Kostunica makes first visit by Yugoslav leader to Bosnia since independence

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Yugoslavia's new president averted a diplomatic debacle Sunday by meeting Bosnia's political leaders, defusing anger over his decision to use his first trip to the country to attend a ceremony that some said had ethnic overtones.

Vojislav Kostunica's visit was the first a Yugoslav leader has paid to Bosnia, a former Yugoslav republic, since the 3-year war here ended half a decade ago. He spent part of the day in the small southern Bosnian town of Trebinje before flying off to Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, for the meeting.

Kostunica's stop in Trebinje seemed simple enough: He was in town to attend a reburial service for a prominent Serb poet. But in Bosnia - which fought to separate itself from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia in 1991 and was subsequently ripped apart by ethnic warfare between Serbs, Croats and Muslims - the visit caused an uproar.

The Croat and Muslim members of Bosnia's three-person multiethnic presidency considered it an insult that the new Yugoslav leader, who is a Serb, would choose an event with nationalistic Serb overtones for his first visit. Even though Kostunica attended the reburial privately, the Bosnian government believed it signaled that he had not fully accepted the country's independence.

Compounding the problem, Kostunica's visit fell just three weeks before national elections in Bosnia. The timing alarmed the international officials who run Bosnia under the 1995 Dayton peace accord: Some fear that extremists may use the vote to promote Serb nationalism.

Looking to head off an incident, the international officials hastily convened a meeting between Kostunica and the members of the multiethnic presidency. Bosnia's top international official, Wolfgang Petritsch, persuaded Kostunica to take part in the symbolic 30-minute meeting, and U.N. officials dispatched a helicopter to fly him from Trebinje to Sarajevo for the talks.

In an indication of the haste with which the session was convened, the leaders met in an airport VIP lounge and the Bosnian Croat member of the presidency, Ante Jelavic, did not attend because U.N. officials weren't able to find him on such short notice. Jelavic was represented by his adviser for foreign relations, Drazenko Primorac.

Afterward, Kostunica put a positive spin on the meeting, describing it as a first step toward the establishment of diplomatic relations between Yugoslavia and Bosnia.

''I thought this event would happen later and in another place,'' Kostunica said. ''But it's good. New pages in the relations between Bosnia and Yugoslavia have been opened.''

International officials working here described the trip to Sarajevo as a victory under the circumstances.

''Anything that helps restoring normal relations between the two countries is in everybody's interest,'' said Doug Coffman, the U.N. spokesman in Bosnia.

During his comments to reporters, Kostunica seemed to open the door for closer cooperation with the U.N. war crimes tribunal at The Hague, Netherlands. But he stopped short of committing himself to arresting key figures under indictment and hinted that the full truth about ethnic atrocities had not yet come to light.

''The truth is not one-sided, especially when we talk about interethnic relations,'' he said. Serbs have long complained that The Hague ignored atrocities committed against them by Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo Albanians.

Kostunica had intended his visit to the reburial ceremony of Jovan Ducic to be private - a reflection of his devotion to the author's staunch anti-communist principles and literary grandeur. He declined an invitation to speak at the ceremony, but he was greeted with full military honors when he arrived in Trebinje.

Ducic's remains were brought to the town 80 miles from Sarajevo by a delegation of teen-age girls in traditional Serb folk dress. The girls had traveled from Yugoslavia's tiny republic of Montenegro to the Serb half of Bosnia without being stopped at the border - a symbolic act organizers said showed there were no longer any divisions between the two entities.

The reburial featured Bosnian Serb politicians of all kinds, even those who don't normally speak to each other. The wife of wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic offered prayers beside Serb intellectuals from Belgrade and dozens of Orthodox church clergy in gleaming gold and white vestments.

Ducic, whose elegant verse is still widely read, is revered by Serbs for celebrating their national heritage. He moved to the United States when World War II broke out and died in 1943.

Ducic was originally buried near Chicago, but he had expressed a wish to be reburied in a church in his hometown. The church - a replica of the 14th century Gracanica monastery in Kosovo - was completed this year, making the long-awaited reburial possible.