It was a slim hope at best, that a patched-together international could sell a patched-together peace plan to a Bosnian Serb leadership puffed up with its own success. Last week, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his self-declared parliament answered the take-it-or-leave-it proposal. The response, surprising hardly anyone, was presented with characteristic drama -- in a sealed pink envelope. But it was also characteristically dilatory. Acceptance it was not.
By allocating 51 percent of Bosnia to the Bosnian-Croat federation, and 49 percent of the fractured republic to its secessionist Serbs (which would require them to give up about a third of the 70 percent of Bosnia that they currently control), the awkward blueprint proposed by a "contact group" of mediators from the United States, Russia, France, Great Britain and Germany is satisfactory to neither side. "My stomach turns when I think of this plan," said Bosnian Vice President Ejup Ganic, "but other solutions are worse." His government said it was willing to swallow the offer.
Bosnia's Serbs, apparently not so war weary, remain unimpressed by threats of punishment. "No one can make us accept this plan," said Momir Tosic, a delegate to the Bosnian Serb parliament from Pale. "The more the international community pressures us, the more motivated we are to resist." As if to emphasize the point, Bosnian Serb forces around Sarajevo again took potshots at relief planes, shutting down the airlift and forcing the cancellation of a visit by U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry.
Foreign ministers from the contact group countries are expected to meet this week in Geneva to consider their response. Calling additional economic pressure "small potatoes," one Clinton administration official said the White House would like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to move quickly to expand the heavy- weapons exclusion zones that already exist around Sarajevo and Gorazde to four other Bosnian locales designated by the United Nations as "safe areas" and to use NATO air power to strictly enforce the zones. Despite all the bombast about lifting the arms embargo against the Bosnian government, U.S. officials admit privately that they still are not close to that controversial step. Nor do they have the Security Council votes needed to end the embargo.
Holding the coalition together in support of any measures beyond more talk or incremental sanctions won't be easy. Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev has already telegraphed the fissures that might lie ahead, opining that the equivocal Bosnian Serb response reflected a "rather positive attitude." And U.N. officials in Bosnia warn that they might drastically restructure their mission if air strikes become a regular tool of pressure. Failure to respond, however, will leave international efforts to cope with the war in a bad place: at a final dead end.
