Bosnia 1993: Showdown for U.S., U.N. And Shape of the New World Order

By Richard H. Curtiss

"President Clinton said today that the United States was drawing up plans with its allies to conduct an emergency airlift of food and medicine to remote areas of eastern Bosnia and that they expect to unveil the initiative in the next few days."

—Correspondent Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, Feb. 21, 1993

American talk show hosts, who ordinarily are well-informed, shy away from the subject of Bosnia. It's "very complex," a "potential quagmire," or "there are no good guys" they say as they shift the conversation to more familiar subjects. In fact, however, the situation is not that complex, prompt intervention could keep it from spreading before it does become a quagmire and, at present, the good guys and bad guys are distinguishable.

Muslims, from Kuala Lumpur to Detroit, cite European and American reluctance to use military force to halt the slaughter and break the siege to get food to the starving in Bosnia as a classic example of the West's "double standard" when the victims are Muslims. A Saudi told the writer that his son, a university student in the United States, wants to donate "to the Bosnians" during the current month of Ramadan a large sum of money his parents have given him. Asked if he was pleased or concerned by his son's decision, the father responded, "I'm delighted. I was afraid he would ask my permission to go fight there, and I would have felt obliged to grant it."

That's how strongly Muslims feel. However, while a case can be made for the "double standard" charge, Western failure also results from America's quadrennial election-year paralysis, greatly magnified by the inability of the European Community to take unified action except under U.S. military and political cover.

Speaking of the possibility of a more active American role under President Bill Clinton, Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic says hopefully: "We've always thought that they had a better feel for Bosnia and Herzegovina as a multicultural society. America understands what that means, better than Europe. On the other hand, Europe understands the power of nationalism better than the United States."

It may be true that some Europeans, concerned by the rising tide of Arab and Turkish immigrants, are not eager to see a Muslim state in Europe. In the U.S., however, thanks to the power of television, informed public opinion supports the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Some Americans also are aware that restoring peace in Bosnia without legitimizing the gains of the Serbian aggressors would represent another milepost in the attempt to establish order in the post-Cold War world. The skill with which the U. S. organized a U.N.-sanctioned military effort to eject Iraq from Kuwait made it unlikely that any but the most heedless Third World leader again would launch an over-the-border invasion of a neighboring country. It made it all but certain that such a fate would not befall a strategically important country like Kuwait or its other oil producing neighbors.

If the U.S. is as skillful at getting out of Somalia without significant bloodshed as it was at getting in, and leaves at least a nascent Somali government infrastructure to replace the United Nations peacekeepers, it also sets a hopeful precedent for humanitarian intervention in a country of little strategic importance.

Avoiding a Quagmire

In Bosnia, although its history and population mix seem more complex, a "quagmire" can be avoided by applying exactly the same rules: Cross-border invaders will be ejected, as in Kuwait; internal bloodshed will be ended, by protecting the weak against the strong, as in Somalia.

As for the argument that it will be far easier to get in than get out of Bosnia, the same was true in Kuwait and in Somalia. Few would claim, however, that because Saddam Hussain still terrorizes his own people, and that Somalis still live with a clan system, halting the shooting of children in Kuwait and the starvation of children in Somalia should not have been undertaken.

Even more than the two post-Cold War precedents cited, Bosnia represents a potential turning point in the quest for means to keep the strong from tyrannizing the weak. Historians have argued that if the U.S. had joined the League of Nations it helped organize after World War I, the League might have acted to halt Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. If that had occurred, Japan might not have invaded China in 1937. Or, if the League of Nations had taken firm action against Japan, Hitler might not have moved to seize a part of Czechoslovakia in 1938. If Western Europe had not accepted, at Munich, Hitler's claims on Czechoslovakia, an alarmed Josef Stalin might not have made the pact with Hitler to occupy Poland, touching off World War II.

That was a quagmire. Fifty million died, and the world emerged into two generations of cold war in which anything more than "limited intervention" to halt bloody local conflicts was ruled out by the fear of touching off a nuclear holocaust.

In 1993, however, everything is changed. The U.S. is a leading member of the United Nations, and there is no second nuclear-armed superpower pursuing diametrically opposed interests inside and outside the world body. Much of the world is prepared to follow the U.S. Lead, particularly if the objective clearly is humanitarian or to prevent a war from widening.

Both objectives apply in Bosnia, which is a nearly landlocked, mountainous Balkan backwater, strategically important solely to its neighbors. It is psychologically important enough, however, to ignite a major Balkan war involving all of them, including NATO members Greece and Turkey, who would choose opposite sides. It also could involve intervention by Russia or other former Warsaw Pact members, who could end up supporting Serbia to offset Western European, Middle Eastern and U.S. support for Serbia's victims. The still-limited Bosnian war, therefore, cries out for informed and determined U.N. "peacekeeping" to halt its spread. There will be no such intervention, however, without strong U.S. political as well as military leadership.

