4th State Dept. Officer Quits Over Bosnia

Another State Department specialist--the third in a month--resigned Monday over U.S. policy in Bosnia, as the department acknowledged that Secretary of State Warren Christopher had met privately with several dozen mid-level diplomats in an effort to head off a full-scale rebellion over the handling of the Balkan conflict.

Spokesman Mike McCurry revealed the previously undisclosed meeting, held Aug. 13, after Monday’s resignation of Stephen W. Walker, an eight-year foreign service veteran who was a desk officer for Croatia.

Walker’s resignation was the fourth by a State Department officer in a year to protest American inaction in the Balkans.

In a letter to Christopher, Walker described U.S. policy as “misguided, vacillating and dangerous.”

McCurry said Christopher “shares the frustration” of the department’s Balkan specialists, who are becoming increasingly outspoken in their complaints that the Clinton Administration has failed to back up its threats to punish Serbian and Croatian militiamen for atrocities committed throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Although the Administration continues to reject the advice of the dissident diplomats, McCurry said Christopher wanted to give them every opportunity to make their case. Unlike some previous administrations that treated complaining employees with contempt, the spokesman said, the department recognized resignation as “an honorable form of protest” and was sorry to lose Walker.

“Our actions (or perhaps, more appropriately, inaction) have undermined and threatened not only the fate of the Balkans and the hundreds of thousands of victims there, but also vital U.S. national interests,” Walker wrote to Christopher.

“A dangerous precedent is being set. Genocide is taking place again in Europe, yet we, the European Community and the rest of the international community stand by and watch.”

Earlier this month, Marshall Harris, the Bosnia desk officer, and Jon Western, an intelligence research specialist, quit. Yugoslavia desk officer George Kenney resigned his post last year, in the final months of the George Bush Administration, in the first such open challenge over the United States’ inability to come to grips with the Balkan tragedy.

The conflict over the ruins of the Yugoslav federation is shaping up as the most divisive issue facing U.S. diplomats since the Vietnam War. Unlike other internal disputes, which focused on whether a policy was likely to be effective, the debate over Bosnia has turned on stark arguments of morality. Walker and some of his colleagues maintain that the United States is turning a blind eye to a moral obligation to stop genocide.

In his meeting with the department dissidents, Christopher sympathized with their outrage at the daily reports of atrocities coming across their desks. But, according to a senior department official, he urged them to consider the ultimate implications of their recommendations.

* TENSIONS RISE IN CROATIA: An attempt to open a bridge sparks shelling. A4