Senate OKs Military Aid for Bosnia

Stepping up pressure on President Bush to intervene in the Yugoslav crisis, the Senate on Wednesday authorized the transfer of up to $50 million in military aid to the beleaguered government in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The Senate also approved restrictions barring the Agency for International Development (AID) from offering financial incentives to American companies that export U.S. jobs overseas when they open manufacturing facilities abroad.

Both the military aid to Bosnia and the restrictions on the use of foreign aid funds were added over muted Administration opposition to a $26.4-billion foreign aid appropriations bill that the Senate was rushing to complete before adjourning for the year next week.

The bill provides economic, development and military aid to American friends and allies globally. Among major provisions are a five-year, $10-billion loan guarantee for Israel to use in absorbing a flood of Jewish emigres from the former Soviet Union and authority for $12 billion in new lending for the International Monetary Fund.

But in what appeared to be at least a tacit compromise with the White House, the potentially contentious measures affecting Bosnia and AID were both approved by unrecorded voice votes.

This procedure, at least in this instance, puts the items in peril of being dropped from the legislation later this week when Senate negotiators meet with their House counterparts to reconcile differences between their bill and the one already approved by the House.

Neither measure was included in the House-passed bill. Republicans indicated that the Administration, calculating that it can get the Bosnia measure dropped in conference, had agreed not to oppose it on the Senate floor, provided it was passed on a voice vote, where individual senators would not have to go on record as opposing or favoring the amendment.

But even without the added insurance of a recorded vote, inclusion of the amendment reflected a growing sentiment in Congress, even among Republicans, that the Administration is not doing enough about the worsening ethnic conflict in Bosnia.

New CIA estimates warn that nearly 150,000 people could die there this winter if fighting continues to disrupt the supply of humanitarian aid.

“The human tragedy of Bosnia cries out for a human response,” said Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), who portrayed the amendment written by fellow Democrat Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware as the “least we can do” to respond to the “unspeakable crimes” being committed by Serbian forces.

He and other supporters of the amendment said they still hoped the Administration would accept it because its non-binding nature merely authorizes military aid to Bosnia but does not mandate it.

They also noted that the aid, to be drawn from existing Pentagon stocks, would be contingent upon lifting the current U.N.-imposed arms embargo on all parties to the bitter ethnic conflict being waged in the former Yugoslavia.

But Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), echoing the Administration’s hesitancy to become militarily involved in Bosnia, said that supplying arms to one side or the other would only prolong the conflict, not end it.

“If the embargo were to be lifted and the United States had the option (of sending military aid to Bosnia), what would be the likelihood of other nations then sending supplies to the Serbs? . . . We all want to stop the suffering, but I want proponents of this amendment to explain to me how the supply of arms to one side is going to end the killing,” Warner said.

The other provision the Administration is likely to oppose would bar government agencies from using funds to encourage U.S. companies to invest overseas, if it resulted in the loss of jobs at home.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) sponsored the effort to add the restrictions after news reports detailed how an overseas investment program run by AID used tax breaks and other incentives to encourage American manufacturing firms into moving some of their operations to Central America.

“The craziness of trying to create jobs abroad instead of spending tax dollars to create them here is so obvious and so fundamentally unsound that I can only shake my head in wonder,” said Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.).