Baker Considers Bosnia Air Raids : Balkans: Secretary of state edges closer to advocating the use of an international force to break the siege of Sarajevo.

Increasingly frustrated by the world’s inability to stop the carnage in Yugoslavia, Secretary of State James A. Baker III said Saturday it would be possible to create an international air squadron to bomb the Serbian fighters besieging Sarajevo if peaceful methods don’t work.

Although he continued to rule out the possibility of the United States acting alone militarily, Baker edged closer to advocating the use of armed force by the sort of multinational coalition that fought the Persian Gulf War.

Asked on the CNN program “Newsmaker Saturday” about possible air action to break the siege and open supply lines for food and medicine to the suffering population of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Baker replied bluntly, “No one has ruled out the possibility of some sort of multilateral (military) engagement.”

At the same time, he cautioned that it could be far more difficult to dislodge the Serb forces from their mountain strongpoints around Sarajevo than it was to overrun the Iraqi army in the Kuwaiti desert.

“Germany had many, many divisions for a long, long time (during World War II) trying to suppress the situation in the mountains of Yugoslavia,” Baker said. “So it is not a simple and easy situation.”

For the time being, he said, Washington supports the United Nations’ effort to negotiate a cease-fire that would permit the reopening of Sarajevo’s airport to relief flights. He added that the United States wants to allow time for U.N.-imposed economic, political and diplomatic sanctions to work before turning to possible military action.

On another subject, Baker denounced the criminal indictment of former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger on charges of lying to Congress and concealing evidence in the Iran-Contra affair.

Calling Weinberger “an outstanding public servant,” Baker said: “To see a man like this hounded and chased five or six years after the events in question, I just think it is a tragic situation. . . . More and more in this country, we are tending to criminalize our policy differences.”

And on the question of POWs, Baker said U.S. and Russian investigators came up “empty-handed” after a two-day search for an American flier from the Korean War who was reported to be in a prison camp near Pechora in the Ural Mountains. It was the first on-the-scene attempt to discover if U.S. prisoners of war are alive in Russia.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin said during last week’s summit visit to Washington that recently opened Soviet archives indicated that U.S. servicemen from World War II, Korea and the Cold War had been imprisoned in the former Soviet Union. He added it was possible that some Vietnam War MIAs had been taken to Russia and that some might be alive.

Asked if he was disappointed at the failure of the Pechora search, Baker said: “I don’t know that we could say that we really expected to find one, because as President Bush said a couple of days ago . . . we have no evidence . . . that there were American prisoners of war from Vietnam there. But when the Russian president says the archives there show some evidence of that, why, we certainly want to undertake every effort to find out. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

Asked if Yeltsin’s revelation about prisoners of war would help or hurt the chances of congressional passage of a Russian economic aid package, Baker said, “Well, initially . . . it appeared that it would hurt it, but now I think it will help it in the aftermath of his speech to a joint session of Congress, because he made it abundantly clear that as president of Russia, he is committed to an all-out effort . . . to see if any of these reports are true.”