TEARS AND TERROR

By Bruce W. Nelan

The conqueror, General Ratko Mladic, swaggered among the defeated, issuing orders with broad gestures to show who was in charge. Beaming, he watched as his Bosnian Serb soldiers offered candy and other treats to the terrified and bedraggled throngs of Muslim refugees in the Srebrenica enclave. He patted a boy on the cheek and assured the crowd, "No one will do you any harm." That much the outside world was allowed to see last week after the Serbs stormed into the eastern Bosnian zone the U.N. had declared a ''safe area" in 1993. Then the cameras were turned off and the horror began.

Summoning a cavalcade of buses and trucks, the Serbs mounted a full-scale "ethnic cleansing" operation. They packed thousands of Muslim women, children and old men into the vehicles and shuttled them west to territory controlled by the Muslim-dominated Bosnian government. Assembling at the base of a Dutch U.N. battalion in Potocari, a town just north of Srebrenica, Muslim families walked to the buses through protective rows of peacekeepers. But behind the 400 Dutch soldiers stood glowering Bosnian Serb troops. "The most incredible thing was the silence," said a Serb witness. "It was the silence of pure terror." As the Muslims stepped to the waiting vehicles, a trio of armed Serbs wearing red armbands looked them over, occasionally barking, "You, out." Serbs hauled the Muslim men of military age onto other vehicles. The women, children and older men were driven to Tuzla, a larger safe area 35 miles away. When they reached Muslim lines and staggered from the buses, they burst out with a stream of tales of terror and brutality.

The Muslim men and boys, some of them not even in their teens, who were pulled away from their families were then carted off to warehouses and a soccer stadium. U.N. officials quoted Mladic as saying they would be interrogated about "war crimes." A spokesman for the international war-crimes tribunal in the Hague, Christian Chartier, responded that the mass deportation of Muslim civilians would itself be investigated as a possible "crime against humanity." The refugees also reported seeing women dragged off by jeering Serbs and hearing the sound of women screaming. The implication was that the Serbs were once again using rape as a weapon of war. Others said they saw some Muslim men taken to a nearby house where shots may have been fired. Still others claimed they saw bodies piled along the road from Srebrenica to Tuzla. One despairing woman who had safely reached Tuzla hanged herself from a tree with torn strips of blanket.

Two days after the Serbs overran the Srebrenica enclave, all but a few of its 42,000 Muslims had been expelled. Thousands of them were in Tuzla or just outside, crowded into a makeshift tent city in appalling conditions at a U.N.-controlled airfield. The daytime sun was scorching, the smell overpowering. Wounded men on homemade wooden crutches hobbled amid hordes of kerchiefed old women in knitted vests as children shouted and played. Other thousands camped along the roadsides. Workers for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees put up temporary shelters and passed out food, but they were unable to keep up with the demand as refugees kept streaming in. Perhaps 3,000 younger men from Srebrenica, many of them Bosnian government soldiers, had fled into the woods and dodged the Serb invaders, and some made their way to Tuzla.

Then, on Friday, the ugly drama started to repeat itself at Zepa, a second safe area harboring about 16,000 Muslim refugees 10 miles southwest of Srebrenica. As they had earlier, the Serbs gave the U.N. peacekeepers on the spot -- 79 Ukrainians -- an ultimatum to get out of the way. The Ukrainians stood fast, and the Serbs opened up with tank guns and mortars. "If they want to take Zepa," said an official at U.N. headquarters in Zagreb, "they can, and we can't stop them." Bosnian troops at Zepa, however, were determined to try, and on Saturday they fired shots at the U.N. compound and hijacked three armored vehicles. At the same time in Gorazde, some of the 10,000 government soldiers based there seized small arms and vehicles from Ukrainian peacekeepers.

The pictures of all this carnage and human misery sickened a world watching on television. At the same time the image of Western impotence, the inability of the U.N. and NATO to do anything to limit the Serbs' brutality, was no less searing. With little more than a flick of the hand, Mladic revealed how hollow was the U.N.'s vow to protect the eastern towns it had declared safe. The taking of Srebrenica was an immense public humiliation and one that forced the major powers to once more rethink the U.N. mission: Should it be withdrawn or beefed up? Should Paris, London and Washington admit failure or decide at last to confront the Serbs? All the allies said they were unwilling to pull out. The French even expressed their willingness to fight if others would take part. President Jacques Chirac called on Britain and the U.S. initially to recapture Srebrenica and then to join him in safeguarding the third eastern enclave, Gorazde.

