June 30, 1996
Clinton Presses Serbs on Ouster of Bosnian Serb Chief
By CRAIG R. WHITNEY
YON, France -- President Clinton threatened Serbia on Saturday with reimposition of United Nations economic sanctions if it did not use its influence to press Dr. Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader indicted on charges of war crimes, to step down from political office before the Sept. 14 elections in Bosnia.
Clinton, speaking at the end of a gathering of eight leaders of industrial democracies here, also announced that Gen. Wayne Downing, former commander in chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command, would lead an investigation of the bombing that killed 19 U.S. military personnel in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, last Tuesday and make recommendations within 45 days on how to prevent further attacks like it.
"We want Mr. Karadzic, in the words of the secretary of state, out of power and out of influence," Clinton said at a news conference. "And we think that is very important."
The president and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, then flew to Paris late Saturday afternoon for dinner with President Jacques Chirac and his wife, Bernadette, before flying on to Florida for a memorial ceremony for the 19 Air Force personnel killed in the Dhahran bombing.
Saturday morning, the leaders attending the summit meeting once again warned Karadzic to resign his public functions as required by the Bosnia peace agreement negotiated in Dayton, Ohio, last November.
They said they were ready to consider reimposing United Nations economic sanctions on any party to insure compliance with the accords, thus vaguely threatening Serbia with economic punishment if it did not make good on repeated promises to get Karadzic out.
But the summit-meeting leaders, who included Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin on Saturday -- President Boris Yeltsin did not come because of his campaign for re-election -- did not endorse a call by Carl Bildt, the international coordinator in Bosnia, to give Karadzic only until Monday to step aside, or else.
"It was not a matter for decision by the summit," Chirac said, though he added that he hoped Karadzic would step down. A German diplomat said the expectation was that Karadzic would step down as president of his self-styled Bosnian Serb republic this weekend.
President Clinton's press spokesman, Mike McCurry, said that Bildt had authority under the Dayton accords to recommend a reimposition of sanctions by the U.N. Security Council, and that the leaders at the meeting would support any recommendation he made.
They pledged to contribute "substantially" to preparations for the Sept. 14 elections in Bosnia by helping to bolster independent news media there and by sending 2,000 observers to insure that the vote is free and fair. And they urged the NATO peacekeepers to increase their activities to provide the atmosphere of security the electoral process needs.
Before Clinton met with U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whose re-election after the end of year he opposes, and with the heads of three other international organizations here, the president joined in a pledge of financial and political support for the United Nations.
All eight leaders promised "scrupulous respect by member states for their financial obligations" to the United Nations, including U.S. payment of hundreds of millions of dollars in arrears. But they also called for "a more equitable scale of contributions," something long called for by the United States, which now has to pay a quarter of the organization's budget, more than any other country.
McCurry described the atmosphere in the leaders' meeting with Boutros-Ghali as "correct and dignified." Chirac and German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel both said Saturday that all the European leaders present strongly supported Boutros-Ghali's re-election.
All the leaders came here to do was talk, and there was little beyond broad, droning declarations to show for the three days of discussions that have taken place here in the Modern Art Museum, set in a park on the banks of the Rhone River that thousands of police officers sealed off from the public for the duration.
Thursday night, the leaders condemned the Dhahran bombing, and called an international conference in Paris for mid-July to work out specific measures governments can take to combat terrorism more effectively.
If Clinton expected to get his European allies to agree to break off trade and diplomatic relations with Iran, which the United States regards as a leading source of terrorism, he succeeded only in getting them to join in calling on Iran to stop supporting "extremist groups that are seeking to destroy the peace process in the Middle East and to destabilize the region."
The summit leaders asked Iran to reject terrorism and to stop endorsing threats on the life of the British author Salman Rushdie, under a sentence of death for writing a novel that Iranian religious leaders considered blasphemous.
On the rest of the Middle East, the leaders had little to say beyond urging Syria and Israel to resume negotiations on a peace agreement as soon as possible, and all parties to live up to accords reached before momentum stalled over concerns over security.
"We note the preeminence of the theme of security in Israel's recent election campaign. We are convinced that the security of all people of the region can eventually be achieved only through comprehensive, equitable and lasting peace," their statement said.
They expressed support for a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty, even though the negotiations to conclude one missed their deadline of last Friday, and agreed that it should prohibit all types of nuclear explosions, including peaceful ones.
