Bosnia Issue a Thorn at NATO Summit

When President Clinton and other leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization gather here today, one issue most of them won’t want to talk about is Bosnia-Herzegovina and the brutal war that NATO has so conspicuously failed to end.

But they won’t have that luxury. Bosnia is forcing its way onto the agenda of the NATO summit, whether the alliance’s leaders like it or not.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who arrived in Brussels on Saturday to prepare the way for Clinton, asked European foreign ministers to head off another angry debate over who is to blame for NATO’s inability to end the siege of Sarajevo, diplomats said.

But French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said his government will press for an explicit NATO commitment to use military force in Sarajevo--and an explicit U.S. commitment to provide ground troops to implement a European peace plan.

Events on the ground have made the French demands more urgent. Serbian shelling of Sarajevo closed the city’s airport--and thus its major pipeline of humanitarian relief--for most of last week. The French commander of U.N. troops in the former Yugoslav republics, Gen. Jean Cot, asked for authority to order air strikes in retaliation, but U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali turned him down.

Christopher, who steadfastly opposes sending U.S. ground troops into Bosnia, has been battling against reopening the issue at the summit.

Nevertheless, recognizing that NATO can’t duck the presence of a brutal war on its own border, Christopher has been working toward agreement on a NATO statement that would reaffirm past commitments to act to prevent the fall of Sarajevo.

Those past commitments appear to have had little practical effect. The Serbian forces besieging Sarajevo have subjected the Bosnian capital to daily bombardment and cut off its electricity and water, and NATO has not retaliated. U.S. officials argue, though, that NATO’s threats may have restrained the Serbs from pressing their offensive even further.

Diplomats said there was little support in the alliance for France’s demand for immediate military action. Britain, Spain and Canada all worry that air strikes against Serbian positions would lead to retaliation against their peacekeeping troops in Bosnia--and eventually force their withdrawal entirely, leaving the Bosnians even worse off.