Allies Launch Retaliatory Raid Against Serbs

U.N. and NATO forces launched a series of attacks against Bosnian Serb targets around Sarajevo early today in retaliation for the Serbs’ lethal shelling of the capital on Monday, allied officials said.

The attacks, which included both air strikes by NATO warplanes and artillery barrages by the British-French rapid-reaction force now stationed in Bosnia, were designed to destroy Serbian artillery and air-defense systems.

U.N. and NATO officials took pains to point out that the sorties were carried out by units from an array of U.N. and NATO member countries, not just by the United States, which had pushed for the attacks.

There was no immediate assessment of how severe the damage was, and officials said none was likely until later in the day. The attacks began just before dawn.

But allied officials described the attacks as “substantial.” They said the operation lasted several hours and that the targets all were Bosnian Serb military sites around the Sarajevo area.

The action came after a day of hesitation as the United Nations first conducted its own investigation to confirm U.S. assertions that the Bosnian Serbs were behind the shelling Monday and then debated what to do about it.

By Tuesday afternoon, however, U.N. officials had decided that the Bosnian Serbs indeed were to blame, and they were under increasing criticism to act promptly for fear of being embarrassed over their inaction.

The shelling Monday killed 37 people and wounded more than 80 others, many of them women and children. It came in broad daylight in the center of Sarajevo.

Today’s air strikes were conducted primarily by warplanes from the U.S. aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, which was sent back to the Adriatic Sea on Tuesday from the eastern Mediterranean.

French artillery units assigned to the rapid-reaction force carried out the bulk of the shelling of Bosnian Serb targets. The units are equipped with counter-battery radar, which can pinpoint enemy artillery.

Earlier, the Clinton Administration welcomed as “potentially positive” a new letter from Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic hailing the latest allied peace initiative as a basis for negotiating a peace accord.

Karadzic’s statements came in a letter to former President Jimmy Carter, who said in a televised interview on CNN that he thought there was “good reason to take [it] and put it to the test.”

Shortly after Carter’s appearance on CNN, State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns told reporters that the Administration was studying the document and had found “potentially positive elements” in it. Burns said Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke will discuss elements of the letter in talks today with Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic.

But he asserted that, despite the Bosnian Serbs’ latest gesture, the Administration continued to believe that the allies should retaliate against them for Monday’s shelling of Sarajevo. “The appearance of the Karadzic letter in no way dissuades us that there should be an appropriate military response,” he said in a statement. “It’s very important that the Bosnian Serbs be held accountable.”

Western officials said the combined operation, involving both air strikes and artillery barrages, was decided upon partly for political reasons--to ensure that the attacks were viewed as an allied operation, not just American.

The officials also dismissed suggestions that the action would begin a long-term military campaign against the Serbs. “It won’t go on for days,” one official said. “It’s only meant to respond to Monday’s shelling.”

Early Tuesday afternoon, U.N. spokesman Joe Sills read a carefully worded statement asserting that there was no doubt that the Bosnian Serbs had been responsible for the attack and vowing that “appropriate action will be taken.”

Earlier, Burns dismissed reports aired over Bosnian Serb radio saying that the self-styled Bosnian Serb government in Pale now was willing to negotiate a peace settlement with the Bosnian Muslims and Croats. “Words are cheap--actions are more important,” he told reporters. “[Monday’s] actions were murderous, they’re reprehensible and the Bosnian Serbs must be held accountable for those actions.”

But U.S. officials said they were mildly encouraged by the Karadzic letter because it appeared to accept the plan’s formula dividing Bosnia about evenly between the Muslim-Croat coalition and the Serbs.

The Bosnian government, however, has said its willingness to accept the peace initiative depends on whether NATO can be trusted to enforce terms of any agreement, as U.S. officials have pledged. If NATO did not act, Bosnian government officials said, there would be no basis for trust.

Demanding that the Bosnian Serb artillery that surrounds Sarajevo be destroyed, Bosnian President Izetbegovic said Tuesday that he would probably have to pull out of peace talks if no retaliatory action against the Serbs was taken. “We cannot negotiate with a gun at our head,” he said in Paris.

On Tuesday, another mortar killed a 4-year-old girl outside a Sarajevo apartment building and wounded two friends with her, even as bodies shattered in Monday’s attack lay side by side at the city’s morgue to await burial.

“Yesterday the ‘safe area’ of Sarajevo became a killing field,” U.N. spokesman Alexander Ivanko said in condemning Monday’s shelling as “barbaric.” The scene of the massacre “was simply a place of markets, shops and cafes where people were busy enjoying the treacherous calm,” Ivanko said.

Calls for military reprisals against the Bosnian Serbs came from a wide range of sources and suggested a rare consensus.

The five-nation Contact Group mediating the war in Bosnia also reportedly endorsed the military strike against the Serbs. Meeting in Paris with Holbrooke, the Contact Group--France, Germany, the United States, Britain and traditional Serbian ally Russia--gave “their full support for the military reprisals that prove necessary,” French Foreign Ministry spokesman Yves Doutriaux said.

“The possibility of dramatic action is there,” Yasushi Akashi, the U.N. special envoy for the Balkans, said in Belgrade. He was in the Serbian capital following a meeting with Serbian President Slobodoan Milosevic, whose help in controlling the Bosnian Serbs is being sought by U.S. negotiators.

Lt. Col. Chris Vernon, U.N. military spokesman in Sarajevo, said Tuesday night that preparations were being made to protect U.N. peacekeepers from retaliation by the rebel Serbs. The last time NATO launched bombing runs against the Serbs, they responded by taking peacekeepers hostage.

The chain of command for unleashing air strikes or other actions was streamlined in July in the wake of past inability to respond to nationalist Serb attacks. Military commanders on the ground in the former Yugoslav federation can now more easily order up air strikes without the interference--and often the veto--of their U.N. political masters.

Pine reported from Washington and Wilkinson from Vienna. Times special correspondent Laura Silber in Belgrade contributed to this report.