NEGOTIATION ON AND ON

By JAMES L. GRAFF/DAYTON

MAYBE IT SAYS SOMETHING ABOUT the hard slog to peace in the Balkans that the first important agreement to come out of the negotiations at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio was between the two parties who are already supposed to be allies. Last Friday Secretary of State Warren Christopher presided over the signing of a pact to strengthen the Bosnian-Croat Federation that will govern slightly more than half of Bosnia and Herzegovina when an overall peace is achieved. The Bosnian Muslims and Croats spent most of 1993 and the early part of 1994 killing each other, but in March 1994, Washington brokered an alliance between them. The agreement last week reinforces the federation by allowing for the return of Muslim and Croat refugees and providing for the reunification of the city of Mostar. "This is not the final peace we seek here," says Christopher. "But it is a very important first step down that road."

What is ahead, the mediators hope, is an agreement to end the conflict between the Bosnian-Croat alliance and the people with whom they are still at war, the Bosnian Serbs. In 20-hour-a-day rounds of negotiations, under virtual house arrest, the diplomats are struggling forward. As one Balkan delegate says, "Things are getting much more intense in here." At the end of last week the delegations were still wading through a raft of U.S.-prepared documents addressing the question of how the Bosnian Serbs can be integrated into a reconstituted Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic has signaled his willingness to exclude Bosnian-Serb "president" Radovan Karadzic and military commander Ratko Mladic from political office in the country. But he has not agreed to the Bosnian demand that they be extradited to the Hague, where they have been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Last week, in a clear signal to Milosevic, the tribunal indicted two current and one former officer of the Yugoslav army for their role in the murder of 260 non-Serbs seized at a hospital in Vukovar in November 1991--the first time Belgrade has been explicitly implicated in an indictment.

On the question of dividing land, one problem predominates. "You can sum up the big territorial dispute now in three words," says a Pentagon official. "Sarajevo, Sarajevo, Sarajevo." Having maintained the capital through more than three years of siege, Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic wants it to be unified under Bosnian control, while the Bosnian Serbs in Milosevic's delegation want it split between the Muslim-Croat alliance and themselves. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, the leader of the talks, last week pushed an American proposal to make Sarajevo a separate "federal city" outside the territory of either faction and under international control. A U.S. diplomatic source says Milosevic has agreed to the "federal-city concept in principle," but Bosnian Foreign Minister Muhamed Sacirbey has threatened to walk out of the talks rather than accept any division of the capital. The Bosnians have even hired Richard Perle, a top Reagan Administration official, to be in Dayton as a consultant.

Perhaps the most ominous development was the decision by Croatian President Franjo Tudjman to send troops and heavy artillery to the U.N. buffer zone in eastern Slavonia, a strip of Croatia that was seized by local Serbs in 1991. An armed conflict there could bring in the powerful army of Serbia, yet Tudjman has vowed to take the territory back by force before the end of the month, when the U.N. mandate expires. The Serbs in eastern Slavonia profess to be unintimidated. "Let him come," says Slobodan Antonic, a commander of the main Serb military force there. "We have laid 250,000 mines, dug 62 miles of new trenches and built more than 100 new bunkers." Despite Tudjman's "crude saber-rattling threats," as one U.S. State Department document has called them, mediators detect a willingness to reach an agreement that would install international monitors for two years before the Croats regain control.

Under the most optimistic assumptions, a comprehensive agreement could be reached by the middle of this week. But by then a Balkans battle inside the Beltway may erupt. House Republicans expect to force a vote this week on a measure that would bar any spending for the 20,000 American troops that would be the linchpin of the NATO implementation force. (That force would now include Russian soldiers, since Moscow agreed last week to put them essentially under NATO control.) "We're afraid Clinton will cut some kind of deal and our troops in Germany could be down there [in Bosnia] a few hours after an agreement is signed," says the bill's author, Colorado Republican Representative Joel Hefley. Without those U.S. troops, any accord achieved will probably be impossible to enforce. Unfortunately for Bill Clinton, he can't lock up a recalcitrant Congress at an Air Force base in Ohio.

--With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Vukovar and Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by MASSIMO CALABRESI/VUKOVAR AND MARK THOMPSON AND DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON