The United States has offered a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest and conviction of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia and others indicted by an international tribunal for war crimes in the Balkans.

Mr. Milosevic and the former Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic are the most prominent among the suspects wanted by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

President Clinton said today at a news conference that the reward was not meant to encourage the assassination of Mr. Milosevic, nor to encourage bounty hunters, but was intended as an incentive because Serbia does not comply with extradition treaties. In the case of Mr. Milosevic, whose whereabouts are well known, officials said they assumed that at some point he might travel outside Serbia and that the reward would still apply.

General Mladic has lived in Belgrade for the last three years, and the Clinton Administration chose not to put pressure on Mr. Milosevic to hand him over when the Yugoslav leader was still the Administration's partner in the search for peace in the Balkans.