A PERILOUS PEACE

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IF PEACE WAS AT HAND, WHY DID ITS makers look so somber? The three Balkan Presidents were pale and hollow-eyed as they gathered behind the diplomatic table at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, last week. When Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia and Herzegovina walked to his chair, he focused his gaze downward and barely touched the proffered hands of his counterparts, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Franjo Tudjman of Croatia. As the three leaders initialed the stacks of documents that would end the 44-month war among these South Slavs, each gave the impression he was sitting behind an invisible wall, making no contact with the others.

And yet the three leaders had just collaborated on a remarkable achievement. When they began negotiations 21 days before, as political enemies and former battlefield foes, they carried with them lists of unyielding demands and untouchable interests. In the isolation of the air base and under the unrelenting hectoring of mediating diplomats, they began slowly to bend and then to compromise in the interest of fashioning a peace. By the time they left last Tuesday, all of them had accepted much they had sworn they never would, and had agreed to end a war that has killed untold thousands and left nearly 3 million homeless. Not least, they had agreed on the creation of a new Bosnia and Herzegovina. Whether their formula can work will be tested in the weeks ahead, but they all came to agree with Secretary of State Warren Christopher when he told them it was the best deal they were going to get.

Part of the Presidents' apparent shell shock could be attributed to pure exhaustion. They had been negotiating almost nonstop for three weeks and around the clock for several days before the signing ceremony. Part of their mood may have been introspection, a feeling of concern about just what they were doing and how it would be received by the most passionate combatants at home. It was inevitable that some diehards would consider the settlement, any settlement, unsatisfactory.

That danger was strongest for Izetbegovic, and he was most concerned about it. He told Christopher and the chief U.S. negotiator, Richard Holbrooke, that Bosnia was being victimized by a settlement that awarded half the country to the Serb perpetrators of ethnic cleansing. He was the most resentful of the official split that allotted 51% of the country to the Muslims and Croats and 49% to the Serbs. When at last he initialed the documents, he insisted they did not provide a just peace. But, he added, "in the world as it is, a better peace could not have been achieved."

His countrymen felt much the same way. There were few joyous celebrations in Sarajevo, but quiet smiles and sighs of relief were everywhere. There were understandably mixed feelings. Sanel Isovic, 29, a lawyer, says she had feared from the beginning that the negotiations would fail and the war, and the brutal siege of Sarajevo, would resume. Now that a compromise agreement has been made, she says, "I am suddenly disappointed because this is not what we have been fighting and suffering for." But Hata Bandic, 27, probably speaks for the majority when she says, "I think of what we went through, of fetching water under sniper fire, and the fear for the lives of my father and brother at the front line, and I can only be happy."