Russia to Boycott U.S. Meeting on Bosnia

As an American-sponsored effort to persuade the United States’ allies to provide arms and training for the Bosnian government fell flat Friday, Russia announced that it will boycott a meeting on Bosnia called for Monday by U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

Christopher summoned to Geneva representatives of the five-nation Contact Group on Bosnia, which includes Russia, to confer with them before meeting with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and Bosnian Vice President Ejup Ganic, acting on behalf of the ailing Alija Izetbegovic.

Although the Russians gave no reason for their decision, the Kremlin was said to be annoyed because Christopher called the session only a few days before a similar meeting--of allied and Balkan foreign ministers--is scheduled to be held in Moscow next Saturday.

U.S. officials insisted that the decision to call the Geneva session came mainly because Christopher will be in the area en route home from the conference on terrorism in Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, this week, and that it was not designed to upstage the Moscow meeting.

They said the Monday meeting, called to discuss ways to shore up compliance with the Bosnian peace accord, will be held anyway.

“We need to have a regular series of meetings with these guys to press them on compliance issues,” State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said.

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Christopher, who flew from Tel Aviv to Brussels on Friday afternoon, plans to concentrate on Bosnia issues during most of the rest of a European trip that is scheduled to end next Saturday.

Burns said that the military provisions of the Bosnian peace accord seem to be on track but that there are problems on the civilian side, such as “the severe treatment of Bosnian Serbs who tried to stay in the Sarajevo suburbs” where control has transferred from the Serbs to the Muslim-Croat federation.

He was referring to repeated incidents in which Muslims have seized the homes of Serbs who refused to obey the demands of the Bosnian Serb leadership to abandon the Sarajevo area.

The Russian announcement and the disappointing arms-and-training meeting in Ankara, Turkey, were setbacks to the United States, which had hoped to use both sessions to increase the momentum of the peacemaking effort in Bosnia.

Despite vigorous campaigning by the United States, sponsors in Ankara were able to gather only a few million dollars’ worth of pledges from about 30 countries.

Saudi Arabia, which had been expected to contribute heavily, boycotted the conference entirely.

The lackluster response reflected a fear, particularly among European governments, that arming the Muslims will unsettle the Bosnian Serbs and set off a new arms race among the warring parties.

Publicly, the Clinton administration sought to play down the poor response by the allies. Glyn Davies, the State Department’s deputy spokesman, termed the Ankara meeting only “the first meeting in a process that will play out over a number of months.”

Privately, however, officials acknowledged that the showing was a setback to the administration’s effort to arm and train the Bosnians--a move it says is necessary in order to bring “military balance” to the region and prevent a resurgence of fighting.

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Meanwhile, under intense pressure from the United States, Bosnia’s Muslim-Croat government Friday fired the head of a shadowy security organization that Washington says has been harboring Islamic militia groups and maintaining close ties with Iran.

Clinton administration officials said the move, announced by Ganic, could be the government’s first step toward the expulsion of Islamic “freedom fighters” from Bosnia, as required by the peace accord signed in Dayton, Ohio, last fall.

Senior U.S. officials said the security chief, Bekir Alispahic, used his post as head of the Bosnian government’s Agency for Investigation and Documentation to issue passports to hundreds of Islamic militiamen and that he openly promoted active links to Tehran.

Bosnia’s failure to expel Islamic moujahedeen militia forces has been a bone of contention between the U.S. and Bosnia, threatening to sour relations and possibly endanger the peace process.

In Washington on Friday, the White House announced that First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton will visit U.S. troops in Bosnia later this month during a trip that will also take her to Greece, Turkey, Italy and Germany.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.