At a Bastille Day news conference in Paris on Friday, Chirac took a fittingly resolute stand, appealing to France's partners to shake off their paralysis. "I call on all the great democracies to think again," Chirac said, "and to impose respect for human rights and international law." The U.N., he said, "must at the very least be ready to protect the remaining enclaves and notably Sarajevo." Defense Minister Charles Millon added that if positive replies were not received within 10 days, France would consider a pullout.

In a series of phone calls, Chirac, President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister John Major and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl discussed the options. The French proposed that the U.S. and Britain join in defending Gorazde -- Srebrenica and Zepa are written off -- as well as Sarajevo. They asked Washington to contribute the helicopters needed to lift 1,000 reinforcements to Gorazde, where 300 British troops and 100 Ukrainians of the U.N. Protection Force, known as UNPROFOR, are already dug in. Paris was not asking the U.S. for ground troops, something Clinton has always ruled out, but wanted to be assured of enough air support to move, supply and protect the U.N. forces.

Despite its reluctance to be drawn deeper into Bosnia, Washington is thinking seriously about the French request. Administration officials say they are not yet certain of what Chirac has in mind or how Major will respond. "We don't know where the British are," says a senior official. "Backing up our allies is what this is all about. But the British government hasn't backed up the French request." Major was still consulting, but his new Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, had already gone on record saying that the U.N. was not prepared "to cross the Rubicon and become a combatant in a war." Says a senior official in Washington: "There's a broad range of options between deterrence and war fighting. The question is, Are the British and French willing to go up the ladder?"

The U.N.'s civilian representatives have always held back from using air strikes, because bombing the Serbs has resulted in hostage taking and other reprisals. And, as officials in Washington pointed out, the use of American helicopters around Gorazde would require air cover from fighter-bombers. For strike planes to be able to operate safely over Bosnia, NATO military commanders are likely to say they must destroy Serb antiaircraft-missile sites. Such operations would put aircrews and other U.S. military personnel in harm's way and so would require Clinton to consult with Congress.

A Republican expert on Bosnia says the idea of U.S. helicopters ferrying UNPROFOR around the war zone will not play well on Capitol Hill. "What if the French want it done again?" the expert asks. "This is involvement." Officers at the Pentagon did not like the idea either. "What happens if the French get in trouble and they ask us to land in a hot landing zone to pull them out?" one asks. "I'd be a heck of a lot more willing to risk my life to rescue Americans than I would be for someone whose language I can't even speak." The Republican congressional leadership has been leaning toward a U.N. withdrawal and a lifting of the arms embargo on Bosnia, and expects to put such a plan to a Senate vote this week. Nevertheless, insists a senior Administration official, "our strategic goal is to enable unprofor to stay."

But stay to do what? The collapse of the eastern safe areas and the suffering of the refugees from renewed ethnic cleansing are the results of a U.N. policy based on declarations instead of action backed by force. Srebrenica was the first safe area, created in April 1993 after French General Philippe Morillon, then the U.N. commander in Bosnia, dramatically drove into the besieged town to give his personal protection to the Muslim refugees who filled it. Under his supervision, the rebel Serbs and the Bosnian government signed an agreement that demilitarized the town and guaranteed its safety.

Flushed with this success, the Security Council then went ahead in May 1993 to designate five other safe areas: Zepa and Gorazde in the east, Tuzla and Bihac in the north, and the capital, Sarajevo. The policy was a bluff. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali told the Security Council at the time he would need 34,000 soldiers to provide the enclaves with real security. The council balked and mandated only 7,600. In fact, not even that many were ever assigned to the safe areas. So the resolution approved a month later did not mention their "defense" but called on unprofor "to deter attacks" on them. "They were indefensible from the start," says a U.N. official in Zagreb.

"The safe-areas policy has been a gamble from the beginning," agrees a U.N. official in New York City. "The international community thought a lightly armed presence would be enough to deter attacks." The deterrence lasted only as long as the Serbs allowed themselves to be deterred. Why they changed their minds and decided to move against the eastern enclaves is another matter the Western governments are trying to figure out. Many military officers, including some on the U.N. staff and at nato, believe the Serbs are acting to pre-empt the new 10,000-troop Rapid Reaction Force the French, British and Dutch decided to deploy after hundreds of their peacekeepers were taken hostage in May.

