Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/072792/07279926.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 6KB | 124 lines

                                                                                THE BALKANS, Page 47

Aggression 1, International Law 0


As the Serbs prepare to seize Bosnia, the West remains indignant
-- and powerless

By GEORGE J. CHURCH -- With reporting by James L. Graff/Zagreb,
James O. Jackson/Belgrade and William Mader/London


    Policymakers have an awesome capacity to intone that
"things can't go on this way" for months or years -- while
things do go on the same way. In the rapidly disappearing
republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, though, the vicious fighting
that has raged since February might really end soon. Not
primarily because of the cease-fire announced in London last
week; no one yet knows whether it will become fully effective,
let alone last any longer than an eyeblink. Nor will any thanks
be due to the American and European statesmen who have almost
daily proclaimed that the bloodshed must stop but have done
nothing effective. If peace -- even the peace of the grave --
is at all foreseeable, it is only because aggression is on the
verge of winning in Bosnia.

    Already, says a senior British diplomat,
"Bosnia-Herzegovina has ceased to exist." Even if the cease-fire
were to hold, Serbs control about two-thirds of the country, and
Croats have proclaimed a quasi-independent republic in most of
the rest. Sarajevo, if it should be able to hold out, looks
increasingly like a Balkan West Berlin: cut off from any
countryside, capital of Nowheresville. Outside city limits, only
a few slivers of territory remain under the control of the
Muslim Slavs who constitute 41% of Bosnia's population.

    Now even the slivers are vanishing. "While [French
President Francois] Mitterrand's visit diverted the world's
attention to Sarajevo, the Serbs got all they wanted in northern
Bosnia," says Vinko Begic, mayor of Derventa, one of the last
towns to fall to the Serb offensive. In eastern Bosnia, only
Gorazde, a town whose normal population of 20,000 has been
swollen to 70,000 by a tide of refugees, remains a haven for the
Muslims, and it is under heavy siege.

    Nor does any of this necessarily mean an end to the
killing. Ivo Banac, a Croatian-born Yale history professor,
fears a repetition of the 16th to early 18th centuries. "Then,"
he says, "the region was in a state of permanent seasonal war."
A modern version might consist of back-and-forth fighting among
Serbs, Croats and remnants of an independent Bosnia across ever
shifting frontiers. War could resume in Croatia too, despite the
presence of 14,000 U.N. peacekeepers. Though a cease-fire has
supposedly been in effect since January, Serbs last week resumed
shelling the port of Dubrovnik.

    There are rich possibilities for more bloodshed in other
parts of the country still called Yugoslavia, which now consists
only of Serbia and Montenegro. Triumphant Serbs might try to
extend their conquests in Kosovo, a province populated
overwhelmingly by Albanians; in Macedonia, like Bosnia a former
Yugoslav republic that has declared independence; and in
Vojvodina, another Serbian province with a large and restless
Hungarian minority. Finally, says one diplomat, "there is the
Serb-Serb civil war" for control of what would then be a Greater
Serbia.

    The best way to prevent such a chain reaction would be to
stop aggression in Bosnia short of victory. But, cease-fire or
no, there is little on the horizon that might do the job.

    Military intervention? The only kind the U.S. and European
powers will discuss is providing escorts for relief convoys to
Sarajevo, and that would not prevent the people who are being
fed from also being killed. As for a bigger expedition, says an
American official, "we're nearing the point where intervention
is impossible -- where people have fled and territory has been
seized." In other words, there will soon be nothing left of
Bosnia to save.


    Sanctions? Western officials think they will eventually
bite hard enough to modify Serb behavior, but by then Bosnia
might be only a memory. Oil and weapons are still leaking into
Serbia, mostly from Russian ships through Romanian ports on the
Black Sea. Western officials do not see how they -- or, for that
matter, Russian President Boris Yeltsin -- can stop the
smuggling.

    Diplomacy? Even while proposing a cease-fire that Croats
and Muslims finally accepted, Serbian leader Radovan Karadzic
insisted that his side would not give up any Bosnian territory
in exchange for peace. That might well indicate that the Serbs
are ready for a cease-fire only because they have conquered
about as much of Bosnia as they want. Western powers could only
indulge in more hand wringing.

    The most encouraging voice sounded in, of all places,
Belgrade. Milan Panic, a Serbian-American businessman and new
Prime Minister of Yugoslavia, pledged to respect the
independence of Bosnia and to insist that the shooting stop. He
denounced the "ethnic cleansing" of Serbian areas as a "the
disgrace of our nation." But Panic has little power; Serbian
President Slobodan Milosevic is still the boss, and he has shown
no sign of giving up creation of a Greater Serbia.

    Some Western officials are beginning to wonder whether it
is not time to switch primary attention to easing the suffering
of the estimated 2.2 million refugees of the wars. Anything done
for them, however, would not change the outlook. Sooner or
later, with or without further fighting, the outcome in Bosnia
seems almost sure to be a sweeping victory for aggression,
reversing the supposed lesson of the Persian Gulf war: that the
international community will band together to force an aggressor
to give up his gains. In Bosnia the all-but-final score is
Aggression 1, International Law 0.