U.S. Reports Progress in Effort to Keep Croatia From Ousting U.N. : Balkans: American officials fear a pullout of peacekeepers would widen war. Cease-fire violations increase urgency.

The Clinton Administration said Thursday that it is making progress in trying to persuade Croatian President Franjo Tudjman to rescind his order requiring United Nations forces to leave his country after March 31, but it declined to provide details.

In testimony before Congress, Assistant Secretary of State Richard C. Holbrooke said he has just completed the first round of “a very intense dialogue” with the Croatians and plans to return to Zagreb this weekend. He called the talks “delicate and critical.”

The Administration has been mounting a crash effort to get Tudjman to change his mind because it fears a U.N. withdrawal from Croatia would embolden Serbian nationalists to force U.N. peacekeepers out of Bosnia-Herzegovina as well and quickly widen the war in the region.

Holbrooke told lawmakers Thursday that he had sought to persuade Tudjman in their talks Tuesday that a U.N. withdrawal from the Krajina region of Croatia “could be extraordinarily dangerous and could trigger the most dangerous situation Europe has seen since 1945.”

Holbrooke was making his first public comments on the issue since his discussions with Tudjman. Although news reports uniformly portrayed the meeting as a failure, U.S. officials have been insisting that those assessments were wrong.

Senior officials said privately that much of their optimism came after Germany, which has been a major ally of Croatia in the 44 1/2-month-old conflict in the former Yugoslav federation, stepped up its pressure on Tudjman to allow U.N. troops to stay in Croatia. The Germans “came down on them like a ton of bricks,” one U.S. official said.

Officials said the United States plans to step up its own campaign this weekend by sending Vice President Al Gore to join Holbrooke when their talks resume. Gore and Tudjman will be in Copenhagen for a U.N. summit on social issues.

U.S. officials said the urgency of the situation in Croatia has intensified over the past several days amid a rash of incidents involving cease-fire violations by Croatian Serb nationalists that have threatened U.N. and Croatian positions. Administration officials said units of the Krajina Serbs, as they are known, had moved into U.N.-patrolled separation zones in the north and east, removed their tanks from U.N. storage sites, blocked critical roads and harassed U.N. officials.

The U.S. officials said deterioration of the security situation in Croatia played a major part in persuading the Croatians to reconsider their expulsion order. But they cautioned that Tudjman still is a long way from reversing his decision.

Holbrooke also confirmed Thursday that a new report by the Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that 90% of the “ethnic cleansing” atrocities in Bosnia were carried out by Serbs, far fewer by Muslims, and that top Serbian politicians played a leading role.

“The report points out that atrocities have been committed on both sides . . . but that the burden of responsibility and guilt lies clearly with the Serbs,” Holbrooke said. “The Serbs started this war. The Serbs are the original cause of the war.”

His testimony came as the Administration began a major new effort to win congressional support for its policies in Bosnia and Croatia and to head off resolutions in both houses designed to force it to lift the arms embargo that critics say works against the Muslim-led Bosnian government forces.

In a speech in Manhattan, Kan., Defense Secretary William J. Perry warned that lifting the arms embargo now would only provoke Serb nationalist leaders into widening the war in the region and ultimately could force the United States to send combat troops to the area.

He portrayed the Administration’s current approach as the far lesser of two evils.

“Our current policy on Bosnia has been called unpalatable,” he conceded, “but the alternative would be disastrous. It could lead to a wider war.”

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Holbrooke disclosed that the Administration will press members of Congress to travel to the region next week to help bolster Croatian and Bosnian resolve by celebrating the first anniversary of the loose federation between Croatia and the Bosnian Muslims and Croats. Congressional support for the federation “is a critically important component (in) preventing the Serbs from completing their goals,” he said.

It was not clear what Tudjman is demanding as the price for reversing his expulsion order. Holbrooke dodged the question in his testimony, and other U.S. officials declined to spell out terms of the discussions.

But senior U.S. officials said at least part of any compromise with Tudjman would deal with demands by the Croatian leader that U.N. troops in Croatia alter their mission to monitor Croatia’s legal border rather than just patrolling safe areas.

With an eye to the talks, Holbrooke made a point in his testimony of conceding that the Croatians “have a legitimate grievance” in their complaints about the United Nations’ effectiveness in their country. He said that many Croatians specifically protested that the presence of U.N. troops had not prevented the Serbs from practicing their “ethnic cleansing” in Croatia during the early days of the conflict.