Clinton Insists on Diplomacy as Criticism Rises

As criticism of his Bosnian policy mounted Sunday, President Clinton insisted that diplomatic rather than military actions hold the key to defusing the renewed hostilities in the war-torn nation.

Speaking with reporters Sunday, Clinton said that U.N. officials in Bosnia have concluded that further NATO air strikes would be ineffective against Bosnian Serb forces besieging the Muslim enclave of Gorazde, and he stressed once more his hope of finding “a negotiated agreement” to the civil war.

“We have a diplomatic role, and we are doing our best to fulfill it,” Clinton said during a trip to Virginia and North Carolina.

But even as the President spoke, a senior official in the Bosnian government warned that any diplomatic agreement that left the Bosnian Serbs in control of conquered territory guaranteed continued hostilities.

“You have to reverse the results of ‘ethnic cleansing’ if you want a stable peace,” Bosnian Vice President Ejup Ganic said on ABC’s “This Week With David Brinkley.”

That stark warning came as calls mounted for the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies to take firmer military action in response to the Bosnian Serb attacks over the last week on Gorazde.

Clinton and NATO have struggled to deter the renewed Serbian attacks without widening Western participation in the civil war or provoking an open break with Russia, which has generally supported Serbia and resisted military action. On Sunday, Clinton said the United States will respond to requests for additional military responses from U.N. commanders on the ground but added that the principal goal was “getting these peace talks back on track.”

Clinton said the Administration had indicated a willingness to discuss with Russia the lifting of U.N. economic sanctions against Serbia as a way of stimulating the stalled peace talks but that the recent Bosnian Serb offensive has taken that option off the table.

“Continued Serb aggression on the ground, not only in Gorazde but everywhere else, is hardly an encouragement to discuss that,” he said. “We can’t even begin discussions in the environment which has existed for the last few days there.”

Clinton also said he had spoken Sunday with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin but offered no details about the conversation.

Taken together, these statements suggest that the Administration remains committed to holding the line on its policy of using the minimum amount of force necessary to spur negotiations. But an array of senators and two former Republican secretaries of state insisted Sunday that the policy had demonstrably failed.

“If we had planned it, I don’t see how we could have gotten into a worse mess than we are now in,” Lawrence S. Eagleburger, secretary of state under former President George Bush, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

But, in a revealing display of the difficult choices facing Clinton, Eagleburger and the other critics diverged dramatically in their assessments of what the Administration should do next.

In talk-show appearances, Sens. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) all called on Clinton to urge the United Nations to lift the arms embargo against the Bosnian Muslims--or to unilaterally ship arms to the Muslims if peace talks remain stalled.

Biden, appearing on “Meet the Press,” said that “if the Serbs don’t move over the next month” the United Nations should remove its peacekeeping troops from Bosnia and arm the Muslims and Croats to escalate their operations against the Bosnian Serbs.

“Let’s supply them with weapons and let them go after the Serbs,” Biden said. “Let ‘em fight, because that’s the only way you’re going to . . . end up with a genuine settlement on the ground, when the Serbs . . . understand nothing more can be gained by the use of force.”

On the same program, Hatch echoed Biden’s call for lifting the arms embargo and said the move should be reinforced with “surgical air strikes” to knock out Bosnian Serb “fuel supplies, their transportation lines, their ordnance depots, their ammunition dumps.”

But other officials warned of expanding U.S. involvement or otherwise widening the war. House Foreign Affairs Chairman Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.) criticized calls for a unilateral U.S. end to the arms embargo, saying such a move would “Americanize the entire war.”

“I still do not think we should enter this war on the side of the Bosnian Muslims,” he cautioned.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger suggested that events had rendered the anguished U.S. debate over how to proceed in Bosnia largely irrelevant.

“I think the Serbs already have almost everything they want, and we are now engaging in a sort of a symbolic tit for tat in the closing phases of an operation that is more or less concluded,” he said.