West Struggles to Map Strategy for Bosnia Aid

North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies failed Friday to agree on a plan to provide military protection for relief shipments to besieged Bosnia-Herzegovina, even as the European Community’s latest effort to engineer peace in the Balkans ran aground.

NATO ambassadors, wary that Yugoslavia and its former republics could become a Vietnam-style quagmire, sent back to the drawing board a staff options paper suggesting that as many as 100,000 troops might be needed to guarantee the safety of relief convoys from the Adriatic Sea to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.

The ambassadors of the 16 NATO nations gave the staff until Aug. 24 to prepare a new report. The use of force to protect humanitarian aid was authorized Thursday by the United Nations.

Meanwhile, across town, the EC’s peace conference on Yugoslavia was stymied by the absence of delegates from Serbia, the Yugoslav republic that is widely held responsible for most of the continuing violence in the Balkans.

“If people don’t come and negotiate, we must assume they don’t want to contribute to the search for peace,” said Douglas Hogg, minister of state in the British Foreign Office and his country’s second-ranking diplomat, who participated in Friday’s peace conference.

In other developments:

* French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas said France is prepared to send 1,100 troops to Bosnia to help protect relief convoys. Spanish officials said they would be willing to send an unspecified number of troops.

* A U.N. refugee official said ethnic Serbs in Bosnia are using “Nazi” tactics against Bosnian Muslims. “What these people are living through is absolutely medieval,” the official said.

* Serbia and Croatia exchanged about 1,100 prisoners of war. The swap, arranged by Yugoslav Prime Minister Milan Panic, was conducted under the auspices of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations and took place near Osijek in northeastern Croatia.

* The U.S. aircraft carrier Saratoga is to return to the Adriatic Sea off the Yugoslav coast today, a Defense Department spokesman said.

Bosnia-Herzegovina, one of six republics that once constituted Yugoslavia, is ethnically split among Muslims, Croats and Serbs. The Muslims and Croats declared an independent Bosnia on Feb. 29 in a referendum boycotted by the republic’s Serbs, who preferred to remain in a Yugoslavia dominated by the republic of Serbia.

Since then, Bosnia’s Serbs, declaring a policy of “ethnic cleansing,” have gained control of two-thirds of Bosnia’s territory in a war in which 8,000 people have been killed, as many as 2 million have lost their homes and countless Muslims have been held in detention camps.

Worldwide outrage has mounted weekly, but Friday’s events showed that the West has yet to agree upon a strategy for stopping the violence.

Among NATO ambassadors who met behind closed doors, there was little support for a massive show of force in Bosnia. NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner, asked about the staff’s estimate that 100,000 troops could be needed to protect overland relief convoys, said after the meeting, “We are indeed now studying a range of options, options which involve different numbers.”

France’s commitment of 1,100 troops would fall far short of the NATO staff estimate, and Woerner said the French had made clear that these troops would be for the use of the nine-member Western European Union, not for NATO.

Apart from Spain and Turkey, no other NATO nations have pledged troops. The United States and Britain have opposed sending large numbers of ground troops.

Woerner said NATO could dispatch troops only if the United Nations specifically requested them.

Peacemakers also made no headway Friday. Britain’s Lord Carrington, chairman of the European Community’s 11-month-old Yugoslav peace conference, called it “a great pity” that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic chose not to attend Friday’s meeting in Brussels.

If Milosevic had attended, Carrington said, he would have heard that “international opinion is becoming more and more enraged at what the Serbians are doing.” Carrington said the republic of Serbia must stop sending arms to ethnic Serbs in Bosnia.

In Milosevic’s absence, the peace conference mainly took stock of present circumstances--including what Carrington characterized as Serb-operated “concentration camps” in Bosnia--two weeks before an international conference on Yugoslavia scheduled to be held in London.

Attending Friday’s conference were the presidents of four of the six former Yugoslav republics--Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia. Joining Serbia in boycotting the conference was the tiny republic of Montenegro. Serbia and Montenegro have declared themselves the constituents of a new, reduced Yugoslavia.

Panic, a Serbian-born Southern California businessman who has assumed the job of prime minister of the new Yugoslavia, was in Brussels to represent Serbia and Montenegro.

Panic said he had come to Brussels because the new Yugoslav constitution bars the leaders of Serbia and Montenegro from conducting foreign policy. Lord Carrington, while meeting individually with Panic, denied him a seat at the peace conference table because no European Community nation recognizes his country.

Panic, talking with reporters after the peace conference, insisted that there are no “concentration camps” in Bosnia. “I have repeatedly condemned ‘ethnic cleansing,’ ” said Panic.

He expressed wonderment that Serbia’s critics could call Milosevic, its president, a “murderer.” He said he could not understand how Carrington could “invite a murderer and not invite me” to the peace conference.

HUMAN RIGHTS INQUIRY: U.N. names a special envoy to probe abuses in Balkans. A11

How to Help War Victims

Here is a list of international agencies helping Balkan orphans and war victims. Officials in most cases ask that checks be sent marked for Yugoslavia rather than making phone calls or sending goods: UNITED STATES

American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Open Mailbox for Bosnia-Herzegovina

711 3rd Ave., 10th Floor

New York, N.Y. 10017

(212) 687-6200

AmeriCares

161 Cherry St.

New Canaan, Conn. 06840

(203) 966-5195

Brother’s Brother Foundation

824 Grandview Ave.

Pittsburgh, Pa. 15211

(412) 431-1600

International Rescue Committee

386 Park Avenue South

New York, N.Y. 10016

(212) 679-0010

MAP International

2200 Glynco Parkway

Brunswick, Ga. 31520

(912) 265-6010

Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees

1718 Connecticut Ave. N.W., Suite 200

Washington, D.C. 20009

(202) 387-8546

UNICEF

333 E. 38th St.

New York, N.Y. 10016

(212) 686-5522

American Red Cross

P.O. Box 37243

Washington, D.C., 20013

(800) 842-2200

(make checks payable to Yugoslavia-Conflict Relief)

EUROPE

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Geneva advises that checks be donated to local Red Cross branches that exist in most European and North American cities.

Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees

P.O. Box 2500

CH-1211-2 Geneva, Switzerland

(22) 739-8111

Deutsches Rotes Kreuz

Friedrich Ebert Allee 71

5300 Bonn 1 Germany

(49) 228-5411

Source: Associated Press