Doesn't Anybody Want Peace?

Peacekeepers in Bosnia watched as two fighter-bombers took off from Udbina, in an area of Croatia controlled by Serbs. A few minutes later other U.N. military observers saw two jet planes roar low near the town of Bihac, a mainly Muslim "safe zone" theoretically under U.N. protection in Bosnia's northwest corner. "After they arrived," a U.N. spokesman reported, "two loud explosions were heard." Military monitors went to inspect and found fragments from cluster bombs and, in the U.N.'s view, for the first time in the war, napalm. Fighting worsened the next day as Serbian jets from Udbina bombed and strafed the center of the nearby town of Cazin.

On Saturday the U.N. Security Council voted to permit NATO air strikes into Croatia, forcing NATO officials to confer nervously on how to put the resolution into effect. The escalating warfare could not have come at a worse time for the NATO allies and the members of the five-nation contact group that has been working on a plan to partition the country. Mired in their own disagreements over how to end the war, almost anything they might try seemed likely to add to the tensions. The Europeans, especially the French, are outraged at the U.S. decision to stop enforcing the international arms embargo on Bosnia, and they complained aloud over what unpleasant surprises might issue from Washington next.

Less than a month ago, the news from the government-controlled enclave of Bihac had lent hope to the diplomats trying to negotiate an end to the 31- month-old war. After a period of training and refitting with weapons smuggled in from Croatia, a reinvigorated Bosnian army conducted sharp, sustained attacks and was driving the rebel Serbs back from the Bihac area and several towns in central Bosnia. Even Yasushi Akashi, the U.N.'s very cautious representative in the former Yugoslavia, speculated that the Bosnian Serbs' unexpected losses of territory might push them to return to the negotiating table.

) Such hopes, always frail, evaporated last week. They have been replaced by fear of a wider war, one that may bring the national army of Croatia back into the battle against the Serbs. The fighting around Bihac exemplifies the ethnic confusion of Bosnia. Bihac is surrounded by Serbs, but because it sits at what is now an international border, the Serbs to the north and west -- self- proclaimed rulers of the Krajina region -- are in Croatia, while the ones to the east and south are in Bosnia.

As the two groups coordinated their attack, the Serbs recovered all the territory they had lost and could probably overrun the town of 60,000 and its government defenders. If the Serbs were to take Bihac, they would forge a more solid link between their holdings in Bosnia and Krajina across the border in Croatia. The threat of such a consolidated Serb ministate reaching into Croatia could then set off a counterattack by the Croatian army. "The Croats are very nervous," says a senior U.S. official. "There's a war party in Zagreb that would like nothing better than an excuse to fight."