As The New York Times pointed out in a Feb. 20 editorial entitled "Don't Let Bosnia Starve," that's taking too long to develop. In August, the U.N. Security Council resolved to take "all measures necessary" to deliver food to the Muslim towns and villages under Serbian siege. President Bush offered the U.N. "no matter what it takes" to make good on its pledge. Now Clinton administration Secretary of State Warren Christopher has promised "determined steps" to deliver food to help thwart Serbian "ethnic cleansing." That must involve armored columns capable of escorting food convoys through roadblocks and siege lines, or fighter aircraft escorting low-flying aircraft engaged in food drops, or both.

"There are a lot of children in Bosnia who now can't get food and medicine because . . . the trucks which have been delivering those supplies have been stopped," Clinton said Feb. 20. "We have an agreement to try and start the trucks up again, but we may have to go and drop some aid in to them."

If Serbian opposition develops, few Americans at that point would have serious qualms about escalating military steps, such as air strikes on Serbian artillery and shooting down Serbian aircraft over Bosnia. That was suggested by Clinton last September when he was campaigning for the presidency.

Such measures would be likely to yield quick results. Though the arms they inherited from the Yugoslav army still give the Serbs a qualitative edge, the battle has settled into a stalemate, with Serbs hoping to use starvation where military measures have failed.

The history of the current dispute starts with the chain reaction among the countries of Eastern Europe to the collapse of Communist rule in the former Soviet Union. Fear of the Soviet Union was what had held together the six federated people's republics and two autonomous regions (Vojvodina and Kosovo) comprising Yugoslavia. They were ruled from the Serbian capital of Belgrade for many years by a Croatian communist World War II guerrilla, the late Josip Broz Tito.

As non-Serb majorities in four of the six republics, Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, began moving toward independence, U.S. diplomats, led by Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, a former U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, a former U.S. military attache in Belgrade, advised prudence.

They foresaw that a too-rapid breakup of Yugoslavia, without international guarantees of the borders of the component parts, could lead to bloodshed. The European Community, however, led by Germany which had religious and historical sympathies with Catholic Slovenia and Croatia, rushed to recognize them.

Then Serbia, joined by Montenegro, announced it would not permit non-Serbs to rule over Serbs within the former Yugoslav boundaries, and in 1991 Serbian troops, wearing the uniforms and supported by the heavy weapons and aircraft of the former Yugoslav army, set out to "free" Serbian towns and villages in Croatia and Slovenia.

After a year of fighting, in which 10,000 people were killed and up to a million Serbs and Croats driven from their homes, a force of 10,000 U.N. peacekeepers was assigned to police a cease-fire which left Slovenia virtually untouched, but Serbia occupying a third of the territory that had been assigned to the Republic of Croatia, including Vojvodina.

Throughout the fighting in Croatia, where majority Croats and minority Serbs lived in well-defined towns and villages, a major U.N. objective was to keep the ethnic fighting from spreading to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina's 4.4 million inhabitants, 44 percent were Muslims with historical ties to the 400 years of Ottoman Turkish rule, 31 percent were Eastern Orthodox Serbs with sentimental ties to Russia, and 17 percent were Roman Catholic Croats with religious and cultural ties to the West. All three groups speak the Serbo-Croatian language, but the competing pulls on the Christian Croats and Serbs date back more than a millennium to the division of the Roman Empire between Rome in the West and Constantinople in the East.

Unlike most other areas of the former Yugoslavia, the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina did not live in well-defined enclaves. This was particularly true in the picturesque and sophisticated capital of Sarajevo. Its 380,000 inhabitants, comprising members of all three groups, along with Jews and other Balkan nationalities, lived in adjacent houses and in mixed apartment buildings. Sarajevo and the province of Bosnia and Herzegovina were a working model of multiculturalism, where members of diverse nationalities and sects lived side by side, spoke the same language, attended the same schools and theaters, worked in the same stores and offices, and intermarried frequently and without social ostracism. If there was any city in Europe that lived "the American dream," it was Sarajevo.

Instead of containing the ethnic upheaval, the cease-fire in Croatia only freed up Serbian troops to pursue the dreams of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, a former Communist official who had turned to extreme Serbian nationalism. After the European Community recognized the Republic of Bosnia on April 6, 1992, and the U.S. recognized it the following day, the heavy artillery of the former Yugoslavian army was assembled by Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on the hilltops around Sarajevo to lay siege to the capital, while Serbian militiamen began the "ethnic cleansing" of a "corridor" through central Bosnia to link Serbia with Serbian populated areas in Bosnia and Croatia.

