SILENCE OF THE GUNS

By Bruce W. Nelan

THE MOST RICHARD HOLBROOKE EXPECTED from his round of shuttle diplomacy last week was a bit of progress on designing a new shape and government for war-ravaged Bosnia and Herzegovina. Instead, when the American special envoy arrived in Belgrade, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic surprised him with a proposal to end the siege of Sarajevo in exchange for cessation of NATO's bombing campaign against Serb military installations.

After half an hour of discussion, Milosevic startled Holbrooke again by telling him that the two key Bosnian Serb leaders, Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, were standing by in Belgrade. With Holbrooke's approval, Milosevic summoned them, and they strode in--Mladic in his combat fatigues, Karadzic with his gray tresses waving. For the next eight hours the Bosnian Serbs and Holbrooke's staff worked on the language of the agreement Milosevic had proposed. Part of the time Holbrooke and Milosevic were out of the room for private talks and a dinner of roast lamb and red wine.

Finally, at 2:15 a.m. last Thursday, they all gathered for a signing ceremony. The Americans signed nothing, but the Bosnian Serbs, with Milosevic as witness, put their signatures to the agreement to withdraw most of their heavy weapons from around Sarajevo. They agreed to open the Bosnian capital's main roads and airport to unrestricted U.N. traffic. Milosevic kept one copy of the document, and Holbrooke took two copies with him to Zagreb to show to U.N. officials and Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and then to Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic.

NATO promptly put its air strikes on hold and gave the Serbs three days--until Sunday night--to begin fulfilling their promises. If they did so, the bombing pause would be extended for another three days to complete and verify the pullback. The Bosnian government, for its part, pledged not to launch any attacks on the withdrawing Serbs in the Sarajevo area.

The Bosnian Serbs have reneged on so many similar agreements in the past that there could be no certainty about this one. "If there isn't full compliance," said Holbrooke, "the U.S. will urge immediate resumption by NATO of the air attacks." President Bill Clinton backed him up, saying the Serbs should have no doubt that "NATO will resume the air strikes if they fail to keep their commitments." But Karadzic vowed, "We will withdraw our weaponry," and said it would be hauled outside the U.N.-declared 12.5-mile exclusion zone around Sarajevo. The pledge was confirmed by General Dragomir Milosevic, the commander of rebel Serb forces around the capital.

By Friday some compliance with the agreement had begun. Journalists were taken by Bosnian Serb authorities to witness removal of three T-55 tanks, three 105-mm howitzers and several mortars, but the journalists were not allowed to see where the weapons were taken. The airport was reopened after having been shut down for five months, and the first flight in carried French Defense Minister Charles Millon with a shipment of flour. Several more aid flights arrived Saturday. At the same time, two U.N. relief convoys rumbled into Sarajevo with minimal harassment at Bosnian Serb checkpoints.

When this phase of late-summer diplomacy began, Western policymakers were wondering whether Milosevic could "deliver the Bosnian Serbs" in any serious negotiation. Last week he produced the two top bosses and their signatures, even though Mladic had stubbornly insisted through two weeks of NATO bombardment that he would not move those guns. With his show of authority, Milosevic--who is striving to win an end to U.N. sanctions against his country--has indicated a readiness to get on with an overall peace settlement. The U.S.-brokered plan for a Bosnia consisting of autonomous Serb and Muslim-Croat republics that once seemed hazy and far off suddenly looks attainable.

The breakthrough in Belgrade came as a great relief for the NATO allies. Though they were dropping the bombs rather than absorbing them, they faced a tough decision about what to do as an encore. Beginning Aug. 30, NATO air forces flew 750 strike missions against 56 target complexes. The raids, the Pentagon claimed, were 95% effective, smashing Bosnian Serb air-defense and communications systems, storage areas and ammunition dumps, roads and bridges. But Pentagon planners were about to run out of targets that met their requirements: avoiding civilian casulaties and not too radically altering the strategic balance between Serb and Muslim-led government forces.

American military strategists were gloomy last week as they surveyed the situation. The shattering of military support targets, important though they were, had not forced Mladic and the Serbs to withdraw their weapons. "They were hunkered down," says a Pentagon official, "and we were being forced to escalate." That was the tough decision and very likely a political impossibility. The next set of potential targets for NATO warplanes, dubbed Option 3, would have entailed a widening and intensification of the air war to include factories, power plants and airports in the civilian areas of Serb-held Bosnia. Washington officials had little confidence that they could persuade the U.N. or NATO's Atlantic Council to escalate the bombing, and on Capitol Hill, members of Congress were also restive.

Moscow was already shouting genocide and threatening a reappraisal of its relations with the West, the U.S. in particular. For a week or so the Clinton Administration thought the Russian government was simply pandering in public to its hard-line critics, but then the private channels heated up as well. Defense Secretary William Perry phoned his Russian counterpart, General Pavel Grachev, and got an earful. The air attacks, Grachev warned, had to stop. Perhaps sending the same message, a masked man fired a rocket-propelled grenade into the U.S.-embassy building in Moscow, smashing into a sixth-floor office and destroying a copying machine but causing no injuries. Russian police increased security around the embassy and sent out a sketch of the attacker, but no arrest has been made.

NATO's prolonged bombing clearly threatened to damage U.S.-Russian relations, and more bombs brought with them the danger of a bigger war were Moscow to decide to provide direct military support to the Serbs. Perry hinted to Grachev that the Clinton Administration was working on a compromise. Meanwhile the U.S. sent Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott to mend fences in Moscow and urge the Russians to take a more active part in peace efforts. As Talbott left, Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev appeared mollified, saying the U.S. and Russia had to remain partners.

