TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/093091/0930000.000

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                                                                                WORLD, Page 38

YUGOSLAVIA

The Flash of War


A hotbed of nationalism that sparked World War I, the Balkans
ignite a new European crisis as Serbs and Croatians open full-
scale civil war

By JAMES WALSH -- Reported by James L. Graff/Zagreb, William
Mader/London and Frederick Ungeheuer/Paris


    Not long ago, the reputation of the Balkans as the tinderbox
of Europe seemed to have faded. Now the region is once again in
flames, igniting fears of a broader conflagration. For years,
Yugoslavia was the acceptable face of communism: estranged from
Moscow, a pioneer of peaceful coexistence with the West, a country
whose rugged Adriatic coastline attracted tens of thousands of
vacationers. But last week that idyllic image was irreparably
shattered. After three months of ethnic skirmishing, hapless
Yugoslavia erupted in the first full-scale war in Europe since
1945. The fighting between federal forces and breakaway Croatia
gave Europe and the world beyond a stark reminder of the region's
capacity for violence.

    The Serb-dominated Yugoslav military threw itself into the
conflict with a will. Federal gunboats boomed off the Croatian
coast as warplanes and artillery opened fire on targets across
the secessionist republic. A massive column of federal battle
tanks, armored personnel carriers and 155-mm howitzers set out
from Belgrade to assault Croatia's eastern wing, which borders
on Serbia. In another action, two columns of federal reservists
marched into Bosnia-Herzegovina, shattering the tense calm of
that buffer state with its explosive mixture of Serbs,
Croatians and Slavic Muslims. When an oil refinery blew up under
attack in Osijek, Croatia's key city in the east, it became
clear that a region long dormant had loosed a volcano of
passions.

    For the first time, the conflict was brought home to
Zagreb, Croatia's capital, which howled with air-raid sirens and
rattled with sniper fire. For the first time, too, the emergency
came truly home to Western Europe. After the fourth attempt by
the 12-nation European Community to arrange a cease-fire fell
apart almost instantly, the U.N. Security Council considered an
attempt at peacekeeping. There may be little time to waste. An
old infection -- Europe's original sin of tribalism -- is once
again raging out of control in the Balkans. Since the
Continent's nationalist frenzies had drawn the U.S. into two
world wars during this century, Washington sat up and took sharp
notice as well.

    In Yugoslavia's strife, the E.C. has been haunted by a
feeling of deja vu. More than a century ago, Otto von Bismarck
gazed on another Balkan crisis -- the collapse of the empire of
Ottoman Turkey -- and shrank from getting militarily involved.
In the Iron Chancellor's view, Germany had no interests there
that "would be worth the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian
musketeer." Though Serbian nationalism went on to ignite the
First World War, the E.C. last week seemed to feel much as
Bismarck had. At an emergency session in the Hague, the
Community's foreign ministers rejected the idea of committing
a "buffer" military force. The rejection prompted three other
countries -- Canada, Austria and Australia -- to call on the
U.N. to step in. When France and Germany joined the appeal, it
seemed Europe was about to shirk a responsibility -- one that,
in the end, might devolve on American leadership.

    Yugoslavia today is not the Balkans of 1914: no great
powers are struggling for advantage in the peninsula. If
powerful Serbia were allowed to walk over Croatia, however, it
might encourage aggression elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The
Yugoslav army insisted that it wanted only to relieve its posts
under siege in Croatia, but the firepower it deployed -- and its
marches into Bosnia -- looked more like Serbian expansion. While
Bosnia was frantically mustering a defense force of its own, two
frontline Croatian towns, Vukovar and Vinkovci, came under heavy
fire as tanks advanced on Zagreb.

    The extraordinary nature of Yugoslavia's crisis became
clear when Stipe Mesic, the country's nominal President and a
Croatian, urged federal soldiers to desert and "join the
people." According to Belgrade news reports, moreover, federal
Prime Minister Ante Markovic tried and failed to force the
resignation of Defense Minister Veljko Kadijevic on grounds that
the Yugoslav People's Army, in waging open war on Croatia, had
proved to be "neither Yugoslav nor of the people."

    Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia's crypto-communist president,
has steadily usurped federal authority in championing the
resistance of Serbs in Croatia. As Croatians see it, his goal
is to swallow up Serb-inhabited territory in the separatist
republic. Milosevic might have met his match, though, in Franjo
Tudjman, Croatia's fervently nationalist president. After the
assault began, Tudjman offered to restore food and utilities to
surrounded federal barracks in Croatia, but Kadijevic rejected
the offer as inadequate and "cynical." Dressed in combat
fatigues, Tudjman vowed to "fight and defend our homeland," and
added angrily, "I think it is time for Europe to wake up."

    Was Europe sleepwalking? In many ways, yes, according to
a number of critics. Western Europe did not want to ignore
lessons of the past. If it cannot help restore order in
Yugoslavia, it fears that reawakened ethnic rivalries may catch
fire throughout the decommunized East. But in this, the first
security challenge it has ventured to handle alone, the
Community had to wonder finally if it was equal to the task. And
strains over how to act in the East were sharpening old
jealousies in the West, threatening the E.C.'s cohesion.

    While Germany has argued for a more decisive approach --
despite its own purported constitutional ban on deploying troops
beyond NATO's boundaries -- Britain and the Netherlands viewed
Bonn's rhetoric as grandstanding, a ploy to extend German
influence in Eastern Europe. The French, meanwhile, seemed "torn
between their desires and what makes sense," as a senior Italian
diplomat put it. Francois Mitterrand dearly wants a distinct
West European "defense identity," but the French President has
a Bismarckian distaste for the Balkans. "These countries," he
fairly snorted two weeks ago, "have been at the origin of
several great wars into which we were then dragged."

