British Bring Up Big Guns to Bolster Peacekeepers

The future of the faltering U.N. peacekeeping mission in the Balkans may well rest with the success of an experiment under way in this central Bosnian town tucked 15 miles behind the front line.

Beginning today, hundreds of British soldiers will rumble past the ruins of downtown Gornji Vakuf to an abandoned tool factory that they will make home.

The troops from the 19th Field Regiment will be carrying the blue flag of the U.N. Protection Force, but unlike thousands of peacekeepers before them, they will be hauling artillery never deployed by U.N. forces in the volatile region.

A dozen 105-millimeter guns are making the tortuous journey from the Adriatic port of Split, Croatia, where they have been flown from Britain over the past few days. The British unilaterally dispatched the force last week in response to rebel harassment of its peacekeepers, and the troops will likely join a quick reaction force approved Saturday by NATO and European Union leaders in Paris.

The light artillery have a range of about 10 miles--nearly double that of any weapon in the U.N. arsenal--and were considered invaluable in the British war in the Falkland Islands in 1982.

Although they have been hastily splashed with the white paint of U.N. neutrality, the imposing guns and their 500 escorts carry an unmistakable message for the Bosnian Serbs: Enough is enough. We are prepared to fight back.

“We are the arrows in the quiver,” said British Maj. Jon Watson, whose infantry regiment in Gornji Vakuf is training to assist the incoming gunners in possible military action. “The traditional U.N. peacekeeping mission of supporting humanitarian aid is one that is essentially foreign to professional British soldiers. This new move really requires a return to a more familiar posture. The troops are entirely at home with it.”

The troops were ordered here last weekend by the British government after the Bosnian Serbs took hundreds of peacekeepers hostage, among them 33 British soldiers, and held them as human shields against threatened North Atlantic Treaty Organization air strikes.

The mission was so unexpected that commanders of the Highland Gunners, as the artillery regiment is known, had to abruptly call off the honeymoon of a soldier granted leave just a day earlier.

The light artillery will give U.N. commanders, locked in an ever-frustrating test of wills with the Bosnian Serbs, a military option that falls short of calling for politically explosive air strikes. Until now, the only alternative available to besieged peacekeepers was cannon and rifle fire, which rarely deterred artillery assaults from rebels intent on intimidating peacekeepers.

“The U.K. has a long record of ensuring that that which is needed to provide the proper protection for British forces is available to them,” said British Defense Minister Malcolm Rifkind, explaining his country’s decision to send the gunners to Bosnia even before the Paris meeting. “That is what the public expect. It is what the armed forces deserve. And it is what will be provided.”

An advance team of British engineers and other experts arrived Wednesday in this government-controlled town of 25,000, which has been largely peaceful since it was wrecked in fighting between Croats and Muslims that ended only when they joined sides against the Bosnian Serbs.

The two dozen scouts have been frantically planning the arrival of the gunners and equipment, which has required everything from installing toilets to shoring up perilous dirt roads that provide the only safe passage from neighboring Croatia.

“To say we will have beds for everybody when they get here might be pushing it,” said Maj. Greig Thomson at the British battalion headquarters.

Hundreds of infantry troops have been relocated to nearby Vitez to make way for the new arrivals, dozens of portable barracks have been hauled into camp, and infantry soldiers have been put on 12-hour mobilization alert.

British Joint Cmdr. Gen. John Wilsey, who oversees British forces in the Balkans, flew here by helicopter Saturday to assure the nearly 1,000 British troops already in the area that they will not be left defenseless.

“It makes me feel proud to feel the whole world is looking at us,” said British Pvt. Adrian Miller, an infantry soldier who has been based in Gornji Vakuf for a month. “As far as I am concerned, we are doing the right thing.”

Several hundred infantry troops have been training and conducting drills all week for a possible face-to-face confrontation with the Bosnian Serbs.

The soldiers have been living in Warrior mechanized vehicles, which are small tanks with 30-millimeter cannons and detachable lean-tos. For peacekeepers accustomed to guarding supplies, manning roadside checkpoints and mediating neighborhood disputes, it has been a dramatic change in routine.

“We’ve passed the message on to be more alert and more aware,” Capt. Jamie Hartley said. “It has helped that we have soldiers here who have been in Northern Ireland and the [Persian] Gulf. They have been a good example for the younger soldiers.”

U.N. officials and British military commanders say the new posture does not mean peacekeepers have given up their neutrality in the 3-year-old civil war, but they acknowledged that impartiality has become more difficult since the hostage crisis.

One of the biggest unresolved questions for participants in a new quick reaction force is how to reconcile its anti-Bosnian Serb genesis with the U.N. requirement not to take sides.

“The soldiers are concerned about the hostages’ welfare,” said Watson, whose troops have been following developments on radio and satellite television. “If the Serbs choose to harm them in any way, I have no doubt the tone would switch to a desire to get even. . . . The most rapid reaction force is the guys already here.”

In town, Muslim and Croatian leaders showed little sympathy for the British predicament, saying U.N. neutrality has always been a mistake.

The two sides rarely agree on anything. They live separate lives, with Muslims on one side of bomb-blasted Marshal Tito Boulevard and Croats on the other. But there is no confusion over their hatred for the Bosnian Serbs and what they perceive as U.N. cowardice in standing up to the rebels.

“The [Bosnian Serb] aggressors are now doing everything to the U.N. in front of television cameras that they did to us, but not in front of the television cameras,” City Manager Midhat Gekic said. “The number of U.N. troops is not the problem. . . . What is happening to them now is a direct result of their fear in fulfilling their mandate.”

That, British soldiers predicted, is about to change.