Conference Initials Bosnia Reconstruction Plan : Europe: More than 50 countries and agencies lay out goals for nation’s rebirth. Specifics are left unanswered.

Concerned international partners for peace agreed Saturday on a sweeping menu for reconstruction in Bosnia-Herzegovina that establishes ambitious goals for social, economic and political rebirth but is short on specifics of how to achieve them.

The more than 50 countries and international agencies that will provide the muscle, money and expertise to rebuild Bosnia agreed to a 47-point document outlining the structure and responsibilities of the complex civilian relief effort.

The concluding document of a two-day Peace Implementation Conference here, drawn up largely by the British Foreign Office, is at once an affirmation of collective will and a leap into uncharted territory in a divided country shattered by 3 1/2 years of war.

Guns are silent now, but ethnic hatreds are unslaked; about 2.7 million people are displaced, and there are few functioning civic institutions, no national economy and no democratic tradition.

The United States, Europe and their partners have promised to feed and resettle the refugees, jump-start the economy, guarantee human rights and supervise free elections in six to nine months.

“Our meeting has ensured that some of the clouds about implementation have parted,” British Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind said.

Among critical unanswered questions after the conference ended Saturday, however, was whether enough money will be forthcoming from the international community to fund the reconstruction.

Neither was corridor politicking able to resolve the debate over what person will lead the international drive for elections and arms control. The United States wants an American in the job, in the face of opposition from France and others favoring a European.

As delegates ended their deliberations, it also remained unclear how the relief agenda will mesh with the priorities of 60,000 North Atlantic Treaty Organization peacekeepers, a third of them American.

The civilian effort will coexist with NATO’s heavily armed presence, with both initiatives being launched after the Paris signing Thursday of Bosnian peace accords initialed last month in Dayton, Ohio.

“If Bosnia is ready for peace, and we believe it is, then the people of Bosnia will have many friends and much help in turning a peace on paper into a permanent peace on the ground,” said Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and head of the American delegation to the conference.

The most concrete decision at the conference was the appointment of former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt as coordinator of the relief effort. Whether he also emerges as a policymaker is a subject of concern to the United States, which does not want the civilian effort to interfere with NATO’s military presence.

Asked what he would do if disagreements arose between civilian aid workers and military authorities in Bosnia, Bildt replied: “We’ll discuss it. . . . I don’t think we’ll have much problem with this.”

Bildt, who has been Europe’s Bosnia negotiator in recent months, must feel his way in the coming months. But an initial, specific assignment from the conference instructed him to move quickly to promote confidence and reconciliation in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, by seeing that public services are restored promptly.

Bildt said he will quickly name a special mission to deal with problems in the scarred capital. Serbs living in suburbs of the city are outraged that they will come under the authority of a Muslim-Croat central government under the Dayton agreement.

“We want to build trust and confidence to build a Sarajevo where all can live in freedom and security,” Bildt said. “That will require urgent efforts.”

To oversee the relief effort, the London conference created two bodies, a Peace Implementation Council (PIC) of nations and agencies attending the conference and a PIC Steering Board.

Albright said the board will be the “command center” of the civilian relief campaign and will provide “political guidance” to Bildt. He will head the board, which will have members from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada, Russia, the presidency of the European Union, the European Commission and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The steering board will establish a secretariat in Brussels.

In outlining its goals, the conference promised to encourage the return of refugees and the release of prisoners. It called for creation of a human rights task force and an international police force, and it pledged a 250-member force to plan and oversee elections.

The task is daunting but doable, said J. Brian Atwood, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development and a member of the American delegation to the conference. In the days of the Yugoslav federation’s Marshal Josip Broz Tito, Bosnians of all stripes lived peacefully in the same republic, he noted.

“If Tito could do it with authoritarianism and manipulation for 40 years, we ought to be smart enough to put together democratic institutions that will achieve the same goal,” Atwood said.