U.S. Considers Tougher Line Against Serbs

After months of cautious inaction, the Bush Administration is looking for ways to level the field of action in Bosnia-Herzegovina, possibly by sending arms to the beleaguered Muslim-led government or shooting down Serbian warplanes, Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger said Saturday.

Talking to reporters aboard his Air Force jetliner on the way to a round of meetings on the crisis in the former Yugoslav federation, Eagleburger said the Administration has concluded that it must come to grips with the bloody ethnic war even though it has only 40 days left in office.

“This is an issue where this Administration feels it cannot simply ignore it and leave it to the next Administration,” Eagleburger said. “We need to try to deal with it so it is at least as containable and manageable as possible when the new Administration comes in. But we also need to deal with it in a way that doesn’t foreclose (President-elect Bill) Clinton’s options.”

As a first step, Eagleburger said, the United States is now ready to consider changing the U.N.-imposed arms embargo against all of the former Yugoslav republics to permit weapons to be supplied to the Bosnian government. Bosnian leaders have appealed for such action for months, maintaining that they could defend themselves if given the tools.

In addition, he said, he hopes to drum up support for the use of military power to enforce a ban on military aircraft in Bosnia-Herzegovina. When the U.N. Security Council approved a “no-fly” zone in October, it did not authorize any means of enforcement. The Serbs are the only side in the complex ethnic war possessing warplanes.

Eagleburger also said the international community must seriously consider the use of military force to ensure delivery of food and medicine to Sarajevo and other besieged cities in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Security Council has already authorized U.N. peacekeepers to use their weapons to protect humanitarian shipments, but so far the authorization has not been used.

Eagleburger also said the world community must find ways to prevent Serbian “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo, a formerly autonomous province of Serbia where the population is about 90% ethnic Albanian. He said that Serbian aggression in Kosovo probably would spill over into such neighboring countries as Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey, sparking a full-scale Balkan war.

Eagleburger said all of the steps require a broad international consensus because the United States is not prepared to act alone. He said he hopes to begin building such an agreement starting Monday when foreign ministers of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe meet in Stockholm. Additional talks will be held Wednesday in Geneva at a meeting of foreign ministers of the countries that attended a largely ineffective Yugoslav peace conference last August in London. The discussions will continue Thursday and Friday in Brussels at a meeting of foreign ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Even though no final decisions have been reached, Eagleburger’s comments marked a dramatic turnaround by the Administration, which had hoped to stay out of the Balkan strife, a conflict some officials believe will become a quagmire. Bush has come under pressure to act more forcefully from Clinton, who said Friday that it was time to enforce the no-fly zone, and from such Republican stalwarts as former President Ronald Reagan and former Secretaries of State Henry A. Kissinger and George P. Shultz.

For months, the Administration has supported the U.N. arms embargo, which was imposed on all of the republics of the former Yugoslav federation even though Serbia and its ethnic allies are far better armed than the other factions. President Bush said last August that Yugoslavia was awash in arms and that additional weapons would only add to the violence. But Islamic countries, meeting in Saudi Arabia, recently demanded an end to the embargo, which they said was preventing the Bosnian Muslims from defending themselves.

“The U.S. is prepared in these discussions this week to examine with others whether it would be wise to move away from the solid position that we have all taken of a flat arms embargo with regard to the Bosnian Muslims,” Eagleburger said.

A senior State Department official aboard Eagleburger’s plane said that the Bosnian government has been so weakened by the Serbian onslaught that it may not be able to defend itself even if the arms embargo is ended.

“It will be less effective than if we had done it six months ago,” the official said. “But the Bosnian Muslims would prefer us to do it now than not to do it at all.”

The U.S. government already supports the use of military power to enforce the ban on military aircraft in Bosnia-Herzegovina. But because of objections by Britain and France, Washington has not sought Security Council authorization to begin shooting down Serbian aircraft.

Since the ban was imposed in early October, the United Nations has counted more than 200 violations, mostly the use of military planes to move men and equipment. But bombing and strafing attacks against targets on the ground have declined sharply.

Eagleburger said he will advocate enforcement during the current round of meetings but said, “I’m not going to go in there with a baseball bat” to try to bludgeon allies into supporting the U.S. position.

Eagleburger said conditions in Bosnia-Herzegovina are growing steadily worse with the onset of the cold mountain winter. He said it is imperative that the United States and its allies act soon to guarantee the delivery of relief supplies.

“It is clear that the Bosnian Serbs are not prepared to let these convoys go through,” he said.

He said that U.N. forces have been reluctant to use force so far but that it is now time to give careful consideration to military action.

Despite the renewed U.S. search for ways to increase the cost of Serbian aggression, a senior State Department official acknowledged that there seems to be no way of saving the Bosnian Muslim community “short of massive employment of (outside) troops.” And he said no country, including the United States, is ready to do that.

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