A PERILOUS PEACE

By BY BRUCE W. NELAN JAMES L. GRAFF/DAYTON, ALEXANDRA STIGLMAYER/SARAJEVO MARK THOMPSON AND DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON

IF PEACE WAS AT HAND, WHY DID ITS makers look so somber? The three Balkan Presidents were pale and hollow-eyed as they gathered behind the diplomatic table at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, last week. When Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia and Herzegovina walked to his chair, he focused his gaze downward and barely touched the proffered hands of his counterparts, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Franjo Tudjman of Croatia. As the three leaders initialed the stacks of documents that would end the 44-month war among these South Slavs, each gave the impression he was sitting behind an invisible wall, making no contact with the others.

And yet the three leaders had just collaborated on a remarkable achievement. When they began negotiations 21 days before, as political enemies and former battlefield foes, they carried with them lists of unyielding demands and untouchable interests. In the isolation of the air base and under the unrelenting hectoring of mediating diplomats, they began slowly to bend and then to compromise in the interest of fashioning a peace. By the time they left last Tuesday, all of them had accepted much they had sworn they never would, and had agreed to end a war that has killed untold thousands and left nearly 3 million homeless. Not least, they had agreed on the creation of a new Bosnia and Herzegovina. Whether their formula can work will be tested in the weeks ahead, but they all came to agree with Secretary of State Warren Christopher when he told them it was the best deal they were going to get.

Part of the Presidents' apparent shell shock could be attributed to pure exhaustion. They had been negotiating almost nonstop for three weeks and around the clock for several days before the signing ceremony. Part of their mood may have been introspection, a feeling of concern about just what they were doing and how it would be received by the most passionate combatants at home. It was inevitable that some diehards would consider the settlement, any settlement, unsatisfactory.

That danger was strongest for Izetbegovic, and he was most concerned about it. He told Christopher and the chief U.S. negotiator, Richard Holbrooke, that Bosnia was being victimized by a settlement that awarded half the country to the Serb perpetrators of ethnic cleansing. He was the most resentful of the official split that allotted 51% of the country to the Muslims and Croats and 49% to the Serbs. When at last he initialed the documents, he insisted they did not provide a just peace. But, he added, "in the world as it is, a better peace could not have been achieved."

His countrymen felt much the same way. There were few joyous celebrations in Sarajevo, but quiet smiles and sighs of relief were everywhere. There were understandably mixed feelings. Sanel Isovic, 29, a lawyer, says she had feared from the beginning that the negotiations would fail and the war, and the brutal siege of Sarajevo, would resume. Now that a compromise agreement has been made, she says, "I am suddenly disappointed because this is not what we have been fighting and suffering for." But Hata Bandic, 27, probably speaks for the majority when she says, "I think of what we went through, of fetching water under sniper fire, and the fear for the lives of my father and brother at the front line, and I can only be happy."

Milosevic was perhaps the cheeriest on the dais at Dayton, since by ending the war he also brought an end to the U.N.-imposed sanctions that were crushing Serbia's economy. Though he is regarded as the man who provoked the war, with his nationalist speeches and calls for a Greater Serbia in the former Yugoslavia, he was also the key to last week's peace agreement. U.S. diplomats knew his past but credited him nevertheless with pragmatism and a willingness to compromise. As the boss of Serbia, he could make decisions and cut deals on the spot.

Milosevic handled the territorial bargaining almost without consulting the Bosnian Serbs, who were left confused and fuming. The Bosnian Serb representatives reportedly got their first look at the finished documents only 10 minutes before the final ceremony. Even though they had given Milosevic full authority to negotiate for them, there was a serious question whether they would go along with the agreement or scuttle it, as they have done with other peace plans in the past.

