Frustrated U.N. Troops Humiliated in Bosnia : Balkans: Top military officials say the mission is caught between lofty resolutions and hostile forces.

ZAGREB, Croatia — When Croatian army troops disarmed and abducted four Canadian soldiers on a routine patrol earlier this month, an enraged Gen. Jean Cot, the French commander of the U.N. Protection Force, denounced the affront to his peacekeeping mission as “outrageous.”

But the kidnaping incident and Cot’s protest passed almost unnoticed.

After almost two years of provocations by Balkan combatants that have ranged from extortion to mock execution, the U.N. peacekeeping mission here has amassed a history of humiliation.

Three generals have left the Balkans peacekeeping effort, the largest and most expensive in U.N. history, with harsh words for the operation and the Security Council that ultimately commands it. Two others have left quietly, but they clearly suffered the same frustration.

Senior officials still assigned to the operation warn that the United Nations is discrediting the very principle of peacekeeping by persisting with a mission they consider a charade.

And as incidents of hostage-taking and harassment add new terrors to an operation that has quickly rolled up a record casualty toll, top U.N. commanders here are increasingly vocal about their displeasure in being the fall guys for the West’s inability or unwillingness to halt the worst bloodletting in Europe since World War II.

Frustration is epidemic in the ranks of the U.N. mission as its 29,000 soldiers--with no mandate to fight--try to bridge a chasm between good intentions, in the form of lofty Security Council resolutions, and the reality of a deployment that has placed them between hostile forces.

The resentment was most recently made apparent by the resignation of Belgian Gen. Francis Briquemont, who denounced the “fantastic gap between all these Security Council resolutions and the means available to execute them.” Saying that he no longer even reads the resolutions that serve as marching orders for the U.N. mission, Briquemont decried “a sort of paralysis” that he believed was plaguing the operation.

The Belgian general, who commanded the 12,000 troops in Bosnia for less than six months, echoed the condemnation of his unhappy predecessors in saying the Balkans mission was doomed from the start.

“The United Nations decided to come to Bosnia in a peacekeeping operation when there was no peace and no agreement,” Briquemont told reporters in Sarajevo before his departure.

One senior official at U.N. headquarters here said Briquemont was compelled to leave because “he couldn’t put up with the increasing irrelevance of the operation and its degradation of the entire United Nations.”

“It’s not just humiliation--we are being censored in New York and ICFY,” the Geneva-based International Conference on Former Yugoslavia being mediated by European Union envoy Lord Owen and special U.N. envoy Thorvald Stoltenberg, the official said. “Reports to the Security Council are ‘cleaned up’ to describe a mission we don’t recognize. We have a sense we are just being played with.”

Cot, the third person to command the operation since its first troops arrived in April, 1992, has warned of the potential for the conflict to spread faster than his forces would be able to contain it.

“Given the inertia in the system,” he said, it would take too long for contributing countries to deploy more troops vital to ensuring the success of any peace accord for Bosnia or Croatia.

He pointed to Security Council resolutions passed seven months ago designating Sarajevo, Srebrenica and four other besieged Bosnian cities as U.N.-protected “safe havens” that were to be guarded by 7,600 more troops; fewer than 2,000 of those forces have been deployed, and those only within the last two months.

Cot has publicly lamented the “humiliation” of his troops in both Bosnia and Croatia, where armed renegades on all sides have fired on U.N. forces and humanitarian aid workers, hijacked their armor and supplies and stolen huge sums of hard currency.

U.N. forces have also capitulated to Serbian demands for road-use taxes, security deposits or supplies of gasoline for rebel escort of U.N. soldiers.

Because the U.N. forces are deployed in Bosnia to protect aid convoys and have no orders to stop the fighting, they are often caught in the cross-fire of battles raging around them.

One of the most devastating recent incidents, according to U.N. sources here, was a Serbian rebel attack on Canadian troops near the central Bosnian town of Visoko in late December.

Two drunken Serbian gunmen, angered by the United Nations’ failure to rescue another rebel fatally wounded by government sniper fire, surprised 11 Canadians, only two of whom were armed at the time; the Serbs disarmed them, took them hostage, lined them up against a wall and terrorized them with sprays of machine-gun fire aimed just over their heads.

Officers of the Nordic contingent deployed near the now Muslim-held town of Vares have appealed for reinforcements and shows of air power that have not come, another U.N. source said, leaving field commanders resentful that the mission is incapable of providing backup.

Increasingly frustrated with an operation that has ambitious goals but no means to achieve them, Cot reportedly has asked for the authority to order air strikes.

He used what was supposed to be a briefing for Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to appeal for American pressure on U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to give him that right, according to one participant at the meeting.

Almost no one among the legions of military officers and foreign diplomats monitoring the Balkans crisis believes that the U.N. hierarchy in New York will ever confer such powers to operation commanders, not least because the mission in Bosnia continues to be defined as a humanitarian action.

Last week, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization broadened its threat to intervene in Bosnia, declaring that in addition to Sarajevo, they are prepared to launch air strikes in two other “safe haven” areas.

