Bosnia Peace Bid Impaired by New Debate on Arms

A revived debate over whether to arm the nearly defeated government forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina has undermined today’s peace talks in Geneva and widened a rift in the Sarajevo leadership.

At a European Community summit in Copenhagen, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl disclosed some wavering among the 12 nations in their opposition to lifting a U.N. arms embargo by suggesting that the embattled government be allowed to buy weapons to defend the country against nationalist land grabs.

“We must answer the question if it is not a moral duty to help the Muslims defend themselves,” Kohl told reporters after the conclusion of the EC’s two-day summit.

His appeal for support to the predominantly Muslim government forces, prompted by the Clinton Administration and backed by Turkey, appeared to rekindle hope among Bosnians opposed to segregation that they may escape a plan for ethnic division drafted by nationalist Serbs and Croats.

The EC summit leaders made no mention of lifting the arms embargo in their concluding statement, but resurrection of the issue encouraged Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic to boycott negotiations resuming today in Geneva that aim to pacify the country by dividing it into Muslim, Serb and Croat cantons.

The proposal for the ethnic partitioning of Bosnia was worked out last weekend at the Adriatic port of Herzeg-Novi by Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and Croat chieftain Mate Boban. Izetbegovic condemned the plan as a conspiracy to legitimize borders changed by force.

Izetbegovic also fears, as do many Bosnians--either Muslim or of mixed nationality--that if Serbian and Croatian ministates are created in Bosnia, they would eventually secede and join Serbia and Croatia respectively. And this, they are sure, would leave a landlocked, war-damaged and economically unviable reservation for Bosnia’s 2 million Muslims.

But the Bosnian president’s hardened stance against discussing ethnic partitioning has prompted other members of the collective presidency to offer to negotiate in his place, setting in motion what could become a dangerously ill-timed struggle for power.

At a meeting in the Croatian capital of Zagreb, the badly splintered 10-member presidency overruled Izetbegovic on Tuesday and elected to go to Geneva to “listen to new proposals.”

Izetbegovic contended that they lack the authority to sign any agreements and declared that he is still in control of the republic’s 100,000-member army.

But the open split in the beleaguered presidency clearly undermines his authority.

The multiethnic Sarajevo leadership has been torn apart in recent weeks by the pressures of intensifying sieges launched by both Serb and Croat rebels.

Opposing Izetbegovic’s call for holding out against rewarding Serbian and Croatian military aggression are pragmatists who insist that Bosnia can only lose more by staying out of the peace process.

“We have to remain open to anything that will be constructive and lead to peace. We still don’t know what ideas and suggestions will come up in the talks with Lord Owen in Geneva,” said Fikret Abdic, a Muslim member of the presidency, referring to the talks chaired by the EC mediator from Britain and U.N. envoy Thorvald Stoltenberg of Norway.

Sources close to the Bosnian presidency said there is no public mandate for signing an accord in Geneva for division of the country into ethnic enclaves.

“The one who signs in Geneva has to have 100,000 U.N. soldiers to protect him when he comes back to Sarajevo,” said a Bosnian analyst.

Indeed, the Muslim opposition leader who sat on the earlier Bosnian negotiating team in Geneva, Muhamed Filipovic, lashed out at Abdic and his camp for “knocking at Lord Owen’s door” and vowed to preserve a united Bosnia.

“I don’t believe that a politically responsible international public supports the emergence of three tiny fascist regimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Filipovic said.

Conference sources in Geneva indicated they would recognize the proposed substitute for Izetbegovic, Croatian Franjo Boras, as a legitimate representative of the Bosnian people--a move that many observers criticized as Western eagerness to wring out any paper resolution to the conflict, even if it fails to stop the fighting.

Supporters of at least nominally united Bosnia won some moral backing from the EC leaders, whose concluding statement expressed commitment to preserving the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the republic.

Since the United States and its European allies backed off a peace plan negotiated by Owen and the recently retired U.N. envoy Cyrus R. Vance, a war that began with Serbian artillery assaults against largely unarmed civilians has flared into a vicious, three-way grab for territory as Bosnia’s people fear they have been left to fend for themselves.

(Fighting around Bosnia died down Tuesday, and U.N. officials said an aid convoy that had been held up by Serbs finally reached the besieged Muslim enclave of Gorazde. The convoy was the first in a month to reach about 60,000 residents and refugees trapped in the eastern Bosnia town, which has been under intense Serbian attack in recent weeks.)

“Some are now realizing they have been part of a very undignified retreat from Vance-Owen,” one Belgrade-based diplomat said of the renewed debate on the arms embargo. “This may indicate the distaste, if not disgust, Western governments feel about the corner they have backed themselves into.”

Although Kohl’s call for lifting the arms embargo was rejected by the other EC leaders, the issue appeared to remain open to debate.

“We want to prevent the Muslim population from being completely crushed,” said French President Francois Mitterrand.

“But for the moment,” he said, “let’s make the safe areas work,” a reference to EC support for U.N. plans to send 7,600 more troops to guard six designated havens for Bosnia’s embattled Muslims.

The EC summit endorsed dispatch of the troops, but only the Netherlands offered any new soldiers.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said the embargo should be lifted only as a “last resort.”

The majority of the EC leadership clung to hopes that the Bosnian combatants can still be made to negotiate an end to the conflict in which rebel Serbs have conquered 70% of the republic and nationalist Croats control most of the rest.

The Belgrade daily Borba published one version of the ethnic map showing grossly gerrymandered Serbian and Croatian ministates wrapped like interlocked claws around a new “Bosnia” that covers far less than 20% of the republic’s territory.

The summit meeting’s final communique urged “a fair and viable settlement acceptable to all three constituent peoples of Bosnia-Herzegovina.”

“It (the EC) will not accept a territorial solution dictated by Serbs and Croats at the expense of the Bosnian Muslims.”

However, the summit leaders urged the Bosnian government to take part in the Geneva talks.

Williams reported from Belgrade and Murphy from Zagreb, Croatia. Times staff writer Joel Havemann, in Copenhagen, contributed to this report.