Advance Team in Tuzla Paves the Way for GIs : Bosnia: Reconnaissance contingent starts setting up headquarters for 20,000 U.S. troops.

The vanguard of the U.S. deployment to Bosnia came to Tuzla on Tuesday and set about preparing a command center for the 20,000 American GIs who will soon be launched on an ambitious peacemaking mission.

Ten members of an advance reconnaissance team checked maps, measured bridges and inspected roads as they slogged through the frosted countryside of northwestern Bosnia-Herzegovina, the heart of what will become the American sector in the largest military operation that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has ever undertaken.

“A big adventure!” said one soldier from Vienna, Va., summing up his work thus far as he lugged his backpack and flak jacket into the dark at the Tuzla air base.

Brig. Gen. Stanley F. Cherrie, an assistant division commander from the U.S. Army’s 1st Armored Division who led the reconnaissance team to Tuzla, said that the conditions in Bosnia had not surprised the troops but that they were concerned about the condition of the infrastructure, especially the roads.

“We had heard the roads were fragile,” Cherrie told reporters. “But they’re in a little bit worse shape than I thought.”

The U.S. contingent, which traveled to Tuzla on Dutch armored personnel carriers belonging to the U.N. peacekeeping force, is part of a 2,600-member NATO team sent to set up headquarters and communications and other facilities and to prepare transportation hubs for the full peacekeeping force. About 735 soldiers in the advance team are Americans.

The full deployment of 60,000 mostly Western troops begins in mid-December after the presidents of Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia formally sign the peace agreement reached last month following arduous negotiations in Dayton, Ohio.

Under the accord, NATO troops, including the 20,000 GIs, will establish a buffer about 2 1/2 miles wide between Bosnian government and Serb forces.

For now, U.S. troops are arriving in spurts rather than in large bursts, apparently to keep the operation as discreet as possible before the signing ceremony Dec. 14 in Paris.

The GIs, however, are outnumbered by the U.S. television crews pursuing them.

Cherrie professed to be stunned by the groups of reporters, photographers and television crews staked out at the front gate of the Tuzla air base for several days.

“If I had known you were out there, I would have waved,” Cherrie told reporters at a 20-minute news conference, which was held under unusually tight security.

The scene outside the airport’s front gate has taken on the surreal look that only a mass of American journalists hot for a major story can create.

Television networks, mounting a virtual round-the-clock vigil, have constructed massive wooden platforms along the muddy street outside the air base, like giant kiosks on stilts. The networks have also rented the handful of farmhouses nearest the gate, and dozens of satellite dishes, cameras and other high-tech equipment have sprouted from their balconies.

On Tuesday, Tuzla residents joined the crowd outside the gate, perhaps hoping to get a glimpse of the Americans, perhaps just enjoying the spectacle.

Talking with correspondents, Cherrie recited the litany, now familiar, of potential perils awaiting the U.S. forces: 6 million mines dotting the landscape, accidents on bad roads through rugged terrain, frigid weather.

But he added that specialized training in “mine awareness” and in cold-weather operations in German forests should help prevent mishaps.

The disputed Posavina corridor will pose one of the most dangerous challenges to the U.S. contingent, Cherrie said.

Control of that strategic strip, which connects Bosnian Serb holdings in eastern and western Bosnia, was the single issue that could not be settled in the Dayton negotiations; it was left to international arbitration.

Brcko, the Serb-held city that is the focal point of the corridor, is about 24 miles north of Tuzla. Fighting could easily flare up in that region, he warned.

After 3 1/2 years of bitter disappointment with the United Nations’ peacekeeping force, many residents here seem eager to welcome the American troops.

As the first U.S. soldiers began to arrive in Tuzla, protests from Bosnian Serbs who live around the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo continued.

Under the peace agreement, they will be brought under Muslim-Croat rule, a prospect they fear. Some have threatened violence, and a referendum for Bosnian Serbs has been scheduled for Dec. 12. It is almost certain that the vote will be against the Dayton plan.

In the Serbian and Yugoslav capital of Belgrade, meanwhile, pressure was growing to remove Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic from the political scene.

The independent Belgrade news agency Beta reported Tuesday that Karadzic’s opponents within the Bosnian Serb leadership were “preparing for a decisive strike” against him.

Beta said that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic has lost patience with Karadzic, who has been openly critical of the peace agreement and has called upon Bosnian Serbs to oppose it, and that Milosevic will not wait for Karadzic to step aside quietly.

The news agency said Milosevic has put pressure on Nikola Koljevic, a Bosnian Serb leader based in Banja Luka, the largest Bosnian city controlled by Bosnian Serbs, to oust Karadzic, who keeps his headquarters in Pale near Sarajevo.

Times staff writer Dean E. Murphy in Belgrade contributed to this report.