France Deserves Credit for Bosnia Pact, Envoy Says

French Foreign Minister Herve de Charette on Wednesday offered Americans a new perspective on the Bosnian peace process, describing the United States as a latecomer that finally caught up with the ideas of France and other European nations.

Discussing the current U.S. peace initiative, the foreign minister told reporters at a breakfast meeting: “We are very grateful for their action after so many months of inaction and after slowing down the peace process.”

The French view differs from the one espoused in Washington, where officials insist that an end to the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina may be in sight only because President Clinton decided to assert U.S. leadership and remove Bosnian strategy from the hands of ineffectual Europeans.

Asked to explain how Americans slowed the peace process, Charette said French diplomats meeting with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade several years ago had “arrived at the same point where we are today”--implying that the American aversion then to allotting half of Bosnia to the Serbs prevented an earlier agreement.

“But they changed their mind,” he went on, “and we are grateful that they have given the impetus for peace, as we have for four years.”

The foreign minister gave the election of French President Jacques Chirac at least as much importance as the new activism of Clinton.

“Since last May [when Chirac was elected],” Charette said, “we decided not to accept the humiliation” of the U.N. peacekeepers in Bosnia. Chirac also persuaded the United Nations to authorize a French-British-Dutch rapid-reaction force in Bosnia, Charette said.

“Without the rapid-reaction force, the NATO air strikes would not be possible,” he said.

Charette said air strikes have the ability to destroy only one in five targets. In the past, he said, the Serbs could stop air strikes by raining mortar and artillery shells on Sarajevo.

He said that the heavy weapons of the reaction force prevented Serbian retaliation by eliminating their big guns. The reaction force, he said, has “a 90% efficiency.”

“This was a crucial change. . . . And the French were the main reason for this,” Charette said.