Heavy Fog Puts Brakes On Operations In Bosnia Flights Into Tuzla Stalled As Nato Begins Operations

They were prepared for land mines, for hostile Bosnian Serbs, for waist-deep snow and biting cold.

But American military officials here had not counted on the fog that has enshrouded this airport. The fog has kept a fleet of planes scheduled to bring in U.S. troops and equipment as part of a NATO peacekeeping mission from touching down.

As NATO on Saturday activated its most ambitious operation ever in Europe, British, French and American troops began heading toward Bosnia in a triumphant moment military officials called G-Day, for Go Day.

But in Tuzla, G-Day became W-Day - or Wait Day - as officials kept hoping that 12 to 20 transport planes bearing troops and equipment would be able to land.

“We weren’t anticipating a sustained period of fog,” said Maj. Gary Dornan, a spokesman for the U.S. forces.

Despite the delay, U.S. military officials said plans to put 20,000 American troops on the ground over the next month are proceeding smoothly. They insisted that moving cautiously and carefully is just what the U.S. military should be doing, given the hazards it faces in Bosnia.

“A plan is simply something you deviate from,” said U.S. Air Force Col. Neal Patton, in charge of Tuzla’s air operations. “This is not a combat situation. … We are not going to take chances and we are not going to do things that are silly, because we can just come back tomorrow. This is a peacetime operation.”

The NATO mission is to enforce a peace treaty that was signed Thursday in Paris by Balkan leaders. The accord was brokered by the United States last month in talks at an air base outside Dayton, Ohio.

The NATO mission began Saturday when the U.N. Security Council formally handed its Bosnia mission to the alliance. U.S. Gen. George Joulwan, the supreme allied commander in Europe, ordered troops to begin heading toward Bosnia, saying: “Our mission is clear … and with robust rules of engagement.”

NATO hopes its troops, with orders to fire when needed, will succeed where the U.N. force failed.

Nearly 200 American troops are already in Bosnia, part of the initial enabling force that arrived to prepare for the troops’ arrival. After Saturday’s order, logistics equipment arrived at Sarajevo airport and 826 troops from the U.S. Army’s 5th Corps landed in Kaposvar, Hungary.

It will take up to two months for most of NATO’s 60,000 troops to take up position. Americans, headquartered in Tuzla, will be spread across northeast Bosnia. About 1,000 will arrive by plane; the rest will be driven or arrive by train.

Joining the U.S. force here will be a 4,000-member Russian contingent, including 2,000 combat soldiers.

An estimated 13,000 British troops will oversee central and western Bosnia and 10,000 French soldiers will patrol Sarajevo and the south. About half of those soldiers currently serve as U.N. troops.

The following fields overflowed: DATELINE = TUZLA AIR BASE, BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA