THE green and fertile Makronovi valley spreads out in front of us, dotted with red tiled houses and orchards of plum trees like some Swiss Alpine paradise. The birdsong is loud, there is game in the hills and fish in the streams in a part of Bosnia where Irish military police may soon be stationed. But appearances are deceptive in 1997 and this spot, now deserted by all but a handful of octogenarian Serbs, is witness to the fact that Bosnia remains an inferno of tribal and religious hatred.
Surveying the scene is Maj Ian Hope of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, part of the Stabilisation Force or SFOR, run by NATO under a UN mandate.
Maj Hope, a short wiry man, recalls the night of May 2nd. Then the Catholic Bosnian Croat authorities, members of the same community which worships at Bosnia's Marian shrine of Medjugorje, methodically set the torch to 50 or 60 of the abandoned houses in the valley.
They knocked the roof tiles off so the air would circulate and give a good blaze and thus prevent their former owners, Orthodox Serbs who fled from earlier slaughter, from returning and registering their vote in the much delayed elections scheduled for September this year.
"When I arrived on the scene at one o'clock in the morning this valley all I could see was fires from one end of the valley to the other," Maj Hope said.
The same sort of destruction is to be seen throughout Bosnia. The pretty village of Jezero picturesquely built on islands in a fast flowing river lies in the four kilometre wide zone which SFOR has set up to keep the Serbs from the Croats and Muslims. Only a small number of inhabitants stays on in a village where no house has been left with a roof.
Lieut Andy Thompson of the Royal Horse Artillery points to a ruined chemist's shop with the blue medicine bottles lying where they were thrown by some marauding soldiers. "Don't go inside any building - it could still be booby trapped," he warns.
SFOR is made up of troops from a dozen nations deployed to keep the peace and to stop the ethnic and religious slaughter which broke out in 1992. For the moment the guns are silent in this part of north western Bosnia. The Croat, Serb and Muslim forces are caught in a military straitjacket which prevents them even training effectively for a resumption of the struggle.
Beside the Canadians are battalions of British and Malaysian infantry, artillery and armour with support tin its from everywhere from the Netherlands to New Zealand. If the local military, Croat or Serb, try to move their weapons without international permission, for instance, or if they do not lift their quota of the mines they themselves sowed five years ago, they are confined to barracks.
Maj Hope has a TOW missile vehicle targeted on a Croat Guards battalion at the Titov Drvar barracks lest things get out of hand. The missile vehicle stands a few yards from the entrance to a cave system that was Tito's headquarters in the second World War, and where he narrowly escaped an assault by 1,000 German troops in 1944.
Helicopters are constantly in the skies, part of what Gen Ramsay, the British commander of SFOR in north western Bosnia, calls a hammer poised over the heads of those local forces who want to return to war. Similar constraints go for the local police, a venal and treacherotis gang of exsoldiers, who now have to submit to having their actions investigated and their books picked over by trained officers from abroad.
And while the stick has been wielded on the local military, the troops have done their best to woo the civilians. In this town SFOR has built a children's playground; in nearby Sipovo British troops have collected unwanted spectacles and secondhand teddy bears from home to distribute to the old and the young.
In addition many military units are engaged in identifying the projects on which foreign governments and private charities could direct their funds for Bosnian reconstruction. Should money, for instance, be spent on the local school or the local hospital? The SFOR Informer, the force's newspaper, contains pictures of children on swings built by soldiers.
But a year from now the UN mandate will end. Recent events in the Makronovi valley undecline once again how likely it is that this land will collapse back into the abyss once the foreign troops.
The divisions between the Catholic Croats, who write in Latin script, the Orthodox Serbs, who write the same language in Cyrillic: characters, are deep.
Then there are the Muslims, many of them formerly of Serb stock and followers of the strange Bogomil faith, who converted to Islam when this region was a fief of the Ottoman sultan.
SFOR, and its predecessor IFOR, have done valuable work in stopping war and must have saved many lives. But the military cannot force people to be reconciled to each other and the prospects for reconciliation by the time SFOR winds up its efforts a year from now in June 1998 are, to put it at its happiest, dismal.