ZAGREB, Croatia -- When the United Nations Protection Force bowed to Bosnian Serb demands for a substitute hostage as the price for freeing a gravely ill Jordanian peacekeeper, mission officials sacrificed principle for what they described yesterday as overriding humanitarian aims.
But, as has increasingly been the case where the U.N. forces here have tried to appease gunmen who bargain with human lives, humiliating capitulation backfired, bringing more humiliation.
Bosnian Serbs grabbed a Spanish captain delivered to Banja Luka Monday as a substitute hostage for the sick officer, as well as a Czech major assigned to handle the hostage trade.
The failing, bedridden Jordanian army major would not be released, the U.N. hierarchy here was informed, unless senior U.N. officers negotiated directly with the Banja Luka Serbs.
The failed exchange left five U.N. officers imprisoned at the airfield in Banja Luka instead of the original three.
Protests from the U.N. force commander were sent through fax machines to Bosnian Serb headquarters in Pale, east of Sarajevo. Gen. Milan Gvero, the Bosnian Serb army's chief of staff, responded that there was nothing Pale could do.
The Jordanian took a turn for the worse late yesterday, said Alex Ivanko, a U.N. spokesman. He feared the officer would not long survive captivity in which he was being denied food and needed assistance to walk.
The latest act of Serbian defiance underscored the thorough collapse of U.N. authority in the Balkan conflict.
The incident added momentum to the groundswell of pressures for an end to the disastrous peacekeeping mission in which hundreds of other U.N. troops are in Serbian captivity, thousands are blocked and cut off from supplies, aid deliveries have been thwarted routinely and the only course more dangerous than staying in Bosnia might be that of trying to get out.
U.N. officials concede privately that their position has become untenable in Bosnia, where 24,000 U.N. peacekeepers are prevented from carrying out any of the humanitarian and security work for which they were deployed.
More than 1,200 Bangladeshi soldiers are trapped in the embattled Bihac pocket in northwestern Bosnia. They are confined to quarters with no heat, suffering shortages of food and winter coats, sharing scarce sleeping bags and having to defend themselves with at least four soldiers to every gun.
Twenty Canadian soldiers who had been guarding weapons collection sites have been jailed by Serbs in the Sarajevo suburb of Ilijas, where they have been denied regular food and communication with their commanders.
Monday, in the U.N.-protected "safe haven" of Goradze, Bosnian Serb gunmen subjected a U.N. patrol to a three-hour artillery barrage inside an area that had been proclaimed a weapons exclusion zone.
Yesterday Serbian commanders continued to block all 32 U.N. supply convoys in Bosnia, although the first delivery of relief goods to starving Muslims in the besieged Srebrenica "safe haven" was allowed through Monday.
Arrival of the desperately needed food cache set off fierce
fighting among the 40,000 residents and refugees of Srebrenica, said Peter Kessler, spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
Bosnian Serb attacks on the Bihac enclave continued yesterday, according to U.N. spokesmen.
The heaviest fighting was in the town of Velika Kladusa, which teetered on the brink of falling to the invading alliance of Bosnian Serbs, Croatian Serbs and a renegade Muslim force.