Europe Security Summit Fails to Agree on Bosnia

Leaders from Europe and North America meeting here to discuss European security in the aftermath of the Cold War failed to agree Tuesday on a common approach to the war in Bosnia, the Continent’s bloodiest conflict in half a century.

In the latest in a series of humiliating setbacks for the United States and its allies over Bosnia-Herzegovina, Russia blocked approval of a declaration that would have condemned the Bosnian Serbs for their recent assault on the U.N. “safe area” of Bihac as well as their policies of “continuing warfare and ethnic cleansing” throughout Bosnia.

The strongly worded statement, worked out over two months of talks leading to the summit, would also have condemned the Bosnian Serbs for rejecting an international peace plan for the region and demanded that “the aggressors” accept a cease-fire.

“We are forced to conclude that the international community is capitulating to the aggressors and accepting the breakup of my country,” said Bosnian negotiator Mahir Hadziahmetovic, bitter and deeply disappointed as the two-day summit ended. “The people of Bosnia-Herzegovina have been betrayed.”

The Russian move meant that the meeting of top leaders from more than 50 countries ended without any official statement on the most serious threat to European security since the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Both President Clinton and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin attended the summit but left before the final session Tuesday.

“It was a very difficult meeting,” said Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose country was among the summit’s organizers. “I found myself in a situation that left me embittered, disillusioned and full of anxiety.”

The leaders were in the Hungarian capital of Budapest to give new authority to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Continent’s only security organization with members on both sides of the former East-West divide. The organization was born in the mid-1970s as a bridge between Western countries and the Soviet Bloc, and is intent upon becoming the primary mechanism for resolving conflicts in the region into the 21st Century.

But the achievements of the summit--including agreement to send a multinational peacekeeping force to the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan--came against the gloomy backdrop of fighting several hundred miles away in Bosnia and the extraordinarily public display of international disarray.

“The Cold War has ended, but the peace that has followed looks somewhat frightening to humankind,” said Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister who now is Georgia’s leader. “We are living through such a frightening peace because the termination of the Cold War has not yet rid us of its legacy.”

Czech President Vaclav Havel, a former Communist-era dissident, said creating a stable European order was taking much longer than most people expected. He warned that the delay could give “nationalists, chauvinists, populists and extremists” the opportunity to dictate the Continent’s future.

“The many demons we thought had been driven forever from the minds of people and nations are dangerously rousing themselves again and are surreptitiously but systematically undoing the principles upon which we began to build the peaceful future of Europe,” Havel said.

The divisiveness over Bosnia demonstrated in an unusually open manner that the struggle for influence in Europe between the United States and Russia, a staple of the Cold War, is still very much alive despite pronouncements from both sides that a new era of cooperation had begun.

The heightened tension between the two Cold War adversaries was also evident at the summit’s opening Monday, when Yeltsin issued a stern warning about American efforts to single-handedly dictate the new world order. For his part, Clinton insisted that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization military alliance should be allowed to expand into Central Europe despite Russian objections.

In an interview on Russian television Tuesday, Yeltsin sounded a more conciliatory note: “We should look for ways to get closer with the United States,” he said. “With the Americans, we will look for such a compromise and we will find it.”

Nevertheless, asked by Russian reporters whether the United States was the unchallenged master of the CSCE, Yeltsin said, “The fate of the world must not be decided in one capital. I hope you all understand which capital I meant.”

He added that Clinton “did not leave (Budapest) triumphant.”

Because of the Russian maneuvering Tuesday over the Bosnia declaration, U.S. officials were left in the embarrassing position of pushing for a weak alternative statement on Bosnia put forward by the host government, Hungary. The substitute declaration was intended as a face-saving measure after marathon efforts to persuade the Russians to back down collapsed about 3 a.m. Tuesday. Under conference rules, official declarations must be endorsed by all members.

Negotiators said the Russians’ primary objection was to the obvious laying of blame on the Bosnian Serbs. Russia is a longtime ally of Serbia and has been accused of supplying arms to the Bosnian Serbs in defiance of the U.N. weapons embargo.

In Moscow on Tuesday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nikita Matkovsky denied those reports, blaming them on unspecified parties wanting to make Russia look responsible for the escalation in the Bosnian fighting.

“Russia has not and is not undertaking any moves to sidestep the embargo,” he said.

Even the weaker, last-minute statement, which called for safe passage of humanitarian relief and a stop to the fighting, was approved only over the emotional objections of the Bosnian delegation and then as an unofficial adjunct to the summit’s formal agreements.

“The crisis we face . . . is one that also calls on our conscience and does not allow us to leave here without saying strongly to the world that we identify with it, we share the suffering of the people, and we commit ourselves to take additional action to respond,” said U.S. delegate Samuel W. Brown in supporting the Hungarian proposal.

Even with such pleas and a public arm-twisting session by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the Bosnians refused to endorse the makeshift declaration. Bosnian officials said it made a mockery of the crisis in their country and the tough negotiations that went into preparing the rejected declaration.

“My country is not facing a natural disaster. We are facing aggression,” Hadziahmetovic said.

The messy handling of Bosnia provided an inauspicious setting for one of the summit’s most visible decisions: the renaming of the CSCE as the Organization of Cooperation and Security in Europe. Although the new designation carries no new legal meaning, officials said it signified an upgrading of the group’s international standing and would ensure continued high-level participation by its members.

Times staff writer Sonni Efron in Moscow contributed to this report.