The answer came quickly. On Thursday, Milosevic summoned the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and eight other officials to a meeting near Belgrade. There, after a full day of tough talking, Karadzic signed on to the Dayton agreement. Experts in Belgrade said the threat hanging over Karadzic was that if he refused, Milosevic could hand him over to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague. The tribunal has indicted the Bosnian Serb leader, and his military commander General Ratko Mladic, for genocide and other crimes against humanity. The Dayton agreement pledges all the governments to cooperate with the tribunal but stops short of requiring them to hand over indictees.

It will now be up to Karadzic to make sure lower-level Serb officials in Bosnia also go along with the peace plan. That may not be easy, since many of them are shouting defiance. He appeared on television Friday to tell his people, "We accept the peace." But on Saturday, thousands of Bosnian Serbs protested in and around Sarajevo, vowing to defend their turf.

In Serbia proper, reaction was muted but generally welcoming. Most Serbs long ago lost their nationalist fervor and their passion for the war next door. As sanctions hit hard and fueled inflation, the Serb nation looked forward to peace and a return to normality. They realize Milosevic touched off the bloodbath, and now has tried to end it. "I know Milosevic started this," says Dejan Popovic, 22, a student in Belgrade, "and his guilt may be greater than any other's. But now I have to say thank you." Last week the U.N. Security Council said it too by suspending the main economic sanctions against the remnant of Yugoslavia--Serbia and Montenegro.

The pile of legal and diplomatic documents the three Presidents signed add up to an extremely complex new design for Bosnia that will be hard to construct and easy to paralyze. It turns the country into a republic containing two "entities." American officials insist this is not a partition and that Bosnia is a unified state, but other observers, including Bosnians, are not so sure. The Bosnian Serb holdings, the Republika Srpska, total 49% of the land. The other entity is a federation of Muslims-- called Bosniacs in the documents--and Bosnian Croats. All citizens will be free to travel in both parts of the country, and roadblocks and checkpoints are to come down. Both entities will have presidents and legislatures, and so will the central government, which is carefully weighted to reflect the Bosniac, Croat and Serb ethnic groups.

To separate the combatants and get the new country up and running, NATO plans to send in an Implementation Force, called I-FOR, of some 60,000 troops, 20,000 of them American. They will separate the federation's forces from the rebel Serb army, supervise their return to barracks and patrol demilitarized zones on both sides of the cease-fire lines. The I-FOR commanders will be the judges of what action they must take in any situation, and while the military annex to the agreement does not say so, the force will function much like an army of occupation.

The world's peacekeepers will remain on duty for only a year, American officials say. But the long-term threat to Bosnia's future will go beyond skirmishes with rebel Serbs and perhaps take firm shape only when the year is up. Even if elections are carried out as prescribed, the central government may never become a functioning administration that can earn citizens' loyalty. Under the agreement, both entities in the new state are permitted to establish parallel links with neighboring countries. That means the Serbs with Serbia and the Croats with Croatia. The biggest worry for Bosniacs is that those links will turn into de facto secession and that Milosevic and Tudjman may yet divide up Bosnia.

In Dayton, the biggest task was to convince the Presidents they had common interests. The U.S. negotiators and their colleagues from Britain, France, Germany and Russia tended to use very forceful persuasion. Some of the Balkan officials suspected the U.S. was using sleep-deprivation as a negotiating tool. Deadlines slipped repeatedly, and late-night meetings turned into desperate pre-dawn sessions seeking to put issues back on track and, finally, to seal the overall agreement. Tempers were frazzled, sensibilities were hurt and resentments flared. Holbrooke, who is credited with being the locomotive of the talks, operated with gradations of anger. "He frequently used words that are not quotable," says a European diplomat who was there. "I don't think there is anyone Holbrooke didn't yell at at least once."

In spite of his powerful negotiating style, Holbrooke could not sew up the package. "He built the house," says a member of the Serb delegation, "but he couldn't put on the roof." At crucial moments Christopher had to fly in and stay on. Christopher received good reviews from participants for his gravitas, his lawyerly interventions and his general serenity amid tumult. But even the 70-year-old facilitator had his limits. When Izetbegovic accused him of deception, Christopher blew up and warned the Bosnian to find a way to compromise or the negotiations would be over.

