Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 10, 1993 TAG: 9302100245
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
CLINTON WEIGHS SENDING U.S. TROOPS TO KEEP BOSNIA PEACE
The Clinton administration, in a major U.S. policy shift, is prepared to offer ground troops as peacekeepers in Bosnia-Herzegovina as part of a broad proposal to end a year of bloody conflict in that former Yugoslav republic, administration and diplomatic officials said Tuesday night.President Clinton's highest-ranking national security advisers reached consensus in a 2 1/2-hour meeting Friday, one official said, that such an offer was "the price of admission" if the United States wished to force further negotiations among Bosnia's warring groups on a peace accord.
The prospect that U.S. troops would be sent to Bosnia was said to be contingent on conclusion of a peace accord among the Serbs, Croats and Muslims - who remain far from agreement on terms for halting the fighting between them. U.S. officials also made clear that any U.S. military involvement would be as part of a multinational force to ensure enforcement of any peace accord.
A senior administration official, responding to an ABC News report about the U.S. troop offer, first denied Tuesday night that Clinton was considering deployment of peacekeepers into a conflict that top U.S. military officers have long regarded as a quagmire. But the official, who has not been involved in the policy-making on the Balkans, withdrew the denial an hour later, saying the "use of U.S. Military officials said they would argue strongly for NATO to take the leading role in enforcing any Bosnian accord, perhaps under the auspices of the United Nations. military force to enforce a peace settlement is under consideration."
"No decisions on committing such forces and no commitments" to other countries have been made, the official said, but added there has been "general discussion of the need for enforcement of an agreement and a U.S. willingness to participate in such enforcement." Use of U.S. military force, the official said, "is implicit when [there is] a discussion of enforcing a settlement."
The Clinton administration intends to push for a peace accord along the general lines worked out by U.N. envoy Cyrus Vance and European Community envoy David Owen. The Vance-Owen plan, which has been the subject of talks among the Bosnian factions for several months, would divide Bosnia into 10 largely autonomous ethnic cantons. The U.S. goal is to have the lines redrawn in a way more favorable to the Bosnian Muslims, who have lost 70 percent of their territory to Serbian forces.
Clinton's Cabinet advisers, officials said, left several options open in Friday's meeting, but the broad package included at least three main elements: appointment of a U.S. special envoy to join the negotiations; the application of pressure on Bosnian Serbs and Muslims to accept an agreement defined in large part by the U.S. envoy; and the offer of American troops as part of a multinational peacekeeping force to guarantee the agreement once signed.
Pressure on the Serbs, officials said, likely would come in the form of stricter enforcement of two existing U.N. resolutions: one barring commerce with Serbia and Montenegro, and the other banning Serbian military flights over Bosnian territory. The trade sanctions have been ineffective in stopping traffic on the Danube River, and allied disagreements have prevented efforts to shoot down Serbian planes that violate the "no-fly zone."
Two officials said Tuesday night that Clinton decided Monday night among the options offered by his advisers, but details of his decision could not be learned.
Among the details to be finalized, officials said, were the number of U.S. troops to be offered and their precise command arrangements. Military officials said they would argue strongly for NATO to take the leading role in enforcing any Bosnian accord, perhaps under the auspices of the United Nations.
The Clinton administration, like the Bush administration before it, has had strong reservations about the peace plan negotiated by Vance and Owen because Bosnian Muslims object strongly to it and because it would seem to ratify the results of "ethnic cleansing" against them by Serbs.
But U.S. officials and senior military officers have also been deeply anxious about the commitment of American ground troops under any circumstances in the Balkan conflict. Last year, when the U.N. Security Council formed a multinational force for peacekeeping in neighboring Croatia, the United States refused to participate.
The nearly unanimous view of U.S. military leaders, then and now, is that there could be no graceful exit once American troops injected themselves between the bitterly warring parties. Even in the context of a peacekeeping plan, said one NATO officer Tuesday night, "Would you ever achieve an end point?"
During his presidential campaign and the transition, Clinton appeared to adopt those views, saying repeatedly he did not favor the use of U.S. ground troops in the former Yugoslavia. But Clinton's advisers came to believe that they could not force renegotiation of the Vance-Owen plan, which had the strong backing of nearly all the European allies, unless the administration also placed American forces at risk.
"The feeling was that we had no bona fides, because even the Egyptians had 400 soldiers on the ground there, and Americans on the ground was the price of admission if we were going to ask folks to renegotiate a peace settlement," said one official. "We had to put some of our people in harm's way."
Memo: Shorter version ran in Metro edition.