NATO Threat of Air Strikes Fans Fires of War, Bosnian Serb Leader Charges

Hours after NATO threatened aerial bombing raids against Serbian troops in Bosnia, their leader on Tuesday denounced the decision as one that further fans, rather than extinguishes, the fires of war blazing in the Balkans.

Radovan Karadzic charged that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s dramatic change in policy late Monday had sabotaged the peace talks in Geneva and emboldened Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic to stay away for the second straight day.

“We have been just close to the solution and then those threats come in, and the Muslims are reluctant to talk because they (now) have hopes of military intervention,” Karadzic said in Geneva.

NATO’s policy shift, the Serbian leader continued, “may ruin this conference”--and chances for a negotiated end to the siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.

Izetbegovic’s son, Bakir, said his father, who boycotted most of the negotiations Monday, will not return until attacks by Serbs around Sarajevo cease. But there was little question that Izetbegovic and other leaders of Bosnia’s hard-pressed Muslims have been greatly heartened by NATO’s decision.

At U.S. prompting, the 16 member states of the Atlantic Alliance, meeting in Brussels, warned that they would launch air strikes unless Serbian irregulars released their chokehold on Sarajevo and allowed much larger quantities of relief aid to reach its residents.

The plan for military action engineered by the Clinton Administration was also panned by European Community mediator Lord Owen. Like Karadzic, Owen complained that it came precisely as Bosnia’s three factions were engaged in “serious negotiations” on an end to the conflict.

In the Geneva talks, the three warring groups--Muslims, Serbs and Croats--are studying a proposal to chop up the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina into three states. Last Friday, Izetbegovic reluctantly agreed to the idea, but he later emphasized that the carve-up plan “has not been signed at all.”

To salvage the negotiations, the two main powerbrokers in the geopolitical mess that was once the federation of Yugoslavia--Presidents Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Franjo Tudjman of Croatia--were hurriedly summoned to rejoin them today.

Karadzic had reportedly given assurances Monday that Serbian troops would withdraw from a strategic mountaintop near Sarajevo that they stormed over the weekend. But there was no indication from Bosnia’s devastated capital Tuesday that the Serbs had actually decamped.

To the contrary, Bosnian Radio reported Serbian troop movements on the contested peak, Bjelasnica, overnight and early Tuesday. The radio said Bosnian government forces are expecting new attacks on their lines on Mt. Igman, which lies between Bjelasnica and Sarajevo and controls the last tenuous supply line that smugglers can use to sneak in weapons and munitions to the capital’s defenders.

The situation around Bjelasnica, however, was confused, because the Serbs notified U.N. officials Tuesday that five U.N. military observers could be stationed on the mountain, implying that they do intend to put it under international control as Karadzic pledged.

Cmdr. Barry Frewer of Canada, U.N. spokesman in Sarajevo, also reported that aside from Serbian shelling of a village between Bjelasnica and Igman and minor small-arms and mortar fire near another mountain northwest of the city, Serbian offensives in the area apparently have ceased.

But fighting in Bosnia’s three-way civil war continued elsewhere, with Serbian artillery salvos reported on Muslim positions in the north and pitched battles between Muslims and Croats in central Bosnia.

Frewer said that in the center of the country, it appeared that troops of the Bosnian government had taken the key city of Gornji Vakuf and were mopping up Croat resistance in Bugojno to the northwest.