Clinton Commits Troops for Bosnia Until Mid-1998

President Clinton agreed Friday to keep American troops in Bosnia-Herzegovina until mid-1998, extending by 18 months his deadline for wrapping up a peacekeeping operation that he called the only barrier to resumption of bitter ethnic warfare in Europe.

“We have a responsibility to see [the] commitment through, to give the peace America helped to make in Bosnia a chance to grow strong, self-sufficient and lasting,” Clinton told a White House news conference at which he also defended his decision to commit American troops to a refugee relief operation in Central Africa.

Clinton said the United States will provide about 8,500 troops to a follow-on contingent of 31,000 in Bosnia. There are now about 15,000 Americans serving in Bosnia.

The new force will replace the 60,000-member force, led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, that has been patrolling Bosnia under the year-old peace agreement negotiated in Dayton, Ohio.

While that force’s original task of separating the warring Bosnian factions is essentially complete, the president said, “rebuilding the fabric of Bosnia’s economic and political life is taking longer than anticipated.”

He said Bosnia will need “the stability and the confidence that only an outside security force can provide” if it is to reconstruct its war-torn society.

Senior U.S. officials acknowledged months ago that the flames of war would be rekindled in Bosnia if the peacekeepers were withdrawn. But Friday’s announcement was the first formal change in Clinton’s pledge to keep American troops in the Balkans for only about a year.

The president denied any political motivation in delaying the announcement until after his reelection Nov. 5. He offered two seemingly contradictory explanations.

On the one hand, Clinton said, U.S. allies in Europe made it clear well before the election that a follow-on force would be needed, and thus voters should have known what was coming.

At the same time, he said, NATO representatives did not officially propose an extension of the mandate until last week, and there was no reason for the United States to make a commitment before then.

He said that Bob Dole, his defeated Republican challenger, had declined “in a very statesmanlike way” to make an issue of a possible Bosnia follow-on force.

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Some congressional Republicans accused Clinton of going back on his word.

The president “said that he would keep the mission to a year,” Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) said. “He didn’t. He said he would arm and train the Bosnian Muslims. He hasn’t.”

Clinton asserted that both the extension of the Bosnia operation and a planned international force, including up to 5,000 U.S. personnel, to deliver food and medicine to sick and hungry refugees in Zaire represent the burden of America’s status as the only remaining superpower in the post-Cold War world.

“The United States cannot and should not try to solve every problem in the world,” he said. “But where our interests are clear and our values are at stake, where we can make a difference, we must act and we must lead. . . . Neither the new security force in Bosnia nor the humanitarian relief effort in Zaire will be free of risk, but I will do everything in my power to minimize the risks by making sure both missions are clear and achievable.”

The president, addressing reports that hundreds of thousands of the more than 1 million Rwandan refugees in Zairian camps had crossed the border back into their homeland, called the reports “very good [but] preliminary news.” He said, however, that the international relief operation still is needed.

“The world’s most powerful nation must not turn its back on so many desperate people and so many innocent children who are now at risk,” Clinton said of the refugees remaining in Zaire.

Clinton said his approval of the new Bosnia deployment is only “in principle.”

He said he will not make a firm commitment until he determines that NATO’s objectives are “clear, limited and achievable.”

But the president, Defense Secretary William J. Perry and Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described U.S. participation in such detail that there seems little chance of its falling through.

In a nod toward the president’s original pledge to withdraw the peacekeepers by Dec. 20, the administration said the tasks of the original deployment will be complete by December and that the unit will cease to exist.

But some of the same soldiers, including many of the top officers, will be assigned to the follow-on organization.

The force now is slightly below its peak strength of about 60,000, which included a maximum of 20,000 Americans.

Shalikashvili said the new organization will have about 31,000 personnel, including about 5,000 stationed outside Bosnia as a ready reserve. The 8,500-member American contingent will be stationed in Bosnia.

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By the end of next year, he said, the total force will be down to 22,500, including 9,000 stationed outside Bosnia. The U.S. contingent will total 5,500. He said all foreign troops should be out of Bosnia by the middle of 1998.

Perry said enough progress has been made in the last year that the war would not immediately resume if peacekeepers were withdrawn.

But he added: “Because . . . civil tasks are still unfulfilled, there is a fertile breeding ground for violence, for localized conflicts, which could escalate, get out of control and lead to a general war” if the peacekeepers went home.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Forces in Bosnia

U.S. troops will remain in Bosnia until June 1998, President Clinton announced Friday. The U.S. peacekeeping commitment in Bosnia was expected to end next month.

Beginning of 1996

Total forces: 58,000

U.S. forces: 19,000

Dec. 20, 1996*

Total forces: 31,000

U.S. forces: 8,500

End of 1997

Total forces: 22,500

U.S. forces: 5,500

* Projected