Croatia's Choice: War With Serbia or Helping to Carve Up Bosnia

By Richard H. Curtiss

"On the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, our own generation's well-modulated, finely tuned holocaust rolls jauntily along, with the U.N. flag flying high over the proceedings and General Rose congratulating himself on having 'held the line.'"— Syndicated columnist Paul Greenberg, The Washington Times, Feb. 2, 1995

Both wars that began with the breakup of the former Yugoslavia are in a state of remission. The first war began in 1991 with the withdrawal, with German encouragement, from Yugoslavia of two of its constituent republics, Slovenia and Croatia. Since the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army could only reach Slovenia through Croatia, the Roman Catholic Slovenes won their independence quickly. The Roman Catholic Croats won theirs as well, but only after several months of fighting that left some 10,000 dead, and some of their cities near the Adriatic coast heavily damaged. The December cease-fire left Orthodox Christian Serbs in control of about 27 percent of the land inside Croatia's borders, mostly in the area called Krajina, which means "border" in the Serbo-Croatian language.

After the Serb-Croat cease-fire, the people of the Republic of Bosnia also voted to secede from former Yugoslavia. In their cities, towns and villages, the population was mixed, with people of different religions living in the same neighborhoods and even the same apartment buildings, as in the United States. Overall, census figures showed the Bosnians were 44 percent Muslim, 31 percent Serb, 17 percent Croat and the remainder Hungarians, Jews, Albanians and people who called themselves "Yugoslav," meaning they were secular, or the products of mixed marriages, or didn't approve of the breakup of Yugoslavia, or just thought sectarian labels were demeaning. In fact, religious identity had been largely irrelevant until Yugoslavia began to break up, and parties based upon religion began to agitate in a Bosnian society that since the terrible experiences of World War II had been as cosmopolitan and tolerant as any in Eastern Europe.

When the Bosnians voted for independence, however, the Yugoslav army was ready. Starting in April 1992, within weeks it had seized nearly the entire 72 percent of the country presently occupied by Serbs. The Yugoslav army then withdrew, but only after putting all of its Bosnian Serb personnel into special units which it equipped with heavy artillery, tanks and armored personnel carriers to remain behind as an army of occupation.

Initial resistance was conducted largely by a Croat militia, the HVO, originally formed to assist Croatia in its war with Serbia. When the Croat militia became the first line of Bosnian defense, Bosnian Muslims flocked to enlist. Bosnian government forces were slower to organize under a rotating Muslim-Croat-Serb presidency and joint high command. Assisted by a draft, however, they began building a large, multi-sectarian force based largely on Muslim manpower.

The notorious "ethnic cleansing" to remove both Muslims and Croats from Serb-occupied areas began immediately under direct Yugoslav army supervision in areas seized by the Serbs, and continued under the Bosnian Serb forces that remained behind. The object, openly proclaimed, was to incorporate virtually all of Bosnia into a Greater Serbia, consisting of the republics of Serbia and Montenegro that remained in Yugoslavia, the autonomous areas of Vojvodina and Kosovo, and the Serb-controlled areas of Bosnia and Croatia.

The presence of United Nations Protection Forces, who had been in Croatia since 1991, slowed the fighting in Bosnia, which finally narrowed to separate Serb sieges of Sarajevo and some major Bosnian cities on the fringes or just outside of a Muslim-controlled heartland. One by one, these cities were placed under UNPROFOR protection. Although the besieged cities got the headlines, Serb efforts have centered on continuing ethnic cleansing in the vast areas under their control, while the defenders have concentrated on building up the Croat militia, which obtains its arms from Croatia, and the Muslim-led Bosnian government's army.

The latter has been particularly hindered by the U.N. Security Council embargo on exports of arms to any part of the former Yugoslavia. The Serbs started the war well-supplied, and in fact manufacture and export arms. The Croats get all the arms they need via their long borders with other European countries and their extensive seacoast. The Muslim-led Bosnian government has no shortage of well-wishers among oil-producing Middle Eastern nations willing to pay for arms. However, the embargo has made it almost impossible to get arms to Bosnia except at the sufferance of the Croats, who have been alternately uncooperative, or cooperative at a price.

Shifting Fortunes

This ambivalent Croat role underlies the shifting fortunes that have characterized the first three years of the Bosnian war, and that makes its next turn so unpredictable. Even when Croat-organized militiamen were providing the initial defense against Serb forces engulfing Bosnia, there were persistent reports of a deal between Croatia's strongman president, Franjo Tudjman, and Serbia's strongman president, Slobodan Milosevic, to divide Bosnia between them. That this was more than a rumor became evident in 1993 when the Croat HVO militia suddenly turned on its Bosnian government allies, and seized and imprisoned thousands of Muslims serving in HVO ranks. In the year of fighting that followed, Bosnian government troops were forced to defend their remaining territory against the Serbs at the same time they were contesting jointly held areas with the Croats.

