U.N. Council Votes to Enforce ‘No-Fly’ Zone Over Bosnia : Balkans: Implementation of resolution authorizing shooting down of military aircraft could be delayed up to two weeks. NATO warplanes would do the patrolling.

Sending a warning against Serbian aggression, the U.N. Security Council overwhelmingly approved a resolution Wednesday authorizing the shooting down of Serbian or any other military planes violating the U.N. ban on flying over Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Ambassadors from the council’s 15 nations acknowledged that their action has far more symbolic than military value. But they insisted that they are mostly trying to send a message to the Serbs, the aggressors in Bosnia and the perpetrators of “ethnic cleansing”--their program to drive out or kill all non-Serbs in the territories they claim as their own.

British Ambassador David Hannay expressed the Security Council’s message to the Serbs in stark and simple terms: “If they do not heed this, the prospects for them are grim indeed.”

And before the vote, former British Foreign Secretary Lord Owen, one of the authors of a peace plan for Bosnia that the council is trying to pressure Bosnian Serbs to accept, said: “I don’t think (the enforcement resolution does) a lot, but I think it’s important to go ahead and do it, and I think it makes it clear that you can’t flout Security Council resolutions.”

However, in deference to the Russian government of President Boris N. Yeltsin, whose political enemies back home revile him for betraying the Serbs, Russia’s traditional Slavic allies, the council agreed to delay implementation of the resolution for at least a week and possibly two.

It also tried to assuage Russian concerns by authorizing the shooting down of planes in the sky but not those on airfields within Bosnia. And it provided that the enforcers would have to act in “close coordination” with U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and the U.N. peacekeeping forces in the region.

The U.N. plans to leave enforcement of the “no-fly” zone in the hands of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The United States, France, Britain and the Netherlands were reported likely to offer a total of 50 to 100 fighters for the operation.

Pentagon officials said the U.S. carrier Theodore Roosevelt, with as many as 65 warplanes and more than a dozen helicopters, is in the Adriatic Sea, near the coast of the former Yugoslav federation. American or allied AWACS surveillance aircraft are likely to be used to help monitor air traffic and to direct allied warplanes toward any violators of the no-fly zone, they said. Any additional NATO or American aircraft needed for the effort could operate from Italian air bases.

Lt. Gen. Lars-Eric Wahlgren, commander of the peacekeepers, opposed the resolution, arguing that if any Serbian planes are shot down, Serbian retaliation might endanger the peacekeepers and jeopardize the delivery of humanitarian aid.

The vote on the resolution was 14-0. China abstained--its ambassador, Chen Jian, explaining that it has reservations about using force to implement it and shared Wahlgren’s concerns about the dangers.

But the council has been made to look foolish and toothless since it ordered the ban on flights over Bosnia last October. As of March 14, the United Nations reported 492 violations, almost all by Serbian planes. Although the vast majority of these flights gave the Serbs no evident military advantage, the Serbs infuriated the council in early March by bombing some Muslim villages during a Serbian offensive in eastern Bosnia.

As a result, the United States, which has been calling for enforcement of the zone for some time, finally managed to persuade its main allies on the council, Britain and France, to support the enforcement resolution.

As Deputy U.S. Ambassador Edward Walker told the council after the vote Wednesday, the United Nations cannot remain passive in the face of “the Bosnian Serbs’ determination to flout the will of the international community with impunity.”

The council is discussing another resolution that would call on the Serbs to accept the peace plan proposed by Owen and former U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance. The resolution would threaten Serbia with a tightening of U.N.-imposed economic sanctions unless the Bosnian Serbs signed the agreement within 15 days.

The peace plan, which would divide Bosnia into 10 semiautonomous provinces, each dominated by a specific ethnic group, has been signed by Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats. The Serbs oppose it because it would deprive them of some of the territory they have taken by force and ethnically cleansed.

The U.S. government too has been reluctant to give the Vance-Owen plan unqualified support, apparently because President Clinton, while campaigning last year, criticized it for accepting some of the Serbs’ territorial gains.

The latest draft resolution, which was read to the council behind closed doors by British Ambassador Hannay on behalf of Britain, the United States and France, uses the word “commends” rather than “supports” to describe the council’s endorsement of the Vance-Owen plan.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said, “We certainly fully endorse the (Vance-Owen) process, but our position has always been that we shouldn’t try to impose a particular plan upon the parties, but rather we should try to work with the parties in order to find a viable resolution that the parties can accept.”

The resolution enforcing the no-fly zone exempts U.N. peacekeeper planes and U.N.-authorized humanitarian flights. In its key wording, it “authorizes member states . . . acting nationally or through regional organizations or arrangements, to take, under the authority of the Security Council and subject to close coordination with the Secretary General and (the U.N. peacekeeping force), all necessary measures in the airspace of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the event of further violations.”

The resolution adds that these measures should be “proportionate to the specific circumstances and the nature of the flights.”

Instead of shooting down violators, the NATO pilots could also order planes that enter the no-fly zone to land for inspection, then escort them out.

NATO planes would be permitted to strike ground targets in self-defense, if antiaircraft radar locked onto allied warplanes.

The resolution would delay authority for enforcing the no-fly zone for seven days. Even then, NATO would have to inform the United Nations of its plans before actually implementing its authority. This would presumably allow Wahlgren time to move his peacekeepers if he feared that NATO’s operations would provoke Serbian retaliation.