NEWS ANALYSIS : U.S. Hopes Serb Voters Will Rescue Its Yugoslav Policy

After months of hesitation and a week of frantic action, the Bush Administration’s program for bringing peace to the ruins of Yugoslavia comes down to one frail hope: that Serbian voters will turn Slobodan Milosevic out of office.

In a diplomatic flurry that took him to Stockholm, Geneva and Brussels, Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger missed no opportunity to send a message to the voters who go to the polls today that a vote against Milosevic is a vote to rejoin the world community.

Despite considerable skepticism that Milosevic will accept defeat even if presidential challenger Milan Panic amasses more votes, Eagleburger was left with few alternatives after other world leaders balked at easing the arms embargo against the beleaguered government of Bosnia-Herzegovina and gave only tepid backing to enforcement of a “no-fly zone” over the shattered republic.

“In the end, if you are intent on killing each other, there is only so much the rest of the world can do to stop you from being insane,” Eagleburger said, displaying growing frustration at the inability of the world’s only remaining superpower to stop ethnic bloodletting in the Balkans.

The United States was not alone in its impotence. In the last week, diplomats from the 51-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, a 29-nation Yugoslav peace conference and the 16-nation North Atlantic Treaty Organization tried and failed to find the key to ending the crisis.

For U.S. officials, the failure of European nations to come to grips with a brutal tribal war in the heart of Europe was especially galling. One reason why the Administration held back earlier in the crisis was the hope that European nations, especially the rich and powerful 12-member European Community, would take the lead. Now, officials have decided that the Europeans are not up to the task.

“It is not certain that any action will lead to the results we want,” said Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, whose government hosted the CSCE meeting.

Talking to a small group of American reporters, Bildt said that the Balkan war was “a massive failure of Western policy.” If the West had been more accurate in assessing the pressures that led to the breakup of the Yugoslav federation, he said, “we might have taken more forceful action from the start.”

But the world wasted valuable time, first by trying to prevent the breakup of the six-republic Yugoslav federation and then by underestimating the determination and brutality of Milosevic’s government and its ethnic Serb allies in the other republics.

“What we lack most is not military capability but intellectual capability,” Bildt said. “In the past 45 years we have learned how to deal with a bipolar world, but that is a knowledge of increasingly academic interest.”

Today, he said, the United States “is the only power in the world that has the capability to do things globally.”

Eagleburger had hoped to end his 35-year diplomatic career and his brief tenure as secretary of state by ratcheting up the pressure on Serbia to end the campaign of “ethnic cleansing,” which U.S. and allied officials consider the primary cause of the violence that has shattered the federation where he once served for seven years as U.S. ambassador.

While placing primary responsibility on the Serbs, U.S. and allied officials insist that no side is blameless. In fact, a growing animosity on the part of world leaders to all sides in the Yugoslav conflict complicates efforts to launch a peace process.

It now seems likely that the U.N. Security Council will authorize the use of military force to prevent Serbia and its Bosnian Serb allies from using their air power monopoly in Bosnia. But the reluctance of some countries, especially Britain, to take the step has blurred the message that Washington had hoped to send to Belgrade.

British officials say enforcing the no-fly zone won’t change the course of the war but could prompt Serbian forces to attack the humanitarian convoys that are bringing food and medicine to Bosnia’s population. U.S. officials reply that if the no-fly zone isn’t enforced, Serbia might conclude that it is free to ignore U.N. resolutions on other issues as well.

President Bush and British Prime Minister John Major discussed the issue Saturday in hope of reaching a common position, and aides said the two leaders would report on their progress today. Major spent the day with Bush at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Md.

The Muslim-led Bosnian government has long appealed for the United Nations to lift the arms embargo that has frozen them into a disastrous disadvantage against the far better equipped Serbs.

Although the official U.S. position is only that the embargo should be reconsidered, it seemed clear that Eagleburger was ready to end it.

“When you get to questions like ending the arms embargo, I’ve got to tell you, I’ve run against . . . a stone wall,” he said, adding that only Turkey and other Islamic countries support relaxation of the ban.

Which leaves it up to the voters in Serbia. Although diplomats like to pretend that they do not take sides in contested elections, they made an exception for Milosevic.

Eagleburger and Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev issued a joint statement warning Serbs that if they reelect Milosevic they will “remain in a pariah status, politically isolated and economically devastated because of the policies of the present regime.”

On the other hand, they said, “if the correct choice is made, Russia and the United States pledge to work with the government of Serbia to restore its position in the world.”

Later in the week, Eagleburger was even more blunt, placing Milosevic at the top of a list of political leaders who should be put on trial for war crimes.

Nevertheless, Eagleburger and other diplomats fretted that the message may not reach most Serbs because the regime controls most information outlets.

In an effort to break the news monopoly, British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd said his government was buying satellite time to permit independent television signals to reach Serbia during the final hours before the election.