Despite Peace Bid, Bosnia Battlefields Are Still Tense

Croatian army units were withdrawing from northern Bosnia on Thursday after Bosnian Serbs took to the skies to bomb them, turning back a joint Croatian-Bosnian government offensive that consumed large swaths of Serb-held land, the United Nations said.

Progress was reported in negotiations to restore utilities to this besieged capital. But fighting continued to rage in central Bosnia-Herzegovina around the city of Doboj, a hub and gateway to the Serbs’ vital east-west supply corridor. Government troops have been chipping away at a Serbian pocket south of Doboj.

Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, in Vienna, said his Muslim-led government would consider a 60-day cease-fire if the Serbs met conditions that included the removal of military authorities from the rebel stronghold of Banja Luka. He said his army would not enter Banja Luka, which has been the focus of a government offensive that on Thursday appeared to have stalled against tough Serbian defenses.

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In Washington, U.S. peace envoy Richard Holbrooke reported to senior Clinton Administration officials on his shuttle diplomacy efforts in the Balkans. After Holbrooke’s briefing, it was announced that another round of negotiations will be held Tuesday in New York. The foreign ministers of Bosnia, Croatia and the rump Yugoslavia are expected to attend.

President Clinton, in a radio interview, said the planned meeting “and the willingness of parties to work with Mr. Holbrooke and with our partners in Europe and in Russia to get a negotiated settlement, give us some hope.”

“Now, I want to caution everybody,” he continued, “this is Bosnia, and it’s tough. . . . But I feel better than I have in a long time.”

Overall, Bosnia’s battlefields remained tense and unstable, despite general Western relief that NATO had ended its air strikes Wednesday after determining that Serbian heavy weaponry had been removed from around Sarajevo.

Ethnic expulsions, the hallmark of this war, continued. Hundreds of Muslim and Croatian civilians were being turned out of villages still in Serbian hands in response to the gains by government forces, relief officials said Thursday.

In one case, about 435 Muslims and Croats from Doboj were rounded up and held in a soccer stadium, then forced to walk 10 miles across battle lines to government-held territory, said Kris Janowski, spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

“They [the Serbs] seem to be cleaning out entire towns and villages,” Janowski said. “We are seeing it on a much larger scale, [with] people given very short notice.”

While Serbs were carrying out expulsions from their towns, tens of thousands of Serbs fled villages that fell to the Muslim-Croatian offensive.

An estimated 100,000 refugees surrounded or flooded Banja Luka, U.N. officials said. The refugees languished in the streets guarding the few possessions they could hastily load onto tractors or into horse-drawn carts before abandoning their homes. Very little food or other humanitarian aid was available in the overwhelmed city.

In violation of a NATO-designated “no-fly” zone over Bosnia, Bosnian Serb warplanes twice attacked Croatian positions with cluster bombs this week, apparently inflicting substantial casualties and sending the Croatian army into retreat over the Una River and into Croatia, U.N. officials in Zagreb said.

U.S. and NATO officials, alarmed that the offensive could derail the promising U.S. peace initiative, earlier this week urged Bosnia and Croatia to exercise restraint. For the Bosnian government, that admonition did not seem to have much impact on the battlefield.

“We are satisfied that Croat forces have stopped and in some cases even have withdrawn from their positions” in Bosnia, U.N. special envoy Yasushi Akashi said. “I’m not certain about the forces belonging to the Muslim government.”

In a positive development, U.N. officials reported the first significant progress in months toward turning on electricity, water and gas to the estimated 300,000 people of Sarajevo.

Utilities were cut by the Serbs as part of their campaign to choke off the capital. Most Sarajevans have no electricity, no running water and, with winter fast approaching, no gas to heat their homes.

John Fawcett, a U.N. official, announced that Serbian negotiators had agreed to allow gas valves to be opened and to give inspectors access to them for a permanent monitoring system. He predicted that homes could have gas by late next week.

Electricity and water will take longer, in part because of damage and sabotage to the infrastructure, Fawcett said.

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At the New York meeting called for Tuesday, representatives of the three warring parties will join the five-member Contact Group of nations at a gathering sponsored by the United States and the European Union.

Still open is the issue of how many U.S. troops will be needed to act as peacekeepers in the country if a peace agreement is reached.

Some advisers have been arguing that the number should be close to the maximum of 25,000 U.S. troops that Clinton has pledged, while others have been contending that, with fewer small pockets of government territory to defend, fewer U.S. troops would be needed.

Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday that the United States would send up to 25,000 troops to enforce a Bosnia peace accord.

“It is very important that we . . . size the force sufficiently large enough so that, when they go in, they are robust enough to take care of themselves no matter what else happens, and to ensure the freedom of movement so they don’t get pushed around like [the U.N. peacekeeping force] has been pushed around.”

Times staff writers Paul Richter and Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.