The Shadow of a Shield : Amid deepening violence, U.N. forces in Bosnia have come to symbolize not hope but impotence to those they’ve come to help.

The distant groan of U.S. Army cargo planes passing two miles overhead sounds reveille across the landscape of Srebrenica. Homeless Muslim women, roused by the engine noise from their beds of asphalt on the fetid streets, disentangle themselves from children nestled around them in a warming heap. They pick off the most bothersome lice, hitch up their grimy floral pantaloons and scurry off to the surrounding hillsides. In this pre-dawn ritual of degradation, those who first sight the parachutes, then push, claw and bite their way past the rest, will come back to their curbside encampment with a token of Western largess.

Each morning before first light, C-130 Hercules transports from the Rhein-Main air base in Germany jettison huge wooden pallets of relief goods into besieged Srebrenica. There is only enough in the food drops to sustain a fraction of the refugees, inspiring a brutal scramble among displaced mothers with hungry children who have made their way to the town, a U.N.-protected way station for Muslims.

Most of the dropped containers hold more than a ton of MREs, the bland but hearty military ration packs generically labeled “Meals Ready to Eat.” Unheated tins of pea soup and meatball stew are the butt of jokes among the soldiers they are prepared for, but to the victims of slow starvation trapped by Serbian artillery, each cold calorie is a savored reprieve from death.

But on this late spring morning, the foraging mothers find a disappointing substitute for the usual life-sustaining alms. Instead of the cherished aluminum ration tins, their grappling is rewarded with men’s shaving kits. In a town as achingly short of water as it is of shelter and food, the mini-bottles of lotion and after-shave and plastic-wrapped disposable razors seem more a mockery of the desperate, infested women than a hygienic pick-me-up, as the men’s toiletries were meant to be.

“It’s ridiculous. These people are starving, but it is literally all we had to send them,” concedes a chagrined official of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. UNHCR’s European aid warehouses have been intermittently barren for months, drained by the open mouth of Bosnia, where war has raged for 15 months, producing more hungry and homeless each day. Dispatch of aid--usually food, but sometimes toiletries or teddy bears--has been the outside world’s main response to the mayhem, in which the Bosnian government claims that more than 200,000 have been killed and 2.2 million driven from their homes by battle or the war’s signature practice of “ethnic cleansing.”

The United States and its European allies have backed off from the Vance-Owen accord, a U.N.-mediated plan to impose peace in Bosnia, having concluded that no strategic interests are at stake in the Balkan crisis--only the lives, health and dignity of war victims like the women of Srebrenica. The peace plan, months in the making, had nurtured refugee hopes of one day returning home, but it has been declared dead, victim of both Serbian nationalism and Western leaders’ refusal to put humanitarian principle ahead of political risk. Fearful of being drawn into a Vietnam-style quagmire, the presidents and prime ministers of the world’s leading democracies have retreated from the Bosnian crisis and covered their tracks with the ill-understood U.N. aid mission.

More than 32,000 U.N. troops have been deployed amid the wreckage of former Yugoslavia. The world body’s white armor seems to clatter everywhere, and its sky-blue flags flutter along patrol routes stretching hundreds of miles. But despite the physical evidence that the West is working on the Balkan crisis, the purported beneficiaries of one of the largest and most expensive U.N. relief missions in history see the foreign presence as a giant cover-up for the international community’s reluctance to stop the war. The ever-expanding U.N. deployment costs more than $1 billion a year, but the millions of people it claims to be aiding consider it little more than a cynical charade designed to ease the consciences of those in the West who are otherwise willfully ignoring a genocide.

The collective voice of the outraged world has loudly condemned Serb nationalist forces for sparking what has become an intractable, three-sided war. U.N. Security Council resolutions have decried the use of heavy artillery against unarmed civilians and ordered the rampaging guerrilla forces to kindly abide by civilized rules. But none of the diplomatic snarls from New York have the bite of enforcement, and the warriors know it. Sarajevo and all other vestiges of integrated Bosnia continue to be bombarded. Militant Serbs’ hardware has only advanced amid the U.N. pleas. Troop-ferrying helicopters and supply planes, mostly those of the defiant Serbs, are spotted over the forested mountains violating the U.N. no-fly zone almost every day.

