Why Europe Failed to Halt The Genocide in Bosnia

By Ben Cohen

There is no doubt that Europe has singularly failed to resolve the conflict in Bosnia. Neither can one ignore the irony that as the European Community races toward unification, its increasingly wretched neighbors in the east and south face violent disintegration. The war in the former Yugoslavia threatens to become a model for other parts of the post-communist world, particularly in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) that emerged from the fragmented former Soviet Union. The common denominator is the emergence of new state forms based on national, rather than civic, identity.

Perhaps better than anywhere else, Serbia represents the demented logic behind nationalist exclusivism. After former Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito's death in 1980, the Serb leadership became progressively more immersed in the drive for a "Greater Serbia,'' even if that meant sacrificing Yugoslavia. Serbia revealed its intentions during the 1980s with its campaign of repression in the predominantly Albanian province of Kosovo. By 1991, the Yugoslav federation had been plunged into full-scale war, beginning with a pitiful attempt by the Yugoslav Army (JNA) to prevent Slovenia's secession, leading to bloody conflict in Croatia and then entering its genocidal phase with the war in Bosnia.

As the war in Bosnia marks its first anniversary, the real costs in human terms are well known: almost two million refugees, who face a precarious future in an unwelcoming Europe. Approximately 140,000 dead and a further 750,000 ''missing,'' according to figures released by the Institute for Public Health in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. Nearly 30,000 women systematically raped by Serb insurgents, according to the findings of a Commission of Inquiry headed by the UK's Dame Anne Warburton. It is a war that brought obscure Balkan villages into the international spotlight and revealed cruelties not witnessed in Europe since World War II. In spite of all this, the 12 countries of the European Community continued to insist that negotiations were the only path.

European reluctance to support a military intervention with clear political goals proved to be the main obstacle to securing a settlement. The litany of European failures is astonishing—numerous cease-fire agreements have been broken and none of the main commitments undertaken by the Serb side have been respected. This should not have come as a surprise. The Serbs had no reason to curb their campaign so long as the EC refused to flex its muscles to punish previous infractions. Hence, Belgrade received the green light to organize, as JNA General Zivota Panic once put it, ''all Serbs in one state.''

The EC's acquiescence to Serbia's diktat outraged the Bosnian public, infuriated the Islamic world and vexed the United States. On the moral level, the EC clearly failed to implement the main lesson of the Nuremburg Tribunal: "Never Again.'' However, this moral failure also carried a strategic dimension.

The EC's collapse in the face of genocide in the former Yugoslavia raises the question of whether the Community can ever operate a coherent foreign policy. This is the key challenge to those in Europe trying to devise a security architecture beyond the Atlantic alliance, framed during the Cold War. Bosnia is the acid test.

The EC's first mistake was to classify the Bosnian conflict as a "civil war," based on the assumption of centuries-old ethnic hatreds. European leaders refused to recognize that the Bosnian war had an international character. This is not the case at either U.N. headquarters or in the U.S. Addressing the London Conference on the former Yugoslavia in August 1992, U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali declared that as Bosnia had been admitted to the United Nations, the conflict was an international one. In February 1993, U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher criticized the plan for the division of Bosnia by EC/U. N. negotiators Lord Owen and Cyrus Vance with a defense of Bosnia's sovereignty. Yet for the past 12 months, EC politicians have continued to insist that the conflict is a civil one, dragging out the principle of non-intervention in such wars as justification.

Behind the Failure

The EC cannot claim that it was not aware of Yugoslavia's imminent eruption. The Kosovo events are ample proof of that. However, the EC did not make its first serious foray into the Yugoslav crisis until May 1991, when EC President Jacques Delors offered Yugoslav leaders a series of economic incentives to avoid violent conflict. Nevertheless, this was too little, too late. From that moment onward, the agenda was set by Belgrade. Under the leadership of President Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia rejected all pleas for arbitration and territorial compromise.

Neither was the situation helped by the EC's internal squabbling. On the one side, Britain and France, backed initially by the U. S., were determined to keep the Yugoslav federation intact, ignoring the fact that the Yugoslav concept was merely a cover for Serbia's ambitions. On the other, Germany pushed for immediate recognition of Croatia and Slovenia.

The position of Britain and France was based on a reluctance to allow Yugoslavia to break up into nation-states; the Balkans are an historic point of tension in Europe, having seen two wars in 1912-13. Renewed intra-state conflict, the argument went, would inevitably ignite regional war and pull the EC in.

