Clinton Eulogizes Bosnia Envoys, Names New Team : Balkans: President salutes diplomats who died as ‘extraordinary Americans.’ U.S. negotiators to head for Europe this weekend.

President Clinton on Wednesday appointed a new peace team for Bosnia-Herzegovina, replacing three U.S. diplomats killed there over the weekend. He praised the fallen envoys, calling them “extraordinary Americans who made reason their weapon, freedom their cause and peace their goal.”

White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said “the group will continue the diplomatic effort begun two weeks ago to seize the opportunity for a negotiated settlement in the Balkans.”

U.S. officials believe that the recent successful Croatian offensive against secessionist rebels in the Krajina region of Croatia has created a momentum that may make neighboring, recalcitrant Bosnian Serbs more amenable to an American peace plan for Bosnia.

That plan divides Bosnia more or less equally between the Bosnian Serbs and a confederation of Croats and Muslims. For this reason, the Clinton Administration announced an almost immediate resumption of talks suspended by the deaths of the three Americans in a road accident on Mt. Igman near Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital.

McCurry said Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, who was leading the talks at the time of the accident, will return to Europe this weekend with members of the new team. They are expected to meet in Paris on Monday with Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic and European diplomats, then go on to the Balkans.

The White House appointed four men to the team: Roberts Owen, a Washington lawyer credited with helping to put together the confederation of Croats and Muslims in Bosnia; Brig. Gen. Donald Kerrick, director of the Pentagon’s national military intelligence center; James Pardew, director of Defense Secretary William J. Perry’s Balkan task force, and Christopher Hill, a diplomat in the State Department’s European affairs office.

The President, who interrupted his vacation in Jackson, Wyo., arrived at Ft. Myer, Va., by Marine helicopter in the morning, walking 50 yards to the memorial chapel not far from Arlington National Cemetery. One of the diplomats was buried there Tuesday; the other two will be buried there today.

McCurry said the President, who talked separately with members of the three grieving families before the service, met with Owen, Kerrick, Pardew and Hill afterward.

Speaking to 300 mourners during the brief service in the chapel, Clinton described the men as “quiet American heroes who gave their lives so that others might know a future of hope and a land at peace.”

“Let us resolve,” he went on, “to carry on their struggle with the strength, determination and caring they brought to their families, their work and their very grateful nation.”

Clinton announced at the service that he was awarding the Presidential Citizens Medal posthumously to the three diplomats: Robert Frasure, his special envoy to the former Yugoslav federation; Joseph Kruzel, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, and Air Force Col. Samuel Nelson Drew, a member of the National Security Council staff.

Maj. Gen. Arthur S. Thomas, the Ft. Myer chaplain officiating at the service, praised Frasure, Kruzel and Drew as “peacemakers, investing their very lives in the process of hope and healing.”

Bosnian Foreign Minister Muhamed Sacirbey, who was related by marriage to Kruzel and attended the memorial service, said the new team has no more than two months to engineer a peace settlement before more intense fighting is likely to erupt in Bosnia.

But he added: “We are not inclined to pull any triggers as long as this [American peace] mission is moving forward.”

The State Department was vague about any future meetings between the new team and the regime of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic in Pale, the rebel stronghold outside Sarajevo.

“They are a party to the conflict. Eventually they will have to be a party to the solution to the conflict,” State Department spokesman David Johnson said.