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56                          THE ECONOMIST JANUARY 21ST 1995

EUROPE --  Croatia --  Deadly gamble



 IF the familiar conflicts of former Yugoslavia were not
terrible enough, that unhappy part of the world now faces an
unexpected threat which could tip it into the most savage round
of warfare yet. This is a demand by Croatia's government that
United Nations peacekeepers should leave its soil, where they
hold the ring between Serbs and Croats in Krajina, the Serb-held
part of Croatia.

Born of frustration and anger with the UN for failing to bring
justice as well as peace, the Croats' decision smacks of
desperation: "liberty or death". They have made similar threats
before, but this time, for the moment, the Croats seem to mean
what they say the 15,000 UN troops must go, however dire the
consequences.

The UN's blue helmets began arriving in Croatia in 1992 after
Croatia's Serbs, backed by the Yugoslav army directed from
Belgrade, had managed to rip a third of Croatia from its
government's control. Up to 300,000 Croats fled from what was to
become the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina; perhaps
the same number of Serbs left government-controlled Croatia. The
UN mandate in Croatia, which allows its soldiers to patrol
Krajina, expires on March 31st, but the Croatian government has
given the UN another three months after that to complete its
withdrawal. Technically, that does not affect the world body's
peacekeeping mandate in Bosnia, though the UN is likely to move
its headquarters for former Yugoslavia from Zagreb, the Croatian
capital, possibly to Brindisi.

One reason for the Croats'ultimatum is fear of what might happen
now that the Contact Group (America, Russia, France, Britain and
Germany) has accepted the Bosnian Serbs' demand to confederate
with Serbia proper. That raises the possibility that the Krajina
Serbs will demand, and get, the same thing. if that were to come
about, it would make Croatia's loss of Krajina permanent. By
threatening a new bout of mayhem, the Croats hope that the UN
will press Serbia's president, Slobodan Milosevic, into
recognizing Croatia's frontiers. There is scant reason to think
that, in the foreseeable future, he will agree to do so.

Under the terms of the 1992 plan which brought UN peacekeepers
to Croatia, refugees were supposed to return home. Few have done
so. Though they have talked about an economic agreement with
Croatia, the Krajina Serb leaders still insist that they will
never submit to Croatian rule. The way to prevent this, the
Croats seem to argue, is to kick the UN out, thus breaking the
stalemate over Krajina that the blue helmets have produced. The
Croats say they will not start fighting again. But with the UN
troops out of the way, a new round of warfare would be hard to
prevent.

Croatia's president, Franjo Tudjman, wants to believe that his
army can beat the Krajina Serbs, that the Bosnian Serbs will not
come to their rescue because they are tied down at home, and
that Serbia would stay out of a rekindled war because it is
keener on having economic sanctions lifted than on striving anew
for a Greater Serbia. These calculations look suspect. The
Yugoslav military commander who helped carve Krajina out for the
region's Serbs was General Ratko Mladic. He is now the Bosnian
Serbs'military commander. He has come to the aid of the Krajina
Serbs before and would be unlikely to ignore them now. At a
stretch, Mr Milosevic might let Krajina make do with autonomy
within a federal Croatia if that were negotiated as part of a
wider peace. But it is barely conceivable that he would stand by
if it happened as a result of military force, or if Krajina's
existence were to be threatened.

According to the International institute for Strategic Studies
in London, the Croats and Bosnian Croats together have 248
tanks, the Bosnian army (their nominal ally) perhaps another 40.
Together, the Serbs of Krajina, the Bosnian Serbs and the now
purely Serb Yugoslav army could go to war with more than 1,200.
The Yugoslav air force has 284 combat jets; Croatia has 20. The
Serbs could even bomb Zagreb or other Croatian cities spared in
1991. Mr Tudjman may calculate that, with the UN gone, the
Krajina Serbs will "see sense". The trouble for Croatia's
gambling president is that the exact opposite is just as likely
to happen and the cards in his hands are deuces.


