Leading Article: Deaths challenge UN policy

ONCE AGAIN, events in Bosnia have called the policy of the United Nations into question. Yesterday's attack on Danish humanitarian aid workers, killing two and wounding four others, comes just two days after the shooting of three Italian relief workers in central Bosnia. The sole purpose of UN troops in Bosnia is the protection of humanitarian relief supplies to civilians in danger of starvation or death from injuries. In fulfilling that role, a number of UN troops have been killed, including several Frenchmen, Ukrainians and one Briton. Now relief workers are coming under direct attack. If the response is nothing stronger than angry words, such assaults are likely to multiply.

What lies behind this sinister development? Part of the blame surely lies with the recent Washington agreement, in which the Western powers appeared to abandon the Vance-Owen plan and to reduce their ambitions to the protection of six 'safe areas': or rather, more narrowly, to the protection of UN troops within them. In these reservations the chief victims of the war, the Bosnian Muslims, would be concentrated.

The Washington agreement was generally interpreted as de facto acceptance of a carve-up of most of Bosnia between the Serbs and Croats. Both were thus emboldened, even jubilant, while the Muslims became even more desperate than before. It is not yet entirely clear who killed the Danes and the Italians, though Serbs and Muslims respectively are suspected. No doubt the leadership of the guilty factions will claim that wild militiamen were to blame. Whoever it was, the change in the overall strategic situation produced by the Washington agreement will have played its part.

Desperate men commit desperate acts. That is not to condone them. But the reality of the so-called safe areas, revealed by journalists, is that most of them are, and seem likely to remain, squalid, overcrowded refugee camps entirely dependent on international aid. In them adults will remain unemployed and children will be brought up to seek revenge for the horrors inflicted on their elders. The prospect of life in such conditions is likely to redouble desperate Muslim efforts to increase Western involvement in the conflict.

At present the safe areas are not even safe from shelling - and the Washington agreement makes no provision for their active defence by UN troops.

If UN troops cannot defend helpless civilians within safe areas, the name is a mockery. It now seems that the men in blue helmets also cannot effectively protect humanitarian workers: the Danes were delivering aid to the besieged town of Maglaj within the largest of the safe areas focused on Tuzla.

The US has given an undertaking to defend UN peacekeeping forces if they come under attack and request help while patrolling such zones. Any distinction between peacekeeping troops and UN aid workers is in this context artificial. All are working for the UN and all deserve the same protection. Yesterday's events prove yet again that if those who attack UN personnel remain unpunished, they will deduce that such murders can be repeated with impunity. It is time for that American promise to be taken up.