    Jacques Delors, the E.C. commission President, lamented
that "the E.C. is a litlike a child confronted with an adult
crisis." At the same time, Lord Carrington, chairman of the
E.C.-sponsored Yugoslav peace conference, voiced the widespread
conviction that little more than jawboning could work. After
last week's cease-fire began to unravel, the former British
Foreign Secretary noted wearily, "In the end, the only thing
that stops violence is when the people involved want to stop
it."

    Serbs and Croatians plainly were not in the mood to stop
it. At the meeting Carrington conducted in Igalo, a seaside
resort in the small Yugoslav republic of Montenegro, Milosevic
and Tudjman glared at each other fiercely and refused to
exchange a word. The agreement they signed never had a chance.
When he returned to Zagreb, Tudjman fired his defense minister,
Luka Bebic, for carrying out the cease-fire's terms prematurely
-- and the belligerents leaped at each other again.

    Along with Slovenia, its sister western Yugoslav republic,
Croatia on June 25 declared independence from the polyglot state
cobbled together by wartime communist resistance leader Josip
Broz Tito. Ancient enemies, Croatians and Serbs had dangerous
scores to settle. One-eighth of Croatia's 4.75 million people
are Serbs, and super-Serb Milosevic offered them a cause.
Serbian guerrillas have seized perhaps one-third of Croatia --
mostly in the lowland east neighboring Serbia and in the
boomerang-shaped republic's coastal south. The heavily
Serb-officered federal military has aided and probably armed
them right along, but it avoided large-scale attacks until last
week.

    The turning point came when Croatian militia units laid
siege to Yugoslav army garrisons in the republic and cut off
power, water and food supplies. Federal soldiers inside
responded with artillery, shelling civilian neighborhoods around
their bases at random. Yugoslav MiG-21 fighter-bombers streaked
over Croatia, and gunboats threw up a blockade of the republic's
long coastline, pressing in with bombardments of major Adriatic
ports, from the medieval stoneworks of old Dubrovnik north to
Split, Sibenik and Rijeka.

    Western officials did not exempt Tudjman from fault. Said
a U.S. diplomat: "The Croatian government is far from blameless
or democratic, and it has severely discriminated against Serbs
living in Croatia." But Milosevic's aims are expansionist, and
success on his part threatens to undo everything the E.C.
stands for.

    Mitterrand, on an official visit to Germany, argued that
Yugoslavia must not be allowed to "poison European cohesion."
But beyond whatever precedent it was setting for the fragmenting
Soviet Union and other parts of Eastern Europe, the crisis was
already seeping venom into the West. The main rubs: How could
the E.C. enforce a peace, and what kind of peace did it want?
With French support, German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich
Genscher undertook to jump-start a rusting security mechanism,
the Western European Union. Consisting of nine of the 12 E.C.
members -- Denmark, Ireland and Greece do not belong -- the WEU
was garaged soon after it was created 43 years ago, when
U.S.-led NATO assumed its functions. But France sees it as a
vehicle for an autonomous West European security role, and
Genscher had hoped it would sponsor a peacekeeping force.

    Policing a cease-fire, however, depended on gaining a
cease-fire, chances for which were going up in smoke.
Ultimately, the WEU was asked to "study" how to improve
protection of the 200 unarmed E.C. civilian monitors already in
Yugoslavia. The union is in a poor position to do more: it has
no military command structure or troops at its disposal. Any
West European force that might intervene would surely consist
of British and French troops in the main, supported by NATO
logistics.

    Washington still insisted late last week that it was
sticking by the E.C.'s leadership in exploring peace options.
But Britain remained opposed to sending peacekeepers without a
peace to keep. Unless all of Yugoslavia's factions invite such
a force, said British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, an
"open-ended commitment" is doomed. Hurd argued for economic
sanctions, perhaps an oil embargo.

    Would the U.N. commit troops instead, then? Though France
would welcome such a move, it was not optimistic. An outside
chance was that the U.N. would act by choosing to see Croatia
as a discrete nation being invaded. Yet Germany's threat to
recognize Croatia and Slovenia -- a threat Bonn dropped two
weeks ago -- has been the biggest sticking point in Europe's
handling of the crisis. Among other things, Britain fears
emboldening other ethnic separatists such as restive Slovaks in
Czechoslovakia and Basques in Spain.

    Dutch Foreign Minister Hans van den Broek, the E.C.
President, condemned the idea outright last week. In acid
remarks clearly aimed at Genscher, Van den Broek said, "It is
easy from behind a desk to recognize Slovenia and Croatia and
leave the rest of the work aside." According to Dutch officials,
moreover, their government moved to call the WEU meeting only
to force gun-shy Bonn "to put up or shut up" on the proposal to
commit troops. About Genscher, a British diplomat cracked, "In
his pursuit of the Nobel Peace Prize, he has been grossly
irresponsible." Britain and France expect that 30,000 to 40,000
troops would be required to keep Yugoslavia's combatants apart.

    Yet hopes for anything short of intervention were not
good. Susan Woodward, a fellow at Washington's Brookings
Institution, criticized the E.C. for waiting too long. The storm
has been gathering for months, she notes, but only when fighting
broke out in June did the Community attempt to set up a peace
conference. Mitterrand said in Germany last week he did "not see
it as the end of human progress if we reconstitute the Europe
of tribes." But would tribal Europe, starting in the Balkans,
overtake and drown the tolerant Europe of ideas?