Not one of the soldiers assigned to the U.N. Protection Force, code-named UNPROFOR, is authorized to protect civilians from the murder, rape, pillaging and torture committed by the combatants and unruly paramilitary gangs. The tasks of the U.N. mission, which has already suffered nearly 50 fatalities, are to keep its own troops out of harm’s way, to take note of the abundant horrors and to escort humanitarian aid to the victims, where and when the gunmen let them, when and if there is aid to give.

Most days, the U.N. soldiers guard trucks and planes delivering food and medicine. Some days, their balm for Bosnia is shaving cream.

SHIRTLESS AND SHOELESS, THREE DOZEN CANADIAN SOLDIERS SUN themselves atop their mud-encrusted armored personnel carriers. The unusually agreeable spring weather gives them an early start on their tans, dries their soggy socks and lifts spirits at the camp they call their “dump on the Drina.”

The aptly dubbed bivouac, rife with soldierly garbage and body odor, was born of a rare moment of triumph for UNPROFOR. Barred by rebel warlord Vladimir Dakic from entering Bosnia across the Drina River bridge at Mali Zvornik, the Canadians parked the war machines they use to escort aid convoys in a wide dirt lot in view of the barricaded span.

Dakic, a swaggering and temperamental captain in the self-styled Bosnian Serb army, is known among U.N. soldiers and relief workers as the “king of the bridge” for his power to control passage of life-saving humanitarian aid. The lanky, mustachioed gunman had for days held up a UNHCR convoy bound for Srebrenica with an agonizingly slow inspection of the relief goods. Gruff Serb rebels under Dakic’s command pawed through their enemies’ rations, truck by truck, carton by carton. Every jar of baby food was opened, every sack of flour speared with bayonets.

When the inspection ruse became tiresome, the king of the bridge demanded that UNPROFOR collect and deliver Serbs from nearby Tuzla, one of the few areas of Bosnia still integrated and largely at peace. When the U.N. agreed to relocate those Serbs who wanted to leave, Dakic demanded a third of the convoy’s cargo as the toll for crossing his fiefdom. Eager to be done with the demoralizing standoff, the aid workers and their U.N. escorts agreed to pay up, only to be told of a new condition--that the convoy proceed without its Canadian protectors.

Tired of humoring the warlord while Muslims starved to death only a few miles away, French Gen. Philippe Morillon threw caution and procedure aside. He left the Canadians behind on the riverbank and personally led 17 trucks of food and medicine into Srebrenica, braving a gantlet of gunfire to enter the old silver-mining town, where no aid had reached 60,000 women, children and elderly in four months.

The general rocketed to hero status among the besieged Muslims, momentarily polishing UNPROFOR’s tarnished image with a vow that his troops would protect them from the encroaching Serbs. But Morillon’s brave gesture also gave birth to the delusion among the trapped and hungry civilians that a caring world stood by his side. In the procedure-bound reality of U.N. politics, Morillon’s efforts drew sharp rebuke. Higher-ups clucked that the commander of U.N. forces in Bosnia was empowered to escort aid, not make rash promises to defend the hopeless. Quixotic gestures, even to save lives, clearly exceeded UNPROFOR’s mandate. Rumors circulated that Morillon would be recalled.

Those watching their commander’s endeavors from the east bank of the Drina felt the sting of his censure and drew appropriate lessons about the professional costs of acting on moral impulse. “This mission is a joke!” groused one angry officer who accompanied Morillon during the two-week standoff. Appalled by Dakic’s maneuvers, the officer demanded, “Why are we even negotiating with this Saddam Hussein look-alike?”

Correctly reading from Morillon’s upbraiding that there was dissension in the upper U.N. ranks, Bosnian Serb chieftain Gen. Ratko Mladic deployed fresh forces to drive out the last Muslims from the republic’s eastern region. In April, U.N. troops and trucks were called in to transport thousands of newly uprooted Muslims across Serb siege lines to Tuzla. Relief workers called their role in the deportation a humanitarian rescue, as otherwise the expelled Muslims would have been subjected to hostile fire. Bosnian leaders in Sarajevo called it U.N. complicity in ethnic cleansing.

