May Send GIs to Macedonia to Limit War, Clinton Says : Balkans: Troops would join U.N. peacekeepers. Move to confine conflict would also answer allies’ complaints.

President Clinton said Tuesday he is considering sending U.S. ground troops to join U.N. peacekeeping forces in Macedonia in hopes of stopping the Bosnian conflict from spreading to other parts of the Balkans.

In an exchange with reporters, Clinton said the possibility of an American presence in the former Yugoslav republic was “one of the many things being discussed,” and he cautioned that “no final decisions have been made.” He gave no indication when, if at all, he might announce such a move.

U.S. officials said the step would be designed partly to meet the allies’ complaints that Washington has been pressuring them to endorse air strikes that might endanger European peacekeeping forces in Bosnia, while America has no troops of its own on the ground.

The officials said that sending troops to Macedonia also would reinforce America’s warning to the Serbs that Washington will “draw the line” if they threaten Kosovo, a province in the southern part of the rump Yugoslavia. Kosovo is populated predominantly by ethnic Albanians.

U.S. officials fear that a Serb attack on Kosovo would provoke retaliation by Albania, which in turn would spread the fighting to neighboring Macedonia, possibly bringing Greece and Turkey into the fray as well.

The developments came as Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, in yet another bid to pressure the Bosnian Serbs to ratify a U.N.-brokered peace accord, called a meeting of Serb representatives from the entire region for Friday in hopes that they would approve the U.N. pact.

The session, reported by the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug, would include delegates from Serb populations in Yugoslavia and all of its former republics; it is designed to preempt a referendum of Bosnian Serbs scheduled for this weekend in which Milosevic fears the U.N. plan will be rejected.

But Bosnian Serb leaders rejected the call, deciding to continue with plans for the referendum, Tanjug later reported. It said the leadership of Radovan Karadzic’s Serbian Democratic Party agreed unanimously late Tuesday that such a meeting could be held only after the referendum.

Milosevic, who for months has been the principal patron of the Bosnian Serb forces, began calling for an end to the fighting as the threat of imminent outside military intervention loomed and after the United Nations tightened an economic embargo on Yugoslavia.

The Serbian president stormed out of a session of the self-styled Bosnian Serb parliament last week after that body declined to ratify the U.N. peace proposal, referring it instead to the countrywide referendum.

Milosevic, in an interview with Tanjug, said the decision to schedule a broader conference was made because the peace plan concerns more than just the Bosnian Serbs and ought to be considered by a wider constituency.

The plan, already approved by Bosnian Muslims and Croats, would divide Bosnia-Herzegovina into 10 autonomous provinces, each of which would be controlled by a different ethnic group. The accord is intended as a stopgap until a more permanent solution can be found.

Clinton has been pressuring U.S. allies to endorse the launching of air strikes if the Bosnian Serbs reject the U.N. pact, but the Europeans continue to have reservations about using force.

However, they took issue Tuesday with the Administration’s implication that they wanted to wait until the Bosnian Serb referendum is over to make sure that the peace plan is given every chance.

“The question of tying anything in the EC position to the referendum is totally absurd,” Danish Foreign Minister Niels Helveg Petersen said in Brussels, where he and his 11 European Community counterparts had met Monday on the issue.

“We showed our skepticism with regard to this referendum which we consider null and void,” French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe added.

Nonetheless, in Washington, Sen. Joseph R. Biden (D-Del.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, lashed out at the Europeans, charging that their refusal to join the United States in military action to stop the Serbs’ “ethnic cleansing” campaign amounts to “moral rape.”

In unusually strong language, Biden, a vocal proponent of U.S. military action in Bosnia, also suggested that the United States might be forced to abandon its plans for military action because of the Europeans’ reluctance to go along with any form of air strikes.

Thanking Secretary of State Warren Christopher for last week’s unsuccessful mission to try to persuade European leaders to support Clinton’s proposals for use of force, Biden said: “What you’ve encountered, it seems to me, was a discouraging mosaic of indifference, timidity, self-delusion and hypocrisy.

“I can’t even begin to express my anger for a European policy that’s now asking us to participate in what amounts to a codification of a Serbian victory,” Biden said.

And Clinton, asked later whether he shared Biden’s pique at the Europeans, said only: “I hope we can get a common policy. We can’t act alone.” But he also asserted that sanctions alone would not end the slaughter. “We may have to do more,” he said.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials confirmed that Serbia has permitted tanker trucks to cross into Bosnia, despite last week’s pledge by Milosevic that he would no longer support the Serb guerrillas. But they said there was some evidence that it might have been done against his orders.

Although the movements were photographed by U.S. spy satellites, officials cautioned that some of the tankers likely were empty and said the crossing may have been permitted by border guards who were more sympathetic to the Bosnian Serbs than to Milosevic.

“It may be that he (Milosevic) has an enforcement problem,” one analyst said.

Any such violations still would be considered important because the Bosnian Serbs are believed to be critically short of fuel, which they use to power the military vehicles that are used to move their artillery from place to place.

Nevertheless, the incident is expected to provide an arguing point for the Clinton Administration, which has been trying to counter European insistence that Washington hold off its decision on whether to launch air strikes to see whether the Serbian embargo works.

It was not immediately clear how many U.S. troops would be sent to Macedonia if Clinton ultimately decides to go ahead with such a move, but analysts speculated that the contingent might number as many as 200 soldiers. The United Nations already has about 800 troops in Macedonia.

Even so, officials conceded that the deployment of even a limited number of U.S. troops could mark the first serious commitment of American ground troops to the Balkan conflict. Some U.S. troops already are in the area as U.N. advisers.