U.S. Struggling to Restart Talks for Balkan Peace

WASHINGTON — As fighting continued Saturday around the besieged Bosnian town of Gorazde, U.S. officials struggled to reignite stalled diplomatic efforts to end the conflict.

In a telephone conversation early Saturday morning, Secretary of State Warren Christopher warned Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev that continued Serbian attacks on Gorazde would force the United Nations to respond militarily, U.S. officials said. Christopher urged Kozyrev to “use whatever influence he had” to defuse the conflict.

Kozyrev later flew to Belgrade for emergency talks with Serbian officials in an effort to revive the stalled peace talks. Kozyrev’s mission, one White House official said, “is intended to put pressure on them (the Serbs) to get back to the negotiating table.”

Kozyrev’s involvement would intensify Russian efforts to defuse the tense standoff between the Bosnian Serb forces and the U.N. peacekeepers in Gorazde. Russian special envoy Vitaly S. Churkin has been trying without success to mediate an end to the fighting.

Serbian officials have looked to Russia as an ally, and Russia has been cooler toward Western intervention in the fighting than the United States and Western European nations.

One White House official said the Administration had received indications that “some substantive progress” was made Saturday in talks among Churkin, U.S. special envoy Charles Redman and representatives of the Bosnian Serbs, the United Nations and the Bosnian government. But the official provided no specifics.

President Clinton met Saturday afternoon with his senior national security advisers to discuss the situation after another day of sharp military engagement around Gorazde that saw a British warplane shot down over the town.

U.S. officials acknowledged that they remain uncertain about the motivation of the Bosnian Serb forces in pressing their attack against Gorazde; indeed, one State Department official said, it is unclear whether the Bosnian Serbs were trying to overrun the city or merely send a message of defiance to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations. “It is not clear it is their intention” to take the town, the official said.

Appearing on Cable News Network’s “Newsmaker Saturday” program, Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, agreed that the Bosnian Serb goals are unclear. “The choices are (either) they are maneuvering for a tactical advantage just before the negotiations take full speed and go on, or maybe they’ve just decided that NATO and the United Nations are a paper tiger and they’ve abandoned the idea of negotiations altogether.”

As the fighting around Gorazde has escalated, Clinton has struggled to dissuade the Bosnian Serbs of that notion--without encouraging Bosnian Muslims to intensify their own bids to regain lost territory. On Friday, Clinton went to unusual lengths in insisting that the NATO actions around Gorazde were not intended to place the alliance on the side of the Muslims in the bloody civil war. NATO, Clinton declared, is “not trying to change the military balance. We need to get the negotiations back on track.”

Hamilton said that getting the Serbian rebels back to the peace talks would likely require more forceful military action than NATO has taken to date.

Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of foreign policy experts and former officials called for more aggressive military actions to deter the Bosnian Serb offensive. In a telegram to Clinton, the Action Council for Peace in the Balkans said Clinton’s declarations of neutrality “have given a green light for Serbian aggression and war crimes to prevail and for genocide to continue.”

The telegram--whose signatories include Zbigniew Brzezinski and Hodding Carter III from the Jimmy Carter Administration as well as Jeane J. Kirkpatrick and Frank C. Carlucci from the Ronald Reagan Administration--called on Clinton “to issue a categorical warning to the Bosnian Serbs that they will be subject to NATO air action unless the attacks on Gorazde and other besieged Bosnian areas are halted.”