Mountain Bluffs

By BRUCE NELAN By Ed Barnes/Sarajevo, Jay Branegan/Brussels and Robert Kroon/Geneva

Will the Serbian conquest of Bosnia and Herzegovina end with a bang or a whimper -- the crash of bombs or the fade-out of NATO's threat to attack? The answer depends on a dozen conflicting motives, but most of all on the Serbs. Once again the confident Bosnian Serbs are playing the U.N. and NATO like stringed instruments. The Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, and his military commander, Ratko Mladic, last week eased the strangulation of Sarajevo a notch, calculating how much would be just enough to make the U.S. and its allies hold fire.

The cross fire of threats, bluffs and assurances over the former Yugoslavia is confusing -- often intentionally so -- but the Serbs have obviously figured it out. They have concluded they are safe from air attack if they do not fire too many artillery shells into Sarajevo, if they allow a few small convoys of humanitarian aid to enter the city and if they pull back a bit from the mountaintops they recently captured to complete their encirclement of the Bosnian capital. They met those minimum requirements last week when they moved behind agreed withdrawal lines Saturday and allowed U.N. peacekeepers to patrol the area. It worked. NATO strike planes did not take off.

Even so, the war talk went on. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, reversing his July judgment that the U.S. was doing all it could, declared flatly, "It is in our national interest to prevent the strangulation of Sarajevo." In Brussels, the NATO allies worked out a list of Serbian military targets and completed arrangements on which air units would go into action and how the chain of command would operate. The allied air forces were waiting only for the order to go.

On the heights of Mount Igman and Mount Bjelasnica overlooking the city, Serb militiamen appeared to take heed. Making a show of fulfilling Karadzic's original promise to pull back, troops began to move off the mountainsides, accompanied by tanks, trucks and jeeps. As they left, they apparently set fire to several ski lodges. In the town of Trnovo, southeast of Sarajevo, hundreds of grimy soldiers lined up for tourist buses that would carry them away from the peaks they had captured after 10 days of heavy fighting. Some displayed the souvenirs of victory: a Bosnian flag, a helmet with an inscription in Arabic script, street signs from occupied towns. "We follow orders," said one soldier, "but men should not die for this if we are only going to give it back."

Whether they were actually giving it back was far from certain. These troops were from Banja Luka in the north, and as they moved out they were being replaced by fresh, local soldiers. Were they afraid of NATO air attacks if they did not withdraw? No, replied a self-confident Serb captain. "We know you can hurt us by air strikes, but you can only defeat us on the ground," he said. "You will not send your boys here to die on my soil."

NATO might not even send airplanes. When the alliance finally found common ground on the question last week, it announced that at least one more meeting would be needed before any strikes. And those it might order would be "limited to the support of humanitarian relief." The real test, said Christopher, was whether the Serbs would "let conditions improve within that city, so the city is not under the constant threat of being strangled."

In fact, Serb forces can threaten Sarajevo any time they wish, even as they begin making gestures toward improving conditions in the city. Trucks carrying fuel and aid shipments were allowed to drive in. Most important, the Serb artillery bombardment from the mountains all but stopped. Across the city, thin, pasty-skinned children slowly moved outdoors to resume games that had been interrupted for months by falling shells and the crack of snipers' rifles. Warily, the youngsters kept the walls of buildings between themselves and Serb positions.

Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, who had put a freeze on peace talks in Geneva, told a press conference he would return to the negotiating table this week if the Serbs were off the two mountains by Sunday. On Saturday U.N. officials said the pullback was almost complete. General Francis Briquemont of Belgium, the commander of blue helmets in Bosnia, told a news conference, "From my point of view the impasse is over."

The Serbs had argued that if they did not keep some forces on the front line, Bosnian government troops might slip back in. But both sides say they now agree on where their new lines should be. To supervise the withdrawal, the * U.N. put 250 French peacekeepers into the disputed territory. They could occupy checkpoints and control roads but not the mountains themselves. However, as the U.N. blue helmets mingled with Serb units, it was clear there were enough U.N. troops there to make it even less likely bombs would fall soon on those mountaintops.

The U.N. commanders in Bosnia hope the bombs never fall. They maintain that air support would be justified only to open up blockaded areas for aid shipments or to respond to direct attacks on U.N. troops. "Thus far," says a senior U.N. officer, "we have been able to achieve the mission -- the movement of aid -- without encountering anything that warranted the use of air attacks." U.N. commanders consistently warn that air strikes would bring Serb retribution down on peacekeepers and aid workers throughout Bosnia. On Saturday in Vitez in central Bosnia, an area occupied mainly by Croat and Muslim forces, a sniper fired an armor-piercing bullet at a U.N. vehicle and killed the driver.

For many Europeans, the humanitarian issue seems easier to understand than the political and military mess in the warring states of former Yugoslavia. Pictures of a suffering, 5-year-old Irma Hadzimuratovic, dying from shrapnel wounds in Sarajevo, touched off a wave of sympathy. British Prime Minister John Major called up a plane to fly her to London for treatment. After two operations she was in "critical but stable" condition in a children's hospital, surrounded by get-well cards, toys and balloons sent by concerned Britons.

Her plight prompted Major and Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt to announce they would fly out 41 more war victims. Major denied he was acting only because newspapers and television had given the suffering so much coverage: "I can definitely say we have been looking for some time at what we can do to help the seriously ill people in Bosnia." So far, the help he and some other NATO leaders envision does not include bombing the Serbian artillery that inflicted the civilian casualties.