Bosnia: heroism betrayed: The opportunity for honourable peace for the West has gone, writes Paddy Ashdown. And if dishonourable peace fails we must act to save lives

SARAJEVO - We have spent a year barely keeping this city alive, while permitting its people to be killed, and dodging the hard decisions. As we have dithered, the extremities worsened, the city has grown weaker and the UN's room for manoeuvre has shrunk. We are now coming to the crunch. If Sarajevo is to live, we have to act.'

These words, from a senior UN official in Sarajevo, are echoed more graphically by the 60 or so Sarajevans sitting with me on the pavement under the summer evening sky. Around us are children, playing football on the street for the first time for months. The evening bombardment is just beginning; there is sporadic machine- gun fire and the occasional tracer lighting up the darkening sky. Somebody somewhere in the city will no doubt be dying wherever these bullets and shells are finding homes. But this is a peaceful night by Sarajevo standards, and people are making the most of it.

It is now exactly a year since I first came to this city. Over three subsequent visits I have watched it slowly dying. Scarcely a building remains undamaged, hardly a pane of glass intact. Many of the suburbs are little more than rubble, home for the rats and shelter for the snipers. The electricity has been off for months and water has long since become a commodity to be collected only at risk of the sniper's bullet and the carefully targeted shell from the hills above.

The hospitals have run out of essential medical supplies. The available trees were cut down last winter. The warehouses are empty and all the reserves of the city have now gone.

The city receives only around 50 per cent of its daily requirements - almost all through the airlift. Land convoys have been largely stopped since the Croats closed the corridor to the sea. And even the airlift is running down. Twenty nations contributed to the air bridge at the start - there are now only five left.

Fuel is a priority. But getting it into the city is almost impossible. The last fuel convoy to leave Split started with 125 tons of diesel; 25 were left at a power station on the way to Sarajevo. A further 25 were demanded by the Serbs as the price for admission into the city. But at the first Serb check- point outside the city, the convoy commander was met by a Serb 'delegation' consisting of a T56 tank, a triple-barrelled 20mm anti-aircraft cannon aimed at the tankers, and 120 troops armed with armour-piercing weapons. The price of passage had gone up to 50 per cent of the fuel. As the convoy commander told me: 'You don't need a very good argument with a T56 tank behind you.' Despite this, passage was finally agreed. Next time the opening price for getting fuel into Sarajevo will start at 50 per cent.

Meanwhile, average Sarajevans have lost between 15 and 20 per cent of their body-weight. Resistance to disease and to the coming bitter cold of the Sarajevo winter is dangerously low, especially among the old and the very young. 'God gave us the kindest winter on record last year,' a city official in my audience in the street tells me. 'But this winter, unless something is done, the city will die a terrible death. The Serbs know they do not have to kill us with guns - the winter will do it for them.'

That Sarajevo has not already suffered typhus and cholera amazes UN officials. 'These are heroes of survival,' says one. 'They have a standard of public and private hygiene which is quite remarkable. It is nothing for a Sarajevo mother to risk her life walking four kilometres to collect water, then carry it up 10 flights of stairs to bath the baby.'

But heroism is running out, even in this remarkable city. And so is Sara-

jevo's famous tolerance. A year of Serb siege has radicalised the Muslims, and the first revenge killings of Serbs have begun. One man says: 'Since we have nothing, we might as well turn to God.' Morale, too, is terribly low. The young tell me that what they want when the peace comes is to leave.

They have lost all trust in the international community. The hope that is keeping the city alive at the moment is not American intervention or some new initiative from the world community, but the possibility of the arrival of gas for heating. Responding to my question about whether he can survive the winter, an old man says: 'If the gas comes, my wife and I will live - if it doesn't, we will die.' He has learnt not to include the possibility of peace or help from the rest of the world in his calculations.

They blame especially Britain and France. 'Why is it always your Government that stops others helping us when they want to? If you will not help us, at least don't stop others doing so,' one angry woman tells me.

We now have six to eight weeks in which to save Sarajevo. The Serb noose is tightening around the city. By early October the heavy lift that will be required to provide the city with a reserve of fuel, food and shelter for the winter must have started.

The first and best hope is peace. It will not be an honourable peace; the failures of the West have seen to that. But most Sarajevans believe that almost any peace is better than none. If peace fails again, however, then we must be prepared to act.

First, we should insist on a land corridor from the sea for humanitarian aid, backed by sufficient force to make such a demand impossible to refuse.

Second, we should declare a cordon sanitaire around Sarajevo and other besieged cities, in which, after a deadline, all heavy weapons would be liable to air attack. This is not the time for offensive air strikes against Serb and Croat strategic targets. But the defensive use of air power to protect the cities, applied even-handedly to all parties, would minimise the risk of escalating the conflict, lift the siege of Sarajevo, and at last create the conditions that will give the best chance for this great city to begin its long journey back to peace.