The role of Bosnian Croatians in the fighting has been ambiguous. Already mobilized to help their co-religionists resist the Serbian invasion of Croatia, they at first provided the backbone of the Bosnian government's defense. Because the largely urbanized Slavic Muslim population was slow to organize its own militia, thousands of able-bodied Muslims served, at first, in the Croatian militia.

As the siege lines stabilized along a meandering several-hundred-mile-long Bosnian front, however, fighting sometimes broke out between Croatian and Muslim allies. The Croatian militias were perceived to be profiting both from the transit of supplies to Bosnia from Croatian ports, and the reverse flow of Muslims, Croats and Serbs seeking refuge from towns and villages under siege.

At present, the Serbian militiamen allow food packages from Croatian and Serbian relief organizations through the siege lines for distribution by Christian institutions to Serbs and Croats in Sarajevo. However, the only food reaching Muslims from outside comes from U.N.-supervised relief shipments, which are available equally to all residents of the city.

Nevertheless, with a reorganized Croatian army equipped with tanks, rocket launchers and ground-to-air missiles eager to resume the battle against Serb forces occupying Croatian lands, cooperation between Muslim and Croat forces in Bosnia generally is close, and some arms are reaching the nearly land-locked Muslims through Croatian-held territory.

Largely as a result of their initial, rapid military moves, the Serb forces, now ostensibly under the command of Karadzic's "Serbian Republic of Bosnia," occupy about 70 percent of Bosnia's territory. Meanwhile, according to Bosnian government figures, as of mid-February in Sarajevo, 8,327 persons have been killed or have been missing for more than three months, and 63,451 have been wounded. In Eastern Bosnia, tens of thousands of Muslims have been killed and more than a million others driven from their homes.

After their early successes, however, the Serbs have failed to complete the "ethnic cleansing" of the corridor through Bosnia to Serbian-populated areas of Croatia.

It was to highlight the inability of U.N. escorted food convoys to reach Banja Luka, Bosnia's second largest city, and some 200,000 besieged Muslims in eastern Bosnian enclaves around Cerska, Gorazde Zepa and Srebrenica, and the unwillingness of the 8,000 U.N. troops in Bosnia to use force to accomplish this objective, that prompted the Sarajevo city council to protest by suspending U.N. deliveries of food to Sarajevo. One reason Muslims in the outlying areas have seemed willing to starve to death rather than surrender is the knowledge of what happened to people in areas seized by the Serbs.

"Ethnic Cleansing" Atrocities

Concentration camps were set up for Muslim men, who were starved, beaten, degraded and tortured, apparently largely for the amusement of drunken Serbian guards. The Serbs also executed their prisoners in scenes that recall the systematic mass slaughter of war prisoners committed by both Nazi German and Soviet forces during World War II.

Again reminiscent of World War II, the Serbs set up "rape camps" involving an estimated 20,000 Muslim women. Eyewitness accounts, both from Muslim survivors and Serbian rapists, describe how hundreds of women were gang-raped for days.

Many, ultimately, were killed by their captors. Still greater numbers remained in the camps until they became pregnant, at which time they were released to join the flow of Muslim refugees streaming out of Serb-occupied areas. The twisted goal, apparently, was to debase the women, humiliate the husbands, fathers and brothers who were unable to protect them, and replace the surviving Muslim population with half Serbian, half-Muslim children. The fact that the differences between Serbs, Croats and Slavic Muslims are sectarian rather than ethnic only further illustrates the pointlessness of the cruelties accompanying "ethnic cleansing."

While it has continued, Serbian President Milosovic and Bosnian Serb leader Karadzic have agreed repeatedly to internationally negotiated cease-fires, but permitted Serb commanders on the spot to ignore them or resume firing in a matter of hours. Similarly, although their leaders have agreed to allow U.N. relief convoys to proceed toward besieged areas, local Serbian militia commanders have ignored the agreements. Until late February, only 10 U.N. convoys had reached the eastern enclaves in six months.

These practices have set a puzzling precedent whereby first the Canadian commander of U.N. peacekeeping forces, and subsequently some of his successors including the current U.N. commander, Lt. Gen. Philippe Morillon of France, have reacted to cease-fire violations by suspending relief flights altogether. Although 11 of the 16 international peacekeepers killed to date in Bosnia and Herzegovina indisputably were killed by Serbs, it is the areas protected by Muslims and Croats that suffer from suspension of relief efforts after such incidents. As a result, the pace of Serbian violations has accelerated, and increasingly all sides have come to regard the U.N. peacekeepers with contempt.

