Clinton Urges Serbs to Vote Against Regime

Bill Clinton, sounding more like a President-in-office than a President-elect, sent up a flurry of crisp foreign policy signals on Thursday, urging Serbs to vote their hard-line government out of office and saying he would wait for U.N. endorsement before deploying U.S. warplanes over Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Discarding any remaining reticence about speaking out on foreign affairs, Clinton also asked Israel to halt its mass expulsion of Palestinians, assured Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin of continued American support and said he plans to meet next month with Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

Clinton’s comments, his most specific statements about international issues since his election, broke no significant new policy ground: Most fell squarely within positions already taken by the Bush Administration.

His promise of a cautious approach to committing American air power to Bosnia, in fact, represented a small step back from his own statements during the presidential campaign, when he urged more assertive enforcement of a “no-fly zone” over the embattled republic.

More notable was the President-elect’s willingness to comment on foreign affairs. Last month, the morning after Election Day, Clinton admonished the world that the United States has only “one President at a time” and said he would not interfere in President Bush’s conduct of international relations.

But by Thursday, the diffidence was gone, and the United States suddenly had, in effect, two presidents speaking on foreign policy. The President-elect was so eager to reaffirm American support for Yeltsin, for example, that he returned to the podium to speak about the Russian leader after having waved the press conference over and walked away.

The effect was a visible acknowledgment that global power has begun moving into Clinton’s hands. The rest of the world is already planning, and reacting, to the next President’s policies as much as to the current one’s.

“Our governments want to know about Clinton’s intentions more than Bush’s,” a British diplomat noted.

Clinton decided to take a more assertive stance on several issues after his transition advisers suggested he needed to send more precise signals about his intentions, one source said. His statements also appeared intended partly as a response to Bush’s speech in Texas on Tuesday, in which the President warned his successor against “a retreat from American leadership.”

At the same time, Clinton’s global sallies demonstrated some of the same traits in foreign policy that he displayed in this week’s economic conference: boundless self-confidence and considerable command of detail but a tendency to embrace both sides of an issue.

On the Middle East, for example, Clinton said he is unhappy with Israel’s decision to expel about 400 Palestinians accused of militant activities. But he also said he understands Israelis’ strong feelings about terrorism.

“Let me first of all say that I share the anger and the frustration and the outrage of the Israeli people at what has happened,” he said. “And I understand how they feel they have to deal very firmly with this group Hamas, which is apparently bent on terrorist activities of all kinds.

“On the other hand, I am concerned that this deportation may go too far and may imperil the peace talks,” he added.

His comment was strikingly similar in tone and content to a written statement issued by Bush, suggesting that the two had consulted on the issue. Bush called on all the countries involved to “end . . . all forms of violence and avoid reactions such as deportations that risk complicating the search for peace.”

On the Yugoslav crisis, Clinton said he understands Britain’s objections to the use of American warplanes to keep Serbian aircraft from flying military missions over Bosnia and indicated that he would not move unilaterally while London disagreed.

“They have soldiers on the ground, and so I’m sympathetic with that,” he said of the British. “They’re probably worried about what will happen to them if the no-fly zone is enforced by air power. So I think we just have to go back to the table” and find a formula acceptable to Britain. “And I think we ought to give the (Bush) Administration a chance to see what can be done.”

“Anything we do over there ought to be done through the United Nations,” he added.

During the campaign, Clinton criticized Bush for his failure to offer American air power to enforce the no-fly zone and argued for armed protection for humanitarian convoys and an end to the arms embargo on Bosnia. Since the election, the Bush Administration has moved toward Clinton’s positions--and the President-elect has praised its action and backed away a bit from his earlier statements.

At the same time Thursday, Clinton bluntly urged Serbian voters to vote against their hard-line president, Slobodan Milosevic, who has led his country into war with both Croatia and Bosnia.

“If the people in the elections in Serbia were to vote for a government that did not believe in ‘ethnic cleansing,’ and did not believe in the continuation and the fueling of mindless violence in Bosnia, and wanted to turn away from that toward reconciliation and back toward democracy and human rights, that would make all the difference in the world,” he said.

On Russia, where a Congress dominated by former Communists ousted reformist acting Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar this week, Clinton offered a broad commitment of continued American support--but no specific decisions.

“I think this country, and democracy in general, has a lot riding on keeping reform and freedom alive in Russia,” he said. “And I think those folks are going through a terribly tough time.

“I have given a lot of thought to what we might do--over and above what we have done, and within the limits of our own financial strength--to try to stabilize the direction over there and give those folks some way of feeling that this thing is going to come out OK; that if they stick with it there is, in fact, a rainbow at the end of the tough road. . . .

“I wish I could be more specific with you,” he said. “But all I can tell you is it is a very important issue to me, and I’m going to do what I can to keep Russia moving in the right direction.”