Bosnia President Pleads for Western Air Strikes

Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic pleaded for Western air power to rescue his beleaguered nation Friday and accused President Bush of breaking a promise of six months ago to use military force to protect relief shipments.

At a meeting of world leaders last July, Izetbegovic said, “I was told that the humanitarian relief convoys would be protected, ‘no matter what it takes.’ These were the literal words of President Bush. . . . But the convoys haven’t been protected.”

Izetbegovic also brushed aside Western concerns that use of international military force against the Serbian militias dismembering Bosnia-Herzegovina would result in a cutoff of all humanitarian supplies. He said that so little aid is getting through that it is doing little more than prolonging the agony of the population.

“When we have to choose between agony and surgery, it might be better for (Bosnia) to accept the surgery,” he said, equating the medical procedure to international military intervention. “I think (Bosnia) can be saved by the surgery, but it cannot stand the continued agony.”

His remarks came even as Bosnia’s mission to the United Nations reported Friday that the country’s deputy prime minister for economics, Hakija Turajlic, was assassinated by Serbian militiamen.

“This is the kind of provocation I think that the Security Council cannot ignore, should not ignore,” said Mustafa Aksin, Turkey’s U.N. ambassador in New York, according to the Associated Press. “We have been saying all along that the council should take forceful action.”

Talking to reporters in advance of a meeting with Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger, Izetbegovic said he wants Western air strikes against Serbian positions and an end to the arms embargo that has prevented his Muslim-led government from obtaining weapons for its own military forces. He acknowledged that he has been rebuffed repeatedly on both requests.

The Bosnian leader also met with White House National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Vice President-elect Al Gore.

Eagleburger conceded that failure to stop the carnage in Bosnia has damaged Washington’s relationship with the Muslim world and encouraged the growth of Islamic extremism. The longer the crisis goes on, he said, the more damaging it will be to the United States and its allies.

“Every time I sit down with the Turkish foreign minister, he rightly takes me to task for the inability of the West to deal with the problem and goes further to say we really don’t care,” Eagleburger said. “I don’t think that’s correct, but I understand his frustration and concern. It has cost us in the Muslim world--not only us, but all of Western Europe as well.”

Last month, Eagleburger called on the United Nations to consider lifting the arms embargo against Bosnia, but his appeal was rejected. He said Washington will not act in the face of U.N. objections.

Besides his talks with Izetbegovic, Eagleburger met Friday with Ibrahim Rugova, leader of the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo, a formerly autonomous province of Serbia.

Eagleburger has said that if Serbia extends “ethnic cleansing” to Kosovo, where the population is about 90% Albanian, it could touch off a full-scale Balkan war.

Meantime, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe issued a report on the Dec. 20 elections in which Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic--branded as a war criminal by Eagleburger--was reelected by defeating Milan Panic, a Southern California businessman who had been prime minister of the Yugoslav federation. The report said the balloting was “neither free nor fair.”

In Paris, an EC team of investigators has concluded that Serbian forces have raped up to 20,000 Muslim women and girls in Bosnia as part of a systematic policy of terror.