Balkans

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Balkan warlords have stonewalle one of the largest U.N. peacekeeping efforts in history and the world organization's troops are being maimed in record numbers because they are deployed "with both hands tied behind their backs," the U.N. mission commander complained yesterday.Affronts to the U.N. mission include a demand this week by Serbian gunmen in eastern Croatia for the peacekeepers to pay "road-use taxes" if they wanted to patrol Serb-held areas.The soldiers have also been ordered to move out of their hotel rooms and barracks, and their bases have been threatened with a cutoff of water and electricity.

WASHINGTON -- Time has all but run out for NATO to invade Yugoslavia and fight a ground war before the start of the Balkan winter, robbing the West of its greatest threat to President Slobodan Milosevic, alliance diplomats and military officials said yesterday.Though President Clinton insisted last week that "we will not take any option off the table," the calendar is making the decision for him, requiring the United States and its NATO allies to rely on bombing and diplomacy to drive Serbian forces out of Kosovo and allow the return of ethnic Albanian refugees.

Two thousand years of religious differences -- but shared beliefs in justice and peace -- converged on Baltimore yesterday as Christian, Jewish and Muslim clergy prayed together for an end to the ethnic hostilities in the Balkans.Roman Catholic Archbishop William H. Keeler organized the five-hour series of afternoon services that took place in two cathedrals, a mosque and a synagogue.The day began in the Greek Orthodox cathedral on Preston Street, continued at a mosque in Catonsville and a synagogue in Pikesville, and concluded in the Catholic basilica on Cathedral Street.

WASHINGTON -- Croatia's swift seizure of the Serbian-held region of Krajina has demonstrated once again that the only credible means of persuasion in the Balkan war is military force.And with force has come an increased danger of a wider war, still another humanitarian crisis, a renewed split in the Atlantic Alliance and the further erosion of a five-nation peace plan for dividing up Bosnia and ending 3 1/2 -years of fighting.While President Clinton and other officials have expressed public optimism that Croatia's capture of the Krajina could offer new opportunities to end the war, some officials' private assessment is more bleak.

FOR THE SAKE of argument, let's forget for a moment about achieving justice. From a strictly practical point of view, will the war-crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic make things worse in the Balkans? Plenty of Serbs think so. And, with the trial barely two weeks old, so do a growing number of those who worry that reconciliation may never gain a foothold in the former Yugoslavia. Their reasoning goes like this: Mr. Milosevic is doing a surprisingly effective job of defending himself, skillfully playing into Serbs' resentments and fears that the whole world is against them.

WASHINGTON -- With the United Nations Security Council on the eve of authorizing military force to guarantee humanitarian aid to Bosnia, Pentagon officials yesterday painted a bleak outlook for armed intervention in the Balkans.It would take 60,000 to 120,000 ground troops just to secure a lifeline to beleaguered Sarajevo, Lt. Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, assistant to Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell, told the Senate Armed Services Committee.Air strikes would be of little use against the intermingled guerrilla forces in Bosnia, General McCaffrey said, and even an airtight arms embargo would do little good, since the Serbs and Bosnians have enough munitions stockpiled to keep fighting for at least a year.

WASHINGTON -- As President Clinton seeks public and congressional support for sending U.S. troops into Bosnia, a military mission that administration officials point to as a model -- Haiti -- is starting to unravel.A year after 20,000 U.S. troops staged a bloodless invasion to reinstall President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the impoverished Caribbean nation is experiencing renewed political violence, a surge of refugees and a slowdown of its economic reforms. Some observers fear increased violence if United Nations peacekeepers withdraw on schedule in February.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - Former Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic, the first Balkan political leader to plead guilty to war crimes charges, faced justice, history and her country's collective denial in yesterday's opening of her extraordinary three-day sentencing hearing. An academic and politician who incited ethnic hatred, consorted with warlords and earned the nickname the Iron Lady of the Balkans, Plavsic was a key public figure during the violent unraveling of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

He recently won a precedent-setting war-crimes conviction. But as former Carroll County State's Attorney Thomas E. Hickman begins his third year as a United Nations prosecutor in Kosovo, he finds as much meaning - and a reason to hope for better times in the dangerous Balkans - in a case involving a single homicide. A Serb woman had been beaten to death at the door of her bustling apartment building, but his investigation stalled when no one would acknowledge having seen anything. Then about a year later, an ethnic Albanian woman named the killer: an Albanian man who hated Serbs and wanted the victim's apartment.

CETINJE, Montenegro -- In the arid mountains of this tiny Yugoslav republic, where myths seem to spring to life in the smoky cafes, men and women still believe in heroes.They believe in Njegos, the great 18th-century poet and king, who drove many of his people to their deaths fighting the Turks. They believe in King Nicholas; in the early 1900s, surrounded by the Hapsburg empire on three borders, he refused to be dominated by a foreign power.And now, it seems, they have found a new hero in their new pro-Western president, Milo Djukanovic -- a former Communist insider dubbed "The Penknife" for his sharp criticism of opponents.