For the Germans, the main concern was to lead the response to the EC's first foreign policy challenge, simultaneously revitalizing its historic influence over the western Balkans. (In 1941, Nazi Germany sponsored a fascist Croatian state which also included Bosnia.) By pressing for the recognition of Croatia, Germany ignored the advice of the EC's arbitration commission led by jurist Robert Badinter, which concluded that Croatia should not be recognized until the conditions of its Serb minority were improved.

Matters came to a head on Jan. 15, 1992, when Croatia was recognized by the EC. Pushed into a corner, Bosnia declared its independence. Instead of safeguarding Bosnia's security, threatened by Serbia's predatory moves, the EC promptly embarked on carving up the republic into ethnically based provinces. It is this process which has culminated in the Vance-Owen plan.

As Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic once remarked, the demographic map of Bosnia "is like a Jackson Pollock painting." The republic's nationalities are so intermingled that division is only possible through aggression. Before the war, approximately 4 million Bosnians were divided into 109 municipalities, of which only 32 had an absolute Serb majority. Additionally, in a country where the rate of intermarriage was as high as 30 percent, the very notion of ethnic majorities/minorities was a difficult one. Under the EC's guidelines for Bosnia, more than 50 percent of the inhabitants would find themselves living as minorities in unstable mini-states.

The EC advocates ethnic division— which it terms "cantonization"—as a substitute for intervention. In doing so, it is violating the principle of sovereignty and accepting Serbia's ethnic cleansing as a fact. This is grist to the mill of both Serb and Croat nationalists, who will receive 42 percent and 30 percent of Bosnian territory, respectively, on the terms of the Vance-Owen plan.

Will Europe Change?

Can the EC change its position? The record is not encouraging. The Community has openly supported partition. It has ignored massive violations of human and civil rights. Until recently, it remained silent in the face of more than 300 Serb violations of the U.N. "no-fly" zone over Bosnia. By offering only flimsy moral support for U.S. efforts, the EC is in many ways responsible for the backtracking of the Clinton administration on military intervention and lifting the arms embargo on the Bosnians.

Moreover, two members of the EC have been openly obstructive. Greece has become a trusted ally of Serbia, helping to break the sanctions on Belgrade and blocking recognition of Macedonia which, according to Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, should not be allowed to get in the way of a common border between Serbia and Greece.

Also, in December 1992, Bosnian President Izetbegovic charged that "Britain is the biggest brake on any progress. " In part because of the presence of British troops on the ground in Bosnia, John Major's government has obstructed all long-term political and military initiatives, much to the chagrin of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and prominent figures in the opposition Labor and Liberal-Democrat Parties. British Defense Secretary Malcolm Riflcind is perhaps the best known exponent of the view that Bosnia is undergoing a civil war and that efforts should concentrate on the provision of humanitarian aid.

The EC must realize that there are strategic interests in the Balkans. The issue is not so much whether aid reaches eastern Bosnia or electricity functions in Sarajevo.

At stake are wider principles of sovereignty, democracy and minority rights. The current approach of appeasement flies in the face of a range of such international conventions as the U.N. Charter, the 1948 Genocide Convention and the 1966 U.N. Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. If these have no validity in Bosnia, then they can hardly apply in Russia, Georgia, Romania and elsewhere.

Political will is required if Europe is to intervene effectively in Bosnia and mediate other conflicts. Centrally, Europe has to cooperate in a military venture which uses air power to neutralize the primitive but devastating Serbian artillery, arms the 200,000-strong Bosnian defense and provides logistical ground and sea support. Financial aid and political guidance are required for postwar Bosnia to become a democratic, multiethnic state. Finally, the rest of the Balkans needs to be kept under control, by recognizing Macedonia and securing a settlement for Kosovo in keeping with the wishes of its inhabitants.

Such a strategy requires a huge amount of resources. Nor is it easy. Even so, it can be done, especially with the support of the U.S. and the Islamic states. The alternative road leads to a regional war, to ethnic cleansing as an acceptable norm of behavior and to an eventual intervention that will be far more costly in human and financial terms. Crucially, European governments will be at permanent loggerheads with both the Islamic world and with European Muslims. As the Asian commentator Mowahid Shah pointed out at the March 15-16 Washington Conference on Bosnia-Herzegovina and Balkan Security, "Many Muslims ask, if this is the way the world responds to a largely secular Muslim population, what is in store for us?"

Additionally, together with the international community, the EC has accepted that the Vance-Owen plan will have to be backed up by force. While Vance and Owen have, mentioned the unlikely figure of 25,000 .ground troops being needed, NATO has arrived at an estimate of 100,000. If Europe does consent to policing the ethnic division of Bosnia, the Balkans will find itself transformed into another Northern Ireland. The real cost, though, will be to Europe itself. In place of the dream of unity, there will remain only a void.