NEWS ANALYSIS : End of Bosnia Mission Leaves Tarnish on U.N. : Balkans: The international force went in to keep the peace. It is going out blamed for failing to stop the war.

When the pale blue United Nations flag is lowered today at Sarajevo airport, the costliest, most complex and, in the view of many, most calamitous mission ever attempted by the world organization will end.

As U.S. troops filter into a remarkably calm Bosnia with fanfare and worldwide attention to their every move, U.N. troops, some of whom risked their lives and suffered humiliating defeats, are departing or being absorbed by the new, North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led peacekeeping enterprise.

“We offer the chance for something that everyone wants: peace,” Maj. Gen. Michael Walker, the NATO ground commander, said upon arrival in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, on Tuesday. He takes charge today.

To the dismay of many U.N. officials and officers, their accomplishments--helping to feed more than 2 million Bosnian war victims, escorting civilians through the sniper shooting galleries that Sarajevo’s streets became--are largely overshadowed now by an image of impotence, incompetence and the inability to stop a savage war.

The U.N. mission, which this year cost nearly $5 million a day, has been widely condemned as an abysmal failure, one that forever changed the nature, and likelihood, of future peacekeeping efforts.

The critics, from U.S. officials to ordinary Bosnian citizens, blame U.N. leadership for failing to act with decision and force to prevent the kind of Bosnian Serb military attacks that led to the fall of two U.N.-designated “safe areas” last summer and the probable murder of thousands of Muslims.

U.N. officials defend their performance as a thankless task hamstrung by a lack of material and political support from nations themselves divided and at odds over what to do about Bosnia.

“It has been an impossible job--to deploy with a peacekeeping mandate in a country without a peace to keep, without even a cease-fire,” Antonio Pedauye, head of the U.N. mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina, said.

“The lesson is . . . the moral authority of the international community is not enough. You need the military capabilities, the will to use them and the readiness to take casualties.”

The United States steadfastly refused to send ground troops--until a peace was in place--entrusting the mission primarily to the French and British, backed up by men and women from two dozen other countries and not always with proper training or equipment. The Bangladeshis, for example, were expected to protect the Bihac pocket in northwestern Bosnia with an average of one gun for every four peacekeepers.

The lightly armed 20,000-member U.N. Protection Force--known by its acronym, UNPROFOR--was hampered by an awkward chain of command dependent on civilian bureaucrats who, with senior military officials, frequently rejected field officers’ pleas for military support; by timid rules of engagement; and by a limited mandate with even more limited firepower to enforce it.

Failure of the U.N. to take decisive action seems to have plagued the mission from the start. U.N. officials apparently had detailed information on notorious Serb-run prison camps in northern Bosnia, where hundreds of Muslims and Croats were tortured, raped and killed, for several months in 1992.

But only when a British television crew reached one of the camps, Omarska, on Aug. 6, 1992, did the world become aware of the scale of atrocities being committed.

The following year, the U.N. mandate was expanded to include the protection of six safe areas--Muslim enclaves crowded with refugees who had fled Serbian campaigns of “ethnic cleansing.”

U.N. commanders on the ground in Bosnia said they needed an additional 34,000 troops to properly defend the safe areas. The Security Council sent 7,000, unable to get more from Washington or the European capitals.

Protection of the safe areas, including Sarajevo, became the most vexing and unfulfilled portion of the U.N.’s task and led to devastating humiliation for the peacekeepers. Pinprick air strikes against the Serbs in May ended with the rebels taking nearly 400 peacekeepers hostage.

Pictures of the men chained to lampposts and ammunition dumps were broadcast the world over. The U.N. quickly backed down. Lt. Gen. Bernard Janvier, the top military commander for all U.N. forces in the former Yugoslav federation, met secretly with Bosnian Serb army commander Gen. Ratko Mladic and promised there would be no additional air strikes.

In July, the Serbs overran the two safe areas in eastern Bosnia, Srebrenica and Zepa. Because the towns had never been fully demilitarized, the Serbs regarded them as legitimate targets.

