NEWS ANALYSIS : U.N. Chafes at Role as West’s ‘Alibi’ in Bosnia

After Bosnian Serbs seized U.N. peacekeepers last month, U.S. Ambassador Peter W. Galbraith accused the U.N. chief in the Balkans of failing to safeguard the troops, according to U.N. sources.

Galbraith, ambassador to Croatia, insisted to U.N. special envoy Yasushi Akashi that it was folly to leave peacekeepers in posts where they could be easily taken as hostages by Bosnian Serbs. The complaint was echoed by a number of middle-level Clinton Administration officials, who muttered to reporters that the United Nations cannot be trusted to do anything right.

The reaction was hardly unusual among U.S. and European officials. When things go awry in Bosnia-Herzegovina, their target of choice has become the United Nations.

The main gripe is that U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Akashi have turned the peacekeepers into a milquetoast militia that has been humiliated time and again by the Bosnian Serbs.

As a result, the critics say, the United Nations has failed to protect Bosnia’s civilians and ensure that relief supplies reach the sick and hungry without interference from Bosnian Serb soldiers.

Akashi, Boutros-Ghali’s chief agent in the Balkans, is a Japanese diplomat and U.N. bureaucrat who--like the secretary general--has no military experience. Nevertheless, he has overruled the military commanders in Bosnia enough times to enrage hawks.

The usual theory is that there is a U.N. culture based on limited weaponry and endless negotiations and that this culture is incompatible with a North Atlantic Treaty Organization culture based on fearsome power.

As the 50th anniversary of its founding approaches, there is little doubt the United Nations has been bruised by its experience in Bosnia. But its defenders believe the troubles are not of its own making.

Many U.N. diplomats and officials insist that the world body has been used by the United States and Western Europe as a scapegoat--and that those nations’ criticism hides their own failure to work out any coherent policy about what to do to stop the war in Bosnia.

“The margin of maneuver of the United Nations is . . . very severely circumscribed,” a European ambassador at the United Nations said. “The truth of the matter is that nobody wants to go in there with their armies. There is a limit to what you can do if you do not want to use force.”

Akashi’s reply when confronted by Galbraith illustrated the problem. According to U.N. sources, Akashi answered that it would have been even more foolish to signal the impending air strikes by marching the peacekeepers out--assuming, of course, that the Bosnian Serbs would have let them go. Besides, Akashi said, the peacekeepers are assigned to so many vulnerable posts--because of their responsibilities--that it would have been impossible to round up all of them in time.

The mandate of the U.N. peacekeepers in Bosnia has been cobbled together by the Security Council mainly in response to crises that have aroused public opinion. The council has tried to respond to pressure from the public without committing troops to a major intervention.

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As a result, said Jose Maria Mendiluce of Spain, former refugee chief in Bosnia, U.N. relief workers look upon their mission there as little more than “an alibi” for the West: Whenever anyone demands of European and U.S. officials what they are doing to end the war, they can point to the U.N. operation.

Since the U.N. mission has been patched together, it has contradictory roles: Its peacekeepers are supposed to be impartial escorts for humanitarian convoys and tough enforcers protecting “safe areas” from aggressors.

“I think it’s been not only a mission impossible,” said Edward Luck, president-emeritus of the United Nations Assn., a private group, “but it has been a very murky mission. . . . An example of the absurdity is that you have had over 100 resolutions and statements from the Security Council on the crisis. In Desert Storm [the 1991 military operation against Iraq], when they were serious, they had only a dozen resolutions.”

All these resolutions have been passed, Luck insisted, because the members of the council “keep postponing the decisive decision.”

“They don’t want to say there are no moral values to defend in Bosnia and get out,” he said. “They also don’t want to accept the logic of staying, which is to choose sides.”

Luck said the muddled operation has hurt both the United Nations and NATO.

“The whole idea of peacekeeping has been given a black eye unnecessarily,” he said.

In his last report to the council, Boutros-Ghali put forward a choice somewhat similar to that advocated by Luck. He said that, if the members want to use force to bring about peace, they should replace U.N. “blue helmets” with a multinational force, authorized by the council but under the command of the countries contributing troops. This was done in the Persian Gulf War and in the original dispatch of U.S. troops to Somalia in December, 1992.

If they do not want to use force, Boutros-Ghali went on, members of the council should “revise the [U.N.’s Balkan] mandate so that it includes only those tasks which a peacekeeping operation can realistically be expected to carry out in the circumstances prevailing in Bosnia.”

He said peacekeepers, without enforcement power, should be charged with negotiating and monitoring agreements between warring powers, operating the airport with the consent of the belligerents, supporting humanitarian convoys and maintaining a presence in the “safe areas” of Sarajevo and five other besieged enclaves without using force to defend them.

In all cases, he said, peacekeepers should have the right to use their arms only in self-defense. Boutros-Ghali made it clear that he prefers this reduced U.N. role.

But most U.N. diplomats and officials do not believe that the United States and Europe are ready to make a clear choice between peace enforcement and peacekeeping. As evidence, they point to the decision by NATO to send a rapid-deployment force with heavy weapons to protect peacekeepers in Bosnia. A U.N. consultant called the force no more than “muscular muddle through.”