Under the terms of NATO’s potential involvement, however, no air strikes can be launched without the approval of the Security Council.

Since the announced resignation of Briquemont, Cot and other officers in the mission here have been more outspoken about their frustration.

At a recent news conference, Cot accused the warring factions in Bosnia of “a great deal of cowardice” in taking advantage of the self-imposed limits on his own troops’ defense.

“One day, when this war is over . . . we will say in what way our forces--who came to help . . . were treated,” the force commander said of the Balkan gunmen, barely able to restrain his contempt.

In lamenting the departure of Briquemont, Cot clearly blamed the mission more than the man.

“It would be difficult to give more than he has,” the French general said of his Belgian colleague. “When one gives as much as he has, one wears out.”

Cedric Thornberry, deputy chief of mission responsible for civilian affairs, is also preparing to leave the operation after 22 months. He says Western leaders have much to risk by continuing to ignore the underlying causes of the Balkans crisis.

“There is a virtually uncontrollable explosion of extreme nationalism at this moment in Eastern Europe, and there is a danger that this explosion could blow us all away in terms of our commitment to democracy, continental stability and human rights,” Thornberry said. “This is the defining issue of our time, and it is unfair to blame (this mission) or the United Nations” for failure in the Balkans.

He called upon Security Council members to identify and agree on the aims of the peacekeeping mission, warning: “There is no chance for achievement if you don’t define the objectives.”

A lack of direction was one reason the first operation commander, Indian Gen. Satish Nambiar, left after less than a year, and why his successor, Gen. Lars-Eric Wahlgren of Sweden, stayed for only three months before Cot took over.

The first U.N. commander in Bosnia, Gen. Lewis MacKenzie of Canada, left the operation with venomous words for a mission he described as hopelessly imperiled.

French Gen. Philippe Morillon, who preceded Briquemont as Bosnian commander, waged a one-man campaign to protect embattled Muslim civilians during his tenure, only to be stifled by U.N. administrators who have pragmatically accepted the mission’s fig-leaf role.

Another major concern among peacekeeping officials, as stated by Briquemont, is a feeling among U.N. troops that they arrived too late to serve as a buffer between combatants who were already at each other’s throats.

Croatian leaders appealed for Western intervention to protect them throughout the six-month war they fought against the Serb-led Yugoslav Peoples Army, the third-largest force on the European continent, when it rolled over one-third of Croatia in 1991 while claiming to be defending the republic’s Serbian minority.

And while Serbs and Croats were engaged in that bloodletting, the leaders of what was then a broadly integrated, multiethnic Bosnia begged for protective U.N. intervention to establish a peacekeeping force while there was still peace to keep.

The U.N. force here was finally created in early 1992, after then-U.N. envoy Cyrus R. Vance mediated a cease-fire between the Yugoslav army and the Croatian government. That agreement called for an interim U.N. deployment until an international peace conference could work out a permanent solution.

Once the Serbian revolt against Bosnian independence began in March, 1992, attention shifted from the Croatian standoff to the Bosnian crisis and has stayed there, while Serbian rebels in the occupied Krajina region of Croatia solidified their proclaimed independent state.

Owen, the mediator from the European Union (formerly called the European Community), and Stoltenberg, who replaced Vance, have lately talked of the need for a “global solution,” one that would take into account all of the ethnic clashes and frictions in the region.

But as their roving diplomatic endeavor staggers on fruitlessly in its 18th month, Western countries have had to improvise to deal with the mounting humanitarian crisis.

U.S. warplanes nightly parachute relief supplies to starving Muslim enclaves because road convoys are routinely blocked by Serbian gunmen who have the holdout pockets surrounded.

Fighting between Croats and Muslims, who were allied against the Serbian rebellion before it deteriorated into a three-way civil war, has also prevented aid from getting to many regions.

But air drops are the most expensive and least efficient means of getting food to endangered civilians, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has noted often.

Relief officials also criticize the expense of a meaningless “no-fly” zone enforcement, which sends a vast network of sophisticated military aircraft on four-times-daily patrols of Bosnian air space but has been repeatedly denied permission to force down violators.

“It costs more to run the air drops and the ‘no-fly’ zone than it does our entire ground operation,” complained one official with the U.N. refugee agency. “It would be better if they just dropped dollar bills from the sky.”

As relief work is undermined by the unchecked violence, and resentment of the outside world’s indifference turns even the intended beneficiaries of the mission against it, U.N. troops have increasingly become targets of hostility.

Since the world body’s force was deployed 21 months ago, the mission has suffered 850 casualties, 71 of them fatal, making it the most physically hazardous in U.N. history.

Exasperated by attacks on their troops, France, Britain, Canada and Spain have threatened to withdraw from Bosnia this spring, if the mission remains mired in the status quo of thwarted relief works.

But mission officials concede that they are actually hostages of the crisis and fear that they will be expected to soldier on, because their presence is the West’s alibi for avoiding the unpopular moves needed to actually stop the fighting and set a deterrent example for nationalist aggressions to come.