The atrocities that followed were severe even by the standards of this war: Women fleeing Srebrenica were raped; men, as many as 6,000, were rounded up and are believed to have been massacred. Dutch U.N. peacekeepers, outgunned, did not or could not help; their pleas for NATO air support were turned down by U.N. special envoy Yasushi Akashi and Janvier.

The fall of Srebrenica finally prompted action by Washington, London and Paris. The U.N. mandate was changed to allow more “robust” response. The well-armed Rapid Reaction Force was deployed on Mt. Igman above Sarajevo. Peacekeepers were withdrawn from remote posts and no longer vulnerable to hostage-taking.

The next Serbian provocation--the shelling of a Sarajevo marketplace on Aug. 28--triggered massive NATO air strikes unlike anything ever before seen. A separate U.S. diplomatic initiative and rare battlefield cooperation between Croatian and Bosnian government forces against the Serbs all combined to bring about the agreement that formally ended the war Dec. 14.

Peacekeeping had been transformed into peace enforcement.

This transformation, which many Bosnians complain came too late, is embodied in the last two U.N. military commanders for Bosnia: Lt. Gen. Michael Rose and the man who replaced him nearly a year ago, Lt. Gen. Rupert Smith.

Rose was widely seen as a commander who, in the interest of stated neutrality, was unwilling to take a stand against the Serbs, even as they blocked aid convoys and shelled Sarajevo and other safe areas. Smith, by contrast, demanded and eventually used the military means necessary to fulfill his mandate, even when it meant pounding the Serbs with 155-millimeter cannons from atop Mt. Igman.

“You can only use force when you have military capability and the political will to back it up,” said Smith’s spokesman, Lt. Col. Chris Vernon. “There is no halfway line between peacekeeping and the use of force.”

When Rose finished his assignment, the Serbs feted him with a grand feast and presented him with a huge portrait of himself. The Bosnian government gave him nothing.

Last week, the Serbs gave the departing Smith a small medallion. The Bosnian government gave him a Bosnian passport and a picture of the cherished, and now destroyed, Mostar Bridge. President Alija Izetbegovic told Smith that he is always welcome in Bosnia.

With the arrival of NATO--and on Tuesday, an advance party of Russian peacekeepers who will work with NATO--the enforcers of peace will be better armed than ever, an irony that some U.N. personnel note with bitterness.

“When there was no peace, no cease-fire, there was a peacekeeping operation, and UNPROFOR and the U.N. [were] here on the ground,” said Pedauye, the U.N. mission head. “Now that we have a peace, a cease-fire holding, we have a more robust mission coming in. It is just one of the paradoxes in a long history of paradoxes in this war.”

The low regard for the U.N. mission was evident at the peace conference in Dayton, Ohio, where the treaty ending the war, which ushered in NATO, was drafted last month.

No U.N. representative was invited to Dayton, and none of the speakers closing the conference thanked the U.N. for its efforts during four years in the former Yugoslav federation. According to a State Department official, when the State Department prepared background papers for Dayton on civilian programs in Bosnia most of the references to the U.N. were edited out of the reports before they reached the negotiators.

Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali maintains that he feels no resentment about the less-than-abundant gratitude.

“To be a civil servant is to be trained that no one will thank you,” he told a news conference Monday.

The flaws and failings of the Bosnia U.N. mission have thrown future endeavors into doubt and left a sea of confusion about what the Clinton administration wants the U.N. to do now.

“What does the United States want of the U.N.?” asked one high-ranking U.N. official. “Do they want the U.N. to do next to nothing? Do they want regional organizations to become stronger and take on new responsibilities? Do they want the U.N. to do some things? If so, what are they?”

These questions lay at the heart of the ongoing debate about a peacekeeping mission in Croatia that culminated Friday in a rare public spat between Boutros-Ghali and American Ambassador Madeleine Albright.

The Clinton administration evidently does not want NATO to police Croatian Serb-controlled Eastern Slavonia, which, under an agreement brokered by the Americans, will return to Croatia. But, after being vilified for so many months by the Americans for running a wimpish operation in Bosnia, Boutros-Ghali is in no mood to expose himself to the same kind of attacks over Croatia.

Wilkinson reported from Sarajevo, Meisler from New York.