TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081291/0812001.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.0 KB | 127 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 39

YUGOSLAVIA

The Case for Confederation


With options ranging from secession to redrawing the map, only
one holds out the promise of an enduring peace

By JILL SMOLOWE -- Reported by James L. Graff/Belgrade and William
Mader/London


    The grandstanding and rhetoric of June gave way to the tanks
and guns of July. As Yugoslavia heads into August, the fighting
is spurring ever more urgent attempts to devise at least piecemeal
solutions. The European Community last week dispatched three
foreign ministers to Zagreb and Belgrade to secure a cease-fire in
the increasingly volatile republic of Croatia. The trio arrived
bearing words of peace, but withoutany assurance that they could
engineer a truce, let alone an enduring solution. In Belgrade,
sessions convened by Yugoslavia's crippled eight-member federal
presidency produced door slamming and name calling -- but no
cease-fire.

    While Belgrade fiddled, Croatia burned. Yugoslav army
tanks fired from Serbia across the Danube at the Croatian town
of Dalj and two nearby villages 50 miles northwest of Belgrade,
killing at least 80 people. The campaign brought nearly
one-third of Croatia's territory under Serbian control. The
shaken Croatian leadership responded with a series of
unconvincing proposals. To buttress the republic's 70,000
security forces, President Franjo Tudjman called up 30,000
reserves, then admitted that he lacked the weapons to arm them.
He also revamped his Cabinet, firing his hard-line Defense and
Interior ministers and seating an ethnic Serb. In a move that
might have meant something a month ago but last week looked like
what it was -- sheer panic -- government officials even floated
the idea of offering cultural autonomy to Croatia's
Serb-dominated regions.

    With the country in such deep disarray, the contours of
one ghastly solution are already emerging on the battlefield:
a redrawing of internal borders along ethnic lines, accompanied
by population exchanges. In a sense, it is already happening.
Some 40,000 ethnic Serbs have fled across Croatia's borders,
mostly into the Serbian province of Vojvodina and the republic
of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Croatian retreat from embattled
zones where Serbian militias have triumphed over Croatian
defense forces has dislodged tens of thousands of villagers. But
a formal remapping of Yugoslavia, with its six republics and two
autonomous provinces, could deepen the crisis. Historically,
population exchanges have produced bloodshed and pillaging.
Moreover, if Serbia wrests territorial concessions from Croatia,
what is to stand in the way of a Croatian-Serbian scheme to
carve up Bosnia, where ethnic Serbs, Croatians and Muslims
mingle? Or a newly hatched Serbian attempt to incite Bosnia's
majority Muslims against the republic's Croatians?

    How then to stop the lunacy before Yugoslavia erupts in
wholesale civil war? The Yugoslavs have signaled that an
enduring peace must be brokered internally, not imposed by
external forces. The E.C. would like to oblige, but fears are
growing that a European military intervention might be
necessary. "The moment may not be too far away when we have to
take a step forward," Jacques Poos, the Foreign Minister of
Luxembourg, warned last week. The E.C.'s proposal for a
three-month moratorium on independence offers the same
face-saving opportunity that quieted hostilities in the
breakaway republic of Slovenia. The republics' leaders could use
the cooling-off period to consider how the region might be
stitched together again.

    For starters, Yugoslavs would have to give up hope of
putting the federation back together. The linchpin of the
federation cobbled together after World War II by Tito -- a
strong central government -- is a shambles; members of the
collective presidency can barely remain in the same room at the
same time. Moreover, the precondition for a viable federation
-- the voluntary surrender of individual sovereignty by the
member units -- is no longer (arguably, never was) possible to
achieve.

    Confederation, by contrast, suggests an alliance. This
word might not seem anathema to the hostile republics if their
leaders would stop portraying such an arrangement as a shotgun
wedding and instead looked at it as a marriage of convenience
whose purpose is to promote not love but mutual interests. Of
those, economic considerations rank highest. The economies of
Yugoslavia's republics and provinces are inextricably linked.
If Yugoslavia hopes to improve the living conditions of its
people, and thus quiet the ethnic resentments that are fueled
by unequal economic opportunities, the republics must act in
concert. The dream nurtured by some republics that the E.C. will
come to the rescue by granting them membership is folly. Other
countries are ahead in line, and the E.C. will not admit any
country that lacks a stable, democratic government.

    Under a loose confederation, a central, democratically
elected parliament and presidency would preside over truly
mutual interests: foreign affairs, a pared military and a
national budget, shrunk to serve national interests rather than
to prop up inefficient Serbian firms. To ensure that no republic
would trample on the rights of resident minorities, a federal
judiciary would define and enforce human rights. In the
interests of self-preservation, each republic would respect
current borders.

    In exchange for economic collaboration, each republic
would have political autonomy, run its own defense forces,
control its own borders and ignore the other republics as it
pleases. Cultural, religious and social issues would also be
decided locally. Ethnic hatreds -- and certainly this would be
the most difficult challenge of all -- would be held in check
by the perverse threat of renewed violence. If all the republics
signed on to such an arrangement and exercised some restraint,
each could enjoy the fruits of autonomy -- while laying to rest
the terrors of war.