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                                                                                THE BALKANS, Page 48

Munich All Over Again?


Talks on a settlement in Bosnia sound uncomfortably reminiscent
of the 1938 surrender to aggression

By GEORGE J. CHURCH -- With reporting by William Mader/London
and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington


    In international politics, Munich is a word of shame. The
1938 conference at which Britain and France agreed to let Adolf
Hitler's troops occupy a big chunk of their ally Czechoslovakia
made the city's name synonymous with a cowardly sellout to
aggression. So it is no surprise that the organizers of the
international conference on the Balkans that is scheduled to
meet in London this week staunchly deny they will countenance
a rerun. Just the opposite, says British Deputy Foreign
Secretary Douglas Hogg: the conferees will "make it absolutely
plain to the Serbs that they are not going to be allowed to
retain the land they have grabbed" in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The
conference will consider tightening sanctions against the
Bosnian Serbs' patrons in Belgrade and may approve a plan to
assign 10,000 fresh United Nations troops to escort relief
convoys from the Adriatic port of Split to the besieged capital
of Sarajevo. "The Serbs may discover that it is in their
interest -- you have to persuade them that it is in their
interest -- to negotiate," says U.N. Secretary-General Boutros
Boutros-Ghali. "Theirs is a pariah state now."

    But when asked what sort of settlement this kind of
pressure might eventually produce, European diplomats sketch an
arrangement that sounds suspiciously like a 1992 version of
Munich: essentially a division of Bosnia into three highly
unequal parts. Bosnia's Serbs might not hold on to quite all of
the territory they have conquered; their leader, Radovan Karad
zic, asserts that they would settle for 64% of Bosnia rather
than the 70% they now occupy. Croats would get most of the rest.
Bosnia's Muslims would be left with little more than the few
towns and slivers of countryside they now hold. The Serb, Croat
and Muslim cantons might even theoretically join in a
confederation that would be called Bosnia. But that would be a
pious fiction; in reality Serbian, and to a lesser extent
Croatian, aggressors would have extinguished any independent,
multiethnic Bosnia.

    But no one expects an official solution to be reached at
the London conference. Even if all the main factions show up,
the conference will include representatives of so many nations
and groupings, from the European Community to the Organization
of the Islamic Conference, as to constitute what a Dutch
diplomat calls "about as unwieldy a group as they come."
Prospects that the three-day meeting can accomplish much are
minimal.

    British diplomats, though, hope the conference will at
least begin a process of negotiation eventually leading to a
partition into ethnic cantons such as Lebanon's -- not because
they like it but because they see no other way to stop the war.
The brute fact is that the Serbs have won on the ground;
reversing that victory would require military intervention far
beyond anything any Western power will even consider. For all
the relief efforts, Hogg warned Bosnian President Alija
Izetbegovic two weeks ago that he could not hope for military
help to save the remaining Muslim areas from Serbian conquest.
In the British view, the formation of cantons would avoid a
total Serbian victory and avert another looming nightmare: mass
deaths -- perhaps 200,000 to 300,000 -- among refugees inside
the former Yugoslavia who might not survive the rough Balkan
winter. An end to the fighting would enable international relief
organizations to supply food, shelter and clothing that would
keep the refugees alive.

    The U.S., however, is "absolutely opposed" to
cantonization, says Lawrence Eagleburger, who will attend the
London conference as Acting Secretary of State. He fears setting
a dangerous precedent of accommodating aggression. In fact,
while Eagleburger voices hope that the London conference "may
begin to find some new diplomatic approaches that may over time
bring the bloodshed to an end," others in the Bush
Administration sound unhappy about negotiations now. "Pushing
negotiations in the midst of the horrors being perpetrated on
the ground is bizarre," says one official. But the U.S. may well
be unable to stop the unequal partition of Bosnia. The
Administration's ideas, chiefly a tightening of sanctions
against Serbia, seem pitifully inadequate to bringing about any
happier end.

    Unfortunately, setting up cantons might not stop bloodshed
in the Balkans any more than the Munich agreement headed off
World War II, which exploded a year later. Serbian President
Slobodan Milosevic has already announced plans to resettle
140,000 Serb refugees in Kosovo, a province of Serbia. Western
officials are worried that he may well clear room for them by
"ethnic cleansing" of the province's majority Albanians and then
attempt a conquest of independent Macedonia in the guise of
protecting a Serb minority there. Reports are filtering in to
London of ethnic purges carried out by both Serbs and Croats in
Serbia's sister republic of Montenegro: Croatia might also try
to annex by force the Croat-populated northwestern corner. Any
of these moves could touch off a general Balkan war drawing in
Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey -- making the parallels to
Munich uncomfortably close to complete.