Hopes among the Muslims that Western forces would eventually save them crashed along with Morillon’s stardom. Wounded by reprimands and handcuffed by U.N. wobbling, the French general failed in his attempt to lead a protective cordon of troops into Srebrenica only two weeks after his triumphal delivery of aid. Black-clad Serbian women, who had also lost sons and husbands in the past year’s offensives, blocked his armored column at Zvornik with a hail of rocks and curses.

Beaten down as much by the West’s failure to back him as by the angry, stone-throwing mob, Morillon retreated to Sarajevo and the comfortable obscurity of his requisitioned villa, where he awaited routine reassignment. The Canadian troops who had followed their commander’s exploits by radio from their river-side perch at Mali Zvornik packed up their camp and clattered off to a base in Croatia. The king of the bridge, his mustache twisted by a smirk, dispatched a few local urchins to clear away the heaps of trash.

SENADA KRESO’S OFFICE LOOKS LIKE THE HEADQUARTERS OF A FRINGE political party. Mismatched chairs are haphazardly arrayed around a wobbly low table. Ashtrays are overflowing, and there is a camp bed in one corner. The walls of the dark cubbyhole are crowded with posters decrying genocide, demanding of fellow Europeans what they meant by “Never Again.”

But the message that emanates from Kreso’s Sarajevo office is not a radical minority view. It is the voice of many Bosnians who remain loyal to the principles of tolerance and integration, living defiance of the nationalist quest to force an ethnic division with bombs and bullets. A prominent radio reporter before the war in her homeland, Kreso, like many Bosnian journalists, has been transformed by the violence into an activist in the cause of defending multiethnic Bosnia. She has joined the government as a media liaison and undertaken with crusading vigor the task of convincing foreign visitors that some semblance of multicultural Bosnia has survived and that Western mediators, instead of bowing to the bloody drive for division, should work to preserve the country’s diversity.

Elegant even in a simple white T-shirt and ankle-length khaki skirt, Kreso seems the embodiment of Sarajevo’s grace under fire. Her calm, congenial exterior is overcome by irritation, however, when the conversation she is having with me and another American is interrupted by the piercing screech of a NATO jet. “We have a joke about them, you know,” she says, waving a bony hand in the direction of the Western warplane, one of dozens patrolling the skies over Bosnia to symbolically enforce the no-fly zone. “We say that there are really no planes flying over us, just big balloons that carry loudspeakers and a tape of the noise a jet makes.”

Sarajevo needs more noise about as much as Srebrenica’s scabrous women need after-shave. Staccato bursts of machine-gun fire echo incessantly through the rubble-strewn streets, punctuated by sniper rounds directed at those brash enough to walk about. Mortars and tank shells beat out a tuneless percussion concert, each impact reverberating for miles. There is little traffic, as few can afford gas, which is smuggled across the siege lines by war profiteers and sold for $50 a gallon. But tractor-treaded and sputtering U.N. armored personnel carriers send up a deafening roar as they patrol shattered Sarajevo, tackling with gusto their orders to “provide presence.”

Kreso complains that neither the NATO flyovers nor the armored ground forces have brought any relief for the embattled people. American, Dutch and French pilots streaking by loudly overhead are counting the hundreds of flights that have been made in defiance of the air cap by Serb pilots cockily confident that no Western power wants to risk retaliation by shooting them down. The ground troops are empowered to do little more than defend themselves while on an ambiguous mission of being seen and keeping a distance. U.N. personnel carriers thunder past civilians felled in the streets by shrapnel, their crews officially discouraged from showing favoritism by shuttling the other side’s wounded to the hospital.

It is this view of the Bosnian conflict as a three-sided orgy of killing that outrages Sarajevans like Kreso, who are on the receiving end of the rebel guns. They see the U.N. as trying to apportion blame equally between land-grabbing attackers and their civilian victims, a deliberate distortion by Western politicians who simply don’t want to get involved.

“What do they do for us?” Kreso asks with unmasked bitterness, gesturing toward the unseen jet as its diminishing roar is drowned out by a fresh burst of shells. “What are they here for? They don’t help anyone.”