In December, however, Acting U.S. Secretary of State Eagleburger announced that the U.S. would back the convening of war crimes trials for those judged guilty of the worst atrocities in Bosnia. Among those he charged with responsibility for war crimes by their subordinates were Serbian leaders Milosovic and Karadzic. Both, however, continued to participate sporadically in negotiations conducted under U.N. auspices in Geneva by former British Foreign Minister David Owen, now Lord Owen, and former U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.

By January, the negotiations had produced a flawed peace plan which would divide Bosnia and Herzegovina into 10 provinces administered by a weak central government. Bosnian Serbs, Muslims and Croats each would constitute majorities in three of the provinces, with a 10th "multiethnic" province around Sarajevo.

Croatian President Franco Tudjman and Bosnian Croat leader Mate Boban eagerly accepted the plan, which would provide Bosnian Croats territory out of proportion to their percentage of the population. Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Muslims accepted "in principle," but both had objections to "the map" of actual adjustments on the ground. The Bosnian government has pointed out that in view of the Serbian record of noncompliance with agreed cease-fires, acceptance of any plan by the Serbs is meaningless unless the U.N. is prepared to force their withdrawal from territories they have seized. Bosnian President Izetbegovic's principal objection to the plan, however, is that in effect it legitimizes the Serbian conquests, and makes inadequate provisions for restoration of the homes and lands seized by Serb occupiers from their Muslim owners.

It was while the newly installed Clinton administration sought to renegotiate the plan to meet some of those Muslim objections that the latest crisis arose over U.N. supervised food distribution. Reacting to the Muslim request that shipments to Sarajevo be halted until food reaches other besieged Muslims, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata suspended the entire U.N. food relief effort.

Ogata's order was reversed the next day by U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who said she had not consulted him before issuing it. Izetbegovic in turn asked the Sarajevo city council to end its ban on relief shipments to Sarajevo when a U.N. convoy reached the besieged, mainly Muslim city of Gorazde. The Bosnian president also declared a unilateral cease-fire on the part of Bosnian government (Muslim and Croatian) forces to facilitate aid shipments. Explaining that his government's actions were directed at forcing the U.N. to pin blame for halting the relief convoys on the Serbs, Bosnian Vice President Zlatko Lagumdzija said, "finally we forced people in the U.N. to name who is actually blocking them."

It was against this background that Clinton announced his willingness to use U.S. aircraft to drop relief supplies into besieged Muslim areas. U.S. transport planes have for some time been engaged in ferrying food into Sarajevo from Germany.

Some U.S. Leaders outside the government are criticizing the Clinton administration for not following through on its campaign promises to take stronger measures. "The powerful rhetoric used to justify the U.S. engagement was, much to my regret, refuted by the toothless and essentially procedural steps that then emanated from the rhetoric, " Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter administration national security adviser, told the House foreign affairs subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East on Feb. 18.

On the same day, the Reagan administration's U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Jeane Kirkpatrick, in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations European subcommittee, called for American air strikes against Serb forces in Bosnia. "I'm entirely ready to see unilateral U.S. action," she said.

Former CIA Director William Colby told the same Senate subcommittee the U.S. should commit 30,000 to 50,000 troops, unilaterally if necessary, to lift the siege of Sarajevo. "We should take the lead and begin to do it," he proposed.

Determined not to alienate the new U.S. administration, no matter how little and how late the measures it is discussing, Izetbegovic officially has "welcomed" the timid U.S. government statements, although he told reporters at the same time that, if he were to speak personally rather than officially, he might react differently.

For months, however, he has reiterated his own fervent plea that, in addition to using aircraft to halt the shelling and starvation of his people, the United Nations also lift the arms embargo. The embargo has had virtually no effect on the Serbian forces. It has limited but not halted modern arms flowing into Croatia. However, it has prevented the Muslim forces from acquiring the artillery and anti-tank weapons they need to halt the pounding of Sarajevo and other besieged Bosnian cities. In February alone, the embargo resulted in the seizure in the Adriatic Sea of two shiploads of arms en route to Bosnia's Muslims.

Since the international community seems unwilling to halt the genocidal actions of Serbia's bellicose Milosevic and his dwindling number of followers inside and outside Serbia, the Bosnian president's plea must be heeded. At least, then, the brave but beleaguered Slavic Muslims and Croatians can themselves be armed for the defense of tiny Bosnia and Herzegovina—and of international morality and the new world order.