Clinton Orders Tightening of Sanctions Against Serbs

As he studied more drastic steps, President Clinton on Monday ordered a tightening of the economic sanctions against the rump Yugoslav federation in hopes of forcing the Balkan state to halt its support for rebel Serbs in the civil war in Bosnia.

The new steps implement a U.N. Security Council resolution adopted April 17 and effective at 12:01 this morning. The resolution calls on all U.N. members to freeze all foreign assets of Serbia and Montenegro and cut off virtually all remaining commerce between the outside world and the two republics, together all that’s left of the old Yugoslavia.

The measures are expected to do little to halt the Serbian military machine in Bosnia-Herzegovina but are likely to further damage a Serbian economy already suffering from hyper-inflation, a 40% one-year decline in industrial production, high unemployment and shortages of key industrial goods and fuel, officials said.

Clinton said he will consult Congress this week on further steps to halt fighting that already has left at least 135,000 dead or missing in Bosnia in the past year.

“I want to do some serious consultation with the Congress and others, and I will be doing that in the next few days,” Clinton said.

The President, who last week said he was giving serious consideration to air strikes and to lifting of an earlier U.N embargo that prohibits arms sales to Bosnia, said it is “clear that the United States and our allies need to move forward with a stronger policy.” His policy will be announced “in the next several days,” he said.

The new Security Council resolution came into effect after the Serbian leadership in Bosnia refused to accept a peace plan mediated by special U.N. and European Community envoys that already has the support of the other elements in the civil war, Bosnia’s Muslims and Croats.

Specifically, Clinton’s executive order freezes American business interests in Serbia and Montenegro, prohibits American ships from entering Serbian territorial waters and permits U.S. forces to board any truck or vessel believed to be violating U.N. trade sanctions. It takes other steps to close loopholes in economic sanctions ordered by the Security Council last May.

The new U.N. resolution is also designed to halt transshipment of goods through Serbia and Montenegro. In the past, such shipments, bound for other destinations, often ended up in Serbian hands.

As part of the tougher sanctions, U.N. countries are stepping up their surveillance of ports on the Adriatic Sea and the Danube River, the latter a main trade route between the Balkans and the rest of Europe.

The United States has given six unarmed river patrol boats to Bulgarian and Romanian officials to help their customs departments to monitor river traffic. U.S. Customs officials are also training their counterparts for the work.

Despite sanctions imposed last May, 55 Serb-owned or -controlled ships have continued to bring goods to their country, officials said. The seagoing trade will now be monitored by U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization warships and the vessels of other Western European countries.

The United States has also provided 25 customs officials to give Serbia’s neighbors advice on how to check compliance with the sanctions.

A senior U.S. official said that the Administration does not expect such sanctions necessarily to destroy the will of the Serbs’ leaders to continue their fight. But “the impact of the new resolution would be to substantially raise the cost (of continuing warfare) above anything they have already paid, which is substantial,” the official said.

The officials pointed to “an awful lot of cross-talk going on in diplomatic channels” as one sign that Serbia is concerned about the new sanctions and might take steps to prevent them. They said that some Serbian citizens, fearing that tightened sanctions would further reduce everyday necessities, have been making trips to border areas.

Other signs of the sanctions’ impact include the shutdown of several Belgrade banks. These banks generate hard currency for the Serbian administration and thus are important to its operations.

Officials said that the sanctions are not likely to affect the Serbs’ fighting units because officials will divert fuel from civilian supplies. They said that rebel Serbs also continue to be well armed because of a huge weapons stockpile held by the Yugoslav federal army, an active backer of the rebels.

U.S. officials said that steps will begin immediately to put the new sanctions into effect but will take some time to be completed.

For several reasons, however, some outside experts questioned whether the sanctions would produce the intended results. They pointed to the ineffectiveness of past economic sanctions on Iraq and the old Soviet Union.

Serbia does not have an active opposition leadership urging an end to military intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina. So pressure from the rest of the world could deepen sentiments that Serbia has been victimized by bigger countries for most of the century, these experts say.

“There’s no automatic relationship between the tightening of sanctions and any change in the political outlook of a leadership or people,” said Martin van Heuven, a senior consultant at the Washington offices of the Santa Monica-based think tank, RAND Corp. “It might do that. But it could do the opposite.”

In New York, 13 national Jewish organizations called on the Clinton Administration to coordinate limited air strikes to stop the Serbian aggression.

In a joint statement, members of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council also urged the immediate lifting of the arms embargo to give Bosnians the means to defend themselves.

The Jewish group also called for the creation of a war crimes task force of professional investigators to collect information for future trials.

Times staff writer John J. Goldman, in New York, contributed to this story.