MORE TALKING, MORE BOMBING

By Bruce W. Nelan

The idea was to bring the warring parties in Bosnia closer together, and with some overt stage management, the U.S. accomplished it--literally. When the foreign ministers of Bosnia, Croatia and Serb-led Yugoslavia arrived at the American mission in Geneva last Friday, they were ushered into a modest conference room and seated at a small round table that was purposely chosen by the Americans for the intimacy it would create. Things were so cramped that the ministers and their hosts sat almost knee to knee. After seven hours, they emerged with a one-page agreement on basic principles that U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, the key mediator, called "an important milestone in the search for peace."

It was a fair assessment because any step toward peace in the agonizing 41-month-long Bosnian war is significant and hard won. But the search for an actual settlement is still likely to be a long one. Even as the diplomats put the final touches on their agreement, NATO warplanes were blasting Serb military targets in Bosnia for the second straight week. And the principles the parties were able to agree on in Switzerland could sink under the weight of the many issues on which they disagree.

While the Serbs, Croats and Muslims have all accepted the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina in its present borders, they have also approved dividing it in some undefined way into "two entities," one a Bosnian Serb republic and the other the Muslim-Croat federation. According to the statement of principles, the split will be based on the long-standing proposal put forward by the team of international negotiators called the Contact Group: 49% of Bosnia to go to the Serbs and 51% to the existing federation of Bosnian Muslims and Croats.

The proportions may, however, be "adjusted" if the sides can agree on how to do it. In addition, each of the ethnic entities has the right to establish "special relationships" with neighboring countries. That covers Bosnia's ties to Croatia and allows for a linkage between the Bosnian Serbs and Serbia proper. What kind of links they will be will have to be thrashed out in future negotiations; they might yet lead to the creation of a Greater Serbia.

Even if Bosnia's division into rough halves seems to be accepted, there is still bitter disagreement over what specific areas will be allotted to each side. The peace plan the U.S. has been putting together suggests, for example, that the Bosnian government trade Gorazde, its sole, isolated enclave in the east, for control over all of the capital city of Sarajevo. The Bosnians insist they will never surrender Gorazde, and the Serbs, for their part, demand both Gorazde and a portion of the capital for their republic.

If the deal can be achieved at all, can it last? Behind the scenes, Serbs and Muslims are already arguing about how long the jigsaw shape of Bosnia must be guaranteed before the Serbs will be allowed to secede. The opening Serb bid was one year, while the Bosnians think their country should be recognized for at least five years.

Despite the focus on peace, the war in Bosnia has pulled in a new belligerent: NATO. As the official protector of the four remaining U.N.-declared safe areas, NATO retaliated with air power last month after a Serb mortar shell killed 43 people in Sarajevo. On Aug. 30, the alliance launched heavy attacks on Serb military storage areas, ammunition plants, missile sites and radar and communications centers around Sarajevo, the Serbs' capital of Pale and other parts of Bosnia. NATO then warned Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic that he had to pull his heavy weapons back from the city and give the U.N. freedom of movement or face major punishment from the air. After a pause to see if Mladic had decided to comply, the attacks began again last week. Wave after wave of NATO planes, including U.S., British and French jets, bombed Serb installations in several parts of Bosnia, and by Friday, when the diplomats met in Geneva, NATO air forces had flown more than 2,000 sorties.

Nevertheless, NATO officials stoutly deny that they are participants in the war. They are trying to calibrate their air attacks carefully enough to permit them to claim that they are still peacemakers and are not fighting Mladic's Bosnian Serb army. "I do not consider myself to be taking sides," says Admiral Leighton Smith, the NATO commander in the region. The 300 or so artillery pieces and tanks ringing Sarajevo--the weapons Mladic has been told to pull back from the 12.5-mile-wide U.N. exclusion zone around the city--have not been targeted. For now, that would be too blatant an intervention and, at the same time, might dangerously encourage the Muslim forces to take the offensive.

However NATO sees its role, its bombs seemed not to be hurting Mladic enough to force him to back away from Sarajevo. The longer the attacks go on, the more the pressure will mount on the West to up the ante and compel the Serbs to move. But increasing the ferocity of the air war could threaten allied unity and shake the new cooperation between NATO and the U.N., and might also precipitate a split with Russia, which is a member of the Contact Group. In Moscow last week, a fit-looking President Boris Yeltsin demanded, "Why are only the Serbs punished?" He warned NATO to halt the air strikes or see Europe again divided into "two camps." American officials assumed most of Yeltsin's protest was for domestic consumption, but they took care to seat Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov prominently at the negotiating table in Geneva.

Privately, Clinton Administration officials concede they were disappointed that the Geneva meeting did not produce a cease-fire agreement along with the set of principles. That would have halted the gunfire on the ground and also enabled NATO to suspend the air strikes. As it is, the allies will run out of so-called Option 2 targets--the relatively bloodless ammunition dumps and radar stations--as early as next week .

If Mladic still stubbornly refuses to move his weaponry back from Sarajevo, NATO will have to decide whether to move on to Option 3 targets, and that presents a problem. Those targets include power plants, airports, roads, bridges, fuel supplies and other installations in Serb-held Bosnia. This prospect of what a Pentagon official calls a "quantum leap" in the air war makes the alliance nervous. It could also disturb Americans by forcing them to recognize that NATO is truly getting involved in a war, civilians are being killed, and the U.S. is likely to take casualties too.

But NATO might feel compelled to escalate the attacks if the U.N. is willing to go along. "We're in this for the duration," insists a senior State Department official who monitors the region. "NATO cannot tolerate defeat at this point." On a visit to Belgium last week, Admiral Smith seemed to be telling the Serbs they haven't seen anything yet. The plan, he said, was not to begin hitting them with overwhelming force but to use "a graduated response" to produce "some state of compliance" from the Serbs. "They're losing some pretty valuable stuff," he said. "It's got to have an effect." For those with long memories, of course, this sounds very much like General William Westmoreland talking about Vietnam.

After the Geneva meeting ended last week, Holbrooke was asked what would happen next. "We don't know," he replied, explaining that the U.S. and the Contact Group had to take the peace process one step at a time. "We have not looked down the road and prepared contingency plans for failure," says State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns. "We are preparing for success."

Holbrooke will continue his shuttle diplomacy among the warring parties and the Contact Group, who are to meet again in Geneva this week, but there is no certainty that he will get them to agree on a cease-fire or anything else. The allies began this new round of talks with a faint hope that a comprehensive settlement might be possible and that 70,000 NATO peace enforcers--the newly named Implementation Force, or IFOR--could be deployed before winter closes in on Bosnia's muddy mountain roads. There is little chance of that now, but with negotiations sputtering along, perhaps the allies will not have to face the task of evacuating their peacekeepers along those roads either.

--Reported by Jay Branegan/Brussels, Alexandra Stiglmayer/ Sarajevo and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by JAY BRANEGAN/BRUSSELS, ALEXANDRA STIGLMAYER/SARAJEVO AND DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON