NEWS ANALYSIS : U.N. in Bosnia: From Peacekeepers to Pawns

As Bosnian Serbs three days ago were releasing U.N. peacekeepers they had taken hostage, an additional 550 Canadians were being trapped in their camp north of here--but this time by the other side, the Bosnian army.

The government’s army, seeking to keep probing eyes from its latest military offensive, mined roads around the Canadians and warned that it would shell their camp if the peacekeepers tried to escape. On Wednesday, the United Nations was asking the government to please let the “blue helmets” go.

It was the latest in a litany of failures, humiliations and abdications for the United Nations in the Balkans.

There is a growing conviction in Bosnia that the expensive, international U.N. peacekeeping mission can no longer fulfill its original purposes, such as monitoring the warring factions and feeding the desperate civilians caught in between. Bosnians have watched as the United Nations seemed to capitulate repeatedly to Serb separatists, while the Bosnian Serbs have seen their internationally condemned misdeeds ultimately rewarded.

Despite a flurry of diplomatic activity Wednesday, most observers have decided that the U.N. mission in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, has all but collapsed. The progress of the past three years, and especially the past 15 months, has been destroyed. The question now is whether the United Nations has any future here at all.

Among the most recent steps in the decline of the U.N. Protection Force:

* The hostage crisis ended over the weekend, and by most accounts, the Bosnian Serbs won. The United Nations gave in to their demands, and the rebel Serbs got a huge arsenal of weapons, trained on Sarajevo.

* Saying that it was withdrawing from most of its positions in Bosnian Serb-held territory, the United Nations abandoned its principal tools for protecting the besieged city and its 350,000 residents.

* Its supply convoys blocked by Bosnian Serbs, the United Nations cannot feed itself, much less the trapped people of this and other Muslim enclaves.

* The United Nations has not been able to re-establish Sarajevo’s electricity, water and gas, which the Serbs cut off a month ago.

* U.N. officials on Tuesday rebuffed a North Atlantic Treaty Organization request for air strikes after Bosnian Serb planes violated a ban on flights over Bosnia, even as five more civilians were killed Wednesday by Serb shelling in Sarajevo. The NATO request late Tuesday came after jets patrolling the “no-fly” zone near Banja Luka, a Serb stronghold in northern Bosnia, spotted two Serb planes, a U.N. official said. The planes then disappeared from radar screens, presumably having landed.

“I’m not sure we’ve been at a lower ebb than we are now,” U.N. military spokesman Lt. Col. Gary Coward said this week.

U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali is now publicly conceding that the mission has failed. “We cannot do anything [in Bosnia],” he said in a speech in New York on Monday night. “We cannot impose peace on the parties of the dispute. There is no political will among . . . the governments . . . to conclude a peaceful solution.”

In a rare bright spot, the first U.N. food convoy to reach Sarajevo in more than a month delivered 165 tons of flour, salt and yeast Wednesday to a hungry city. Three more convoys were expected later Wednesday.

Delivering humanitarian aid to civilians is the most fundamental order in the United Nations’ mandate here, but the Bosnian Serbs have repeatedly halted U.N. relief convoys into Sarajevo and five other Muslim enclaves. The nationalist Serbs shut down Sarajevo’s airport 10 weeks ago, stopping the humanitarian airlifts that supplied the bulk of Sarajevo’s food.

Warning of an impending catastrophe, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the principal U.N. relief agency, said it needed 6,000 tons of food to feed Sarajevo’s neediest people in the month of June. The amount that reached Sarajevo on Wednesday will meet less than 10% of the demand, said Mark Cutts, the U.N. agency’s spokesman.

And to persuade the Serbs to permit the convoys, officials of the U.N. refugee agency agreed to allow Bosnian Serb police--instead of the United Nations--to escort the trucks.

Perhaps even more embarrassing for the United Nations is the way in which the rebel Serbs have blocked the U.N. convoys that resupply the U.N. troops. The nearly 5,000 U.N. troops in Sarajevo, as well as those in the enclaves, depend on the convoys. “By the end of the month, without food or fuel convoys, we face our own resupply crisis,” Coward said.

The crisis has raised the possibility of the United Nations having to use force to get a convoy through Bosnian Serb, or Bosnian government, lines. And that, U.N. officials fear, would draw the United Nations more directly into the war.

Meanwhile, in some of the enclaves and in Sarajevo, where the food shortage is most acute, Bosnian officials view the U.N. mission as more of a burden than a help. “All we have now is an extra baby to feed” in Sarajevo--the U.N. force, said Bosnian Vice President Ejup Ganic.

The last 26 of about 370 U.N. peacekeepers whom the rebel Serbs took hostage last month were freed Sunday. U.N. officials had vowed repeatedly not to deal with the Bosnian Serbs, but the release smacked of a deal, in the opinion of many observers.

As the 26 boarded a bus in the Bosnian Serb stronghold of Pale, four rebel Serb soldiers captured by U.N. forces were returned to their units, fulfilling a nationalist Serb demand. The rebel Serb soldiers had battled French peacekeepers for control of a bridge to Sarajevo, and two Frenchmen were killed.

And as soon as the last hostages were released, the United Nations announced it was withdrawing from Bosnian Serb-held territory around Sarajevo, ending its often futile efforts to guard heavy weaponry that the Serbs routinely use to shell civilians in the capital.

The decision marked the formal dissolution of the “weapons exclusion zone,” one of the United Nations’ most important tools in protecting Sarajevo. The zone bans heavy weaponry from within 12 miles of Sarajevo.

Rather than force the Bosnian Serbs to remove their weapons from the 12-mile zone, however, the United Nations stockpiled the weapons and was supposed to guard them from the warring factions. But over time and especially in the past two months, the Serbs recovered the weapons, or were simply firing them at Sarajevo from the warehouses where they were stored.