U.S., Allies Agree on Bosnia Stand : Balkans: Resolution for use of force to ensure aid is offered to Security Council. Britain, France support measure that could lead to a NATO operation.

The United States reached agreement Monday with its three West European allies on the U.N. Security Council for a resolution authorizing “all measures necessary”--a euphemism for military force--to ensure the supply of humanitarian assistance to Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The resolution was quickly circulated to the other 11 members of the council, including Russia and China, for their views. The Security Council is not expected to vote on the resolution in open session until at least Wednesday.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told correspondents that the United States, Britain, France and Belgium “have reached agreement on the proposed text of a resolution authorizing all necessary means to ensure the delivery of humanitarian assistance.”

The resolution, according to Boucher, included a provision authorizing the delivery of food and medicine to the Serbian-run prison camps in Bosnia. News of the camps horrified much of the world last week following the release of videotape footage and survivors’ accounts.

Boucher said the governments had not defined exactly what they meant by “all measures necessary” but added that ways of implementing the resolution were “being looked at in places like NATO, where they’re planning and reviewing options for what they might do to support the U.N.’s efforts.”

This seemed to imply that the Bush Administration envisioned a military operation by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in support of the 1,500 U.N. peacekeepers who are now trying to keep the airport at Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, open for relief flights.

But this kind of talk evidently troubled U.N. officials. In Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, for example, a senior U.N. official said that a major introduction of Western forces to ensure the safety of relief and humanitarian efforts in the former Yugoslav republics could threaten the “delicate situation” of peacekeepers now deployed in the area.

Cedric Thornberry, chief of civilian operations, said that military commanders in charge of 14,000 troops of the U.N. peace force in Croatia doubt the effectiveness of air strikes against guerrilla units.

The commanders are also concerned, he said, that the option of introducing large numbers of troops could destabilize peacekeeping operations in areas where the U.N. troops had established a balance between warring ethnic militias and neutralized their heavy weapons.

“We have some concern,” Thornberry said, “that any operation you put on the ground--at this very delicate stage--could very easily upset the apple cart.”

The doubts from the U.N. command in Zagreb, which directs the peacekeepers deployed in Croatia and observers in Bosnia-Herzegovina, came as NATO sources in Brussels said that the alliance had cleared the way for contingency plans for a protection operation, which could involve thousands of Western troops. Among the plans under consideration is the opening of a land corridor from the Adriatic coast to besieged Sarajevo, an operation that, some experts say, could require 100,000 troops.

A warning about military force came as well from Milan Panic, a Southern California businessman who is now prime minister of the shrunken Yugoslavia, made up of Serbia and Montenegro. He told the Associated Press that “Western intervention could lead to disaster.”

“It could trigger a full-scale guerrilla war in Bosnia and a second Vietnam in the Balkans,” anic said.

While the Western military option was under intensified study, the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva agreed Monday to take up alleged abuses in Bosnia. Pierre Mehu, spokesman for the commission, said that a two-day session will begin Thursday. The step was taken in the wake of a stream of reports about brutal conditions in Serbian-run prison camps.

Teams from the International Committee of the Red Cross are to begin inspecting some of the camps later this week. In the meantime, there were growing reports that the Serbs are busily removing prisoners from the most notorious of the camps.

The conditions in the prison camps have put renewed pressure on Western governments to intervene in the Balkan crisis and forced them, however reluctantly, to consider the introduction of military force. Just what force to use, however, remains an open question.

Some U.S. and other Western political figures have advocated the use of air strikes to neutralize the Serbian heavy artillery around Sarajevo. Military specialists, on the other hand, have doubted the effectiveness of air power against mobile artillery that can be moved quickly and effectively camouflaged in difficult terrain.

In Zagreb, the United Nations’ Thornberry said that U.N. military commanders shared these doubts. “When you are not dealing with a conventional force, as is mostly the case here, you have a very limited capacity” to strike from the air, he said.

Moreover, he said, the deployment of a large land force would also be problematical.

“If there were such a commitment,” he said, “it would raise quite serious questions, not only about the U.N. position in Sarajevo, but in the U.N. Protected Areas as well.”

The so-called U.N. Protected Areas cover large regions of Croatia taken last year by Serbian forces. The U.N. peacekeepers have succeeded in warehousing heavy weapons and, Thornberry said, gradually moving to demilitarize sections in eastern and southern Croatia.

“At the moment,” he said, “we are operating on a series of agreements of honor. It is very difficult for us to envision maintaining this essentially cooperative arrangement . . . if you have a major military operation that is involving their brothers and cousins down the road.”

Thornberry acknowledged that the threat of Western armed intervention has had some effect on the combatants. “I think it has calmed them down somewhat,” he said.

He said he believed that the intensified involvement of the European Community and the United Nations has a chance of being more effective than increased military intervention.

“None of us here believes that (the U.N. peace force) can do much more than run around with stretchers and ambulances until there is a political settlement.”

A divided U.S. Senate, meanwhile, began debating a bipartisan resolution that would urge President Bush to seek Security Council authorization for the use of force not only to send humanitarian aid to Bosnia but also to secure Red Cross access to the Serbian-run detention camps there.

In commenting earlier on the U.S.-European agreement on a Security Council resolution authorizing force to ensure delivery of aid, a State Department official noted that the U.N. measure would stop short of recommending that force be used to open up the detention camps where Bosnian Muslims and Croats have been interned.

However, echoing reservations similar to those expressed during the debate that preceded the Persian Gulf War, senators argued throughout the day over the wisdom of using military force to accomplish the more limited goal of securing supply lines for shipments of food into Bosnia.

Opponents warned that the war raging in the former republics of Yugoslavia is a near-impenetrable problem that the United States and its NATO allies can do nothing to resolve by force unless they are willing to commit tens of thousands of troops to an open-ended conflict in which they could suffer heavy casualties.

Meisler reported from Washington and Powers from Zagreb. Times staff writer Michael Ross in Washington contributed to this article.

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