Bosnia Will Need Multinational Force for 2 Years, Official Says

A senior official working to consolidate the shaky peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina predicted Friday that some form of multinational military presence will be needed in the region for two years after the current intervention expires in December.

Robert Frowick, who is directing an international mission responsible for administering elections in Bosnia, told reporters and relief organizations that maintaining the fragile peace in the Balkans will require “a two-year period of consolidation.”

“Inevitably, this would need a strong international representation with both a military dimension and a civilian dimension,” he said.

Frowick said he believes that allied leaders will soon decide to replace the current 60,000-strong peace implementation force, known as IFOR, with a major follow-on presence.

Planners at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Brussels are engaged in detailed military planning about the size and shape of a force that might follow IFOR.

Defense Secretary William J. Perry has said the Clinton administration will “seriously consider” any NATO request to have U.S. troops participate in a follow-on force.

Hard realities of the Bosnia crisis and internal alliance politics make U.S. involvement in such a force a near certainty. “My sense is that NATO discussions will lead to a follow-on force of substantial numbers, most likely one-third of the present size,” Frowick said. “It’s important that the international community support this . . . as an insurance policy.”

His comments are one more bit of evidence that an American troop presence in the Balkans will likely extend well beyond March 1997, the withdrawal date implied by recent statements of senior Clinton administration officials, and possibly into 1998.

In the three years before IFOR deployment last December--when troops from Britain, France and other alliance allies served in Bosnia as U.N. peacekeepers--transatlantic relations were often strained.

The United States, with no ground forces then to place in danger, pressed hard to arm the mainly Muslim Bosnian government and use airstrikes to punish the Bosnian Serbs.

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“If we learned one lesson from that experience, it is that, whatever we do next in Bosnia, we will do it together,” a senior NATO official in Brussels said.

NATO’s military study is expected to be completed next month and will be submitted to member states for political approval. While one option reportedly under study is complete withdrawal from the region, those familiar with the planning say a force of between one-third and one-half the current size is far more likely to be the result.

Frowick, who directs operations for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, is the second high-profile American outside the administration who has described continued international military involvement in Bosnia as essential to preserve the gains achieved since the peace agreements brokered in Dayton, Ohio, were signed in December.

Richard C. Holbrooke, the former assistant secretary of state and principal architect of the Dayton accords, earlier this month characterized the prospect of a complete international military pullout as irresponsible, predicting that it would “lead to an implosion on the ground.”

Frowick defended his decision last week to postpone for a second time local Bosnian elections that had been rescheduled for late November. He said his new recommendation will be to schedule the elections “in the April-June [1997] time frame.”

The delayed elections have been cited by Bosnia specialists as an important factor requiring prolonged multinational troop presence.