U.S. Presses Serbia on French Pilots : Balkans: Washington places ‘highest importance’ on release of two airmen shot down in August.

In a bid to defuse yet another crisis in the Balkans peace process, the United States pressed Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic on Saturday to help learn the fate of two French fighter pilots shot down by the Bosnian Serbs in August.

France, which is to play host this week to a ceremonial signing of last month’s U.S.-brokered peace plan, has demanded that the Bosnian Serbs provide information on the pilots’ whereabouts by today or face dire consequences.

U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke, who flew to the region over the weekend to put out several peace-pact fires, met with Milosevic here Saturday and told him that both Paris and Washington are demanding the release of the pilots.

Milosevic did not comment on the session, but hours later he met in the Belgrade area with Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, whose troops shot down and captured the two French airmen Aug. 30. The last known time Milosevic met with Karadzic in Belgrade was Nov. 23, when the Serbian president forced his onetime proxy to initial the Dayton, Ohio, peace agreement.

“I want to stress that we attached the highest importance to this issue,” Holbrooke said after meeting with Milosevic.

“We expressed our high concern on behalf of the United States and on behalf of France . . . that the two French pilots in Bosnia held by the Bosnian Serbs must be released as soon as possible.”

This summer, Milosevic helped negotiate the release of nearly 400 U.N. peacekeepers taken hostage by Karadzic’s forces. But his ability to control Karadzic is not always so clear-cut.

Nikola Koljevic, a Bosnian Serb official widely rumored to be a likely replacement for Karadzic, said he hopes the two men are still alive.

“We don’t know where they are,” Koljevic told BBC Television. “We are looking for them.”

The two Mirage pilots were shot down during massive North Atlantic Treaty Organization air strikes against Bosnian Serb positions. They were reported captured alive and photographed with their captors. But the mystery deepened when Karadzic later claimed that the pilots had been kidnapped by unknown forces. There has been no news of them since, and reports have conflicted widely on where they might be and whether they are dead or alive.

A secret U.N. memo, quoting a “usually reliable [Serbian] journalistic source,” said the men were executed Sept. 10 after the NATO bombing raids inflicted damage in civilian areas.

The memo speculated that Milosevic might use the incident to have Karadzic removed from power once and for all.

But there have been other reports too. The French magazine VSD said the men, Capt. Frederic Chiffot and Lt. Jose Souvignet, had been spotted on a property with high walls near the Bosnian Serb stronghold of Pale, near Sarajevo. One of the men was limping.

Another version said the pilots were in the custody of Gen. Ratko Mladic, the commander of the Bosnian Serb army, near Pale. The independent Belgrade newspaper Nasa Borba said Mladic would try to use the men as bargaining chips to get war-crimes charges against him dropped.

Upping the stakes in the dispute, France threatened Saturday to “hit” the Bosnian Serbs unless it gets information about Chiffot and Souvignet.

“These are our boys, on a NATO mission, and NATO is sending in more troops,” said Jacques Rummelhardt, spokesman for the French delegation to a peace conference in London. “We have said we would hit those who have these pilots.”

France and Britain later assured the international community that the peace-signing ceremony will proceed as scheduled.

But Jean-Louis Chiffot, the father of Capt. Chiffot, demanded Saturday that the signing ceremony be postponed if the Serbs do not meet today’s deadline for freeing the men.

“For 101 days I have had no news of my son,” he said in a televised plea on the eve of the deadline, reiterating the families’ attempts to link the peace ceremony to the pilots’ fate.

“I find it inconceivable that France, cradle of human rights, could sign a peace treaty in Paris with the states concerned while, in one of them, my son--two of our soldiers--are held as prisoners.”

The deployment of 60,000 NATO troops to Bosnia--one-third of them American--hinges on the signing of the accord.

So far, 350 soldiers have arrived in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and up to 2,600 are expected by the end of the week, said British Maj. Simon Haselock, a spokesman for the vanguard of peace enforcers. Forty-seven U.S. troops are in Bosnia.

Times special correspondent Silber reported from Belgrade and staff writer Wilkinson from Sarajevo.