U.S. May Not Go to Bosnia, House Warns

The House passed a resolution Monday warning negotiators in this week’s Bosnian peace talks not to hinge any accord on expectations that the United States will send troops as peacekeepers, even though the participants say they are banking on it.

Although the Republican-sponsored measure, approved by a vote of 315 to 103, is not binding, its passage was important symbolically because it came just two days before U.S.-sponsored peace talks are scheduled to open in Dayton, Ohio.

The House action visibly angered key Clinton Administration policy-makers. Even before the vote was taken, Richard Holbrooke, the Administration’s chief envoy for Bosnia, charged that the resolution would “weaken the negotiations” and do “grave damage to the national interest.”

Both the Bosnian Serbs and the Bosnian federation, which comprises the Muslim-led government and its Croatian allies, have served notice that they would sign a peace accord only if the United States was among the countries that sent troops as peacekeepers.

At the same time, Holbrooke and other State Department officials sought to dampen public expectations about the talks among the presidents of Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, who will meet at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

Holbrooke cautioned that despite the public fanfare surrounding the negotiations, their outcome is uncertain, particularly since “all three sides have hardened their position” in recent days.

“We go into Dayton [Wednesday] without any assurance of success,” Holbrooke told reporters. He warned that if the negotiations in Ohio do not succeed, the confrontation in Bosnia “will slip back into war, because the issues that led to war are unresolved.”

The run-up to the talks also was marred by controversies over the disclosure that the United States has obtained new evidence of Bosnian Serb atrocities at Srebrenica over the summer and by new incidents of killings at the Serbian stronghold of Banja Luka.

Nicholas Burns, the State Department’s spokesman, declined to provide details of any new evidence, saying only that it is being turned over to the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague. The tribunal already has issued indictments for several prominent Bosnian Serb leaders.

The resolution passed by the House on Monday contained two parts. First, it declared that the participants in the peace talks should not assume that the United States will send troops to Bosnia and should not make a U.S. deployment a condition of any accord.

It also asserted once again that the United States should not dispatch any ground troops to Bosnia until Congress has approved the deployment. President Clinton has said he would welcome lawmakers’ support of a U.S. deployment there but that he will not seek congressional approval.

Republicans, who pushed the measure to the floor without holding hearings or even notifying House members that there would be a vote, said the resolution was necessary to stop Clinton from acting precipitously.

Noting that Clinton has said he plans to have U.S. troops in Bosnia within four days after a peace accord is signed, Rep. Benjamin A. Gilman (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House International Relations Committee, warned that “96 hours is not long enough” for lawmakers to act.

But House Democratic leaders argued that the GOP action was premature and would only undercut the Administration’s efforts to produce a peace accord.

“This resolution would say to the rulers of the Serbs and Muslims, ‘Our negotiators don’t have the support of Congress--take their words with a grain of salt,’ ” said House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.).

The three major participants in the peace talks--Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic and Croatian President Franjo Tudjman--are scheduled to arrive in Dayton today along with diplomats from key allied countries.

On Wednesday, the talks will be opened formally by U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher. The diplomatic compound inside the air base then will be closed indefinitely to all but the actual participants--until the negotiators either reach an accord or give up and go home.

Administration officials say they hope to engineer an accord by serving as mediators among the three principals, taking proposals on key issues back and forth between them.

Holbrooke told reporters that the Clinton Administration plans to take a no-nonsense approach designed to prod the warring factions into agreeing on a U.S.-brokered compromise accord rather than trying to get them to agree on one another’s peace plans.