Washington was so eager to find a way to end the bombing offensive that some policy planners had fudged on the weapons withdrawal. One Pentagon option under consideration last week would have halted the air strikes if Mladic had merely agreed to lift the siege of Sarajevo and stop shelling the city. His guns could remain in place to be monitored by U.N. observers on the ground. Luckily for NATO, that idea never emerged from the interdepartmental debate in Washington. Instead Milosevic hauled NATO's chestnuts out of the fire by ordering Mladic to accept a pullback of mortars 82 mm and above and artillery 100 mm and above. The Bosnian government protested that this allowed too many weapons to remain but in the end went along with the agreement.

Mladic had a reputation of being willing to stand up to Milosevic in the past, so why did he cave in this time? All indications are that he and his Bosnian brethren were in a bind tighter than NATO's, and getting worse. In recent months Croatian forces have recaptured Western Slavonia and the Krajina, swaths of territory that had been seized by Serbs in 1992. At the same time, Croats, Bosnian government forces and their Muslim allies went on the offensive in northwestern Bosnia and relieved the siege of Bihac, a Muslim enclave in the north. Under the allied pounding of the past two weeks, the vaunted Serb air-defense system has been neutralized, leaving ground targets vulnerable to attack by day or night. Bosnian forces with their allies last week retook another large area in the west and were closing in on Banja Luka, the biggest Serb stronghold in Bosnia, although they may not take it.

The capture of Banja Luka, says a Western diplomat in Belgrade, "would be huge, and it could happen. Apparently the Serbs just aren't fighting." Though the Bosnian government has promised to adhere to a cease-fire around Sarajevo, it has made no apologies for its offensives in other areas. Some analysts suggest the Bosnian Serb forces are not making much of a stand in the northwest and center of the country because they see no point in taking casualties to hold on to territory they assume will be allotted to the Muslims and the Croats under a negotiated peace. "Mladic seems to be recognizing political reality," says a U.N. official in Sarajevo, "and is not willing to fight for land that is inevitably going to be given up anyway."

Two weeks ago, the Serb, Croat and Bosnian foreign ministers agreed to peace "principles" that call for two ethnic "entities" inside Bosnia. The Serb share would be 49% of the territory, and the federation of Bosnian Muslims and Croats would get 51%. This split has been viewed by Pentagon analysts as unworkable because the Bosnian Serbs were reported to hold 70% of Bosnia's land. But the tide of war has recently been going so badly for the Serbs that the previous estimate is now way off.

Last week CIA and Defense Department experts analyzed new reconnaissance photos from satellites and spy planes and concluded that the Bosnian Serbs control only about 55% of the country, while the Muslims and Croats have 45%. As the Bosnian government offensive continues, the actual holdings may come very close to what has been agreed upon. The major outstanding territorial issues could be reduced to Sarajevo, eastern Slovenia and Gorazde.

If the disengagement around Sarajevo goes according to plan, the Serb and Bosnian government generals are scheduled to meet this week with U.N. military commanders to discuss extending the cease-fire to all of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It might take some doing to persuade the Bosnians to agree to that because of their latest successes on the battlefield. But Bosnian government officials last week began a series of television appearances to urge a move away from fighting to peacemaking.

Though there were hopeful signs, the international mediators of the Contact Group--the U.S., Britain, France, Germany and Russia--are not predicting that progress will be easy. The agreement on principles two weeks ago presents as many questions as it answers: What kind of constitutional arrangement can create one country that contains both a Serb republic and a Bosnian-Croatian federation?

France and its new President Jacques Chirac show no overt indications of pique at Washington's sudden front-running role. In fact, officials in Paris take some credit for the development, pointing out that it was Chirac who pushed for a well-armed Rapid Reaction Force and urged NATO to show its muscle. "I am delighted," said Chirac, "that the Americans have become strongly involved for the past few weeks." The British were solidly behind air strikes until, as Defense Minister Michael Portillo said, "the threat to Sarajevo is lifted." Privately, London had been asking Washington to broker a local cease-fire around the Bosnian capital. Now that it is in place, Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind hopes for, if not steady progress, then at least "three steps forward and one step back."

With a cease-fire in prospect for the whole country, the allies have begun to rethink how many troops will be needed to police an actual peace agreement. Last week Defense Secretary Perry scaled back previous Pentagon estimates. He said the so-called NATO Implementation Force may need only 50,000 rather than 70,000 on the ground, of whom 15,000, not 25,000, would be American. French Defense Minister Millon is to arrive in Washington this week to begin talks on how to provide political direction to the soldiers of the NATO peacekeeping force. France is leaning toward some form of U.N. operation, while the U.S. is determined to keep it entirely under NATO command.

That argument may be premature, but then, maybe not. The energetic Holbrooke plans to return to the U.S. this week and quickly resume his shuttle diplomacy. White House officials told reporters on Friday they hoped to see "an actual deal signed within the coming weeks." If it happens, American and other allied troops could be taking up their patrol duties in Bosnia before the end of October.

--Reported by Massimo Calabresi/Pale, Dean Fischer and Douglas Waller/Washington and Alexandra Stiglmayer/Sarajevo, with other bureaus

With reporting by MASSIMO CALABRESI/PALE, DEAN FISCHER AND DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON AND ALEXANDRA STIGLMAYER/ SARAJEVO, WITH OTHER BUREAUS