatia, a Jordanian, be replaced with a European.

The Croatian position reflects the reality of European influence in the region, the military might of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the politics of the United Nations itself, U.N. officials and analysts said.

The United Nations has never been an organization of equals. Under the U.N. Charter, the Security Council wields more influence than the larger and more diverse General Assembly. And within the Security Council, permanent members--the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China--have a greater say than temporary ones.

The U.N. mission in the former Yugoslav federation, the officials and analysts said, has functioned as a microcosm of the parent organization.

“It is less a question of racism than a reflection of the importance of particular countries,” said a former U.N. official from a Third World country with U.N. experience in Europe and the Third World. “People take notice of the British, French or Americans, for example, because they have more clout in the system.

“As a matter of principle, the U.N. should show more even-handedness,” the former official said. “One wishes it would be different, but it isn’t.”

Zagreb University professor Slaven Letica, a former adviser to Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, said it was a shock for Croatians to see firsthand the inequalities within the U.N. mission. When peacekeepers arrived three years ago, Letica said, Croatians had a romantic view of the world body as “a highly principle-driven institution.”

Letica, who worked in the 1980s for the World Health Organization, a U.N. agency, said the peacekeeping experience in Croatia and Bosnia has followed the pattern of missions he observed elsewhere.

“Even from a pragmatic point of view, the salaries of the different national troops are widely different,” he said. “Soldiers from one country are getting paid two to three times less than those from another country. This creates a difference in social status.”

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Supporters acknowledge such problems but say they reflect the United Nations’ diverse membership.

The United Nations pays $988 per month for each peacekeeper. Each government decides how much to pass on to its soldiers. Since most countries pay troops equivalent to what they would earn at home, wages vary from a few hundred dollars a month to several thousand dollars.

Critics charge that the disparity encourages corruption and black-marketing among poorly paid soldiers, which in turn reinforces prejudices against them. Internal investigations, which have not been made public by the United Nations, have uncovered corruption--from illegal fuel sales to prostitution--among some former Soviet Bloc and Third World contingents in the region, U.N. officials said.

The level of preparedness of troops is also dramatically uneven. Richer countries, particularly those in NATO, are deployed with the best equipment. Poorer countries rely on the United Nations to deliver what they cannot supply themselves.

Several armies, including that of Bangladesh, have even been dubbed “mercenary peacekeeping forces” by some U.N. officials, because their countries often seek the hard currency and jobs the missions provide.

But the United Nations, which is usually strapped for cash, is not always able to come through on time--if at all.

“You can move a battalion of troops somewhere in a couple of weeks, but then to get the purchase orders approved for supplies and trucks, pull together the donated equipment and then get people trained to use it can take as long as the troop rotation itself,” said William Durch, a U.N. specialist at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a defense-oriented research organization in Washington.

The degree of cooperation among participating countries can also be remarkably poor. In the case of the Bangladeshis, the United Nations was able to provide the troops with winter equipment donated by the Germans, including boots, uniforms and sleeping bags that had belonged to the East German army.

The United Nations also bought several hundred shipping containers, used as sleeping quarters, from the French, who packed up most everything else--vehicles, weapons, water heaters--when they left Bihac in a rush in October.

“The U.N. cannot force countries to leave equipment behind,” Durch said. “And the U.N. does not have the capability on its own to instantly bring a contingent up to Western standards and training. These problems will always exist.”

The problems of the Bangladeshis, in particular, cannot be laid solely on the United Nations.

The Bangladeshis arrived ill-prepared in part because their 50-ton shipment of supplies and equipment was accidentally routed to Egypt, where it sat until November. Akhtar said a U.S. shipping company was responsible for the error. By the time the shipment had arrived, Bihac was under siege, and it was extremely dangerous and difficult to move the supplies.

U.N. officials acknowledge that it was “ill-advised” to send the battalion into Bihac before the shipment arrived, but the United Nations was in a bind. The French were pulling out of Bihac, leaving its 200,000 Muslim residents surrounded by hostile Serbs and rebel Muslims. The United Nations desperately turned to the Bangladeshis because no other country would volunteer troops. Akhtar said his country has a tradition of U.N. peacekeeping and was eager to assist in the Balkans mission. The Bangladeshis agreed to the Bihac posting, he said, after a year of negotiations with UNPROFOR that touched upon everything from logistic problems to U.N. commitments for supplies and winter gear.

Even when the Bangladeshis’ problems worsened, other countries would not budge.

Western countries refused to air-drop relief supplies--the practice in other Bosnian enclaves encircled by rebel Serbs--because of dangers to the aircraft, U.N. officials said. And the British rejected requests to provide backup for the battalion.

The Bangladeshis were left to fend for themselves in the December ambush as well, even though UNPROFOR characterized it as the most serious assault ever on its peacekeepers. The Bangladeshis received hundreds of needed rifles only in January, when the French agreed to smuggle them in by night helicopter, the United Nations said.

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Efforts to evacuate the wounded in December--including the one soldier who later died at a military hospital in Zagreb--were delayed for four hours because Bosnian and Croatian Serbs continued to fire on the Bangladeshis, Akhtar said. The attack had come after a major offensive by the Muslim-led Bosnian government, making the Muslim Bangladeshi peacekeepers a welcome target for the rebel Serbs, he said.

Nine months earlier, when French troops came under fire near Bihac, the United Nations had called for NATO air protection. In the case of the Bangladeshis, no demonstration of NATO muscle was sought.

UNPROFOR senior spokesman Michael Williams said bad weather, the difficulty of targeting weapons used in the attack and the presence of antiaircraft missile systems made the use of air power too dangerous.

But NATO officials dismissed the concerns as unfounded and said they had been prepared to respond if the United Nations had asked.

Williams said the United Nations feared that helping the Bangladeshis would have endangered other peacekeepers by angering the rebel Serbs, who had already taken peacekeepers hostage. Akhtar said he accepts the U.N. explanation.

“Maybe if we had been Europeans, there might have been a massive air strike,” Akhtar said. “But to be honest with you, I was interested only in the medical evacuation. I didn’t think about anything else except helping my soldiers.”