The reaction force is just beginning to take shape, and Mladic may have concluded this was the time to clear out the eastern enclaves and create a purely Serb area from the border with Serbia proper all the way to Sarajevo. Others say the attack on Srebrenica and Zepa was just what Bosnians could have expected after the counteroffensive they undertook in June. The Serbs usually respond where the Muslims are most vulnerable.

One question no one seems ready to answer: Is Mladic, the commander of Bosnian Serb forces, working for his nominal leader Radovan Karadzic, or for the President of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic? The U.S. and other members of the five-nation Contact Group that is trying to negotiate a settlement in Bosnia have been hoping Milosevic, smarting under tough U.N. economic sanctions, was preparing to recognize the Bosnian state and force the rebel Serbs to sit down to work out an agreement. That might still be true, with the taking of the enclaves a last-stage land grab after which the Bosnian Serbs will be ready to negotiate a peace.

And then, maybe not. Says a congressional staff expert: "Either you believe there's a split between Milosevic and Karadzic and Mladic or you don't. I don't." Some diplomats in Serbia's capital, Belgrade, thought they saw indications Milosevic was backing the offensive. They say the dozens of trucks and buses the Bosnian Serbs used to transport the Muslims out of Srebrenica were observed crossing the border from Serbia into Bosnia last Monday night. They also say the Drina Corps, the Serb unit that launched the attack, was newly resupplied with fuel and munitions that must have come from Serbia. At least two Western embassies in Belgrade sent representatives to Milosevic last week asking him to prove his bona fides by ending the offensive in eastern Bosnia. Could he deliver? Milosevic, who is close to Mladic, told the envoys, as one reported, that he had "tried to get Mladic on the phone, but his calls had not been returned."

Whoever was calling the shots, the Serb war machine rolled forward implacably. After using tanks to drive Dutch peacekeepers out of their observation posts and taking several of them hostage, the Serbs drew up just half a mile from Srebrenica. On Monday, Mladic issued his ultimatum: the population of the enclave and the 400-man Dutch battalion must leave. Throughout the day, fighting had been going on all over the area between Serbs and some 4,000 lightly armed Bosnian government troops; one Dutch peacekeeper was killed at a Bosnian roadblock.

Serbs had already entered Srebrenica when NATO planes, finally called in for support, dropped their first bombs -- 500-pounders aimed at two tanks. That prompted the Serbs to threaten to kill the Dutch soldiers they had captured and to shell the crowds of refugees already heading for the Dutch battalion's base at Potocari. Dutch Defense Minister Joris Voorhoeve asked the U.N. and NATO commanders to call off further air strikes. The Serbs moved on the Dutch compound, where thousands of Muslim refugees had gathered and where Mladic strode onto the scene on Wednesday. He began to release his Dutch captives on Saturday.

Srebrenica is gone now, and Zepa is going. That leaves Gorazde as the last Muslim enclave in the east. The time for decision making is growing short. Clinton admitted Thursday that "unless we can restore the integrity of the U.N. mission, obviously its days will be numbered." It must have pained him to say it, because a pullout will force him to live up to his pledge to contribute 25,000 American troops to the operation. The President's top national security officials met for more than two hours at the White House on Friday. They agreed to try to find ways to provide planes and other special equipment for the new reaction force now assembling. Clinton ordered General John Shalikashvili, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to emergency talks in London over the weekend. While the official topic was the deployment of the reaction force, its real focus was Chirac's call for reinforcement of Gorazde with America's help.

The French plan is on the table. If it is not accepted by the U.S. and Britain, the next plan they turn to is likely to be the blueprint for the withdrawal of all peacekeeping forces from Bosnia. Mladic might then decide to move on the remaining safe areas, including the one he really covets: Sarajevo.

--Reported by Edward Barnes/ Belgrade, Massimo Calabresi/Tuzla, Marguerite Michaels/New York and J.F.O. McAllister and Mark Thompson/Washington, with other bureaus

With reporting by EDWARD BARNES/BELGRADE, MASSIMO CALABRESI/ TUZLA, MARGUERITE MICHAELS/NEW YORK AND J.F.O. MCALLISTER AND MARK THOMPSON/WASHINGTON, WITH OTHER BUREAUS