=============================================


48           THE ECONOMIST JANUARY 28TH 1995


Bosnia -- Blown Rose -- SARAJEVO


IF GENERALS are shot at by their own side, it is normally by
mistake. in the case of General Sir Michael Rose, the potshots
over his one-year stint as commander Of UNPROFOR, the
24,000-strong United Nations force in Bosnia, have been
deliberate. Many of his fellow Britons say he has done a pretty
good job in impossible circumstances. But many Americans, as
well as senior officials in the UN and NATO, have fiercely
criticized his role in former Yugoslavia. And in Sarajevo itself
many Bosnian Muslims accuse him of favoring the Serbs and
compare him to Neville Chamberlain. is the criticism justified?
General Rose began his year in Bosnia as a local hero. in
February 1994, his tough negotiating tactics helped to persuade
Serbs to withdraw heavy weapons from around Sarajevo. Since
then, far fewer shells have fallen on the city. Under his
command, UNPROFOR has helped to restore Sarajevo's water and
electricity supplies and kept a ceasefire between Muslims and
Croats in central Bosnia. It has also continued to assist the
delivery of humanitarian relief. Yet the Bosnian Muslims do not
offer General Rose much gratitude. They claim that he could have
done far more to deter the Serbs during episodes such as the
Serbs' attack on Gorazde in April 1994 and their push into the
Bihac pocket last November. He should, they say, have been more
vigorous in calling for NATO air strikes. in his defense, the
general points out that he did call for air strikes -- but not
many, because he had to worry about the safety of his own men
and UNPROFOR's ability to carry out its humanitarian mission.
After each Of NATO's modest air strikes, the Serbs kidnapped
soldiers, blocked relief convoys or closed Sarajevo airport.
General Rose argues that UNPROFOR cannot do its job unless it is
seen to be scrupulously impartial; that it has neither the
mandate nor the means to enforce peace; and that, if the West is
unwilling to take on the Serbs, it is not reasonable to expect
UNPROFOR to do it. Even so, the doubters persist. Since the
Serbs all-but-overran Gorazde General Rose has sometimes gone to
strange lengths in pursuit of even-handedness. For instance,
when the Serbs have done something bad, he has often accused the
Bosnian government of a similar misdemeanor, sometimes with
scant justification. On January 14th General Rose declared open
the airport road linking Sarajevo to the rest of Bosnia, which
the Serbs had closed. Two hours later, the Serbs shut the road
again. The general's office announced that unreasonable demands
by the Bosnian government had provoked the closure. UN officials
say the Bosnian government was not to blame. On October 8th Serb
machine-gunners attacked a Sarajevo tram, killing one person and
wounding 11 others. Two days later UNPROFOR officials said that,
a few hours after the shooting, Bosnian soldiers had shot at and
missed two Serb women. Senior UN officials accused General
Rose's office of linking an incident of dubious authenticity to
the tram attack. The office now says that it had been mistaken
to link the two incidents, and that the second in fact occurred
a day after the tram attack. The general's breezy style has not
helped him to win the public-relations battle. He described the
Serb attack on Gorazde as "not serious" when it began last
April. As a result, many Sarajevans are reluctant to believe
good news from him even when it is true. He and his team talk of
the Bosnian government's "communist methods and mentality"
(government ministers admit to tapping his telephones). They in
turn were incensed when, after the Serb advance on Gorazde, he
said Bosnian forces had run away; and when, this month, he
accepted as a liaison officer at Tuzla airport a Serb colonel-
who the Muslims say is a war criminal. NATO, too, has become
frustrated with the general. Earlier this month its Naples
headquarters, responsible for flights over Bosnia, found that he
had told the Bosnian Serbs how many NATO aircraft would be
flying over their land (though not the flight paths). That
annoyed NATO, which suspended- pended the provision of that
information to UNPROFOR. For his part, General Rose complains
that "the NATO nomenklatura" has failed to understand his
successes. General Rose's belief in his ability and achievements
is irrepressible. He likes to use the word "heroic" to describe
UNPROFOR'S mission in Bosnia. But, trained in Britain's Special
Air Service, which puts a premium on swift, decisive action, he
has lacked some of the painstaking qualities needed for what has
been, essentially, a political job. His placement, General
Rupert Smith, will need to master these diplomatic skills if he
is to join those described by Pope: "Our Gen'rals now, retired
to their estates, Hang their old trophies o'er the garden gates,
in life's cool evening satiate of applause."


