U.S. Hopes Meeting Will Set Balkan Pact Back on Course

The Clinton administration will seek to shore up compliance on all sides with the Dayton peace accords when its envoy meets in Rome on Friday with allies and three Balkan presidents.

The hastily assembled session, to be led by chief U.S. mediator Richard Holbrooke, is expected to review the provisions of the accord and serve notice to the Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs that they are expected to follow rules of the accords that are increasingly being broken.

Besides Holbrooke, participants will include Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, who represented the Bosnian Serbs in the Dayton, Ohio, negotiations.

European officials and Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov will also attend.

The extraordinary session--the first meeting of all signatories since the agreement was signed in Paris in December--follows a series of incidents in which one faction or another has openly defied provisions of the pact, threatening the entire effort.

Although U.S. officials insisted Wednesday that they are not yet to the point where they fear that the entire accord is about to fall apart, they clearly are concerned that the situation could get out of hand if the United States and its partners do not crack down soon.

The officials also said Wednesday that Washington wants to sound out Milosevic on how quickly the Bosnian Serbs can be expected to end their boycott of the accord and resume regular contacts with NATO and representatives of the civilian-led reconstruction program.

While the three factions generally have complied with requirements that they separate their military forces, they have tested the allies at almost every turn on broader provisions.

Holbrooke went to Bosnia earlier this week in an effort to ease tensions between the Bosnian Serbs and the Muslim-led government over the volatile issue of arresting war crimes suspects, and he announced a compromise to defuse the crisis.

But as the Rome meeting was announced, Bosnian Serb military leaders, angered by the earlier arrest of several Serbian officers on war crimes charges, continued to boycott the peace accord by refusing any contact with North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials.

There has been a string of other serious violations as well, and in almost every case, the United States has had to send high-level diplomats to deal with the situation, almost always resulting in some compromise.

State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns told reporters that the administration has concluded “that it’s necessary for the United States and our European partners to be regularly engaged.”

He predicted that sessions similar to the announced Rome meeting will be held regularly.

At the same time, Burns asserted, “no exceptions will be made on implementation [of the Dayton accord]. No breaks are going to be given to any of these parties that just decide they don’t like an aspect of the Dayton accord.”

Holbrooke, who led the Dayton negotiations, plans to leave office this month to return to Wall Street as an investment banker.