U.S. Role on Bosnia Arms Complicates the Peacemaking

Richard C. Holbrooke, a New York investment banker who a year ago was the Clinton administration’s hard-knocking Bosnian peace envoy, is due back in the Balkans today. This time his assignment is to pressure Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to remove from power the two top leaders of the Bosnian Serbs, who have been indicted by a United Nations war crimes tribunal. Holbrooke’s difficult task may be made even tougher by Iranian influence within the Muslim-led Bosnian government in Sarajevo.

In a recent series of articles, Times reporters have put together a detailed account of the Clinton administration’s acquiescence--at the least--in an Iranian arms pipeline for the Sarajevo government. Now, with a peace treaty signed and elections scheduled in September, Iran’s lingering presence and its continuing influence on the Sarajevo regime of Alija Izetbegovic present a problem that the peacemakers do not need.

An argument can be made that without the Iranian arms shipments during the war (through Croatia), Izetbegovic’s forces would not have resisted the Bosnian Serbs as well as they did, which was perhaps just enough to avoid annihilation. The price of this support, however, was a toehold in Europe for the aggressive Tehran regime. Iranian guerrillas accompanied the guns and late last year they came to total about 2,000 in Bosnia. That number has fallen to 200 or so under Western pressure, but Tehran’s influence still casts a large shadow, one that certainly should concern Washington. The Balkans have enough problems without interlopers from the Middle East, and Washington must have done some serious second-guessing about its decisions on the arms deal.

One obvious effect of Iranian influence has been to stiffen the resolve of Milosevic and his Bosnian Serb brethren against doing anything that would weaken the Serbian position, such as casting adrift the two men that Holbrooke has gone to Belgrade to discuss: Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his top general, Ratko Mladic. Under terms of the Dayton agreement, the 1995 Holbrooke-orchestrated deal that led to a Bosnian peace treaty, Karadzic and Mladic were to give up all political and military power. It hasn’t happened. Holbrooke said before leaving Washington that President Clinton and Secretary of State Warren Christopher “think it would be useful at this point for me to go out and review the bidding and particularly to make clear that there is serious noncompliance on the part of at least one of the parties.”

Richard Holbrooke is a persuasive man, but his job would be easier had the White House earlier thought more clearly about the consequences of inviting Iranian participation in the Bosnia war.