When Christopher flew off to Japan for an economic conference on Nov. 14, he told the negotiators that he expected to find a finished agreement when he returned, or he would call the whole thing off. He got back three days later to find no agreement, and plunged into continuous bargaining. Izetbegovic demanded that the eastern Muslim enclave of Gorazde be linked with Sarajevo by a two-lane road. The width of the corridor for the road was the focus of a bitter dispute, with Milosevic offering only two miles.

At that point the U.S. put to spectacularly good use a high-tech, computerized terrain simulator called Powerscene. It is a military mapping system that creates a virtual reality and was used to train pilots for bombing runs over Bosnia. The Americans took Milosevic on a simulated flight over the hills and forests on the way to Gorazde and showed him that two miles just would not work because there were mountains in the way. Duly impressed, Milosevic became more flexible and agreed to a corridor that will range from two miles to almost five in width. I-FOR may have to pry that territory away from the Serbs.

All the while Gorazde was under discussion, the future of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, was a constant counterpoint. How could they be linked together, and how would rival claims to the city be squared? From the beginning, the U.S. opposed the Serb plan to split Sarajevo with walls and guards. Holbrooke was heard shouting to a working group: "If I said it once, I said it 15 times. This is not Berlin!" It was an emotional and dramatic issue, for besieged Sarajevo had become the symbol of an open, cosmopolitan, multiethnic Bosnia, the opposite of the apartheid the Bosnian Serbs hoped for. Milosevic, for whatever reasons, agreed, saying the Bosnians had "earned" Sarajevo by living through the years of brutal siege. The settlement on Sarajevo not only turns the city over to the Muslim-Croat federation's administration but also cedes four Serb suburbs. It will be a very tricky business for the Muslims and Croats to take control of them.

These decisions on Gorazde and Sarajevo produced some unforeseen side effects. Another of the U.S. high-tech tools was a computer that quickly translated map changes into percentages, in order to keep track of the 51% and 49% territorial split. Suddenly, the Muslim-Croat federation's holdings had ballooned to 56%. Milosevic said that would have to be redressed, and so began a back and forth in the map room that continued through the final days of the talks.

In the effort to bring the Serbs back up to 49%, the Americans had tried to find some sparsely settled spots in Croat areas. That set off one of the worst tussles, over the so-called Posavina corridor, the narrow strip in the north, at the top of the map of Bosnia, that links Serb holdings in the northwest of the country with those in the east. Milosevic continued to seek a wider corridor. But Tudjman balked at handing over the parts held by Bosnian Croats as compensation for Serb losses elsewhere. This time Bill Clinton had to step in. He phoned Tudjman and, without getting into the geography, told the Croat leader that "this is a turning point for your country and the Balkans, and we need your leadership here." A while later, Clinton phoned all three Presidents, who hovered around a speakerphone. It was agreed that the corridor would remain unchanged and the Bosnian Croats would give up most of the land needed to bring the Serbs back to 49%.

Izetbegovic then made his final demand. He wanted Brcko, the Serb-controlled town that anchors the Posavina corridor, turned over to his federation. This looked like a deal breaker. It was almost as if the Presidents were afraid to conclude the deal. "At the end," says Holbrooke, "we faced not a question of substance but one of political will. Do you actually put pen to paper?" Christopher drafted language on his handy yellow pad that would submit the Brcko issue to international arbitration and sent copies to the three delegations.

Christopher had doubts that his proposal would work, so last Tuesday morning he asked Clinton for permission to close down the talks. The President told him to do whatever he thought was right. As Christopher was holding a staff meeting, Milosevic strode across the snowy quadrangle and asked to meet with Christopher and Holbrooke. According to Holbrooke, he said, "I can't let these talks break down. I'm willing to walk the last mile." Milosevic then said he accepted the idea of mediation on Brcko, and the other delegations finally went along. Milosevic spotted Christopher returning to his suite and followed him in. "Mr. President," Christopher said to him, "you have a deal." With tears showing in his eyes, Milosevic said, "I'm so grateful, I'm going to put a big picture of you up in Belgrade." Christopher and the Serb president toasted each other with white wine.

