Salute Or Shake? A Typical Bosnia Dilemma -- Big Gap Between U.N., Locals

TRAVNIK, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Lt. Gen. Michael Rose, the commander of U.N. troops in Bosnia, took a delegation of NATO officers to meet Gen. Mehmed Aligic earlier this week. At the appointed time, the Bosnian Muslim general burst into the room, sucked in his formidable gut and jerked his right hand into a snappy salute.

Nonplussed, Rose extended his arm to shake Aligic's hand. The U.N. commander, a by-the-books British officer, does not salute a man with no hat. But Aligic - Bosnian rascal, lover of women and drink, gloriously incorrect and one of the most successful military leaders of the mostly Muslim Bosnian army - refused to shake.

The NATO commander for southern Europe, U.S. Navy Adm. Leighton Smith, stepped in and saved everyone a bit of face, participants in the meeting recalled. Looser American rules allow hatless salutes. Aligic, his salute returned and his pride intact, settled into his seat, and the meeting began.

The fleeting standoff dramatized a yawning gap in understanding between officers of the U.N. operation here and the military men of the warring Bosnian factions that have brought Europe its bloodiest conflict since World War II. Denizens of different cultures and different worlds, using different maps to fight different wars according to different rules, they can neither shake hands nor salute when they meet.

The ramifications of this gap in perception are significant, affecting everything in Bosnia from the peace process in Geneva to cease-fire agreements on the ground.

Rose cites the Prussian military thinker Karl von Clausewitz to sum up his evaluation of this conflict. "The war," he said with the firm belief of a former war-college commandant schooled in the unassailable logic of NATO strategy, "has long ago reached its limit of exploitation."

Aligic, part Turkish vizier, part communist commissar, trained in the arts of protracted struggle in a culture where Occident and Orient collide, where black marketeering verges on virtue and tending the graves of ancestors constitutes a duty, begs to disagree.

"We don't make war here on the basis of West Point," he said.

Rose predicted, for example, that his masterpiece, a successful cease-fire around Sarajevo that rode on the back of a NATO ultimatum last February, would spread rapidly across Bosnia. Instead, it was followed by a decision by Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic to attack the U.N. "safe area" of Gorazde, precipitating another crisis.

One of the great successes of the U.N. operation in Bosnia, hammered out in tandem with U.S. diplomatic efforts, was the March peace settlement between Croatian and Muslim factions that had fought a vicious war for more than a year in central Bosnia in parallel with the main conflict pitting the Muslim-led government against Serbian secessionists.

Lt. Col. John McColl, commander of British forces in the region, Rose and the U.S. diplomats and military officers who brokered the accord saw it as the beginning of a process that would spread into the 72 percent of Bosnia held by the Serbs. Charles E. Redman, U.S. special envoy to the Bosnian peace talks, says that now that Muslims and Croats have stopped fighting they should sign a peace agreement that would give them 51 percent of the country and the Serbs 49 percent.

But Aligic commands a corps of Bosnian fighters at least half of whom lost their homes in Serbian expulsion campaigns known as "ethnic cleansing." His eyes, therefore, tend to see the Muslim-Croatian deal not as a harbinger of peace but as the facilitator of more war.

While Rose was telling Aligic that continuing the war was "pointless," Muslim infantry and Croatian tanks were attacking Bosnian Serb positions near Tesanj, northeast of Travnik, in a joint probe marking the first time in more than a year that the Croatian militia had fought alongside Muslim forces in central Bosnia. Muslim and Croatian forces also cooperated against Serbian fighters around the Serb-held town of Brcko in northeastern Bosnia earlier this week.

Rose called the fighting "minor skirmishes." Bosnian commanders view the renewed cooperation with Croats as steps toward bigger ones.