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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 29

BOSNIA

Dilemma For the World


By JAMES WALSH


    Tired of waiting for the world, desperate Bosnia is in a
noose: the more it tugs, the more it chokes. The death struggle
was brought home to outsiders last week after besieged
defenders tried to break through Serbian lines surrounding
Sarajevo. The thrusts not only failed but provoked intensified
Serbian fire that closed down the city's airport, cutting off
U.N. relief shipments. Bosnian soldiers who scaled Trebevic
Mountain in the hope of outflanking the Serbian guns may have
at least tasted a moment of gallows humor: before being driven
back, they reached the bobsled run built for the 1984 Winter
Olympics.

    That relic symbolizes as well as anything else the
gathering moral crisis over Bosnia. Eight years ago, Sarajevo
attained the Olympus of international favor, playing host to the
snowy elite from the rest of the world. Today bobsledding down
a slippery slope is exactly what Western leaders fear most about
intervening in the former Yugoslav republic. Even short of a
Desert Storm-scale operation, how can the deployment of
multinational firepower be justified here and now when other
peoples are also in mortal peril -- starving Somalis, say, or
junta-persecuted Burmese? And if intrusion is justified, what
force could conceivably sort out a vicious blood feud among hill
folk who have helped write the book on guerrilla warfare?

    The first question is easier. Why Bosnia? For one thing,
because it is a victim of evident, if not altogether naked,
cross-border aggression. This may sound like a mincing lawyer's
brief, but split hairs have become the tightrope that cases for
intervention must tread. U.N. Secretary-General Boutros
Boutros-Ghali lashed out two weeks ago at British critics for
faulting his lack of deference to the Security Council's big
powers. The West's sympathies for Yugoslavia, he suggested, had
claimed priority over equally desperate crises in the Third
World. Newspapers in London may have rebuked him, he cracked,
"because I'm a wog."

    That rejoinder was not only frivolous but shallow. After
the early '60s, one reason why the U.N. was unable to intervene
in African and Asian bloodbaths was the sanctity-of-boundaries
standard that Third World members held dear. Idi Amin's Uganda,
Pol Pot's Cambodia and other killing fields piled up bones
unchecked in large part because the carnage was performed within
sovereign borders. Many developing countries were disturbed by
these atrocities, but they remained loath to compromise the U.N.
Charter's criterion for use of outside force; the days of
"intervention" by Western colonial empires were too recent.
Beyond that, some U.N. members did not bear much scrutiny when
it came to internal violence. While condemning bloodshed in
Soweto, for example, Syria freely bombarded insurgents in the
city of Hama.

    So double standards exist on both sides. The part of the
world that grieves for Bosnia today is naturally exercising one.
Pictures of European toddlers orphaned and brutalized in
Sarajevo evoke the kind of fellow feeling among Western nations
that similar tragedies elsewhere, sad to say, do not. Images of
starving European inmates behind barbed wire also produce keener
resonances in a civilization with Auschwitz and Treblinka only
50 years removed. And Bosnia today has a legal claim on help
that Somalia, a case of literal and utter anarchy, does not:
Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia has aided aggression against
Bosnia's Muslims and Croats every step of the way in the
interest of carving out a Greater Serbia. The Yugoslav breakup
has spawned atrocities on all sides, but over the long haul this
war, like Iraq's swallowing of Kuwait, is the fault of one big
bully.

    Have the media played a central role in electrifying
outside opinion? Of course, they have. Where cameras go, so go
the susceptibilities of people who live comfortable lives. But
in a strange way -- sometimes flawed but often legitimate --
cameras and notebooks tend to converge on those crises that
really do deserve greater attention. Yugoslavia figures as a
kind of test case of what might happen throughout decommunized,
unstable Central and Eastern Europe. Unrestrained ethnic
rivalries in these lands threaten to turn the European Community
on its ear, upsetting a prosperous balance gained only in the
past couple of generations.

    All these considerations would merely be speculative were
it not for one final, compelling point: the outside world's
Yugoslavia policies to date have abetted strife at least as much
as they have contained it. Foreign leaders failed to warn Serbia
off. Concentration on humanitarian efforts plays into the hands
of Serbs who want to create as many refugees as possible -- and
who perhaps mean to pursue the tactic to "cleanse" other
Serb-minority territory closer to Hungary, Albania, Greece and
Turkey. Faced with Western inaction, Turkey and Iran are
watching the nearby anti-Muslim pogrom more and more anxiously.

    Perhaps "the threat or use of force," as the old formula
goes, would not bring Bosnia's Serbs to heel. But proposing
military targets for air strikes in the Serbian heartland might
make Milosevic think twice, give his many Serbian political
opponents a more persuasive voice and ease the heat on slowly
strangling Bosnia. At the least, it would send a message about
where the West stands. At bottom, this may not be a universal
U.N. concern, but it is a European crisis and, more to the
point, a Western responsibility. As such, it is also a job that
will not get done unless the U.S. takes the lead.