COLUMN ONE : U.N. Force Has a Life of Its Own : Critics of Balkans mission see an unwieldy empire more intent on staying in business than restoring peace. Despite threats of a pullout, troops and money keep pouring in, and the killing continues.

ZAGREB, Croatia —  In between the fierce squalls that usher in the Balkan summer, builders under contract to U.N. peacekeepers have been pouring cement and hammering arches for twin porticoes of faux Ionic columns outside the two most important doors at mission headquarters.

The embellished entrances, about 100 feet apart on Building A, lead to the offices of the U.N. mission chief, Yasushi Akashi, and to an administrative beehive that has swelled since his January arrival.

While the stab at re-creating antiquity’s grandeur may seem pointless against a backdrop of squat military barracks, the colonnades add architectural substance to local fears that the U.N. Protection Force, or UNPROFOR, has metamorphosed from a temporary peacekeeping mission into a city-state with a life of its own. There is no name yet emblazoned on the frieze of the vaulted arches, but U.N. workers joke that it should read: Republic of UNPROFOR.

With nearly 40,000 troops and employees already deployed in the embattled former Yugoslav republics and 5,000 more on the way, the U.N. peacekeeping force has expanded during its mere two-year life span to become the largest and most expensive mission in U.N. history.

Its 3,164 civilian employees alone eclipse the work force of Vatican City.

Its proposed $1.5-billion budget for the next fiscal year is nearly 50% more than that of the U.N. Secretariat.

The mission has its own airline, with two daily flights to Sarajevo and regular service to Belgrade and other peacekeeper venues.

There are 11,527 white vehicles plying the roads from this Croatian capital to the tripwire lookouts in northern Macedonia.

Thousands of portable living units--the postmodern version of the Quonset hut--have created hundreds of remote U.N. mini-bases.

A fleet of white buses shuttle translators and secretaries from the crammed headquarters complex to Zagreb hotels and to the airport, creating a transportation system parallel to the city’s.

The mission is even developing its own radio-television network, hiring reporters and anchors and duplicating the broadcasting services of other international agencies.

While administrators justify the cost and sprawl as investments necessary because of the mission’s broad scope, there are growing concerns in the mission area as well as in the West that the United Nations has built an empire that is more absorbed with keeping itself in business than restoring peace so it can disband and go home.

The mission that has neither the mandate nor the military means to stop the 3-year-old conflict is increasingly raising questions about the efficacy of peacekeeping in regions where there is no more peace to keep.

It is also prodding some Western analysts to wonder whether the ever-expanding and elusive quest for a negotiated resolution will end up costing more in foreign dollars and local lives than a swift and decisive military intervention would have if one had been undertaken at the start. The tab for food aid, humanitarian actions and peacekeeping is generally estimated at well over $2 billion a year. More than 200,000 lives have been lost.

“Not a single objective of this mission has been achieved, because it is compelled to remain neutral in the face of an obvious aggression,” Bosnian Information Minister Ivo Knezevic complained during a recent interview in Sarajevo. “For UNPROFOR troops, overseeing our people’s suffering has become a matter of jobs.

“We don’t want to sound unfair or ungrateful for their endeavors and the aid that we do receive, but the negative aspects of this mission are now dominating.”

His chief complaint, that the U.N. mission is trying to strong-arm the combatants into agreeing to an unjust peace, is, ironically, shared by all warring factions.

Serbian rebels in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia accuse the U.N. troops of trying to reduce their territorial spoils, while Zagreb contends that the world body’s presence here has firmed up the Serbs’ hold on the one-third of Croatia that insurgents seized in a conflict three years ago.

The imperturbable Akashi smiles tolerantly through the accusations of bias, as he does through suggestions his massive mission has become an immovable force.

“We are in good shape when we are equally criticized by both parties,” the 30-year veteran of U.N. bureaucracy said during an interview in his penthouse office atop the newly aggrandized Building A.

Among its assignments, the U.N. peacekeeping force oversees negotiations aimed at brokering peace both in the suspended war between Serbs and Croats in this republic and the Serbian rebellion in Bosnia that has been left to deteriorate into civil war.

But after nearly two years of attempts to cajole the factions into talking out a settlement, the latest team of mediators trying to achieve the elusive peace treaty has begun brandishing the threat of a U.N. pullout.

