U.S. Ready With Air, Naval Cover for Sarajevo Aid

The United States is ready to provide air cover and naval support to protect aid shipments to embattled Sarajevo, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said Tuesday.

Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said a six-ship armada carrying 2,200 Marines positioned itself Monday in the Adriatic Sea off Yugoslavia. The carrier Saratoga, now docked in Cannes, France, is expected to take up position in the coming days in those waters, where it could provide air cover for a U.S. airlift of aid into Sarajevo.

Cheney said American air and naval forces would be used to support “other forces that would be involved on the ground,” but he ruled out the use of American ground combat troops as part of the U.N. peacekeeping effort there.

In other developments:

* As hundreds of U.N. peacekeeping troops from Canada headed for Sarajevo, mortar and small-arms fire broke out near the airport, threatening further delays in international relief flights and distribution of the first planeloads of food and medicine to reach the city in three months.

* The U.N. Security Council moved to intensify pressure on Croatia to halt its recent offensive into Serb-populated areas, voting to broaden the international peacekeeping effort in Croatia.

* The Serbian government announced a sweeping new economic rescue plan that could aggravate the volatile situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Even as the Marine landing force sat off the Yugoslav coast, both Cheney and Williams drew the line at involving American combat ground troops.

“I don’t envision the United States under any scenario to have U.S. ground forces, ground combat forces in Yugoslavia,” said Williams.

“Much as I’m appalled at the loss of life we see in Yugoslavia, that does not automatically lead me to the conclusion that U.S. military forces ought to be involved on the ground in Yugoslavia trying to end that conflict,” Cheney said in a breakfast meeting with reporters Tuesday.

Cheney said that any deployment of U.S. ground troops would require a further United Nations resolution.

A senior Bush Administration official said the U.S. airlift of humanitarian aid to Sarajevo will probably begin early next week. The airlift is likely to involve 12 flights per day, as well as air escort flights designed to protect the relief flights.

A U.S. force numbering just under 200 people would be landed at the Sarajevo airport to unload and supervise, Williams said.

The United States last Thursday began the transfer of humanitarian supplies by overland route toward the breakaway Yugoslav republics. The food and other supplies were scheduled to arrive Tuesday in Zagreb, Croatia, and will be distributed by U.N. personnel into areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The Sarajevo Airport

In Sarajevo, four French aircraft managed to deliver at least 30 tons of supplies to the airport that was taken over by a symbolic U.N. peacekeeping force a day earlier.

But only about half of the cargo was handed over to humanitarian organizations for distribution to the 300,000 starving people left in Sarajevo before renewed fighting prevented aid vehicles from approaching the airport.

“There’s fighting again in Dobrinja (a neighborhood abutting the airport), both mortars and small-arms fire,” U.N. civilian affairs coordinator Cedric Thornberry said, warning that the embattled Bosnian capital remains highly unstable.

Asked whether the shooting jeopardized plans to reopen the airport, Thornberry said he assumed that the combatants will stand by an agreement he negotiated with them three weeks ago aimed at lifting the deadly siege of the city.

“But if there are signs that is not going to happen, we’ll have to reassess” the plan, Thornberry said.

The Canadian troops were headed for Sarajevo in a 30-mile-long convoy. Because the heavily mechanized battalion can move only about 25 miles per hour along the 180-mile route from its base in Croatia, it is not expected to arrive in Sarajevo until Thursday.

The peacekeepers will have to sweep the airport for mines, erect sandbags and steel barricades, then clear the single 8,500-foot runway of spent shell casings and other obstructions before they can declare the facility ready to protect incoming flights.

“At the very earliest . . . the soonest we can foresee the airport opening is late Thursday, and more realistically it would be Friday or the weekend,” said U.N. spokeswoman Shannon Boyd.

Economic Action

In announcing the economic reforms, including wage and price controls, Serbian Prime Minister Radoman Bozovic said a new currency will be introduced today with the aim of devaluing the dinar and slowing hyper-inflation, now at an annual rate of 120,000%.

But the replacement of the current dinar bills will also cut Bosnia and the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina out of the federal monetary system administered in Belgrade.

Bozovic said some “humanitarian aid” to Serbs in those regions would be considered, but he made clear that Belgrade considers repair of the Serbian republic’s economy more important than support for rebellious Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia, where the Krajina lies.

Both regions currently use Yugoslav dinars but will be unable to exchange them for the new currency.

At the United Nations

The unanimous Security Council vote was intended to curb Croatian moves into Serb-populated areas, particularly in the so-called “pink zones,” the Serb-populated sections of Croatia that are not formally under U.N. protection.

The vote, establishing a U.N. “presence” in those zones, also authorized the addition of up to 60 military observers and 120 civilian police to help enforce security there.

The resolution was seen as a relatively tough rebuke for Croatia, whose government has opposed any expansion of the U.N. role there.

In view of the sniper-fire incidents Tuesday, U.N. officials said it was unlikely that Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali would give Western donors the green light to begin the airlift to Sarajevo this morning, as some had hoped.

Healy reported from Washington and Williams from Belgrade. Times staff writer Art Pine in Washington contributed to this article.