French convoys to carve UN aid route: Julian Nundy, in Velika Kralusa, Bosnia, reports on efforts to bring humanitarian relief to refugees on the Bosnian-Croatian border

HIS MAIN concern, the Serbian colonel said as he asked for French-escorted convoys to bring food to his people, was the safety of French soldiers. If any were harmed, it would be blamed on his forces.

The soldiers' safety was uppermost, too, in the minds of the representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and of the commander of the French battalion in the 650-square mile Muslim Bihac pocket on the Bosnian-Croatian border as the three parties met yesterday.

The French and the UN fear was not so much of casualties sustained in the course of war but of hostage-taking, that the soldiers taking food into Serbian-held areas could be used as bargaining counters if and when international community moves began against Serbian forces in Bosnia.

For this reason, Colonel Robert Bresse, commanding 1,400 French soldiers in the UN Protection Force, said earlier that he was willing to let his men cross into the Serbian Republic of Bosnia only one day a week. There was no question of stationing them there, he said.

Many in the Serbian area, said Jacques Franquin, the head of the UNHCR office in the Bihac pocket, were 'in bad shape and they need humanitarian assistance'. But the Serbian request for a meeting after threats to UNHCR staff a few weeks ago forced the organisation to close an office in Banja Luka, in the area under the control of Colonel Dusan Banec's forces, made him wary.

'They would like to have the UN deployment on the Serbian side maybe to have us as hostages,' Mr Franquin said as he and Col Bresse sat down to talks in the town of Donji Lapac, in the Serbian Democratic Republic of Krajina, a redoubt in the mountains just inside Croatia. Krajina is a Jekyll-and-Hyde strip of land where neatly kept Serbian villages alternate with gutted ghost-towns, hamlets cleared of their Croatian residents, tangible signs of 'ethnic cleansing'.

As the Serb, introducing himself as 'Colonel Professor Dr Bonec', talked with the UNHCR, the opening smiles gave way to irritation an he realised that obtaining humanitarian aid was not just a formality.

Mr Franquin said the UNHCR and the French battalion would have to visit the area to make an assessment. 'We need freedom of movement inside the area, to be able to visit villages, towns and to meet people,' he explained. 'Once distribution has been carried out we must be able to check and see if the food has reached the population.'

Col Banec said: 'I had hoped for aid next week. We had prepared lists and organised people for unloading.' Opening the road from the town of Bihac, battered daily by artillery, to Ripac would be a great help, Mr Franquin said.

Col Bresse said his mission was to support the UNHCR. 'As a soldier, I shall secure the route fixed by the UNHCR. Of course, if this route avoids any casualties, I will be very happy. But as a soldier; I'm not to consider that to fulfil my mission. The choice will be made by the UNHCR.' If conditions allow the opening of the Bihac-Ripac road, it will take convoys right past the Grabez plateau overlooking Bihac, where Bosnian Muslims and Serbs are fighting.

Inside Bihac, EC observers and UN colleagues monitor the situation. They say the Muslims' morale is higher than the Serbs' but that the Serbs, while fewer in number, are better armed. 'It's a nasty little entrenched war with brigades facing each other across fixed positions,' one said.

The victims are the civilians. Electricity is rare, education has ceased, people no longer listen to radios, because they cannot obtain batteries. Since November, four months after the town came under regular bombardment, they have been fed, however, as the French deployed there.

'Generally the inhabitants do nothing,' said a young woman who works as an interpreter. 'They stay at home waiting for something to happen. There is work at the hospital - the biggest factory they call it now - the best paid in Bihac are the interpreters, getting 15 German marks ( pounds 6) a day. I earn in a day what my brother earns in a month.' The mark was made the official currency for the 225,000 people of the Bihac pocket, including 70,000 refugees on 1 January.

Mensur Sabulic, the director of the town's hospital where 14 patients have been killed by shells hitting the hospitals said he was expecting up to 30 new wounded from Thursday's shelling. Two children, five and eight years old, were killed playing near a mosque.

Although the 900-bed hospital, its capacity reduced to 800 by night shelling attacks between July and September, had 70-80 per cent of the medicines it needed, this was not enough to ensure sophisticated care. 'To save a leg, an arm or a nerve we don't have the equipment and we have to amputate,' Dr Sabulic said.

At the French HQ in Velika Kralusa, the officers' mess talk was of a Europe which had followed German pressure to recognise Slovenia and Croatia. 'The process was irreversible,' one officer said. 'Britain and France followed on. Now they've got troops here and Germany has an addition to the Deutschmark zone.'