TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/112591/1125001.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.5 KB | 114 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 56

AMERICA ABROAD

Fiddling While Dubrovnik Burns


By Strobe Talbott


    The civil war in Yugoslavia is more than just a tragedy
for the people of one country. It is also the first test of
whether the custodians of European security are up to the task
of redefining their interests and obligations now that the old
communist enemy is history. So far, they've flunked.

    Two years ago, when the Iron Curtain was coming down,
almost everyone in the West was celebrating -- except Deputy
Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. In a speech at
Georgetown University, he found the cloud in the silver lining.
"For all its risks and uncertainties," he said, "the cold war
was characterized by a remarkably stable and predictable set of
relationships among the great powers." He foresaw the "danger
that the change in the East will prove too destabilizing to be
sustained." He was thinking particularly about Yugoslavia, where
he began his diplomatic career. He knew what ancient demons
lurked in the Balkans, waiting, along with decent folk, to be
liberated from communism.

    Since World War II, the very idea of a federal state
uniting the South Slavs -- Serbs, Croatians, Slovenes and the
rest -- has depended on an ideology that claimed to be more
powerful than nationalism and on a common fear of the U.S.S.R.
Now the Yugoslavs are free to fight among themselves, avenging
old wrongs and seeking independence from -- or domination over
-- one another. With Marx and even Tito in disrepute, the
strongmen in Belgrade are exposed for what most of them have
always been: Serbian imperialists, bent on maintaining control
not only over their republic but over the others as well --
especially Croatia, where there is a large Serbian population.

    Meanwhile, one well-intentioned emissary after another has
tried to mediate. Twelve cease-fires have come and gone. At the
end of last week, there was an attempt at No. 13. Governments
across Europe have condemned Belgrade for trying to carve
Greater Serbia out of the flanks of neighboring republics, and
for systematically destroying the civilian centers and cultural
monuments of other nationalities. The European Community has
announced economic sanctions against Yugoslavia, aimed primarily
at Serbia.

    However, even as he reluctantly endorsed these measures,
President Bush expressed doubt that they would work. Peaceful
means, Eagleburger noted, rarely work against people "intent on
killing each other." There is nothing the outside world can do
to stop the carnage in Yugoslavia, he continued, unless it is
prepared to intervene militarily, not with a peacekeeping force
of the kind in which the United Nations specializes but with a
peacemaking one.

    Eagleburger was not advocating that course, but it is
still worth thinking about. The E.C. could take the initiative,
seeking the blessing of the Conference on Security and
Cooperation in Europe, which would bring in the new democracies
of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The CSCE charter
can be interpreted as forbidding the kind of territorial
expansionism that Serbia is now pursuing. Then the E.C. could
use the manpower and firepower available through NATO for a
difficult three-stage mission: 1) drive the Yugoslav/Serbian
army, the Croatian national guard and the various other militias
back into their barracks; 2) impose a truce that would lead to
negotiations; and 3) back up international supervision of a
settlement that guarantees the safety of minorities wherever
they live: Serbs in Croatia, Croatians in Serbia, etc.

    Bush has dismissed any thought of such action as
premature. As Eagleburger has acknowledged, there is no stomach
for it in Europe, much less in the U.S. -- and for good reason:
it would be a risky and thankless task for any outsiders, no
matter how numerous and well armed, to interpose themselves in
Yugoslavia's tribal feuds and partisan warfare. But before
dismissing intervention altogether, Western leaders should
remember how they dealt earlier this year with the first great
threat to the new world order. Global outrage, combined with
diplomatic and economic sanctions, did not dislodge Saddam
Hussein from that corner of Greater Iraq better known as Kuwait.
It took a massive multilateral expeditionary force.

    True, Saddam violated an international border, while
Yugoslavia's misery is supposedly "internal." Well, just wait.
Like all tragedies, this one has an air of inevitability, and
the next act is all too easy to imagine: Serbian troops or
vigilantes massacre Hungarian-speaking villagers in the Yugoslav
province of Vojvodina, north of Belgrade, provoking Hungary to
come to the rescue of its ethnic kinsmen. A senior leader in
Budapest has privately warned the Bush Administration that his
government is preparing for just that contingency; the Hungarian
army is moving south. Something similar could happen on
Yugoslavia's border with Romania, Bulgaria or Albania. Violence
and refugees could spread throughout the region.

    Meanwhile, European and American officials are dithering
over the future of the Atlantic defense partnership and the
preservation of peace on the Continent. They tend to treat
Yugoslavia as an embarrassing distraction rather than the No.
1 challenge. They are fiddling with doctrine while Dubrovnik
burns. If the Western alliance can't cope with the crisis in
Yugoslavia, it doesn't deserve to survive the end of the cold
war.