AT THE EDGE OF PEACE

At 9 a.m. last Thursday, Richard Holbrooke strode into the seventh-floor study that U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher favors for informal staff meetings. Like his boss, Holbrooke was in shirt sleeves. But unlike the dapper Christopher, the chief U.S. negotiator on Bosnia looked rumpled and exhausted. More than five weeks of shuttle diplomacy in a bid to bring peace to the Balkans had sapped him of the nervous energy that usually suffuses his ample frame. But if the sparks were not exactly flying off Holbrooke, the news he brought to Washington was electrifying enough. As a clutch of State Department officials peered over his shoulder, he unfolded a map of Bosnia atop Christopher's desk, took out a ball-point pen and drew a line running from the northern border town of Dvor south to Sanski Most, then snaking southwest to the city of Jajce.

What Holbrooke's rough cartography captured was nothing less than the changing face of the battle for the heartland of Bosnia, which in recent weeks has seen the Bosnian Serbs driven back by the loosely coordinated armies of the country's Croat-Muslim federation capitalizing on NATO's bombing campaign. The results of that offensive--demarcated on Holbrooke's map--produced a strategic shift on the ground that, working with the grain of U.S. diplomacy, opened the most inviting window of opportunity for peace that Bosnia has seen in years. By the time the Bosnian Serbs had withdrawn most of their heavy guns from around Sarajevo last Wednesday night--thus meeting a NATO deadline and staving off renewed air strikes--the Croats and Muslims had recaptured nearly 1,500 sq. mi. of disputed real estate and whittled the portion of Bosnia controlled by the Serbs from about 65% to just under 50%. That land grab initially provoked fears that a possible peace agreement was in danger of being wrecked. But by week's end, the Croat-Muslim federation had put the brakes on its offensive, and suddenly the Clinton Administration appeared tantalizingly close to a diplomatic triumph that could redeem its reputation both at home and abroad.

Before the champagne is uncorked, though, numerous problems remain to be solved. A significant step in that direction takes place this Tuesday when representatives from the so-called Contact Group--Germany, France, Russia, Britain and the U.S.--meet at the U.N. in New York City with the foreign ministers of Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia. Although a new map of Bosnia and Herzegovina has yet to be drawn, they are expected to announce a breakthrough in defining the complex government structure that will rule over it, if and when peace is signed. Consensus has also been reached on constitutional arrangements for the Serb and Muslim-Croat "entities" inside Bosnia. "It's an awkward structure," concedes a State Department official. "But it's a hell of an improvement over killing people."