==============================================================

 WORLD PRESS REVIEW FEBRUARY 1995


 In a desperate race to avert a bigger bloodbath, Western policy
on Bosnia is focusing on a contentious strategy of "peace at all
costs." With Sarajevo bracing for a third winter under siege,
the panic in Western capitals over Bosnia has reached fever
pitch. NATO struggles to the top of the hill marked "air
strikes," takes a nervous peek at the other side, and races back
down to say, "Only joking." The United Nations, France, and
Britain shuffle to the edge of the precipice marked
"withdrawal," peer into the abyss, and back off, proclaiming,
"We didn't really mean it." Yet this sorry spectacle of empty
threats and promises and international buck-passing has produced
a realignment of international diplomacy and a revision of the
mediation strategy that may yet clinch a peace deal. The key
shift wrought by the Serbian siege of Bihac has been the US
administration's abandonment of the moral high ground, its
capitulation -- in the interests of NATO unity -- to British and
French demands for a peace at all costs. In the eyes of many,
that means a bad peace. In the view of the Bosnian government,
it is an unjust peace. The peace-at-all-costs position hurts the
weak -- the Bosnians -- and favors the strong -- the Serbs. The
third party, the Croats, will seek to extract maximum advantage
from whatever settlement might emerge. Last summer, the
five-nation contact group the US, Russia, Britain, France, and
Germany] unveiled a settlement plan and said take it or leave
it. The Bosnians, the Croats, and President Slobodan Milosevic
of Serbia took it. The Bosnian Serbs left it. They are now being
offered an infinitely better deal. The intransigence of the
Bosnian-Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, has paid off. He is now
offering to reopen peace talks and claims to be heartened by the
"new interpretations" of the peace plan from Western mediators.
The so-called final peace plan proscribed any merger of
Serbian-held territory to defeat the aim of an expanded
pan-Serbian state across Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia. Now the
Serbs are being told that the partition map can be redrawn and
that their areas of Bosnia can 'confederate" with Serbia.
Karadzic has been told he need not cede any of the territory he
holds until the constitutional details of the deal are
negotiated, giving him an international license to delay any
pullback. He enjoys international backing for his demand for a
formal Bosnia-wide cessation of hostilities that would freeze
current front lines in his favor. In short, as far as Moscow,
London, Paris, and now Washington are concerned, the Serbs have
won. The priority is to rubber-stamp that victory to reverse
Bosnia's corrosive impact on NATO, prevent it from undermining
the West's relations with Russia, and destroy the case for a
disastrous UN retreat from Bosnia. The cumulative effect is a
coup for Karadzic-all ostensibly because of Bihac, an obscure
corner of northwest Bosnia that the UN pledged to protect. When
push came to shove, the UN admitted that the pledge was
irredeemable and scurried to get its peace keepers out of harm's
way. -Ian Traynor, "The Guardian" (liberal), London,   Dec. 15,
1994.