Nearly 10,000 have been killed in the siege of Sarajevo since U.N. troops first arrived last July. The troops were dispatched to reopen the airport for humanitarian relief flights to feed the nearly 400,000 residents who refused to flee and leave the capital easy prey for the Serbs. Many Sarajevans hunkered down in cellars for the first months, riding out the terror in the belief that Western air power would soon drive the guns away. Most now berate themselves for being so naive.

Many in the capital are now eager to escape, having lost faith in the holdout strategy of idealists like Kreso, but they are hemmed in by the Serbian artillery cordon and, in most cases, have nowhere to go. They are emaciated from the protracted shortage of food, despite the airlift. Schools function only intermittently, on those serendipitous occasions when there is little shelling and some light. Public transportation ceased to function 15 months ago, when bombs halted the red-and-yellow trams dead in their tracks. Many adults still trek to their jobs each day, hugging the rusted metal walls that have been erected across the most vulnerable sniper targets, always choosing the narrowest back alleys, where shells are less likely to fall. But once there, they have little to do. There is no commerce in a besieged city cut off from the rest of the world.

Electricity and water are usually choked off by combat or sabotage. When the government sends tankers to urban intersections to supply apartment-dwellers with water, the resulting lineup to fill containers acts like a magnet for tragedy. Bread lines, water taps, the odd pickup soccer game, all places where crowds gather have been the scenes of massacres inflicted by Serbian shells.

Earlier this month, the situation become so bad that the World Health Organization urged the U.N. Security Council to take emergency steps to deliver vitally needed food, medicine and fuel to Sarajevo and other besieged Bosnian towns. If it didn’t, warned WHO Director-General Hiroshi Nakajima, “A catastrophe will take place, the likes of which Europe and the world have not witnessed since the dark days of the Second World War.”

It is increasingly difficult, but Sarajevans insist that their lives go on. Most have adapted to the constant dodging and hiding and have become masters at bending reality. They say they have come to prefer the new “UNHCR windows,” the opaque plastic sheeting distributed by the aid agency to replace shell-shattered glass; the plastic blurs the devastated scenery. Shrugging off hardships and willing away fear are the tools of survival in the second year of the siege. “For me, they don’t exist. I don’t hate them, they just aren’t there,” Kreso says of the Serb gunmen, her dark eyes flashing through yellow-rimmed designer glasses, a reminder of the sophisticated Sarajevo the howitzers have almost annihilated.

“I ignore them. It’s the only way I can deal with the situation,” she explains between explosions. “I also don’t wait for electricity or get all excited when the water is on. It’s not worth it. We get used to doing without. It’s easier that way.”

She totes around a zippered gym bag with fresh clothes and a little food for the nights when it doesn’t seem worth it to risk the walk home. In her tiny, unlit office, she can sit with her back to the window and, by sheer willpower, make the war go away.

THE SEVEN GRAVES THAT CONSTITUTE Ljuba Eic’s family are scattered among the hillside cemeteries of Sarajevo, rooting her to a city that is itself barely clinging to life. “I spent my childhood here, my young days and now my old days,” the platinum-haired widow says wistfully, heedless of the gun blasts from fellow Serbs in the hills above. “I met my husband here, and I have to say we had a good life. We lived like czars until this war. We had a house in Dubrovnik, as well as the one here. We invested everything we earned in our combined 75 years of working. All our lives we saved for our old age, and now I’m alone and left as a beggar.”

The Dubrovnik summer house on the Adriatic Sea was blasted to bits by Serbs more than a year ago, and only two rooms of her Sarajevo home have survived a bombardment that has persisted since April, 1992. Her life’s savings were lost when the Belgrade regime nationalized foreign currency assets two years ago, around the time her husband died. Her pension, now given out in coupons, buys only a few loaves of bread each month.

“Do you know that they sell potatoes and onions for 5 deutschmarks?” she says of wartime Sarajevo’s black marketeers, aghast at the sum equal to about $3. “Have they no shame, to take advantage of pensioners on the verge of starvation?”

Eic and a handful of other elderly Sarajevans pool their meager food rations to keep themselves fed, cutting down the odds of disaster in the event unreliable aid distributions leave one or the other with nothing to eat. On a spring Sunday blessed with sunshine and cursed with a storm of mortars, the frail old woman gingerly makes the dash from her shattered home to a communal church kitchen, safeguarding inside her purse the single onion she has to contribute.

