Is the End in Sight for Bosnian Agony? : Setting the stage for the contentious peacekeeping question

At the improbable venue of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside Dayton, Ohio, the presidents of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia will meet Wednesday in an attempt to turn the tenuous Bosnian cease-fire into an armistice, a peace, in the most vicious conflict in Europe since World War II, when most of the presidents were boys, if that. But a declaration of peace--and a territorial settlement--may not be the hard part. The players have already accepted a rough American outline on division of the bloodied soil. An edgy cease-fire is holding. In Bosnia all sides seem prepared to talk, or at least pause, and see what they can achieve at the negotiating table that they could not in a horrific 41-month-long war that has taken an unknown number of soldiers and an estimated 200,000 civilian lives, many by abominable means.

But in the rush to find resolution in Bosnia, declaring a peace among the combatants is already taking a political back seat to the Big Power muddle over enforcing the peace. When Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, the superpower presidents, sat together last week at Hyde Park, the lovely Hudson River estate of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the best they could do was to say that both the United States and Russia would take part. Yeltsin, now laid low in Moscow by another mild heart attack, said the leaders would leave it to subordinates to work out the details. There was no hesitation.

KEY AGREEMENT: On, Friday, U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry and his Russian counterpart, Gen. Pavel Grachev, flew together to Ft. Riley, Kan., for a joint American-Russian military exercise, and their airborne discussions focused on Bosnian peacekeeping. Perry disclosed that the two countries would contribute several thousand men each to an engineering, construction and transportation unit that would operate outside NATO command. The support troops, deemed not to be among the proposed 60,000 peacekeepers, including as many as 20,000 U.S. soldiers, would meet Yeltsin’s prideful insistence that Russians not serve under NATO. Perry and Grachev pledged to meet in mid-November in Brussels to work further on the contentious question of peacekeeping. A key agreement among the Western powers is that Bosnia not be cut up into protectorates of the Big Powers, with a Russian sector containing the Serbs and U.S., French and British peacekeepers minding the Croatian and Bosnian Muslim areas of a country already headed for political division under the American-proposed peace agreement. That arrangement would have the smell of a Cold War Berlin, and all the antipathy it created.

RUSSIA’S ROLE: The question of a Russian role in keeping the peace is keeping the lights on late at the State Department. The Americans want the Russians involved for many and varied reasons. Most obvious is the Russian connection with the Serbian government of Yugoslavia, which emboldened the Bosnian Serbs to launch the war during the spring of 1992 in a frenzy of “ethnic cleansing.” Moscow could restrain the Serbs if the current cease-fire collapses. Moscow also needs assuaging on the NATO discussions on an eastward expansion to Poland, Hungary and possibly other states, which would bring the Western military pact to the borders of the former Soviet Union.

But Moscow is not the only sticking point on the peacekeeping proposal. Clinton needs only to look to Capitol Hill to find a congressional bloc wondering why America would want to put its soldiers into the middle of a simmering European conflict, truce or no truce. The Bosnian peace talks this week in Ohio will set the stage for the contentious peacekeeping question. Americans have not forgotten the unwelcome licks their troops have taken in foreign climes like Somalia and Beirut. It’s not necessarily peaceful being a superpower. Bosnia will be another test.