NEWS ANALYSIS : NATO Mandate in Bosnia Dwindles as Force Grows

In its first 3 1/2 weeks, NATO’s peacekeeping force in Bosnia has grown by the day. But its mandate seems to be shrinking just as steadily.

With military commanders defining their mission in increasingly narrow terms, and with the civilian arm of the mission unable to make up the difference, several important provisions of the U.S.-brokered peace accord have been left unfulfilled. Chief among these is security for ordinary Bosnians traumatized by war and looking for relief.

The daily mantra from the NATO-led Implementation Force (IFOR), which will be composed of 60,000 U.S. and other troops, states that it is not a police force.

Even as Bosnian Muslims driving on NATO-opened roads were being illegally snatched by Bosnian Serb police, and even after Bosnian Serbs fired an antitank rocket into a crowded Sarajevo streetcar, IFOR spokesmen insisted it was not their job to prevent such incidents or to investigate what they termed acts of terrorism and minor crime.

For the Bosnian Serbs too, the security issue is a critical one. Serb-held suburbs around Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, will be turned over to Muslim-Croat control starting Friday.

Serbian forces must withdraw, leaving the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as the only armed force until Muslim-Croat authorities enter in March. In the meantime, who will police these districts if it is not NATO’s job to be the cop on the block?

“We have not got the level of troops to saturate these areas--neither is it our task,” IFOR spokesman Lt. Col. Mark Rayner said last week. “It is not our job to do low-level police work.”

Indeed, the NATO-led force, which currently has a strength of more than 36,000, defines its mission as a military one: separating the three armies that have fought a secessionist war since 1992. This conservative approach deviates, in the minds of many Bosnians, from U.S. Defense Secretary William J. Perry’s promise that NATO would be the “biggest, meanest dog in town” and has invited comparisons to the impotent and ultimately disgraced U.N. mission that IFOR replaced.

So if NATO is not to provide security for civilians, who is?

Inquiring eyes shifted to the civilian side of the peace plan drafted in Dayton, Ohio, and signed Dec. 14 in Paris. Police matters, IFOR said, fall under civilian administrator Carl Bildt’s purview.

But Bildt, slow off the mark in getting started here, eventually arrived to point out that the 1,700-member International Police Task Force under his oversight is an unarmed body with no arrest powers. It will monitor and train, not fight crime.

“NATO has 90,000 people and $6 billion,” Bildt said in an interview shortly after his arrival. “I don’t have a car.

“NATO has been at this for half a century. I am starting from scratch. . . . My ability to provide security is rather limited.”

As it turns out, security for Bosnian civilians lies in the hands of “the parties”--i.e., the Bosnian Muslim, Croat and Serb forces who have spent most of the last four years trying to kill each other.

This means that Muslims who want to exercise newfound freedom of movement through Serbian territory and Serbs who live in Sarajevo suburbs must depend on their enemy’s police force for safety.

This also means that investigations of incidents like the streetcar attack will be carried out by the side whose forces probably committed the attack.

But putting that responsibility on “the parties” seems to have been the aim all along of the U.S. sponsors of the Dayton accord. Intent on avoiding “mission creep”--where American soldiers get drawn into all sorts of nagging and potentially dangerous duties--and on avoiding a deadly Somalia scenario during a presidential election year, U.S. planners sought to keep NATO’s mission narrow, sources say.

“Everybody was aware of the burden being placed on the parties,” President Clinton’s special envoy for the Bosnia peace plan, Robert Gallucci, said in Sarajevo. “It was not the desire of the United States to police Bosnia. . . . If the will of the parties is not there, it won’t work.”

But many Bosnians and a number of outsiders as well were expecting a more vigorous, proactive enforcement, one in which NATO took a leading role in compelling the parties to obey.

“Three months ago, if the Serbs had fired a rocket on a tram, we would have bombed them,” said a senior U.N. military officer. “IFOR seems a little timid right now.

“Trouble is, you let the Serbs get away with it, and they’ll keep testing. They’ll find another soldier, tell him to fire another rocket, then afterward claim again it was a rogue element and promise to investigate, knowing they’ll get away with it--again.”

In some ways, NATO seems to have stepped back from its original mission and has not picked up some of the tasks that the United Nations performed. Humanitarian organizations, for example, always counted on U.N. escorts to deliver food and aid in dangerous areas; IFOR does not provide such security, saying that in peacetime, escorts are not necessary.

Instead, the mission says it is creating an overall secure environment that will permit aid agencies and others to work freely. To that end Sunday, IFOR spokesmen reported good progress in creating buffer zones between Bosnia’s armies along a 600-mile confrontation line. The withdrawal of the warring factions from the zones must be completed by Friday, and IFOR said up to three-quarters of the troops have complied nationwide.

Yet the pursuit of war criminals and the investigation of mass grave sites have also found IFOR eagerly shifting the responsibility to “the parties.” The Dayton accord requires Muslims, Croats and Serbs to turn over accused war criminals in their midst and to permit each other to inspect grave sites. None of this is happening.

On Sunday, Adm. Leighton W. Smith, commander of NATO forces in Bosnia, reiterated the official position that the force cannot be distracted from its principal military mission to carry out other aspects of the peace accord.

“Our forces are not [here] to pursue indicted war criminals,” Smith said. “Investigating mass graves is not part of my job.”

Rather than the military muscle of NATO, it may be diplomacy that forces “the parties” to hold up their end of the Dayton agreement. It took pressure from Washington, Belgrade and a couple of other European capitals to force the Serbs last week to release 16 people abducted as they drove through a Serb-held suburb of Sarajevo. Three more were released Sunday after the intervention of the head of U.N. civil affairs here, Antonio Pedauye.

Acknowledging that the Dayton agreement left a gap in security for civilians, officials scrambled late last week to find a solution.

Smith announced the possible creation of an “integrated” police force made up of Muslims, Serbs and Croats, patrolling Sarajevo and its suburbs with members of the International Police Task Force. But such a multiethnic force would require the cooperation of the still-mistrustful Muslims, Serbs and Croats.