Bosnia Air Strike Aborted; Allied Indecision Cited

NATO scrambled warplanes Friday for a third bombing sortie this week against rebel Serbs besieging the Bosnian “safe area” of Bihac, then aborted the air strike in a display of division and indecision in the Western alliance.

Senior officers of the U.N. Protection Force ordered the show of international resolve to save embattled Bihac after Serbian nationalists in both Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia defied the latest U.N. demands that they cease a rampage said to be killing as many as 100 Bosnian Muslims each day.

But as the U.S. and European aircraft closed in on targets in Serb-held territory surrounding Bihac, they were ordered to hold fire by the U.N. commander for Bosnia, British Lt. Gen. Michael Rose.

U.N. and NATO sources gave conflicting accounts of why the demonstration of NATO might was called off.

Officials at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization military command in Naples, Italy, which is in charge of the air support operation, blamed bad weather for obscuring the bombing targets.

Military sources in Sarajevo said Rose had given Bosnian Serb leaders a final chance to stop their advance into the collapsing Muslim refuge and called for the show of NATO air power only “as a precautionary move.”

The head of U.N. peacekeeping operations in New York, Kofi Annan, disclosed that the NATO aircraft were fired at by the rebels with surface-to-air missiles.

Those conflicting signals could be read by the rebels as indications that NATO has no more appetite for enforcing its edicts than does the U.N. peacekeeping mission, which has refrained from strict application of Security Council orders to protect Bosnian safe areas for fear of Serbian retaliation against U.N. troops.

“The Serbs could very well conclude that they have nothing to lose by taking Bihac,” said one U.N. official, noting that the disgruntled Serbian rebels in Bosnia and Croatia appear to be hoping any future NATO attacks will prod Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic to resume open support for their territorial conquests.

Nationalist gunmen loyal to Radovan Karadzic, the self-proclaimed president of Serb-occupied territory in Bosnia, had penetrated deep into the Bihac haven Thursday, burning villages as they advanced, U.N. military spokesman Jan-Dirk von Merveldt told reporters in Sarajevo at the mission’s daily briefing.

The rebels also took hundreds of U.N. peacekeepers hostage Thursday to deter threatened air strikes. Fears that the more than 250 Canadian, French, Russian and Ukrainian captives could be subjected to retaliation may have played a role in Rose’s decision to call off the air attack. It would have been the third air strike against the Serbs hammering Bihac since Monday.

Also at risk are about 1,200 Bangladeshi soldiers--some without weapons--who have been trapped in the Bihac area in northwestern Bosnia for days.

Karadzic and his arch-nationalist military chieftain, Gen. Ratko Mladic, have vowed “all-out war” against the U.N. mission if NATO exposes their rebels to further punishment from the air.

The U.N. mission’s civilian chief, Yasushi Akashi, had observed earlier in the day that any force employed to halt the Bihac offensive would have to be minimal, because “we don’t want to impinge on the diplomatic process,” said Claire Grimes, spokeswoman at the U.N. mission headquarters here.

Akashi, Rose and U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali had been hailing an imminent breakthrough in negotiations toward a cease-fire for all of Bosnia, until receiving word from U.N. military observers that Serbian forces had resumed heavy artillery shelling of the safe area.

The heightened U.N. push for a cease-fire in the Bihac area was also cited as the reason U.N. officials in New York were unable to work out details for imposing a weapons-exclusion zone around the besieged city, although European sources blame divisions within NATO for the delays.

On Thursday, ambassadors of the 16 NATO countries, meeting in Brussels, agreed to provide any air support the United Nations would need to enforce such a zone, but they left the actual creation of the demilitarized area up to the world body.

Western officials said the proposal may be placed back on the front burner this weekend if the fighting in Bihac does not stop. European governments still want to reserve it as a last resort, fearing that it might provoke the Serbs into attacking U.N. peacekeepers.

Rose announced Thursday night that he had gained tentative approval from the warring factions for a local cease-fire around Bihac and claimed Friday morning that the truce was holding. However, reports from ham radio operators and international aid workers in the Bihac region indicated that heavy fighting continued.

Bosnian Serbs, supported by Serbian nationalist allies in the breakaway Krajina area of Croatia that completes a rebel cordon around Bihac, continued their advance Friday despite warnings from U.N. commanders.

At least four heavy artillery shells were fired into the center of Bihac in the afternoon, Grimes said, inflicting an unknown number of casualties in a city whose population has swelled to nearly 70,000 by the influx of refugees.

About 5,000 more Muslims from surrounding villages streamed into the center of Bihac in search of protection from the advancing rebels, reported Peter Kessler, spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees here.

Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic condemned the persistent attacks on the Bihac safe area, appealing to NATO to make good on its promises to protect Bosnian civilians targeted by the rebels in their quest for an ethnically pure Greater Serbia. “There is no justification for inaction anymore,” Silajdzic told reporters in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital.

But NATO’s hesitant reaction appeared to display a widening rift between the United States, which advocates a get-tough policy with the defiant Serbs but has no troops at risk, and alliance countries with peacekeepers on the ground in Bosnia.

The division over how to respond to Serbian provocations throughout Bosnia has also taken its toll on relations between Moscow and Washington.

Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev said Friday that the U.S. decision to stop enforcing a U.N. arms embargo against Bosnian Muslims was “an open challenge to the basic document of international law--the U.N. Charter.”

Addressing an international law conference in Moscow, Kozyrev said the United Nations had never been defied “so openly and roughly” as in the former Yugoslav federation. He said the defiance comes from all sides.

Kozyrev made the remarks before traveling to Bonn for talks in advance of next week’s meeting of the “Contact Group” on the Balkans conflict--the foreign ministers of the United States, Russia, Germany, France and Britain.

Russia, which shares Slavic heritage and Orthodox religion with the Serbs, has opposed the use of force by what was designed as a humanitarian mission, instead supporting evenhanded sanctions and diplomatic pressure on all factions.

Times staff writers Richard Boudreaux in Moscow and Art Pine in Washington contributed to this report.

* MARINES DISPATCHED: 2,000 troops will be poised to rescue U.N. peacekeepers. A17