Holbrooke's Plan Contains Problems for Bosnia and Peace

By Ian Williams

After three years in which massacre after massacre left U.N. peacekeepers unmandated to interfere in Bosnia, suddenly the U.N. and NATO found that the same resolutions that had left them inactive all this time could, after all, let them act in a way that gave every appearance of firmness.

While seeming to punish the Serbs, the current strategy still preserves an idea of moral equivalence between the murderers and their victims. For example, why shouldn't the Bosnian government seek to retake Banja Luka, seized from it by force and where the Serbs' ethnic cleansing has been condemned by the Security Council? But not only did the U.S. support a Russian resolution asking the Bosnians to stop, the Serb forces took advantage of the pause to reinforce their troops there—with heavy weapons moved from around Sarajevo. Those heavy weapons were unscathed by the NATO bombing, since its purpose explicitly was not to reduce the Serb advantage in hardware.

The purpose of these raids was to force the Serbs to say yes to a partition plan that is totally unfair to their victims, the Bosnians. When it first was adopted, the rationale was that it rewarded the victors, no matter how sleazy and evil they were. In the light of the nationalist Serbs' recent military defeats, the Contact Group plan to give the Pale regime 49 percent of Bosnia now rewards defeated aggressors and war criminals.

To give the "the Serbs" almost half of a country in which the Serb population originally was a little over 30 percent of the total is hardly justice, but to make it even more immoral, it assumed that the psychopaths in Pale represented all the Serbs in the country. In fact, not only have many fled to other countries, but many ethnic Serbs still live in Bosnian government-controlled territory, and have played an active part in defending it.

The conflicts over the 1948 partition of Palestine would suggest that the partition of territory, and particularly if it is disproportionate to populations, is not likely to achieve a long-term peaceful solution. Add to Palestine the still continuing repercussions of the partition of Ireland in 1919 and of India and Pakistan 30 years later and you can also see that the British, involved in all three efforts, have ample experience of its inefficacy, which makes their support of it in Bosnia even more disturbing. So what is Richard Holbrooke's excuse for supporting it?

Elections, of course, are not far from the minds of White House planners. Many observers see the present belatedly vigorous U.S. approach on Bosnia as a direct result of the success of the Dole-Lieberman bill on lifting the arms embargo. Since Britain and France had threatened to withdraw if this were implemented, the U.S. commitment to provide ground troops to cover the retreat would have been triggered just as the election campaign moved into overdrive. Hence the rush for a peace agreement—any peace agreement, as rapidly as possible. The NATO bombers' laser sights may have been pointing at Serbs, but their target was the Dole election campaign.

The Contact Group plan now rewards defeated aggressors and war criminals.

Despite that, the bombing clearly has helped the Croats and Bosnians in their offensive. The big question now is to what extent the U.S. will restrain President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia. At a dinner in London, he obligingly sketched in the truth behind all the rumors about his deals with President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia when he illustrated the pact with a map drawn on a table napkin for a British politician. In effect, it means a carve-up of Bosnia between Belgrade and Zagreb with little or nothing left for the Bosnians.

Tudjman's forces' behavior during the siege of Mostar was as vicious and criminal as anything the Serb nationalists have perpetrated, and few Bosnians have any illusions about his good will toward them. The arms embargo has been very leaky for the Croats, who have long seacoasts, many airfields, and generous friends in the U.S. and Western Europe. It has been much less so for the Bosnian government, which is forced to use Croatia as a conduit for weapons. By keeping 50 percent of whatever is shipped to the Bosnians through Croatia, Tudjman has made sure that the Bosnians have not been getting enough heavy weapons to mount a serious challenge to any later Croat ambitions. It will take a determined and explicit effort by Western leaders to stop Tudjman's plans. But there have been precious few signs of that from any of them, unless an election is involved.

In Western Sahara, U.N. Gradually Acceding to Morocco

Another small group of people being sold out by the U.N. is the Sahrawis, except, of course, that they have seniority over almost everyone except the Palestinians on this score. It was over 20 years ago that the Security Council told Morocco to get out of Western Sahara and allow its people to choose between independence and absorption by Morocco. Now, Human Rights Watch has confirmed what many other observers have deduced—that U.N. officials seem to be conspiring to legitimize the Moroccan occupation by accepting Moroccan terms for conducting the referendum. Five years ago the first official to head MINURSO, as the U.N. operation there is called, promised correspondents that it would all be over in one year, because all eligible voters had been listed in the last census the Spanish had carried out before they left.

Since then, the Moroccans have sought to admit three times as many voters, most of whom do not actually live in the territory, and the U.N. has handed over the registration process to the parties involved. The Moroccans have stopped would-be voters approaching the U.N. to register, and the U.N. has simply said that they can try again later. Once again acceding to the occupiers' demands, the U.N. has restricted observations by journalists and NGOs to 30 minutes at the registration office in Laayoune, the capital.

Now practically abandoned by their Algerian former sponsors, perhaps one small weapon for the Sahrawis is that Security Council members are getting exasperated at the $5 million a month the operation costs while the Moroccans stall. In the end, as with the Palestinians and the Bosnians, the issue is not one of legality or of justice but of the political will of the major powers to back up what the U.N. is supposed to do. The real question is whether Washington is prepared to apply pressure on Morocco, and the real answer is that is seems almost as unlikely as the U.S. applying pressure on Israel.

Defections Reinforce Case For Continuing Iraq Sanctions

There is of course no lack of political will to apply pressure on Iraq while Saddam Hussain stays in power. The pressure that had been building up for easing sanctions was blown immediately when Saddam's relatives defected. It was profoundly embarrassing for the regime which had just issued a "very serious" deadline of Aug. 31 for ending cooperation with the U.N. because of lack of progress on lifting sanctions in the face of what the Iraqis claimed was full and complete disclosure of their weapons research and production facilities.

No one believed the infantile excuses from Baghdad that the defected General Hussein Kamel Hassan Majeed, Saddam's son-in-law, was solely responsible for concealing information about the Iraqis' weapons of mass destruction program. When U.N. special representative Rolf Ekeus described the drive to the general's farmhouse where the filing cabinets full of information allegedly had been discovered, he noted drily that they looked very clean for furniture that allegedly had been stored in chicken houses for a long period.

But there were no smiles when the horrifying details of Botulin- and anthrax-laden warheads were disclosed. It seems certain that sanctions will remain for the foreseeable future—if the West has its way, until Saddam Hussain goes.

Ian Williams is president of the U.N. Correspondents Association and author of The U.N. for Beginners , published by Writers and Readers Inc.