Bosnia Atrocities Ignored By Mitterrand, Report Says

PARIS - Five weeks before a furor over Bosnian Serb concentration camps erupted around the world in August 1992, the president of Bosnia personally alerted his French counterpart, Francois Mitterrand, to a pattern of murder in Serb-held areas and the setting up of camps, and even listed specific locations, French and Bosnian officials said this week.

But Mitterrand did not order an investigation or any other follow-up, according to former aide Bernard Kouchner, who accompanied him on a June 28, 1992, visit to Sarajevo, to open the besieged capital's airport to U.N. flights.

"I was in charge" of the visit, said Kouchner, the flamboyant minister of health and humanitarian action in the former Socialist government of France, who organized the trip.

Lives might have been saved had Mitterrand listened to Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic's pleas, according to the director of a new U.N. study on the Serb "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia. In the five weeks between Mitterrand's trip to Sarajevo and Newsday's Aug. 2 revelation of systematic slaughter in camps, Serb forces killed thousands of civilians in camps or in massacres in northern Bosnia alone, according to Judge Hanne Sophie Greve of Norway, director of the U.N. study.

Mitterrand's apparent inaction in response to clear warnings of atrocities seems to be a dramatic example of Western failure to cope with the essence of its worst crisis in Europe since World War II.

"I remember very well telling him and showing proof of the existence of concentration camps," Izetbegovic says in a new French film on the war in Bosnia. " . . . To my surprise, he remained silent."

Mitterrand and his current spokesmen declined repeated requests from Newsday for comment. In the film, the French president denied he had been given information about the camps.

The charge that Mitterrand was passive in the face of reports of atrocities that recalled the Nazi Third Reich is contained in "Bosna!" ("Bosnia!"), a documentary directed by Bernard Henri Levy, a French philosopher and writer, which is to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival this weekend.

Coming some 10 weeks after Bosnian Serb rebels began their siege of Sarajevo, Mitterrand's dramatic visit galvanized international public opinion and led to resumption of humanitarian aid flights.

In an interview by Levy, Mitterrand described Izetbegovic vividly as a "very calm" but "anguished" man, and he said he recalled Izetbegovic asking for a lifting of the U.N. arms embargo against Bosnia. Asked by Levy if Izetbegovic had called for Western intervention or had mentioned concentration camps, the French leader replied in the film: "Non, non."

Kemal Muftic, spokesman for Izetbegovic, recalled that both he and the Bosnian president raised the subject of concentration camps in a meeting with Mitterrand because the government had just received new information.

Izetbegovic was "very, very forceful," he said, and the mention of concentration camps provoked an emotional reaction by Mitterrand. Muftic recalled mentioning Omarska and Kereterm in northern Bosnia, which turned out to be two of the most notorious camps.

In a brief press statement at the time, Mitterrand said France is "not taking sides in this war. We are only in favor of the protection of human rights."

Mitterrand was only one of many Western leaders who apparently ignored indications of atrocities in Bosnia. Bush administration officials at the time repeatedly contradicted one another on what they knew about conditions in the camps and when.

Judge Greve, who spent months researching the "ethnic cleansing" of the Prijedor region in northern Bosnia for the U.N. commission investigating war crimes, said public attention after Mitterrand's Sarajevo visit would have made a difference.

She said the Bosnian Serb army would attack a town with artillery, then round up the men of arms-bearing age and take them to camps. Some of the worst massacres in the camps occurred around July 19-20. Following the international outcry caused by news media reports, Bosnian Serbs closed several of the worst of the camps and transferred detainees to other facilities until Western countries agreed to provide asylum.

U.S. officials, who requested anonymity, said that on the basis of interviews with hundreds of former detainees, they estimate that 20,000 to 25,000 people were killed in camps.