It can be fairly safely said that the primitive and tribal phase of the war is at an end.
FOR three years the Bosnian Serbs have called the tune in former Yugoslavia, and a very nasty tune it has been. They have sustained a siege against a major city longer and crueller than any since that of Leningrad from l941 to 1944. They have provoked in the areas they wished to control the largest flight of population seen in Europe since the Germans of the east fled before the Red Army in 1945. They have burnt and pillaged and apparently raped.
They have defied the opinion of the world and lied and cheated in doing so. They have shrugged off all threat of military retaliation by the international agencies and treated the forces of their ethnic enemies with contempt. Now, suddenly , the biter is bit. Serb towns are falling to the conqueror, Serb civilians are trekking to safety in pathetic refugee columns and the Bosnian Serb army is abandoning swaths of territory to follow them off its chosen battlefields.
Why this sudden reversal? For it is the suddenness that surprises. Shifts of fortune in war are the norm, but this one has been preceded by so long a stalemate - a stalemate in the Bosnian Serbs' favour - that the collapse of their fronts seems inexplicable.
The nature of the war itself has been difficult to explain from the start. It resembles no war
fought in Europe for several centuries. I decided early on that it was unsafe to make predictions. While the Gulf War was an open and shut case from the moment President Bush decided to send armoured divisions to Saudi Arabia, I could find no clues about likely developments in Bosnia at all.
All that I observed, early on, was that certain features of the conflict recalled those of "primitive war" among tribal societies. There was the same reluctance to come to close quarters, the same personal animosities between warriors who often knew each other by name, the same urge to humiliate neighbours - often by the mistreatment of their women - and the same pattern of despoiling their cultural totems. Above all, there was the same drive to take more territory than the victor could settle or usefully employ. The conscious purpose of "primitive" tribal warfare may not be to acquire territory as such. Its result nevertheless is often that the enemy population is shifted from its traditional zone of settlement, leaving some of it effectively unoccupied. The Bosnian Serbs may now be reflecting - if their crisis gives them time for reflection - that territorial over-extension has been their undoing. Their army, though far stronger in heavy equipment than those of their enemies, has always been inferior to them in numbers. As long as they could dictate the terms of the war, taking and keeping the initiative at places of their own choosing, the hollowness of their area of nominal control - seventy per cent of Bosnia - could be disguised.
That was so despite its strategic fragility, with the two large blocs in northern and southern Bosnia connected only by the narrow corridor on the Sava river. Maintaining the terrorisation of Sarajevo and the Muslim enclaves in the east kept their enemies' eyes off their points of weakness.
Hubris, however, took their eye off developments elsewhere. While the loudest international cry was for the arming of Bosnian government forces - a very doubtful solution to their predicament, given their lack of training and logistic resources - the Croatian army was completing its own systematic programme of retraining, rearming and recruitment. Undetected by the outside world, and apparently by the Bosnian Serbs also, the Croatian army has recently emerged as an effective national army in its own right. That was first demonstrated when, in a surprise offensive, it took back Western Slavonia, legally part of sovereign Croatia, in the first week of May this year. While that victory did not immediately alter the strategic situation, the Croatian army's next offensive did. That, which opened on August 5, took back the Krajina in a stunning minor blitzkrieg. It had two crucial effects. The first was to provoke the wholesale flight of the Krajina Serb population tothe already crowded Serb city of Banja Luka. The second was to reopen for Croatia and their Bosnian Croat-Muslim confederates a route through western Bosnia.
"This war," I was briefed by a British commander in Bosnia at the time, "is about communications". It was an acute judgment. The beauty of the Bosnian landscape hides from the traveller, particularly the helicopter traveller, that it is the mountains which determine the line of movement, that there are few roads and they tend to run north-south. The war, however, is also about population. When the people evacuate territory, both the purpose and the basis for the army to remain go also. The Croat drive southwards down their new line of north-south communication provoked a Bosnian Serb withdrawal up the parallel routes further east. Their area of control shrinks as they go.
It is easy to say that all this could have been achieved had the West intervened earlier, or had Bosnian government forces been equipped as the Croatian army has equipped itself. Wars are not as easy as that. Wars have their own rhythms and, harsh as it is to say, much of what has happened in this terrible and cruel war had to happen for the current results to emerge. The harshest thing of all to say is that Nato bombing would not have had the apparently decisive effect it has had unless, over the last three years, piecemeal terrorism had not radically altered the population pattern over wide areas of Bosnia.
It is that which has hollowed out Serbian Bosnia. It is also that which has produced a new ethnic map on which realistic new boundaries can be drawn. Bombing certainly would not have worked without the preliminaries of the Croat offensives, for no international force would ever have achieved the diplomatic assent or strategic base necessary to take the ground they have regained.
Bombing from distant bases alone would not have worked had protracted diplomacy not succeeded in placing artillery above Sarajevo, for it is the instant and accurate retaliation of the British and French guns which has really silenced the Bosnian Serb heavy weapons terrorising the city. The artillery could not have arrived had the relentless passage of time and fruitlessness of military stalemate not ultimately sapped the Serb will and confronted them with a realisation of their own megalomania.
It can be fairly safely said that the primitive and tribal phase of the war is now at an end. But the fighting is not over and I still demur from judgment about its outcome.