It was during this period that the picturesque city of Mostar was devastated, with its Muslim population driven out of some areas by Croats and placed under siege in others in fighting every bit as brutal as anything that has occurred during the three-year Serb siege of Sarajevo.

The ending of the Croat-Bosnian fighting in March 1994 was a brilliant feat of U.S. diplomacy, strongly supported by Germany and Austria. Basically, it consisted of the United States pointing out to the Croats that the pieces of Bosnia they held, which would be largely separated from Croatia by Serb-held Krajina, would be indefensible against a Serb attack. The U.S. instead persuaded the Republic of Croatia and the Muslim-majority Republic of Bosnia to enter into a federation which would have the combined resources to compete with Serbia. Explicit was the promise of U.S.-organized economic support for the federation and implicit was the expectation that NATO would use air strikes and whatever else was necessary to rein in the Serbs. The German government, which the Croats trust, strongly advised Croatia to take the deal.

Although there has been little real coordination in the year that has elapsed since the cease-fire between Muslims and Croats, it has meant the Bosnian army no longer has had to contend with a war on two fronts. U.S. diplomats have urged Tudjman not to intervene in the fighting in Bosnia and not to attack the Serb forces holding Krajina, in order not to trigger renewed intervention from Milosevic's Belgrade-based Yugoslav army forces.

As his army stands idle behind a screen of UNPROFOR troops, however, Tudjman has watched the Serbs consolidate their hold on Krajina while supplying it through Serb-held Bosnia or directly from Serbia via aircraft, in open violation of the U.N. no-fly zone over Bosnia. So, in January, Croatian President Tudjman ordered the UNPROFOR troops to withdraw from Croatian territory by June 30.

While the clock ticks on Tudjman's ultimatum to the U.N., it also is ticking on the Jimmy Carter-negotiated four-month cease-fire in Bosnia, which began on Jan. 1. Almost certainly the Bosnian fighting will resume by May 1, if not before. Therefore, sometime before June 30, Tudjman has to make a crucial decision. If he tries to seize Krajina, he risks war with Milosevic's Yugoslavia, which may still have the strongest army in the Balkans. If the U.N. stands idly by, as it has in Bosnia, the Serbs might even launch another massive invasion and carve up Croatia just as effectively as they have carved up Bosnia.

If, on the other hand, Tudjman reverts to the original plan with Milosovic to carve up Bosnia with Serbia, the Serbs might allow him to reoccupy Krajina and some nearby portions of Bosnia in return for giving the Serbs a free hand to keep all of the Bosnian lands they occupy.

The result would be extreme instability in the Balkans, with the Bosnian Muslims becoming the "new Palestinians," a restless, aggrieved people deprived of their homeland by Great Power machinationsand bent on returning. Already 700,000 of them have been displaced, and another 200,000 Muslims are said to be dead or missing. That surely would be a major catalyst for the much-discussed "clash of civilizations" between Muslims and the Greek Orthodox, if not the entire Christian, world. Meanwhile, the Serb success in seizing and holding Bosnia in defiance of the United Nations would spark more brushfire wars all along the fault-line between Islamic and Orthodox Christian civilizations. Three wars of this kind already have broken out in Azerbaijan, Chechnya, and Abkhazia. Whether they will be extinguished, or will spread along a two-thousand mile frontier deep into Central Asia depends largely on what the United Nations does right now about the Bosnian war that is dividing Europe.

And therein lies the problem. When the delegates of Britain and France lecture American delegates at U.N., NATO, European Community and other international conclaves about the consequences of meddling in matters whose ramifications they don't understand, it is the grossest hypocrisy. Basically, as the discreet silence of the Germans through such diatribes indicates, the British and French regard the breakup of Yugoslavia as a replay of events during World Wars I and II. Or as someone put it, referring to the beginning of World War I with the assassination by a Serb of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand on a bridge in Sarajevo, "odd-numbered world wars begin in Bosnia."

Before generalizing about the present European gridlock over Bosnia, some exceptions have to be made. Margaret Thatcher, an unabashed opponent of over-the-border aggression wherever it occurs, has made it clear that had she been prime minister of Britain in 1992, the Serb occupation of Bosnia would have been rolled back just as surely as was the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait a year earlier.

