Carter Embarks to Try Mediating Bosnia Conflict

WASHINGTON — Former President Jimmy Carter left for the former Yugoslav federation Saturday night to begin his third independent peace mission to an international hot spot this year.

Carter was invited to participate in the negotiations over the future of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, whose separatists appear to be on the verge of winning the bloody Balkan war.

The former President’s trip follows two other free-lance diplomatic forays--one in Haiti, where he helped speed the departure of military dictator Raoul Cedras, and the other in North Korea, where he succeeded in improving negotiations over nuclear issues.

This time, however, the Clinton Administration offered only tepid support for Carter’s special brand of crisis intervention, expressing doubts that he can make a useful contribution toward ending the complex and frustrating situation.

They also were clearly unhappy that the invitation came from the Bosnian Serbs, who have been viewed by the United States as the aggressors in the vicious conflict.

“We have been skeptical about the ability of former President Carter to try to resolve those issues because they are very complicated and because we have seen that, frankly, the motives (of) the parties are always suspect,” White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta said Saturday.

Nevertheless, Panetta said, the White House has provided Carter with logistics assistance and wished him well.

“Obviously, we say God bless him. If he can find a way to solve some of those problems, fine,” Panetta said.

U.S. officials briefed Carter on the Bosnian situation Friday. Carter departed from Atlanta by commercial jet Saturday evening, bound for Frankfurt, Germany. There he is to be briefed again by Charles Redman, the U.S. ambassador to Germany and a former U.S. special envoy to Yugoslavia, according to the State Department and the Carter Center in Atlanta.

Carter then plans to travel by U.S. military aircraft to Zagreb, Croatia, where he expects to meet Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic. He had not yet decided Saturday whether to visit the embattled Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.

Carter said one of his first efforts will be to assess whether Karadzic has complied with the six points agreed to as a condition of Carter’s involvement in the negotiations.

The points were: calling an immediate cease-fire in the Sarajevo area; ending the harassment of U.N. relief operations; releasing detained U.N. troops; releasing Bosnian government soldiers under 19 years of age; permitting the reopening of Sarajevo’s airport, and guaranteeing human rights in areas under Serbian control.

Carter said Karadzic had assured him that progress had been made, but the former President acknowledged that he could not verify that.

“There obviously have been some positive developments, but the exact situation concerning all the points is impossible to ascertain at this time,” Carter said.

Carter has stressed that he does not intend to become a permanent negotiator on Bosnia and said again Saturday that he will not try to develop an independent peace plan.

Instead, he said, he will urge Karadzic to accept the peace plan outlined by negotiators from the United States, Russia, Britain, France and Germany--known as the Contact Group--that would partition the country between the Serbian rebels and a federation of the Muslim-led government and the Bosnian Croats.

That plan would give 51% of the territory to the Muslim-Croat federation and 49% to the Serbs, who now hold more than 70%. The Bosnian government and the Croats have already accepted the plan.

“My purpose in traveling to the region is to seek ways to contribute to the cessation of hostilities and to encourage the acceptance of the Contact Group’s plan as the basis for negotiations,” Carter said in a statement released Saturday.

In recent days, Carter also has insisted that he will not take sides in the ethnic war but will listen to the views of both the Bosnian government and Karadzic’s Serbian insurgents.

That evenhanded approach contrasts with the official policy of the Clinton Administration, which regards the Serbs as the primary aggressors in the conflict and considers the Bosnian Muslims the primary victims.

The Administration, while acknowledging that all sides have committed egregious acts in the 2 1/2-year Bosnian war, has accused the Serbs of a long list of war crimes stemming from their policy of “ethnic cleansing”--a program of murder, torture and intimidation intended to force non-Serbs out of areas under Serbian control.

Carter’s departure for the region came on a day when the airport in Sarajevo opened to U.N. Protection Force flights for the first time in nearly a month. But the situation in Bosnia remained anything but tranquil Saturday.

A Sarajevo woman, walking with her young son in the city’s notorious “sniper alley,” was gunned down and killed.

In addition, a French NATO jet patrolling the skies over Bosnia was struck by ground fire and forced to land at an Italian air base. The source of the gunfire in both incidents was still being investigated late Saturday.

In northwest Bosnia, rebel Muslim forces supported by Croatian Serbs were reported to have overtaken the town of Velika Kladusa in the Bihac pocket, which had been controlled by the Bosnian government army’s 5th Corps. And the United Nations reported new evidence of Bosnian Serb ethnic cleansing of Muslim residents in the Bijeljina area of northeast Bosnia.

“We still face a pretty grim situation,” said U.N. spokesman Thant Myint-U. “Our anti-sniping patrols in Sarajevo have been cut way back because the fuel situation is so desperate there.”

Even the celebrated reopening of the airport did not come without glitches and conditions. Only three of five requested flights were allowed to land, prompting the United Nations to lodge “strong protests at a very high level,” said Thant. One of the planes brought an advance team for Carter, while the others were designated for rotation of U.N. peacekeepers and other personnel.

Times Staff Writer Dean E. Murphy in Zagreb, Croatia, contributed to this report.

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