U.N.’s Croatia Plan Frustrates Residents : Balkans: Little progress in peacekeepers’ new mandate seen. Anger at rebel Serbs remains.

Croats reacted with disappointment Saturday to the new U.N. peacekeeping mandate for their country, suggesting that the United Nations will have to be content with merely deferring violence in Croatia in the coming months. The higher goal of political re-integration seems too much to ask.

“This U.N. resolution is garbage,” complained Josip Popovic, a 60-year-old mechanical engineer who was spending the first afternoon of the new U.N. mandate at a cafe in Zagreb’s downtown square. “For the past four years, Croatia has been trying to attain a lasting peace through peaceful means (with the presence of U.N. troops). Now Croatia should just take matters into its own hands.”

Saturday’s blustery mood followed a week of down-to-the-wire diplomacy in Croatia and at U.N. headquarters in New York, as negotiators rushed to create a new peacekeeping mandate for this former Yugoslav republic before its previous U.N. mandate expired at midnight Friday.

The terms of the U.N. presence in Croatia had to be rewritten because President Franjo Tudjman had earlier threatened to evict all 12,000 U.N. troops from Croatia, complaining that they were helping this country’s secessionist Serbs hold onto territory captured in a bloody 1991 war.

The Serbian rebels now hold about one-third of Croatia, most of it in a curving strip of land called the Krajina, which runs along the border with Bosnia-Herzegovina. The rebels also hold a piece of relatively prosperous territory in easternmost Croatia, along the border with Serbia.

The previous U.N. mandate had called on the peacekeepers to enforce a cease-fire in these lands, and eventually to help restore Croatian authority over them. But this never happened, to the deep frustration of Croatian citizens.

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The Serbian rebels have instead held tenaciously to their captured territory, declared a “Republic of Serb Krajina,” and have taken advantage of their access to Croatia’s borders to receive illicit arms shipments from Serbia and Serb-held parts of Bosnia.

Details of the new U.N. mandate are still being worked out, but peacekeepers will probably be reduced in number to between 7,000 and 8,000, with about 1,000 positioned along Croatia’s borders.

But few Croats on Saturday believed that the stepped-up U.N. border presence will do much to stop the weapons shipments. The new mandate has the peacekeepers “monitoring and reporting” smuggling--not actually interdicting troops or weapon shipments.

Despite such limitations, the new framework calls for the peacekeepers to work toward the ultimate political re-integration of the Croats and their opponent Serbs.

“We have bought time,” said Peter Galbraith, the United States’ ambassador to Croatia. “Time to make diplomatic progress. I’m looking beyond this mandate to the next step, which is more critical.”

That step is repairing the infrastructure of Croatia, much of which still lies in ruins four years after the war.

Once repairs are made, Croatia is supposed to set to work on the seemingly intractable problems of how to resettle people who were driven out of their homes during the war and how to give legal autonomy to Croatian Serbs living in majority Serb regions.

Diplomats have offered a number of possible starting points, but the local parties show almost no sign of interest in accommodating each other.

The mood in Nova Gradiska, a town just over the 1991 cease-fire line from Serb-held Croatia, is illustrative. A roadside gas station and convenience store do a brisk business selling gasoline to rebel Serbs who tank up at the Croatian pumps. Gasoline is available only in tiny amounts in the Serb-held lands. But the Serbs say they want nothing to do with any other aspect of Croatian life.

A junior officer of the Croatian army stood nearby, looking with contempt at the lines of Ladas and Yugos waiting to buy gas. These people had driven him and his family from their home four years ago, he said. Now they could come to his land, Croatia, to buy gas, but he could still not set foot on their land.

“When I go back to my village, it will be with my boots on and a gun,” he said.

The only person who seemed pleased with this tense mingling of Serbs and Croats was the only person making any money from it--Durda Doslic, operator of the gas station and the store.