A War's Grim Lessons


 Bosnia has changed many things, in ways that we do not yet
fully understand. It has caused a rift in the transatlantic
alliance, raising questions about NATO's future. It has exposed
as pious pipe dreams the ambitions of the United Nations to be
an effective peacekeeping agency in the new era beyond the cold
war. It has served as a vehicle for a newly assertive Russian
foreign policy that challenges Western interests. It has left
European Union claims of common foreign and security policies
looking risible. It has left an estimated 200,000 people dead,
tens of thousands more maimed, countless more traumatized, and 2
million homeless and displaced. And it has rewritten Europe's
good-conduct rule book, showing in the case of the Serbs that if
you are determined to establish an ethnically based
blood-and-soil state, willing to prosecute that aim consistently
with a terrible resolve and damn the consequences, you can get
away with it. Meanwhile, there will be more pogroms, more
sieges, another wretched winter in what has largely been a war
against civilians and in which ethnic cleansing has been the
central and paramount aim, not a byproduct of warfare. The war
seems at a turning point. As a result of Jiinmy Carter's foray
and the agreement to resume negotiations, there is again a
prospect of a settlement of sorts emerging. If that fails -- and
recent history suggests it will -- the outlook is for a decade
of "low intensity" guerrilla warfare as the Muslims seek to
reclaim their inheritance. They seem to be convinced that they
can keep losing the battles, as in the fall's at Bihac, but
still win the war. For if at bottom, over the past 32 months,
the Serbs have proved that might is right, that is a lesson not
lost on the Muslims, who, however grudgingly, have done most of
the things the international powers have asked them to do.
Similarly, the Croats have also reluctantly conformed to the
international powers' bidding, refraining from force to regain
Serb-held Croatia and bowing to US pressure to enter a
Muslim-Croat federation. Such virtue has to be its own reward,
for they see the international powers, in their desperation for
a settlement, moving to reward Serbian recalcitrance and
agreeing to renegotiate a peace plan that only a few months ago
was deemed nonnegotiable.  -Ian Traynor, Dec. 22, 1994.


"NATO's Waterloo"


    However the endgame in Bosnia plays out, December's turning
point was crucial. The United States, giving in to its European
allies, agreed in effect that the Serbs had won the war and
would get more concessions to make peace. What forced President
Bill Clinton to change his policy? The latest World Press Review
Opinion Index suggests that global editorial opinion, which both
reflects and influences official policy, had concluded with near
unanimity that the United Nations and NATO peacekeeping efforts
were such a total failure that the future of both international
bodies was in danger. As seen by the world's press, the emperors
have no clothes. The Index sampled editorial opinions about
Bosnia from 50 leading overseas dailies during the first two
weeks of December. The consensus was both massive and harsh.
Forty-six of the 50 agreed in editorials that the UN-NATO
mission in Bosnia had been not just a failure but a debacle.
That's a disapproval rate of 92 percent, and the editors used
such terms as "impotent," "absurd," "irrelevant," "shame," and
"humiliation." Only two of the 50 grudgingly endorsed the peace
keepers' actions as having done at least some good or prevented
greater evil. Two others published no editorials on the subject.
The World Press Review Opinion Index is a systematic gauge of
global views on international affairs, interpreting editorial
comment from daily papers representing a broad range of
ideologies and regions. They are chosen for their national and
international influence. The peace keepers' image had already
been frayed by misadventures in Somalia before the blue helmets
stumbled into Bosnia. But when they mounted only popgun
reprisals against Serbian forces flouting their rules, when they
were treated with open contempt and even taken hostage, and when
UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali him- self was snubbed
by the Serbs and booed by the Muslims he went to protect, the
image of futility became indelible. The liberal Le Monde of
Paris said NATO had been "discredited" and added that "European
defense rests for the moment on myth." London's liberal Guardian
suggested that this might be "NATO's final decade." "Together
with the Bosnian corpses," said the conservative ABC of Madrid,
"the world is burying a mummified UN . . . and a divided NATO."
Editorials from Africa, Asia., the Middle East, and Latin
America were equally damning. The independent Nation of Bangkok
called the Bosnia record a "moral abdication" that sent a clear
message: "Aggression pays." But especially in Europe, some
papers seemed resigned to that, concluding that Serbia has won
the war and the best hope now is to salvage NATO. In Warsaw, the
respected Gazeta Wyborcza said, "Bosnia has turned out to be
NATO's Waterloo." Among NATO members, the paper added, there is
widespread agreement that even if it is too late to rescue
Bosnia, the alliance should be saved. By that reasoning, a
divided Bosnia -- or even total conquest by the Serbs -- may be
the inevitable price for reuniting NATO. The UN was also heavily
criticized, although many papers called for peace-keeping troops
to stay in the region as long as the arms embargo remains in
force. "The United Nations, however maligned, has had modest
success in promoting peace" and assisting war refugees, said
Toronto's Globe and Mail, one of the two papers cautiously
approving the policy (the other: London's Independent). "Without
it, things would probably be much worse." At the other end of
the spectrum was La Stampa of Turin, which said, "The
international community is not giving proof of impotence,
resignation, or passivity. It is giving proof of active
complicity with the Serbian strategy of conquest and genocide."
To all the leaders of the international community, such a solid
global consensus against their policies would be seen as a real
danger signal, undermining both NATO and the UN as significant
players in the post-cold-war era. Naked emperors are figures of
ridicule, not power. In the end, Bill Clinton saw little choice
but to send his predecessor Jimmy Carter to make the key
concession-reopening bar- gaining on who gets which parts of
Bosnia-and paste a smiley face on it.