There are more meetings to come and, presumably, more toasts. The peace agreement is to be signed at a full-dress conference in Paris in the next week or two. But first Clinton hopes to win the support of a skeptical Congress. He was to begin his selling job to an equally suspicious nation this Monday with a televised speech. The arguments he and Vice President Al Gore will use to sway Congress and the public center on the need to halt a bloody and destabilizing war in Europe, to maintain U.S. leadership in the world and to play its role in the forefront of nato, lest the alliance fall apart. To help push the proposal, Administration officials will emphasize their promise that U.S. troops will remain in Bosnia for only about a year. As the campaign to send American troops to Bosnia kicks off this week, Gore, Christopher, Holbrooke and Defense Secretary William Perry are to testify on Capitol Hill. Clinton will be visiting Britain, Northern Ireland, Ireland, Spain, and will drop in on U.S. troops in Germany. His travels will give him a chance to deliver four or five major speeches, all of which will emphasize the importance of America's engagement in Europe.

The Administration is hoping for a vote on the Bosnian deployment in the House and Senate next week. No matter what Congress decides, the military schedules begin to click forward. NATO's governing body, the North Atlantic Council, was expected to approve the operational plan for I-FOR this week and then issue the order to deploy what is called the enabling force, an advance communications-and-logistics team of about 1,000 soldiers, around 200 of them American. NATO would then start sending in the main I-FOR the day after the peace is signed in Paris. NATO's southern command would set up a forward headquarters in Sarajevo, and six days later I-FOR would begin separating the Bosnian, Croat and Serb armies. I-FOR would not, however, be able to complete its move into the country until after the New Year.

Once the American troops arrive, there is no plan to rotate them, only to pull them out after a year. That sounds workable to some experts but not to others. Retired General David Maddox, who until last February commanded all U.S. Army troops in Europe, believes it is "totally wrong" to send in troops without having replacements ready, and to set a time limit without spelling out how the force's success is to be measured. "I am concerned about defining exit criteria by the calendar," he says.

Defense Secretary Perry visited troops in Germany last Friday and told them they were not "going in there to fight a war." The Pentagon did not expect organized opposition, he said, "though there may be some individuals, or some gangs, who will not accept the decision of their leaders." If so, "our forces will be quite capable of taking care of themselves."

The Pentagon likes to say that if its forces are attacked, they will prove themselves the meanest dog in town. That might be true if one armed unit confronts another, but, says Andrew Krepinevich, a retired officer who heads the Defense Budget Project in Washington, the analogy works only for dogfights. "Those who might target U.S. forces," he says, "might compete not as dogs but as fleas." In other words, sniping, ambushes, car bombs and other kinds of terrorism do not offer clear targets for U.S. retaliation.

Senior military officers are saying in public that U.S. forces will take casualties. They don't say how many because they don't know. They tried to find out by commissioning an outside consultant to run a computer simulation. He came back with a figure of 39 deaths among U.S. forces. Pentagon officials viewed that figure as ridiculously low, and some say there will be several hundred casualties, caused by anything from auto accidents to land mines and sniper attacks.

The Bosnian peace agreement was a great achievement for the warring parties and for the American and European diplomats who put it together. It is such a delicate structure of competing and balancing political forces that no one can say whether it will struggle along or collapse once more into war. Similarly, the military mission to police that agreement may succeed or sink into the deadly quagmire so many Americans fear. America, its NATO allies and the Balkan leaders are now bound together in the peace effort, and it will test them all severely.

--Reported by James L. Graff/Dayton, Alexandra Stiglmayer/Sarajevo and Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington, with other bureaus