Thatcher, Shultz, Others Urge U.S. Use of Air Strikes in Bosnia

Scores of prominent public figures--including former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former Secretary of State George P. Shultz--added their weight Wednesday to mounting pressure on President Clinton to bomb Serbian positions in the former Yugoslav federation.

In an open letter to the White House, the protesters urged Clinton to lead a coalition of Western governments in arming the Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in selective and discriminate bombing of Serbian positions and airfields. The letter came as peace talks on Bosnia were collapsing in Geneva.

“If we do not act, immediately and decisively,” the letter said, “history will record that in the last decade of this century the democracies failed to heed its most unforgiving lesson.”

The signatories described that lesson as the certainty “that unopposed aggression will be enlarged and repeated, that a failure of will by the democracies will strengthen and encourage those who gain territory and rule by force.”

In a similar letter, Senate Republican leader Bob Dole of Kansas urged the President to switch his focus from Somalia to Bosnia and to convene a North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit “to establish a new diplomatic and military framework for addressing this conflict.”

State Department spokesman Mike McCurry said that the breakdown of the Geneva talks “reflects the stubbornness of the Serbs in the face of reasonable demands from the Muslims.”

Air strikes, he continued, “remain very much on the table, and the Serbs know that.”

The open letter to the White House was signed by more than 100 professors, celebrities and former government officials. The list included former Secretary of Defense Frank C. Carlucci, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.N. Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick and Nobel Prize laureates Elie Wiesel, Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky.