NOT-SO-RAPID RESPONSE

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The first French reinforcements landed in Bosnia last week. A flight of helicopters lifted 60 Foreign Legionnaires and six heavy mortars off warships in the Adriatic and set them down in a heavily wooded area on Mount Igman, a strategic height overlooking Sarajevo. The platoon quickly moved into position to support a French infantry battalion that had been under attack by Bosnian Serbs.

A platoon of 60 men, even of famously tough Foreign Legionnaires, will hardly make a difference in bloody Bosnia. Still, their arrival was apparently meant to send the Serbs some signals. They were the first new unit into the field since the Serbs rounded up more than 370 U.N. troops and observers as hostages three weeks ago.

The French soldiers were a symbolic down payment on the 10,000 troops who will form a rapid-reaction force to back up the 22,500 U.N. peacekeepers already in the country. The landing on Mount Igman also seemed to lend support to the Bosnia U.N. military command's tentative plan to open a supply route from besieged Sarajevo to the sea at Split.

It looked, at least at the outset, as if the U.N. military officers meant business. The 10,000 British, French and Dutch reinforcements were coming in two new brigades. They would be equipped with artillery and armored vehicles and would move quickly by helicopter to aid and protect peacekeepers in their humanitarian mission of distributing food and supplies. Discussions were held in Paris and London about changing the system under which military commanders must in practice obtain U.N. civilian approval to use force for anything beyond shooting back when under attack. On occasion it has been particularly frustrating to U.N. and NATO officers when they wanted to call in air strikes on the Bosnian Serbs and U.N. officials refused to go along. This time, French and British military leaders argued, the rapid-reaction troops should be authorized initially by the U.N. but then be available to the peacekeeping generals to use in Bosnia as they saw fit.

Such was the tough talk at the beginning of the week. By week's end, however, it was evident that no such significant changes would be made. As a Western diplomat put it, the situation in Bosnia was "going to be the same mishmash it has been." There would be no move from peacekeeping to forcible peacemaking, NATO defense ministers reaffirmed at a meeting in Brussels. At the same time, U.N. officials in the former Yugoslavia insisted that the new rapid-reaction force would operate under the rules that had applied since the beginning. The force would defend peacekeepers but would not launch offensive actions. UNPROFOR has always been permitted to use force in order to deliver aid, but it has never done so. The rapid-reaction force will technically have the same right, but it appears that the force will be treated in somewhat the same way that air strikes have been, and civilian U.N. agreement will in practice be necessary in order for it to act aggressively. Officials in several capitals began to see the decision to send reinforcements not as an indication of strength, but as a step toward eventual U.N. withdrawal from Bosnia.