The U.N. mission is feeding them, or at least trying, while leaving them exposed to unrelenting gunfire. This is little comfort for the people of Sarajevo, who risk being cut down by shrapnel en route to get their share of the shrinking Western dole. The airlift is so often suspended by the surrounding shell fire that the capital seldom gets enough food for everyone.

Eic plays with the slack in her waistband as she morosely describes the usual handout. “Flour, that’s all. Sometimes a little salt and some cooking oil. But everything else is a problem. No sugar. Nothing that tastes good,” she says, smacking her lips in remembrance. The people of Sarajevo realize they have been abandoned, Eic explains. Just as they did after the last war, she says, “we must fend for ourselves.”

Around the plots where her husband and other relatives are buried, including two nephews killed in this war, she has planted green onions and herbs. On days when it seems safe, she tends to both garden and graveyard, nurturing her food for the future and savoring the memories of an irretrievable past.

THERE ARE DAYS WHEN THE U.N.’s mediators and mitigators are convinced their efforts in Bosnia have made a difference, and other days when they fear they are taking part in a cruel hoax.

Having pulled Sarajevo duty for Christmas week last year, UNHCR spokesman Peter Kessler, a Maine native, tapped into his deep reservoir of optimism and told himself this holiday in hell was the very essence of humanitarian relief work. There was, for once, something to feel good about. Several weeks of uninterrupted deliveries by both road convoys and the airlift had filled the Bosnian aid warehouses to a level of unusual plenty. Despite the bitter-cold temperatures, capital residents were reasonably warm once stoves and wood were distributed and plastic sheeting was affixed to the frames of the countless broken windows.

“I was just thinking to myself that things seemed to be going pretty well,” Kessler recalls. “I was staring out the window at an apartment yard that’s now filled with graves, when this dog went by carrying a human arm in his mouth. It was so macabre, it kind of forced me back to reality.”

The combined efforts of UNHCR and UNPROFOR averted the worst-case scenario in former Yugoslavia last winter by feeding, at least occasionally, about 3 million people. Despite harrowing predictions by some relief officials that 400,000 Bosnians were at risk of starvation, few of the thousands who died during the cold-weather months succumbed solely from lack of food.

Yet winter’s privations wore down the resistance of those Bosnians it didn’t kill, and even the optimists look fearfully at the empty aid warehouses as they count the few months until the next snow. “The situation is extremely precarious,” Kessler says of the dwindling relief stocks and what seems to be global fatigue with the Bosnian crisis. “We know there have been deaths, people committing passive suicide by walking toward front lines. Unless the war is ended one way or another, people’s stamina will disappear. They will begin to give up.”

After more than a year of battling nationalist obstructions and waning Western concern, Kessler says that many, himself included, are losing heart.

“Perhaps the moment is lost to show leadership,” Kessler says of the Western countries that have left Bosnia in relief workers’ hands. Expressing doubts about the chances for survival in besieged enclaves like Srebrenica and Sarajevo, he concedes that “it is a disappointing state of affairs when life in a safe area means severe malnutrition, slow death and constant sniping.”

AT UNPROFOR HEADQUARTERS in Zagreb, blue-bereted troops and a battalion of U.N. office workers have taken over a former Yugoslav army compound on the western edge of town. One cavernous room is filled with the products of the mission paper mill: the histories of all past peacekeeping missions, press releases on every utterance of the force commander, texts of Security Council resolutions, maps showing the exact distribution of the U.N. Balkan troops. There are detailed reports from deadlocked talks the U.N. Civilian Affairs staff convenes every so often, whenever the rival warlords can be compelled to meet for a verbal fight. There are also notices about U.N. holiday hours, new badge-issuing procedures and the need for interoffice mail to be placed in the right bins for timely pickup.

Cedric Thornberry, an affable Irishman who is UNPROFOR’s second in command, is less disposed, in this second year of fruitless wrangling with the belligerents, to exhibit the wit that was his constant companion at the start of the mission. He chafes under the bungling image UNPROFOR has acquired as a result of its do-nothing mandate. It is no failing of the U.N. soldiers or policemen that has left civilians at the mercy of the nationalists’ guns, Thornberry peevishly contends. He blames Western governments for their seesawing commitment to resolve the conflict. The massive deployment of U.N. troops into Croatian war zones was never followed up with a promised peace conference, he notes, and in Bosnia the troops still have no authority to intervene among the combatants.

