France Ready to Enforce ‘No-Fly Zone’ for Bosnia

Western leaders toughened their talk on Monday of taking action against Serbia, especially for violating the U.N.-imposed “no-fly zone” over Bosnia-Herzegovina, as a veteran of Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Cabinet resigned, saying he was ashamed by the German government’s “do-nothing stance” on the Yugoslav bloodshed.

In Stockholm, French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas told Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger that Paris is now prepared to support a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing allied air power to shoot down Serbian warplanes flying over Bosnia.

A senior State Department official said later that the U.S. government, which already supports enforcement of the no-fly zone over Bosnia, welcomed the French decision.

Previously, France and Britain had objected to using force against Serbian aircraft because they feared that military action in the air would lead to Serbian retaliation against U.N. peacekeeping forces on the ground. Britain and France have troops in the U.N. “blue helmet” peacekeeping force, but the United States does not.

Although the no-fly zone applies to military aircraft of all former Yugoslav republics, only Serbia and its Bosnian Serb allies have air power. Since the ban was imposed in early October, the United Nations has counted more than 300 violations by Serbian warplanes.

In his Stockholm speech to foreign ministers of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Eagleburger said that ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslav republics is “a mirror of our darker selves--a mirror of what we, too, could become were we to succumb to ethnic hatred and intolerance for diversity.” He said the civilized world “may be losing the race against time with the forces of hatred and disintegration which threaten the new democratic order in Europe.”

He called on the international community to bring Yugoslav aggressors to trial for war crimes.

Eagleburger urged the CSCE to “increase substantially” its force of 20 or so observers in Kosovo to try to prevent the ethnic war from reaching that province of Serbia, where the population is overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian. He has expressed concern that, if “ethnic cleansing”--the Serbian practice of Serbs clearing non-Serbs from areas of Serb control--reaches Kosovo, the conflict may engulf Albania, Bulgaria and perhaps Greece and Turkey.

At the United Nations, as key ambassadors began drafting a resolution to enforce the no-fly zone over Bosnia, French Ambassador Jean-Bernard Merimee told reporters that it would take time to work out the practical military aspects of the plan.

In Bonn, Kohl quickly rejected the extraordinary public attack by Christian Schwarz-Schilling, a fellow Christian Democrat, the post and telecommunications minister and a Cabinet member since Kohl took office a decade ago. “I have used all the possibilities at my disposal . . . to persuade those responsible to end these war crimes immediately,” Kohl said in a statement. He said his government will continue to do “everything in its power” to bring an end to the “war and mass murder and immeasurable suffering of so many people.”

Schwarz-Schilling, 62, told a news conference he was frustrated by the government’s failure to join U.N. peacekeeping efforts in Bosnia. After hearing “shocking reports” about the situation there, he said he declared at a Cabinet meeting last week: “I am ashamed to belong to this government if this do-nothing stance continues.”

Kempster reported from Stockholm and Jones from Bonn. Times staff writer Stanley Meisler contributed to this report from the United Nations.