Switch by Serbs Spurs Suspicion at Bosnia Talks

Threatened with Western military strikes, a Serbian warlord hinted Sunday at a compromise that would permit a multiethnic government in Bosnia-Herzegovina and end a deadly nine-month siege by his rebel forces.

While reported statements by Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic at a peace conference in Geneva produced a glimmer of hope, they contradicted his statement of less than a week ago in defense of an ethnically pure and independent Serbian state.

The Serbian retreat under intensifying pressure raised concerns in Geneva and here in the successor states of shattered Yugoslavia that the Bosnian Serbs might just be buying time with another empty promise, like those that have for months lulled Western mediators into believing a negotiated solution is close at hand.

Karadzic made it clear a week ago that his Serbian fighters would never accept the crucial demand of U.N. and European Community mediators that Bosnia be preserved as a unified state. He told reporters in Geneva and Belgrade that if he were to submit to multinational rule from Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, he would betray the very cause his loyalists have waged war for.

Peace talks in Geneva resumed after nearly a week of recess, during which the Balkan combatants were supposed to consult with their supporters on proposals to divide Bosnia into 10 autonomous provinces governed from Sarajevo by equal numbers of Slavic Muslims, Croats and Serbs.

At a Saturday meeting in the Serb-held city of Bijeljina, the putative legislature that answers to Karadzic voted to reject the proposed plan, claiming that it “tears the Serbian people without geographic continuity.”

Nevertheless, Karadzic reportedly dangled the possibility of a compromise before Geneva conference co-chairmen Lord Owen of the EC and Cyrus R. Vance, a former U.S. secretary of state now serving as the United Nations’ special Yugoslav envoy.

Conference sources told reporters in Geneva that Karadzic expressed willingness to compromise on his faction’s demand for a mini-state having the implicit right to align with other Serbs in what is left of Yugoslavia.

The reported softening of the Serbian position came amid strengthening support among Western governments for military intervention to halt a campaign of Serbian aggression against Bosnia’s Muslims and Croats, including systematic gang rapes and the reviled practice of “ethnic cleansing.”

The U.S. Navy moved an aircraft carrier, the John F. Kennedy, closer to the Adriatic Sea on Sunday, presumably to be in position for air operations over Bosnia in the event the U.N. Security Council decides to enforce a ban on Serbian flights over the war-torn republic.

Vance and Owen billed the talks as the last chance for Serbs to escape punitive intervention, but the rebels’ negotiating position was damaged by the shocking assassination of a Bosnian government leader Friday.

The Sarajevo leadership had threatened to boycott the talks, claiming the slaying of Deputy Prime Minister Hakija Turajlic in Sarajevo showed the Serbs’ contempt for human rights and international institutions. Turajlic was accompanied by U.N. forces when he was shot at least seven times, but their mandate does not authorize them to protect civilians from hostile gunfire.

Bosnia’s Muslim president, Alija Izetbegovic, showed up in Geneva to meet with Vance and Owen but left before the arrival of Karadzic to consult with leaders of Islamic countries meeting in Senegal.

Members of the 51-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference have expressed increasing dismay over what they see as foot-dragging by the international community in halting Serbian aggression against Bosnian Muslims, who make up the vast majority of the tens of thousands killed and 2 million routed from their homes by Serbian “ethnic cleansing.”

The Bosnian leadership’s delegate to the peace conference, Amira Kapetanovic, said after Sunday’s session that she sees no reason for optimism.

“The Serbs are just buying time, as usual,” Kapetanovic said by telephone from Geneva, arguing that Karadzic made no real compromise on his previous positions.

“Vance and Owen just wouldn’t admit the failure,” Kapetanovic said of the talks. “We’re very disappointed with the U.N. The murder of Minister Turajlic just proves how easily we can all be captured and killed like mice.”

The mediators’ insistence on continued talks instead of intervention has angered the Bosnian leadership. Bosnian Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic has criticized the fruitless negotiating forum as a cruel evasion of the inevitable solution--military intervention.

Far from conceding failure after 19 months of various diplomatic endeavors, Vance and Owen have repeatedly portrayed the short-lived cease-fires and broken agreements they negotiated as promising signs of imminent success.

Vance brokered a peace plan for Croatia more than a year ago that led to the deployment of 14,000 U.N. peacekeeping troops here. But their mandate expires in two months, and Zagreb leaders--President Franjo Tudjman chief among them--have warned they will not renew the foreign soldiers’ mandate unless they correct major flaws in the peacekeeping operation that has served to preserve the Serbian occupation of one-third of Croatia and to protect Belgrade’s proxies from reprisals.

Shortly after his appointment as EC chairman of the Yugoslav peace efforts, Owen proclaimed a breakthrough when Karadzic promised at an August conference to surrender heavy weapons to U.N. forces and stop the Serbian shelling of Sarajevo and three other cities. None of the promises has been kept.

While the veteran diplomats have won plaudits from U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali for perseverance, their efforts to broker a lasting settlement of any of the former Yugoslav federation’s crises have largely failed because the combatants cling to irreconcilable positions.

Serbs throughout the fractured remnants of Yugoslavia insist that their only security is living together in a single Serb-ruled state, while the Muslim-led Sarajevo government has rejected any attempt to carve up Bosnia into segregated, ethnic states.

Bosnian Croats, the third party to the conflict, have vacillated on the question of unity.

Negotiations, though basically at an impasse, are to resume today and continue indefinitely.