Bosnia: The Virus That Ate the U.N., NATO and U.S.-European Unity

By Richard H. Curtiss

"If there is a message (from current Bosnian fighting) it is that this can go on for 10 years or 15 years or 20 years. We are doing what we can with what we have. By surviving, we are doing well.

—Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic, March 21, 1995.

If only U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali hadn't taunted lame duck President George Bush with the statement that the war in Bosnia was a "rich [read 'white'] man's war" and Somalia was a "poor [read 'black'] man's war." With time and resources for humanitarian intervention in only one place before he handed over to President-elect Bill Clinton, Bush therefore did the "politically correct" thing and sent the Marines to lead the U.N. charge into Somalia.

The ostensible purpose was the real and only purpose of the U.N. intervention. It was to keep people from starving to death. It seems likely that between 200,000 and 300,000 lives were saved. There was no geopolitical significance to the action.

Fortunately for the Somalis, by the time militiamen of subclan rivals Mohammed Farah Aidid and Ali Mahdi Mohammed had finished looting the last office complex and air terminal behind the departing U.N. forces, rains had restored fertility to the land. Somalia could muddle through without a central government—until the next cyclical drought. The U.N. action therefore had "done no harm," or at least the harm was insignificant compared to the good it did.

Had Bush chosen otherwise, however, the arrival of a U.S.-led coalition force might have nipped in the bud the vicious Bosnian war, which looks increasingly like the slow fuse that could blow up the Balkans and perhaps even set off the Muslim-Christian "clash of civilizations" that otherwise might become a cliché long before anything remotely like it actually happens.

Had Clinton acted on his initial instincts and election campaign promises to contribute U.S. military muscle to an international intervention to end the fighting, which already had taken some 10,000 lives in Croatia and perhaps 200,000 in Bosnia at the time Clinton was inaugurated, the six constituent republics and two autonomous regions of former Yugoslavia might now be co-existing.

By Clinton's third year in office, however, options for a settlement without more fighting that could draw in virtually all parts of former Yugoslavia and several of its neighbors are narrowing. Already the conspicuous failure of European-directed Balkan diplomacy has critically weakened U.S. popular support for the U.N., mortally wounded whatever was left of the U.S.-British "special relationship," and revealed dangerous political fault lines through the heart of NATO and the European Union remaining from the disastrous European implosions of World Wars I and II.

Bitterness over Bosnia may also set into motion again the grinding Muslim and Christian tectonic plates that underlay so much of the bitter history of the Middle East, the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia from the Dark Ages right up to the early 20th century. Paradoxically, this ongoing disaster in the "soft underbelly" of Europe would provide an opportunity for an American president with the vision and decisiveness so conspicuously lacking in the Clinton administration. Strong U.S. leadership to end the three-year-old Serb genocide against the Muslims of Bosnia could begin to refill some of America's once-brimming reservoirs of Middle Eastern trust and admiration that have been so thoroughly drained by heedless and unconditional U.S. subsidization of the reckless and anachronistic Zionist experiment in "ethnic cleansing" in the heart of the Islamic world.

To the confusion of Arabs and Muslims everywhere, while American instincts have been unrealistic, misinformed and driven by domestic politics from the beginning in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, the opposite has been true in Bosnia. There it is Britain and France that have set Western European footsteps on an immoral and ultimately disastrous path, while the U.S. has stood irresolutely aside, seeing the folly but lacking the will to lead the way out of it.

At this point there are as many different ways of looking at the Bosnian quagmire as there are nations observing it. To Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic it represents carrying his demagogic "Greater Serbia" nationalism beyond the sustaining capability of his energetic but small country. He would like to consolidate his gains and cut his losses by accepting the "contact group" plan that would award 49 percent of Bosnia to the 33 percent of its population who are Serbs in return for a lifting of the United Nations sanctions that are destroying Serbia's poor and middle classes.

The longer the war simmers on in Bosnia, the more likely Milosevic is to lose power to even more radical nationalist rivals. These include Serbian gangsters who startlingly resemble the sectarian militia commanders who almost destroyed Lebanon over the course of its 15-year civil war.

Another Milosevic rival is Dr. Radovan Karadzic, the former psychiatrist who has become the abominable-no-man leader of the Bosnian Serbs. For Karadzic the present situation is even grimmer. If he accepts the contact group plan, his fiefdom will be absorbed in fact if not in name into Milosevic's "greater Serbia." If he continues to resist the peace plan, and Milosevic deprives him of ammunition for his heavy artillery and spare parts for his tanks, his 85,000-man army eventually could be defeated by the 200,000 men mobilized by the Muslim-led Bosnian government. Time, therefore, no longer favors the Bosnian Serbs, unless they regain the full backing of Serbia and Montenegro, which together still call themselves "Yugoslavia."

The Croats are an even greater enigma. Croatian President Franjo Tudjman is a mirror image of Milosevic. A Communist-era holdover who retained power by abandoning Communist ideology for an even more radical Croat nationalism, Tudjman has been ready since the breakup of former Yugoslavia to cut a deal with the Serbs at the expense of the Bosnians.

