Troops Arriving in Bosnia Get a Lesson in Peacekeeping 101

Just days after he arrived “in country,” U.S. Army Lt. Col. Stephen Layfield found himself defusing one of the most explosive confrontations since Americans took charge of northeastern Bosnia nearly a year ago.

Old women with sticks and young men with guns--Muslims--were fighting with Bosnian Serb police who also opened fire. The deadly dispute was over a ruined village perched on a desolate hill and part of the unending quest of Muslim refugees to return to their prewar homes.

American soldiers were spat on, yelled at and injured slightly in the scuffles. Wider violence was averted only when U.S. forces launched Apache helicopters and Bradley fighting vehicles to subdue the crowds.

The baptism of fire for Layfield and the Army’s 1st Infantry Division earlier this month was a lesson in Peacekeeping 101 as only Bosnia-Herzegovina can teach it.

“What else can they throw at us?” said a beleaguered Layfield, shaking his head later at Camp McGovern, a U.S. base near the Serb-held town of Brcko.

Whether the Bosnians were deliberately testing the new kids on the block or it was simply coincidence, the violence marred the changing of the guard here in the U.S.-controlled sector of postwar Bosnia.

The lighter, more mobile 1st Infantry Division is replacing the larger, heavier 1st Armored Division as prelude to a wider restructuring of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led mission that will drastically downsize the military peacekeeping force in Bosnia, alter and undoubtedly reduce its tasks, and keep Americans here an additional 18 months.

By Dec. 20--the formal end of the NATO Implementation Force, known as IFOR--the number of troops in Bosnia will be slashed in half, to about 30,000 men and women. Next year, the number may be further reduced, with only 8,500 Americans participating--down from an original 20,000 U.S. troops.

The newly arriving 1st Infantry constitutes a so-called covering force that technically protects the 1st Armored Division as it withdraws on its way back to home bases in Germany.

“We have reorganized the force so that a smaller number of units can cover the same amount of ground,” Maj. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, the new commander of U.S. forces in Bosnia, said in an interview at the Tuzla air base. “Given that the military threat has become such a small one, we do not have the same requirement for overmatch that existed one year ago.”

“Overmatch” refers to the ability to counter a military attack with two or three times the firepower of the enemy. When Americans first filtered over the icy Sava River last December into a Bosnia freshly emerging from 43 months of war, they were prepared to fight.

Combat with Bosnia’s Serbian, Muslim and Croatian factions, in the end, did not prove necessary; instead, once the enemy armies were back in their barracks, NATO-led soldiers found themselves working as diplomats, mediators and crowd controllers.

The new mission is likely to extricate itself from many of those jobs because of its reduced size and a realization that Bosnians will have to be weaned from dependence on international players if any of this is to work.

“A military force can only give you an absence of war--not peace,” said Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, who led the U.S. division here until relinquishing command to Meigs on Nov. 10. “Peace will come from political, economic and social change. Peace cannot be delivered by an outside agent.”

As the 1st Infantry has learned in its debut days, even the absence of war can be pretty brutal.

Its members hear almost nightly explosions in parts of their sector--mysterious hands blowing up houses slated for resettlement of refugees, most of whom are Muslims. They patrol hot-spot villages along the border separating Muslims and Serbs, bracing for the periodic and inevitable flashes.

And for several days starting Nov. 11--the day after they formally assumed command of the zone--the fresh U.S. troops, with their Russian counterparts, ended up in the middle of a series of firefights between angry Muslims seeking to resettle the deserted village of Gajevi and Bosnian Serb police determined to stop them.

When the dust finally settled, Meigs punished the Muslims by confiscating and destroying tons of the Muslim army’s weapons. A couple of Bosnian Serb long-barrel guns were also seized.

“Maybe they were doing some testing to see what they could get away with,” said Master Sgt. Robert Jimenez of San Jose, a military policeman who was part of the first wave replacing heavy armored units with police in Humvees.

Jimenez and others said the mobility of the new force will make up for its smaller number--a tall order, because the same 7,200 square-mile area will have to be monitored by half the number of troops. A senior NATO officer conceded that, if more than one violent resettlement attempt happened at once, the division might be stretched too thin.

And, as Gajevi proved, heavy firepower--Bradleys and helicopters--still makes the critical difference.

“We may look smaller on paper, but we are more agile,” said Maj. Pete Curry, an operations officer from Mt. Prospect, Ill. “We want them to see us, know we’re still here. Their weapons may look old, but they are still serviceable. They can roll out and do damage.”

Curry agreed that the Bosnians, having watched the 1st Armored’s tanks withdraw, may have timed the Gajevi incidents as a trial balloon.

“The temptation may be to try to test us,” he said. “I think we demonstrated we are just as competent and not afraid to enforce the peace accords. I think the message is out on the streets that these guys are just as good as the ones who left.”

Critics said the Gajevi events reflected the lack of experience of new troops who didn’t do all the political groundwork and negotiation with local authorities that often defuse such situations.

These critics said the U.S. commanders overreacted and might have squandered hard-earned goodwill with a Muslim side that had generally been pro-American. In the immediate aftermath of Gajevi, state radio broadcast some of its most anti-Western sentiment, accusing U.S. troops of leaving the Muslims defenseless against potential enemies.

“Everyone has his job to do, but not this way,” complained Ejup Grabus, the deputy mayor of the nearby Muslim town of Celic. “The Americans lied to us . . . and pointed machine guns at us. We didn’t expect that would happen to us.”

And there was some irony in seeing American troops destroy Muslim weapons even as $100 million in new tanks, rifles and ammunition awaited delivery to the Muslim-Croat army as an installment in a U.S.-sponsored “equip-and-train” program.

But in the end, Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim chairman of Bosnia’s three-man presidency, singled out NATO’s British ground commander, Lt. Gen. Michael Walker, for blame and instead thanked President Clinton for agreeing to keep Americans in Bosnia next year.

“It is never a joy to have foreign troops in your country, but if you have to have them, they might as well be Americans,” Izetbegovic said on national television.

U.S. commanders defended their moves, saying the tough response will make the Bosnian military, which was accused of fomenting and directing the violence, think twice before repeating such actions.

“Good people understand that incorrect behavior does not go unpunished,” said Lt. Col. Tony Cucolo, a commander with the 1st Armored who Layfield replaced. Cucolo was kept around during the transition to help out the new group and was also drawn into the Gajevi episode.

Meanwhile, many of the rank-and-file soldiers are eager for an end to the current, unusually late Indian summer, hoping that the arrival of winter will chill inflamed passions.

The resettlement attempts will be volatile regardless of the weather, but even greater tests lie ahead next spring, the traditional time of increased fighting, and in the late spring or early summer, when Bosnia is supposed to hold complicated and potentially violent municipal elections.

Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister who is in charge of the civilian side of Bosnia’s postwar recovery, warned against expecting the future NATO-led mission to solve too many problems. NATO’s narrow interpretation of its mandate thus far has meant it has refrained from pursuing indicted war crimes suspects or taking extraordinary steps to enforce freedom of movement across ethnic lines.

“We cannot expect the follow-on force to do more than very limited tasks,” Bildt said on the one-year anniversary of the Dayton, Ohio, accord that stopped the war. Real peace, he said, “depends on political change. . . . Looking at Bosnia one year later, you’d have to say that . . . most of the agenda remains to be filled.”