Another exception has to be made for the French public, where sentiment, particularly among that country's articulate left-wing intellectuals, is overwhelmingly pro-Bosnian.

However, those in power in both countries have no problem with the creation of a greater Serbia for the same reason they encouraged the formation of a Serb-dominated Yugoslavia during World Wars I and II. They see it, along with a strong Russia, as a Slavic barrier to German economic, cultural and, God forbid, military expansion to the east. If the British and French public construes the silent support by their governments for the Serbs as merely anti-Muslim or anti-Turk, so much the better, since both are unpopular in Western Europe these days. But the real British and French motivation is their fear that nothing but a recreation of the alliances of the first half of this century will stop the eventual domination of Europe by the German dynamo in its midst.

The Germans are fully aware of this, and also aware that their hasty recognition of the first two breakaway republics hastened the disintegration of former Yugoslavia into its present catastrophic state. But the fact that Britain and France were right to urge the world to go slow on such recognition at the beginning does not mean they are right about what to do with the mess in the Balkans now.

Yugoslavia cannot be reconstructed. The focus must be on containing the damage, and keeping it from spreading. Here the U.S. is right, and if a divided Europe cannot act decisively without risking further cleavage along its own "Germanic-non Germanic" fault lines, then the world's only remaining superpower is quite justified in going it alone. Ninety percent of the European people themselves will be grateful.

All of the Muslim world, which is seething with frustration at the invoking of an unjust U.N. embargo to keep help from reaching Bosnian Muslim victims of aggression, will be relieved. One of the principal swords of the Iranian and other Islamic fundamentalists who are whipping up anti-Western sentiments from Algeria to the Philippines will be sheathed.

On Feb. 5, 1994, after one mortar shell killed 68 civilians in a crowded Sarajevo marketplace, the newly arrived UNPROFOR commander, Lt. Gen. Michael Rose, threatened airstrikes if the Serbs did not withdraw their heavy weaponry and halt the random shelling of Sarajevo. It worked, and Sarajevans emerged into the sunlight from the basement shelters in which they had huddled for nearly two years.

As the world watched, however, General Rose seemed to become a craven, contradictory and contemptible commander, humiliating the United Nations, disgracing NATO, and opening the widest breach in U.S.- British/French relations since the Suez crisis of 1956. It was not fear of the army of Serbia, which at this point is probably less formidable than the army of Iraq, that put jelly into General Rose's spine, however. It was fear of the disapproval of the British high command, and the waffling, weaseling hypocrisy of the present British government.

During the same period the U.S. has done considerable waffling of its own, dropping its advocacy of aerial responses to Serb outrages in order to comply with the appeasement of the British, French and Russian members of the five-nation contact group, which has declined to put muscle behind its peace plan giving the Muslim-Croat confederation 51 percent of Bosnia and the Bosnian Serbs 49 percent. Five American career diplomats had resigned or retired to protest U.S. appeasement policies by the end of 1994. In January, when U.S. Ambassador to Bosnia Victor Jackovich protested repeated and demeaning U.S. attempts to deal with the Bosnian Serbs in Pale, he was called to Washington for consultations while another U.S. special emissary, Charles Thomas, went first on his own, and then with the contact group to Pale, to be rebuffed both times. At this writing Jackovich is being given a new assignment.

After a series of public humiliations of American emissaries by Serb leaders, it's important to demonstrate to Croatian Prime Minister Tudjman that even President Clinton and Secretary of State Warren Christopher can learn from their mistakes. They must assure Tudjman that the U.S. is prepared to act on its own to ensure that his shaky confederation with Bosnia stands, and to blunt whatever tactics the Milosevic government in Belgrade may devise to tempt him into turning, again, on his Bosnian neighbors.

It's also important that President Clinton take advantage of the bi-partisan support he would have for helping the Bosnian victims of aggression. As Republican Senate Leader Bob Dole points out, the policy he and House Speaker Newt Gingrich advocate of lifting the U.N. embargo, arming and training the Bosnian army, and providing it whatever air support it needs to persuade the Serbs to withdraw from land occupied and "cleansed" by Serb forces is not just a Republican policy. It is exactly the same policy Clinton advocated in his 1992 campaign, and tried but failed to put into effect in 1993 and 1994 because of British and French opposition.

It's past time for American leaders to follow their own instincts in Bosnia, where the world has watched with horror as Serbs re-enact the European holocaust with impunity—making a mockery of every world leader who's ever vowed, "Never Again." In Bosnia the morally right thing is doable, is in the U.S. national interest, is in the interest of long-term world peace and stability, and would enjoy overwhelming American and international public support.