In exchange for carte blanche from Milosevic to incorporate back into Croatia the two large and important Croatian areas presently controlled by indigenous Serbs, Tudjman undoubtedly would be willing to carve up Bosnia, incorporating into Croatia the city of Mostar and large areas bordering Croatia's Dalmatian coast, and letting Serbia keep virtually all of the Bosnian territory presently occupied by Bosnian Serbs. However, Tudjman knows that if he forces the issue with the Serbs in Croatia now, it will renew Croatia's war with Milosevic's "Yugoslav" army—a war Croatia probably would lose.

This is the background for Tudjman's seemingly inconsistent dealings with the U.N. in which he first demanded total withdrawal of UNPROFOR troops from Croatia between April 1 and June 30, and then settled for withdrawal of half of the force on condition that its "mandate" be redefined. Tudjman wants UNPROFOR troops to stop patrolling the cease-fire lines between Croats and Serbs within Croatia, which he fears will give permanence to the Serb enclaves within his country. Instead he wants UNPROFOR to patrol the former borders of Croatia and interdict the flow of supplies reaching those Serb enclaves from Serbia across Croatia's former Serbian and Bosnian borders.

Credit for preventing the cynical Serb-Croat carveup of Bosnia, in which Bosnia's 44 percent Muslim population might or might not have been left in possession of a tiny central Bosnian heartland, must go largely to the Clinton administration, quietly backed by Germany. Tudjman was persuaded to accept the Croatian-Bosnian confederation—which would preserve the borders of the two separate republics while merging many of their institutions—by promises of U.S. and German financial aid and political backing for entry into the European Union and, like Slovenia, possible eventual entry into the Partnership for Peace and NATO.

Taking the confederation route would halt the "ethnic cleansing" by the Serbs and possibly create the economic and military framework of a power strong enough to roll back some Serb gains and resist further Serb pressures. If the precarious and so-far largely theoretical "confederation" takes on a life of its own, all nations of Europe and the Middle East will owe the U.S. and Germany a profound debt of gratitude for halting a dispute that is on the verge of breaking out of Bosnia and embroiling the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia and the Serb-administered former autonomous area of Kosovo. Should that happen, Bulgaria and Greece very likely would be drawn into the fighting on the side of the Serbs, and Albania and Turkey would be drawn in to support the Muslim 90 percent of the population of Kosovo as well as the Muslim Albanians of Macedonia. If that happened, the so-far facetious saying that "odd-numbered world wars begin in Sarajevo" could become grim reality.

Motivated more by history than logic, however, Britain and France are risking just such a catastrophe by working with Russia within the contact group at cross-purposes with the U.S. and Germany. The Russians would like to see their fellow Slavs achieve a "Greater Serbia" as a bulwark against Muslim influence along Russian borders.

Neither the British nor the French would object to such a strengthening of a Slavic-Orthodox bloc in the Balkans. To them it would be a counterweight to the increasing economic domination of Europe by Germany, supported by some of the Catholic countries of Central Europe.

In anachronistically seeking to revive the "Allied powers-Central powers" European dichotomy of World War I, British and French foreign policy makers seem oblivious to the fact that their efforts are tightening U.S.-German bonds at their own expense. An explanation of British attitudes is the lack of long-range foreign policy vision of the John Major government, a deficiency which may surpass even that of the plodding Clinton administration. France seems predictably motivated by the anti-Americanism that has characterized most of its governments since the end of World War II.

Given this volatile background, what are the alternatives in Bosnia when the four-month "cease-fire" that never fully took hold ends formally on April 30? The best alternative would be acceptance by Karadzic of the contact group plan. Whether or not this happens, another positive development would be sincere implementation by Croatia of its confederation with Bosnia.

This would signal Tudjman's final abandonment of any plan to carve up Bosnia with Serbia, and would face the Serbs with a coordinated Croatian-Bosnian force capable of halting and possibly rolling back Serb expansion. Both of these desirable alternatives would be greatly furthered by measured responses by NATO aircraft to Serb provocations, since they would convince Karadzic that he cannot hold all of the land he occupies militarily.

In the absence of such U.S.-led NATO and U.N. initiatives, anything can happen. Right now, Russia is seeking to tempt the Bosnian government into a harebrained plan to ally itself with Serbia to betray the Croats. Any Bosnian government that fell in with such a plan would deserve to lose.

Nevertheless, it's important to keep the Bosnians from grabbing at such straws by giving them the hope that if the U.S. cannot persuade the U.N. to authorize NATO airstrikes to prevent further Serb attacks on U.N. safe zones, the U.S. unilaterally will lift the arms embargo that hinders the growing Bosnian army from protecting its own people and borders.

What is certain is that if the Serbs remain in possession of 72 percent of Bosnia, the war that is resuming there will continue for as long as it takes to at least partially roll back the Serb occupation. The fighting could flare up and jump to neighboring republics, setting the Balkans on fire. Or the fire could smolder for generations, as has the Palestine problem in the absence of U.S. leadership in pursuit of a just and equitable solution.

Leaving the Bosnia problem unattended is profoundly threatening to European and Middle Eastern stability. Admittedly it is more difficult to deal with in 1995 than it would have been in 1992 at the end of the Bush administration or in 1993 at the beginning of the Clinton presidency. Nevertheless, so long as the problem remains confined to Bosnia, it is considerably less difficult to contain now than it may be in the future. Because British-French-Russian initiatives have failed so conspicuously, the opportunity has never been greater for an exercise of U.S. initiative and leadership toward a just settlement in Bosnia and Croatia in compliance with human rights and international law.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.