France and Britain, who together contribute nearly one-third of the U.N. force (36 other countries make up the rest), have warned they may withdraw their soldiers unless the factions agree to a negotiated settlement within a few months. But in Croatia and Bosnia, political leaders dismiss that ultimatum as diplomatic bluster.

“UNPROFOR, like any other bureaucratic organization, has the intention to perpetuate itself,” said Bozo Kovacevic, a leader of the Croatian Social-Liberal Party. “It has to. There are too many jobs and careers at stake.”

Western diplomats speculate that France and Britain may actually reduce their commitments to the peacekeeping force to calm fears at home that their soldiers are being exposed to the hazards of war while the people they were sent to help show no willingness to make the compromises necessary to end the conflict. The U.N. troops have suffered more than 1,000 casualties--84 of them fatal.

But without any international will to militarily impose a settlement, the United Nations must keep the fig leaf of a peacekeeping force in place, one Western envoy insisted.

“I see no chance whatsoever that UNPROFOR will leave before there is some kind of settlement here,” he said. “They may have to restructure the force with more Third World troops if the British and the French do cut back, but that would probably be to the U.N.’s liking.”

A protracted stay by the peacekeepers is also a boost for the Croatian economy, which was shattered by the six-month war with Serbian rebels in 1991 and has been shrinking with the loss of tourism income and key industrial sites that remain behind rebel lines.

Drazen Kalodjera, a senior research fellow at the Economics Institute of Zagreb, estimates that the mission’s housing, food, gas and other expenditures--an estimated $400 million a year--account for as much as 5% of Croatia’s gross national product.

“Five percent of GNP is important for any economy,” said Kalodjera, dismissing threats by the Croatian leadership to ask the U.N. mission to leave unless it restores Zagreb’s sovereignty over Serb-occupied territory.

“In spite of all our dissatisfaction with the United Nations, these troops are here for a long time,” the economist said.

U.N. activities more telling than the symbolic erection of the porticoes also suggest that the mission is hunkering down for the duration.

A U.N. press center has been built in central Sarajevo to spare public information officers the five-mile drive to forward headquarters from their offices nearer to town. Dozens of observation posts have been established over the last two months to monitor the on-again, off-again truces. Sophisticated radar equipment has just been moved in to trace the origin of cease-fire violations in northern Bosnia. And the search for more troops to bolster the burgeoning force continues.

Akashi waves away questions about how long he expects his mission to persevere, offering vague expressions of hope that it won’t be too long.

“Not decades. Not like Cyprus,” he said. “I completely identify myself with the parties to the conflict here. I do not want a reproduction of the stalemate we see in Cyprus,” where the United Nations has been involved for three decades.

But it is just such a standoff that the Balkan populations and some troop-contributing nations have begun to fear.

“I worked at the United Nations for five years, so I’m familiar with its institutional mentality,” said Slaven Letica, a political science professor at Zagreb University. “It is lazy, bureaucratic and institutionally stupid. The people who take part in these missions learn to accommodate the local suffering. They have to develop this indifference as a survival strategy, because they are nice young people who cannot really do anything to help. Their preoccupation becomes that of any other job--getting by, getting a paycheck, achieving career advancement.”

Like most political and economic analysts in this host nation, Letica dismisses the threat of a pullout by the United Nations as “just for foreign show.”

“We can probably expect a decrease in the scope of the deployment at some point, but withdrawal would be unacceptable for both the international community and the Croatian government,” said Letica, a former chief adviser to Croatian President Franjo Tudjman.

With new responsibilities for patrolling and monitoring heaped on the peacekeepers with each U.N. Security Council resolution, the number of troops needed is likely to continue rising.

Akashi concedes that the mission’s size is approaching its limit, not because the situation is stabilizing but because the international community’s willingness to send armed forces to the Balkans is nearly exhausted.

A March appeal for 12,000 more troops to enforce cease-fires in Sarajevo and central Bosnia drew pledges of only 4,500 soldiers, half of whom have not arrived.

“We continue to assess in a very realistic and pragmatic manner what we can achieve with our limited resources,” Akashi said. “We have to maximize our resources. We should not ask for more and more troops all the time, even though we are fully aware of the danger of being spread very thinly for our comfort.”

In the unlikely event that the mediation efforts wring out a settlement, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has promised to help implement it by sending 50,000 troops. That would more than double the mission’s already unwieldy size.

As one European officer in Sarajevo quipped, “If the U.N. can keep 40,000 people busy without having produced a single agreement, imagine what the force will grow to if we ever get a real cease-fire.”