Dispatches Another Day of Peacekeeping

By JAMES L. GRAFF, in Vienna

For 11 Canadian U.N. soldiers on a cold afternoon just before Christmas, it was bad enough to be on the thankless mission of patrolling a road in the thick of fighting between Serbs and Bosnian government troops. But if the past 20 months of warfare in the former Yugoslavia have proved anything, it is that things can always get worse.

Sergeant Jacques Beaulieu and 10 fellow Canadian blue berets were manning a checkpoint and bunker at a bridge on the recently opened road between Sarajevo and Visoko, 20 miles northwest of the Bosnian capital. Seven feet away was a Serbian checkpoint; across the valley, about 100 yards off, other Canadians were posted near a similar post manned by Muslim troops of the Bosnian army. With minor variations, the arrangement is common along the battle lines throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina.

There was nothing unique about the Muslim sniper's bullet that seriously wounded a Serb or the U.N. soldiers' response, a radioed request to their base in Visoko for medical evacuation of the injured man.

"At the operations center, we had three choices," said Captain George Petrokilis, 34, assistant operations officer of the 12th Canadian Armored Regiment base in Visoko. "Bringing him across the line of confrontation to us wasn't going to fly. We couldn't send the vehicle on the bridge because that would leave our guys without one. So we cranked up an ambulance from our hospital here to take him to the Serb field station in Ilijas."

By that time, almost 25 minutes had passed -- and the Serb had died in a vehicle finally sent by his command. Angered by the loss and fueled by slivovitz, the plum brandy that is ubiquitous here, the remaining Serbs turned on the Canadians. "There were about four guys," said Petrokilis. "They ordered two of our guys out of the checkpoint and the other nine out of the bunker. Everyone was taken outside in a group. None of our guys knew what the - Serbs were saying, but their gestures were aggressive and angry. They fired to the left and to the right of our troops. I can't in all good conscience say it was a mock execution -- there wasn't any system to it. They shot and killed a passing dog."

A little less than an hour later, the incident ended when a Serb officer arrived to calm down his men, and the Canadians pulled out of the checkpoint. Back at their base, the 11 soldiers were given a "critical-incident-stress debriefing" and 48 hours off -- all standard procedure, said Petrokilis.

The Canadians did not reoccupy the checkpoint, but the U.N. was determined to play down the ordeal. "This is a minor incident," said Major Idesbald van Biesebroeck, spokesman for the United Nations Protection Force in Sarajevo. Only in Bosnia, where 10,000 peacekeepers walk the thin line between being humanitarians and combatants, could such treatment of U.N. troops be considered a minor incident. "Repetition creates a sense of ordinariness," said Petrokilis. "Of course, what the Bosnian Serbs did here was inexcusable. But similar things happen all the time on all sides -- just pick your belligerent."