Pressure For Peace In Bloody Balkans Exerted At Summit

Three Balkans power brokers who hold the key to peace in the beleaguered region came together here Saturday facing direct and intense international pressure to recommit themselves to the Bosnia peace agreement they signed two months ago.

Presidents Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, Franjo Tudjman of Croatia and Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia-Herzegovina were effectively summoned to the hastily scheduled summit by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, the chief architect of the peace accord hammered out in Dayton, Ohio. The meeting was called after a series of violations in recent weeks heightened concerns that the accord was in danger of unraveling.

In part, the mere symbolism of bringing the three leaders together in the same room gave a boost to the accord. In the full glare of the cameras, the three shook hands at the beginning of the meeting as Holbrooke, Italian Foreign Minister Susanna Agnelli, senior NATO officers and representatives from Germany, France, Britain and Russia all applauded around them.

The two-day summit is expected to deal with a number of urgent issues, including procedures for detaining suspected war criminals, completing an overdue exchange of all prisoners and easing ethnic tensions between Croats and Muslims in the southern city of Mostar.

While some have called the gathering an “emergency summit,” Holbrooke described it as the first of a series of anticipated reviews of the Dayton accords.

Still, the meeting follows the rockiest 10 days of peace in the Balkans since the accords were signed Dec. 14 in Paris. Ironically, the spate of problems began almost immediately after some of the toughest hurdles had just been cleared.

During the initial 30 days of the peace mission, the NATO-led Implementation Force, known as IFOR, successfully supervised the disengagement of Bosnia’s warring armies and the creation of “zones of separation” throughout the country.

After that, IFOR finished another sensitive job by getting Muslim-Croat Federation forces and Bosnia Serb units to vacate territory scheduled to be transferred to the opposing side under terms of the agreement.

In addition to these milestones, the complex deployment of IFOR’s 60,000 troops to the Balkans had entered its final phase relatively problem-free.

While no one believed that peace had been ensured, there were several upbeat assessments.

As U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher departed for the region earlier this month to mark the end of IFOR’s hectic first 45 days in Bosnia, senior State Department officials declared they were satisfied with the military side of the agreement.

Virtually as Christopher hit the ground, the first crisis broke with news that Bosnian government authorities had arrested two senior Bosnian Serb officers in a Sarajevo suburb and accused them of war crimes. That led the Serbs to break off contact with both the Bosnian government and IFOR.

Only Friday, after NATO’s supreme commander U.S. Gen. George Joulwan met with Milosevic in Belgrade, did the Bosnian Serbs once again resume contacts.

The arrest of the Serbian officers was quickly followed by a dispute between Bosnia’s Croats and Muslims. In Mostar, Croats not only rejected a plan designed to share control of the ethnically mixed city with Muslims, they rioted and physically threatened the city’s European Union administrator, Hans Koschnik, with violence. That dispute threatened to spill over into the larger Muslim-Croat Federation, whose stability is considered essential if the accords are to succeed.

The latest incident occurred Thursday, when IFOR troops took control of an apparent terrorist training camp on Bosnian government territory. On Friday, State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns hinted that Bosnian government officials may have been involved in the camp’s activities.