“A peacekeeping force--and we do not even have a peacekeeping force in Bosnia--cannot be expected to make up in its operations on the ground for any lack of international support to find long-term solutions,” Thornberry says pointedly. “This is the job of the U.N. members, not UNPROFOR. The U.N. is no more than the sum of its parts.”

One senior broker in the Balkan drama, Britain’s Lord Owen, has been riding the undulating wave of Western attention to the crisis with alternating expressions of anger and displays of diplomatic aplomb. It is his name, and that of Cyrus R. Vance, Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, that is attached to a painstakingly drafted, then abandoned, Bosnian peace plan. The product of nine months of negotiation and haggling, the Vance-Owen plan endorsed by Bosnia’s Croats and Muslims was to have been imposed by U.N. military force if the holdout Serbs persisted in thwarting a settlement. The United States promised up to 25,000 troops to enforce the plan.

But threats of air strikes inflicted more terror in European governments than among the Serbs. When Washington and its allied U.N. members abruptly stopped pushing for enforcement of the plan to pacify Bosnia, the civilian victims were left ensnared in the artillery traps of the gloating Serb gunmen, and Owen was expected to forget about his namesake plan.

The Vance-Owen “process,” as it is now called, would have carved up the republic into 10 ethnic provinces and doled them out, three each, to the Serb, Muslim and Croat factions, leaving Sarajevo as the only vestige of tolerance and integration. Since the Bosnian Serbs made clear in a May referendum that they would keep the 70% of the republic they have conquered instead of settling for only three pieces, the U.N. has ceased all bellicose warnings.

There has been no more talk of restoring Bosnia now that the better-armed bullies have won, and Western leaders who earlier warned of an uncontrolled spread of the Balkan crisis to seething Kosovo province or Macedonia have adopted a see-no-evil approach to the explosive tensions building to the south. A token U.N. deployment of 300 American troops to Macedonia is intended to stare down any Serbian assault on Albanians in Kosovo, but the heavily armed Serbs there have been convinced by the Western about-face in Bosnia that U.N. troops are paper tigers, with neither the will nor the authority to get in their way.

Owen has loitered on the diplomatic circuit to pitch a fallback plan to create safe havens and to mull the combatants’ mutually exclusive proposals for an alternative ethnic carve-up of the republic. But the sense of abandonment he shares with Bosnian war victims is apparent in cryptic verbal swipes he has taken at Washington for leading a moral and military retreat. “I won’t agree to be made a fig leaf,” he says of the U.N. peace process.

Now the U.N. soldiers--most of them from Britain and France--have little purpose in a dangerous region, marking time watching a blood bath they are powerless to affect.

“Everything changed when the Vance-Owen plan became, in the eyes of the people on the ground, more distant,” Kessler says dejectedly. “To the fighters in Pale, Banja Luka and Mostar, the plan and the threat of intervention seemed real. But when the military commitment went from 70,000 troops (to enforce Vance-Owen) to maybe 8,000, the forces on the ground started asking themselves, ‘Where’s the beef?’ ” By mid-July, rumors circulated that the U.N. would withdraw all its troops if the Muslims did not accept a Serbo-Croatian partition plan.

With no serious threat of intervention, the Serbian troops now thwart aid convoys and U.N. patrols with impunity. The republic’s Muslim and Croatian forces, whose previous alliance has broken down entirely, have taken to fighting each other for what land and local power is left. As violence breeds revenge and increasing chaos, Western governments feel more inclined to believe the Serbs’ claims that Bosnia is racked by civil war and not a genocidal land-grab. And U.N. officers whose views are based only on what they’ve seen on their patch of ground tend to accept the aggressors’ argument that there are no clear victims or perpetrators.

“There aren’t any white hats here,” says one senior officer at the U.N. Bosnian corps headquarters in Kiseljak, a spa town 15 miles west of Sarajevo. Most of the troops retreated there when the artillery attacks became too intense in the capital.

