WILLIAMSBURG, Virginia -- With Western allies lining up to join a force to implement a U.S.-sponsored peace agreement in Bosnia, NATO is working to find a way to bring Russian troops in as well.
There is a while yet before the force will be in place, despite a cease-fire and peace negotiations President Bill Clinton announced Thursday. The NATO enforcers won't go in until there's a peace agreement to implement, and talks sure to be long and arduous are now not due to begin until Oct. 30 or 31.
A Pentagon official said Army General George Joulwan, supreme allied commander in Europe, outlined a scenario Thursday for alliance defense ministers that would have a detailed force outline ready by then.
"If the peace talks proceed quickly and get a peace agreement in, say, early November, NATO would have to be prepared to make a very rapid deployment of its forces,'' U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry said on CNN.
The Pentagon official said almost every delegation in the private meeting told the U.S. organizers "you can assume we will be in there'' to participate in the force.
With that in mind, Joulwan told the ministers the main missing ingredient now is a formula for getting the Russians involved. Non-NATO Russia should have a "highly visible'' role compatible with their military strengths, engineering, transportation and logistics.
Alliance defense ministers meeting in this historic U.S. city made clear that the Russian question is weighing heavy on their minds.
The Americans revealed that Perry and the U.S. State Department's troubleshooter, Undersecretary of State Strobe Talbott, will fly to Geneva for a Sunday session about the force with Pavel Grachev, Russia's defense minister. Officials said they expect no immediate breakthrough.
"We believe the best way for this to work out would be for the Russians to participate as part of the force under NATO operational control,'' said Walter Slocombe, U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy.
But he admitted: "We understand the reasons why that may be a sensitive issue for the Russians.''
President Boris Yeltsin, who requested the Geneva meeting, has strongly rejected exclusive NATO command of a peace implementation force in former Yugoslavia. Russian leaders also have been exercised about NATO military action against Bosnian Serbs, traditional Russian allies, and are worried about NATO's projected expansion into central Europe to absorb many countries of the former Soviet alliance, the Warsaw Pact. Britain's defense secretary, Michael Portillo, was upbeat about finding a way out.
"It poses a problem, but I think not an insoluble one,'' he said in a British television interview, but added there's no way NATO can surrender operational control. "I think with imagination on both sides, we can get a workable solution.''
Perry mentioned in a CNN interview two possible ways to accommodate Moscow. One is to place Russian troops under NATO operational command but to allow them a parallel link with the Russian chain of command. The other is to arrange a kind of consultation link between Russia's ambassador to NATO and the alliance's political headquarter
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