It’s the critical moment for Bill Clinton’s Balkans deal. As soon as the federation agreement was cleared away, the delegations turned to the core issues of a U.S.brokered peace agreement that would formally halve Bosnia, while retaining the shell of a central government. The plan makes quite a stack of paper-more than a dozen documents, including an 11-page Constitution that would establish a nine-member Bosnian presidency and a 36-member Parliament open to anyone save accused war criminals. Finally the map itself was on the table. So was the question of how to square the Bosnians’ demand for a unified capital, Sarajevo, with the Serbs’ demand that the city be split. “We are entering the final stretch,” said one official.
NATO planners were also working fiat-out. And last week they achieved a critical breakthrough-agreement on the terms under which Russian troops would join the 60,000-person peace “implementation force” that is to patrol 200 miles of disengagement lines between the factions for a year. Under the face-saving deal, a top Russian commander, Col. Gen. Leonty Shevtsov, will become a deputy to Gen. George Joulwan in his role as the ranking U.S. commander in Europe. But difficult questions remain. Russia and France want the United Nations to retain political control; the Western allies want a free hand.
But NATO’s conciliatory message to Belgrade may have been drowned out by a new blast from war-crimes investigators in The Hague. The United Nations’ 2-year-old International Criminal Tribunal charged three Yugoslav Federal Army commanders with responsibility for the massacre of 261 men after their troops captured the city of Vukovar in 1991. According to the indictment, the Yugoslav troops took the victims from the Vukovar hospital to a farm building two miles away and beat them for several hours; the victims then were shot and bulldozed into a mass grave. The three officers are the first who answered directly to the Belgrade government. The case could complicate efforts by Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to win foreign aid and the lifting of international sanctions as part of a peace deal. The prior indictment of two Bosnian Serb leaders by the tribunal has complicated the work of U.S. negotiators, who must rely on Milosevic to speak for the Serbs in the talks.
Last sliver: But the main force driving the negotiators in Dayton is the knowledge that the war won’t stand still for them much longer. Croatian President Franjo Tudjman has pledged to move militarily on Eastern Slavonia, the last sliver of his land held by Serbs, ff the talks don’t bring a deal by the end of the month. If the talks drag on, he’ll be under heavy pressure to make good on his threats.
The weary Balkan leaders clearly all want a deal. While the pace has been slower than the U.S. officials had hoped, they see signs that the politicians are finally putting aside their distaste for each other and getting down to business. Confined largely to a quadrangle formed by four identical officers’ barracks, the players are “meeting everywhere-in the parking lot, in conference rooms, on the tennis court,” says State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns. The window won’t stay open much longer, and they know it.