Although the hundreds of troops stationed at U.N. headquarters have been living in Kiseljak since last summer, they continue to grossly mispronounce the name of their host town (the Serbo-Croatian J always sounds like Y), revealing their limited exposure to anyone outside the fortress-like compound.

IT IS 6:45 A.M., AND A MILKY sunrise over western Sarajevo portends a thundershower. A skinny dog wriggles through barbed wire coiled like a giant Slinky around the edge of a parking lot. Once inside, he abruptly sits, as if to show how easily even a hapless hound can surmount such defenses.

The barbed wire encloses what used to be the postal and communications center for the Bosnian capital, a towering office complex now sandbagged and guarded in its wartime role as forward headquarters for U.N. forces shuttling in from Kiseljak. The fortified parking lot is arrayed with a fleet of white U.N. vehicles, including one rumbling, smoke-spewing armored personnel carrier due to set off in 15 minutes for Sarajevo airport.

The two-mile route from forward headquarters to the airport traverses some of Bosnia’s most perilous territory. It traces the front line running through the fiercely contested suburb of Dobrinja, a Mad Max backdrop of blasted buildings and burned-out cars and buses. Both Serbian and government snipers hide among the rubble, waiting vigilantly to fulfill their orders to shoot at anything that moves.

After dozens of aid workers, foreign journalists and government officials were wounded or killed trying to negotiate the airport road on their own, UNPROFOR early this year relented on its military-passengers-only policy for the headquarters-to-airport shuttles it operates every half hour. Authorized civilians with legitimate business reasons for getting to and from Sarajevo now can ride in armored safety on this most dangerous of runs. Once at the airport, they can catch a ride with the Western military planes ferrying UNHCR relief goods in from the Adriatic seaport of Split.

To escape this last pull of the trigger in a visit that approximates an extended game of Russian roulette, another American journalist, a British missionary and I arrive in time for the 7 a.m. shuttle on this sultry Sunday morning, with every expectation of making an 8:30 flight. After clearing inspection by the sandbagged sentry at one corner of the barbed-wire fence, we haul our bags, helmets and flak jackets into the guarded enclosure and up to the idling personnel carrier.

A French captain about to climb into the shuttle’s rear hatch looks momentarily troubled by conscience. The shuttle driver, another Frenchman, informs us that we need a waiver from Civilian Affairs before we can get in, though when the Ukrainian troops are on duty, a couple of Marlboros suffice.

Inside the sprawling building, the various U.N. factions have their respective offices, each door labeled with the alphabet soup of the U.N. mission: CivPol for civilian police, MovCon for those who control vehicle movement, UNMO for the military observers the Serbs seldom allow to stray far from HQ. A crew-cut blond Norwegian policeman, incongruously perky for the hour, is on guard duty on the ground floor. He apologetically informs us that Civilian Affairs doesn’t open until 9 a.m.

We try to suppress petulance. It is a Sunday, and there are procedures, and the French, unlike the Ukrainians, tend to go by the book. But isn’t it rather ridiculous, we ask, to risk being killed for lack of a paper? Couldn’t we write and sign a waiver absolving UNPROFOR of responsibility for an unlikely mishap? Perhaps there was an early-rising Civilian Affairs worker casting about in the barracks on the floors above?

“You’re dealing with the U.N. here,” the Norwegian observes with as much sympathy as sarcasm. “You won’t get anyone to come down from Civilian Affairs because they all hate the military police. The UNMOs hate CivPol. MovCon hates the UNMOs. Everyone hates everyone else, that’s why nothing ever gets done.”

As if to belabor the point, a French sergeant bolts out from behind the military police reception desk to shoo us off, roaring that we have no business inside the compound before 9 a.m.

Security is tight at U.N. facilities, at least during some shifts, because the troops and aid workers have become targets for Bosnian Serbs who oppose their efforts at deterring aggression and by the rest of the republic because those efforts have failed. Besides the 50 soldiers killed since the mission began, one aid worker was shot to death before the U.N. started providing convoys with military escorts. At least 13 more have been killed since UNPROFOR began providing protective presence.

Promptly at 7 a.m., the shuttle that can carry more than a dozen people departs with its sole passenger, the French captain. Embarrassed, he averts his eyes as we trundle out of the compound, laden with luggage, and head into the sights of snipers for the two-mile journey back to the airport.