July 10, 1996

Kantor Takes Up Brown's Bosnia Mission

By DAVID E. SANGER

ASHINGTON -- Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor will set out on Wednesday to complete the trip on which his predecessor, Ron Brown, died, escorting American business executives through Bosnia and Croatia to explore opportunities to reconstruct a land divided by war.

All but three of the companies that had executives on Brown's mission have signed up to return to the region, Kantor said Tuesday.

Brown's mission ended in a plane crash near Dubrovnik, Croatia, on April 3 that killed all of the 35 passengers and crew aboard. Along with a number of executives, the crash victims included officials from the commerce department and other agencies, and Nathaniel Nash, the Frankfurt bureau chief of The New York Times.

While the executives accompanying Kantor will be negotiating deals to sell airplanes and rebuild highways and a crippled telephone network, administration officials say the trip will also serve as a traveling memorial to Brown and a demonstration that Washington remains committed to the region's economic reconstruction.

President Clinton recently termed Kantor's trip "an attempt to put the power of American commerce to use for peace."

Kantor, who was among Brown's closest friends in Washington and a colleague on the administration's economic team, said: "This trip is full of emotion. Everyone here lost a lot of friends on that trip, and I lost a friend of 20 years. But we all know that the right thing to do, the very American thing, is to go back and finish Ron's mission."

For Kantor, the trip represents a full transition to his new and very different role. As the U.S. trade representative, his arrival in foreign lands usually presaged a trade fight, not a discussion of new business opportunities.

In the last three months Kantor has slowly settled into Brown's old office. In the building's lobby, where a picture of the sitting secretary usually hangs, he has placed a photograph of himself with Brown, taken last year.

He has also begun to venture abroad with the kind of business delegations that Brown first used as a weapon of commercial diplomacy, and then as a symbol of economic reconstruction in Northern Ireland, South Africa and the Baltics. Two weeks ago Kantor returned from his first lengthy overseas trip as commerce secretary, visiting South Korea and several nations in Southeast Asia.

On Tuesday, preparing to leave, he said that after landing in Dubrovnik he planned to hike up the mountainside where Brown's Air Force plane crashed.

Then, along with executives from Boeing, United Technologies, the Riggs Bank of Washington and other companies, he has planned three days of meetings in Dubrovnik, Sarajevo, Tuzla and Zagreb. In Tuzla he will also visit U.S. peacekeeping troops.