Although Mr Yeltsin is still in a sanatorium outside Moscow recovering from a heart attack, Mr Chirac said the pilots would not have been released without his assistance.The French praise for Mr Yeltsin contrasted with the lukewarm view taken of US efforts in the crisis. As events turned out, the Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, once again demonstrated his ability to bring the Bosnian Serbs into line by helping France's efforts to free the airmen.French officials suggested that the successful outcome owed most to the work of three presidents - Mr Chirac, Mr Milosevic of Serbia and Boris Yeltsin of Russia. The Defence Minister, Charles Millon, said yesterday that France would have refused to sign the Dayton peace treaty if they had not been freed in time for today's signing ceremony in Paris.He also said France would have insisted that United Nations sanctions on Serbia, imposed because of Belgrade's role in instigating the wars in former Yugoslavia, should not be lifted in their entirety. Mr Pasqua, when in government, and Mr Marchiani were once criticised for taking foreign policy initiatives, particularly in relation to Islamic countries, that went beyond their official responsibilities.However, if the government was surprised by Mr Chirac's activation of Mr Marchiani as an alternative diplomatic channel to the Serbian leadership, it was giving nothing away yesterday.

The Foreign Minister, Herve de Charette, said: "The plan was to have as many contacts as possible and Mr Marchiani was part of that effort."The airmen, Captain Frederic Chiffot and Lieutenant Jose Souvignet, were shot down near the Bosnian Serb headquarters of Pale on 30 August as they took part in Nato air strikes against Bosnian Serb targets. Mr Chirac, who was at the airport, made a point of calling out to Mr Marchiani: "Bravo, bravo." The President evidently selected Mr Marchiani for the mission because of the former agent's experience in handling hostage crises. An intimate associate of Charles Pasqua, a fellow Corsican and former interior minister, Mr Marchiani was involved in efforts to free French hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s.Liberation speculated that Mr Chirac's decision to use Mr Marchiani had angered the government, especially the foreign and defence ministries, which might have viewed the mission to Belgrade as an unacceptable form of "parallel diplomacy". His mission became public knowledge when he returned with the captives on Tuesday to the military airport at Villacoublay, west of Paris. Jean-Charles Marchiani, a Corsican who now holds the senior government job of prefect in the Vars department of southern France, secretly visited Belgrade at the end of last week.

Many Muslims are unconvinced Croats in western Herzegovina have given up hope of uniting their land with Croatia. It it equally clear that Bosnian Serb leaders view the accord as temporary, to be replaced one day by unification of all Serb lands.Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic may never stand trial in a UN court for alleged war crimes but even if they stepped down, their replacements are more likely to seek closer relations with Serbia than to rebuild Bosnia in co-operation with the Muslims and Croats.. A former French intelligence agent, acting as the personal envoy of President Jacques Chirac, played a key part in securing the release of two French airmen from Bosnian Serb captivity, Western officials said yesterday. Whatever the judgment, it is likely to implant a desire for revenge in one camp or the other.Uncertainty also surrounds the future of Sarajevo, where several districts in Bosnian Serb hands are to be handed over to the Muslim-Croat federation. If the settlement is to uphold the principle of mutual national tolerance rather than countenance the enforced separation of each Bosnian nationality from the other two, it is vital that Serbs in the rebel sector of Sarajevo should not abandon their homes for the 49 per cent of Bosnia allocated to the Bosnian Serb Republic.