Boutros-Ghali Shifts Blame Over Bosnia : Balkans: The U.N. chief points to NATO’s authorization procedures as the source of hesitation. He says he can’t simply order air strikes.

Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, in a rare news conference, insisted Tuesday that NATO--and not the United Nations--is at the core of the hesitation over using punitive and strategic air strikes in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

With this assertion, the secretary general sought to shake himself free of what he believes is a false image of him as the main obstacle to the use of air power in the Bosnian conflict.

Boutros-Ghali said officials of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had informed him that their planes were authorized only to provide “air support”--immediate measures in defense of U.N. peacekeepers under attack in Bosnia. The planes, Boutros-Ghali continued, were not yet authorized by the NATO council to engage in “air strikes”--strategic measures such as the bombing of a bridge or an airport and punitive measures such as the bombing of troops several days after they had attacked U.N. peacekeepers.

In line with this, Boutros-Ghali last week gave his special representative in Bosnia, Yasushi Akashi of Japan, authority to call on NATO for air support should U.N. peacekeepers fall under attack during the weeks ahead while trying to relieve Canadian troops now trapped in Srebrenica and open the airport now besieged in Tuzla.

But the secretary general said that, although a Security Council resolution gave him the mandate to call for both NATO air support and NATO air strikes, it would do him no good to call for the latter.

“I am not at the end of the chain of command,” he said. On the matter of air strikes, that falls on the North American and West European governments that make up NATO.

“So even if you will ask tomorrow (of) NATO, please do an air strike, they will have to take a decision which will have to be adopted by the council of NATO, and, as you know, the council of NATO takes a decision by unanimity,” the secretary general said.

Boutros-Ghali, a former Egyptian diplomat and professor of international law, does not like to meet formally with the U.N. press corps. His news conference was the first at U.N. headquarters in more than a year and only the third since he took office in January, 1992. In the 45-minute session, dominated by questions about Bosnia, he also:

* Announced his opposition to the lifting of the embargo that prevents the Bosnian Muslims from buying weapons on the world market.

* Confirmed that Croatian soldiers had crossed the border into Bosnia.

* Made a plea for continued negotiations for a peaceful settlement even while hinting that the major powers would have to come up with a new approach to the Bosnian war.

* Predicted that countries like the United States, now wary of peacekeeping operations, would someday embrace the idea that these are the world’s best means of maintaining peace and security.

On the issue of the arms embargo, Boutros-Ghali put himself squarely against the Clinton Administration, which has advocated lifting it to help the Bosnian Muslims defend themselves. The secretary general called this “a negative approach.”

“If you ask my personal advice,” he went on, “I believe that this can be dangerous because it will provide more arms in the region and it may open to a real war in the region.”

Boutros-Ghali said that, though it is rarely mentioned, a major aim of the international community was to “contain the dispute inside the border of (the former federation of) Yugoslavia” and “avoid a war in all the region.”

Discussing the Croatian incursions into Bosnia, the secretary general said he did not yet know whether the soldiers were regular Croatian troops or “volunteers.” In any case, he made it clear he was disturbed by their arrival, adding that it would be up to the Security Council to decide what to do about this new development in the war.

The secretary general, without giving any details, hinted several times that moves were afoot to develop a new approach to Bosnian peace negotiations.

“Certainly in the next few weeks we will have to have a general reassessment of the situation, because many member states are thinking to withdraw their troops from Bosnia,” he said.

But the secretary general emphasized there was little choice beyond a slow negotiating process.

Although many U.N. officials have been infuriated by President Clinton’s decision to withdraw all American troops from Somalia by the end of March, Boutros-Ghali painted the new reluctance of Clinton to take part in peacekeeping operations as a universal problem.

“This is not peculiar to the United States,” he said. “Many other countries have the same problem. They are hesitating. Why must I send my kids to be killed for a peacekeeping operation in a very difficult place (when) my public opinion won’t accept this.

“Our role is to convince them that it is in their . . . national interests to participate in these kind of operations, that . . . in the next few years we may have more and more ethnic wars and more and more small confrontations. These confrontations can spread like a disease all over the world.”