The Perils of Good Intentions

By MARGUERITE MICHAELS

HUNGER AND HOPELESSNESS CAN drive people to desperate acts. As a 10-truck U.N. aid convoy entered the Muslim village of Ticici in central Bosnia on its way to Tuzla last Wednesday, more than 200 residents stood waiting by the road. Someone opened fire from the window of a house at the convoy's police escort, and the villagers mobbed the trucks, grabbing for any supplies they could reach. It was the second attack in two days on a convoy in Ticici, where villagers believe they are not receiving their fair share of food.

On Thursday night, gunmen armed with assault weapons ambushed a Land Rover belonging to three British aid workers near a food warehouse in the central Bosnian city of Zenica. The bandits took all three to an isolated spot, where they executed the driver and wounded the other two as they fled. The Overseas Development Administration, which manages British humanitarian aid to Bosnia and carries 40% of U.N.-distributed supplies, suspended its deliveries.

Months of strict Serbian and Croatian blockades have reduced the Muslims in supply-starved central Bosnia to banditry and the looting of food meant for the thousands of other Muslim refugees in besieged Tuzla, 45 miles to the north. Increased harassment at checkpoints has cut aid to the Muslims to a fraction of what Serbs and Croats receive.

Humanitarian aid is, in the post-cold war world, increasingly the response of choice to the plethora of small-scale slaughters that prick the West's collective conscience but do not seem important enough to command greater diplomatic or military involvement. The travails in delivery last week were only a symptom of the lack of political will in Western capitals to act forcefully. Humanitarian aid feels good to those who insist that something must be done to stop the killing in Bosnia, in Somalia, in a dozen other bloody conflicts. And it is far more politically palatable than sending soldiers to fight and die in countries -- without strategic assets like oil or nuclear weapons -- that few people can locate on a map. But as Bosnia and Somalia show, aid by itself solves very little and rapidly becomes part of the problem.

Never have so many aid workers paid such a high price for their commitment. Eleven U.N. relief staff members have died in Bosnia. Kidnappings, shootings and death threats are part of the job description in Somalia, where six aid workers have been slain. Although the Clinton Administration denies it, there is a perception that the U.S. has chosen to abandon Somalia rather than contend with the dangers. Turkish General Cevik Bir, leaving the command of the U.N. operation there last week, leaked an "eyes only" letter to U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, indirectly chastising the Americans and Europeans for "mission erosion." Said Bir: "The contributing nations must be committed enough to accept the violence and loss of life associated with war, and then stay the course."

The U.N. forces assigned to safeguard the convoys complain bitterly over the gap between their task of assuring free passage through a raging factional war zone and the means provided to achieve it. With only 13,000 troops on the ground and no air cover, "our job is becoming impossible," said Belgian General Francis Briquemont just after he asked to leave his post as commander of Bosnia six months early. The overall chief of the U.N. forces, French General Jean Cot, has been relieved of his job after quarreling publicly with Boutros-Ghali over his right to call in air strikes when troops are attacked.

Even the policy of humanitarian aid has come under fire. Frustrated that the Americans are using aid contributions as an excuse to avoid sending in ground forces, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe urged the U.S. last week to take a more active role to push the Muslim-dominated government into accepting a settlement partitioning Bosnia among the three ethnic blocs. "The humanitarian track," he said, "is not enough.

Originally volunteers followed armies onto the battlefield to care for victims. Now it is the armies themselves that must accompany humanitarian organizations to the front line if aid is to be distributed. As the angels of mercy in Bosnia have learned, it is all too easy for combatants to stop, steal or hold hostage the shipments, thrusting the troops protecting them into the middle of the war. Air strikes -- something the U.S. and its allies have resisted -- may now be necessary to relieve Canadian troops in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, a U.N.-declared "safe" enclave surrounded by Serbs. In Mogadishu 12,000 U.N. soldiers are sitting inside walled compounds rather than risk casualties by patrolling the streets. "They are doing nothing but eating and sleeping," says a U.N. military adviser. "Ridiculous."

As aid increasingly serves as a geopolitical tool, the proud humanitarian tradition of neutrality has largely been shattered. "There is a definite change in the attitude toward humanitarian workers," says U.N. aid official Paul Mitchell. "We are now targets." Aid staff members, alone and together & with their uniformed escorts, have taken sides, wittingly and unwittingly, in these fragmented, fratricidal wars. In Somalia, "relief workers tend to become identified with different subclans," says Lance Salisbury, assistant country representative for Catholic Relief Services. "And the leaders attempt to draw you into larger conflicts." In Baidoa, where Salisbury is based, most of his staff is from the Lyssan subclan, which prompted attacks from an opposing subclan.

Nearly two years and more than 200,000 deaths after the West began to assist the Bosnians, some are asking if the aid intended to save lives has only prolonged the war. "That is a downright deadly argument," retorts Wolfgang Berger of the Austrian Catholic charity Caritas, the largest private agency working in the former Yugoslavia. "You can't make peace by sacrificing still more civilians to hunger and destitution."

But Mark Almond, a fellow of the London-based Institute for European Defense and Strategic Studies, believes humanitarian aid in Bosnia has done more harm than good: Serbs and Croats at checkpoints have exacted tolls in hard currency, siphoned food and medicine from the relief trucks and then used the cash and supplies to sustain the fighting. Roads improved by the U.N. to facilitate access for aid convoys have made it easier for all three factions to move troops and guns. The 300,000 survivors of the two-year-long siege of Sarajevo refer to themselves bitterly as "the well-fed dead," plied with just enough food to keep them alive for more shelling and sniper fire while Western nations refuse them military help to end the siege.

The West is also discovering that once a nation engages to bring war-torn countries relief, it is almost impossible to disengage. Last week Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd visited the British troops in Bosnia to see if it might be a smart time to get them out. He came home full of admiration for the soldiers fighting to deliver aid despite constant danger. Britain's participation in the humanitarian program -- as frustrating as it is -- is popular enough that one Foreign Office official admitted "withdrawal would be difficult domestically."

From the beginning it was widely understood that humanitarian aid was not going to resolve a war of such ethnic-based savagery as Bosnia's. But aid was deemed sufficient to straighten out Somalia, where the fighting was considered to be the result of hardship. Yet as both cases demonstrate, in the continued absence of concerted political and military initiatives for peace, humanitarian-aid workers are losing the war against misery. The West will pay a high price for that defeat in a loss of credibility, loss of capacity for effective action, loss of the right to call itself civilized.

With reporting by James L. Graff/Zagreb and Andrew Purvis/Mogadishu