Allies Reportedly Won’t Escalate Bosnian Raids

Reacting to internal and external political pressures, NATO reportedly has dropped any plans to escalate its bombing of Bosnian Serb targets and has swung behind diplomatic efforts that could halt the air strikes altogether.

Remarks by North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials and diplomats on the fringes of Wednesday’s regular ambassadors’ meeting were notably softer than the uncompromising rhetoric that accompanied the recent resumption of air strikes.

The shift comes amid intense diplomatic pressure against the air campaign from Moscow and a growing feeling among some NATO nations that the attacks should be contained. The growth of such pressures had been viewed as a major risk if the Bosnian Serbs were able to resist the air strikes.

As the raids entered their third week Wednesday, the Bosnian government and its Croatian allies advanced on Serbian positions in western and central Bosnia, capturing towns and land and sending as many as 40,000 refugees fleeing, said U.N. officials in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital.

The government offensive met only limited resistance, the officials said. The Bosnian Serbs may have chosen to withdraw rather than fight.

Indeed, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic went on television late Wednesday night to tell his followers that some will have to relinquish claim to their homes.

“We will not become a nation until being a Serb is more important than living where your ancestors lived,” he said.

His comments reversed the traditional Serbian emphasis on ancestral home, apparently in favor of new maps that will divide Bosnia-Herzegovina along ethnic lines.

NATO officials said they plan to continue the current level of air activity despite the apparent softening of the alliance position.

“We got to keep it up, we’ve got to achieve our political goal,” one official said. “The Bosnian Serbs are coming under enormous pressure, that’s clear.”

A key aim of the air strikes has been to force the Bosnian Serbs to comply with a 12 1/2-mile weapons-exclusion zone around Sarajevo by withdrawing about 300 heavy weapons--a move Bosnian Serb commander Gen. Ratko Mladic has flatly rejected.

The changes in NATO policy seemed especially clear in two key areas.

* First, the ambassadors reportedly rejected any possibility of expanding the air strikes to include “category three” targets--mainly bridges, roads and other targets far from Sarajevo whose destruction would hurt the rebel Serbs’ larger war effort.

A list of such targets was drawn up before the current bombing campaign, but additional U.N. approval would be required before they could be attacked.

NATO warplanes have concentrated on providing close air support for the U.N. rapid-reaction force and on hitting a limited number of targets, mostly in and around Sarajevo. Those “category one” and “category two” targets consist of air-defense systems, ammunition depots, and command and communication centers far enough removed from civilian populations to avoid large-scale casualties among noncombatants.

“There is no support at all among the ambassadors for escalation,” one official said. “Everyone agrees we can only continue with the present target categories.”

Senior NATO military officers involved in planning the strikes are said to have told alliance headquarters that there are “several days left” before targets in categories one and two are exhausted.

* Second, the ambassadors Wednesday appeared to have dropped an earlier blanket rejection of Mladic’s rationale for refusing to withdraw heavy Serb weapons from around Sarajevo.

Officials instead indicated some understanding for Mladic on two points: fears that the 20,000 Sarajevan Serbs would be unprotected if the guns were withdrawn and that the Muslim-led Bosnian government’s forces might try to take advantage of a withdrawal by the Serbs and launch their own offensive.

“We agree that some of Mladic’s concerns are genuine,” one official said. “We know that 20,000 Sarajevo Serbs can’t be left defenseless, but they don’t need those 300 guns just to protect their own population.”

One NATO official said it may have been a “political mistake” to fire cruise missiles against Bosnian Serb air-defense targets around the northwestern Serb stronghold of Banja Luka on Sunday.

“There was clearly the perception that the missiles represented much more firepower,” the official said. “We should have had more of a discussion beforehand. It’s a lesson we have learned.”

In Washington, U.S. Defense Secretary William J. Perry appeared to echo the more subdued approach.

“I’m quite satisfied with both the pace and the intensity of the bombing, and I’m not contemplating a request for [an expansion of current targets] any time in the immediate future,” he said.

Perry also said he would not want the bombing “to continue indefinitely.” He said the air strikes were designed to eliminate the Bosnian Serb threat to Sarajevo.

“When we achieve that objective, we’ll be happy to stop the bombing,” he said.

NATO has carefully sought to keep its air campaign separate from the larger Bosnian war. The United Nations on Wednesday confirmed a shift in battle lines in that war. With Croatian allies, the Bosnian army appeared to have captured significant territory in western and central Bosnia, U.N. officials said.

They took the town of Donji Vakuf, about 55 miles northwest of Sarajevo, where Bosnian military police found that houses had been abandoned and booby-trapped, a U.N. military source said. And Croatian television reported that troops captured the nearby strategic town of Jajce, where an electrical power plant supplies Banja Luka.

Earlier in the week, government forces took control of an important road in the north between the government-held towns of Zenica and Tuzla, permitting easier resupply of Tuzla, a U.N.-designated “safe area.”

Government forces were meeting little resistance, according to U.N. military sources, who said the Serbs may have decided to relinquish territory they are destined to lose in the drafting of a map dividing Bosnia as part of peace talks launched last week in Geneva.

“They don’t have a lot of men to spare, so [Mladic] may be saying, ‘Let’s look at the map realistically,’ ” a U.N. official said. “It may be a tactical withdrawal.”

As many as 40,000 Serb refugees were fleeing the Muslim-Croat advances, U.N. relief officials said, threatening to flood some already overcrowded Serb-held areas.

Under U.S. and European pressure, the Bosnian government promised that it will not take advantage of the NATO air campaign to launch an offensive in the Sarajevo area--but was not asked to halt attacks elsewhere.

In Washington, the Clinton Administration renewed its appeal to the Bosnian government and its Croatian allies to refrain from taking the military offensive.

The Administration has long sympathized with Bosnia’s desire to regain territory lost to the Bosnian Serbs earlier in the war.

But State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said, “There is always going to be an opportunity, and maybe even a rational call, for military action on the part of one party or another. . . . They’ve been heeding those calls for four years; it’s time to stop heeding them.”

At the United Nations, Italian Ambassador Francesco Paolo Fulci, speaking for the Security Council, issued a warning to all parties in the conflict, including the Bosnian government, “to cease immediately all offensive military activities and hostile acts.”

Marshall reported from Brussels and Wilkinson from Sarajevo. Times staff writers Art Pine and Norman Kempster in Washington and Stanley Meisler at the United Nations contributed to this report.