Balkan leaders agreed Tuesday on a comprehensive settlement to the 43-month war in Bosnia. President Clinton announced the pact in Washington and declared, "The people of Bosnia finally have a chance to turn from the horror of war to the promise of peace."
After three weeks of arduous talks, the presidents of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia were ready to initial an agreement ending savage ethnic warfare that has taken hundreds of thousands of lives.Disagreements over territory nearly torpedoed the talks in the last 48 hours. Agreement was reached after U.S. negotiators presented Balkan leaders with a last-ditch proposal to overcome a stubborn territorial dispute.
A senior delegation official said the final issue to be settled involved Brocko, a Serb-held town at the narrowest point of the northern corridor linking Serb holdings in northwestern and eastern Bosnia. Control of the town is critical for the Serbs, who want the contiguous territory that borders Serbia proper in the east.
Clinton has committed some 20,000 U.S. troops to a NATO peacekeeping force that will be deployed in Bosnia once the formal peace agreement is signed. His next big hurdle is to persuade Congress to go along.
He said he would ask Congress "to support U.S. participation."
Clinton said that since the warring parties had agreed to lay down their arms, "We must help them to make it work."
"The parties have chosen peace, America must choose peace as well," he said, voicing the necessity for American troops to take part.
"Without us, the hard-won peace would be lost," the president said in a Rose Garden announcement. Clinton said the peace plan would "end the worst conflict in Europe since World War II."
U.S. troops could be in Bosnia within weeks. However, there is strong opposition in Congress to any U.S. military involvement in Bosnia.
The House last week voted to bar funds for sending troops to the former Yugoslav republic unless it approves the deployment first.
Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian delegations had been closeted with the U.S., Russian and European mediators at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base since Nov. 1.
The United States had set a Monday deadline for ending the talks, but the deadline passed and negotiations continued.
The warring factions have agreed to maintain Bosnia's current boundaries but with control divided between a Serbian state and one controlled by a Croat Muslim federation.
Under the pact, individuals charged with war crimes would be banned from political office.