 Among other memorable opinions gathered by the Index:

 Aftenposten, Oslo: "President Clinton ... made it clear that
from now on the Europeans must take the lead in Europe. ...
Maybe the solution is a NATO not watered down by expansion but a
NATO supplemented by tailored agreements with individual
countries in the East."

Corriere delta Sera, Milan: "Restoring motivation and dynamism
to the transatlantic relationship is the priority challenge
posed to the West in the post-cold-war era by the Bosnian
slaughterhouse. To place before this challenge a plan for NATO
expansion to Eastern Europe, an appropriate but not urgent
matter . . . .means condemning the North Atlantic alliance first
to irrelevance and then to self-destruction."


 Straits Times, Singapore: "The failure of Atlantic unity, the
sharp reminder of Russia's capacity for intransigence, the grim
reality of the aggressor walking away with rewards: These are
the lessons of Bosnia, . . . a case study in how not to go about
keeping the peace."

 Jerusalem Post: "Who would believe that a squabbling bunch of
Balkan militias could make utter fools of all the major powers
on Earth, destroy the reputation of NATO . . . and paralyze the
United Nations? . . . It is going to be a long time before the
United States, Europe, Russia, the UN, or NATO recovers from
this humiliating debacle."   -LARRY MARTZ


Back to Basics For the Alliance (Suddeutsch-Zeitung)


 In recent weeks, lightning has crackled across the skies,
illuminating, in its pitiless glare, the real shape of politics
in Europe -- the situation of the great powers in Bosnia, NATO,
and the United Nations. The insights we have gained from these
glimpses have led to sobering conclusions. Gone is the euphoria
felt when the Berlin Wall fell, when dreams soared and when we
believed that the UN -- "the world community" -- would ensure
order, that right would prevail over might, and that the Western
alliance would survive the end of the cold war. Nothing but
illusions-just look at Bosnia, where the great powers and their
institutions have failed. The future is not in their hands;
instead, the past holds them firmly in its grip. The UN has once
again been exposed as nothing more than what it always has been:
a federation of nations that possesses not a single microgram
more power than those nations permit it. The Serbs held 400 blue
helmets as virtual hostages. And all that Secretary-General
Boutros Boutros-Ghali could threaten was to completely withdraw
his forces -- and lose all his power. What are we to make of an
army, now almost 40,000 strong, whose function has become an
absurdity? Is it in Bosnia to guarantee peace? It can't do that
even in the official protected zones, such as Sarajevo, where
shelling has once again become routine, or Bihac. Is it there to
create peace by fighting? That it may not do, although, along
with NATO, the UN could at least have prevented a Serbian
victory. All that remains for the UN is a function that could
not be more shameful: Troops that were sent to protect others
protect only themselves, like a police force that runs for cover
when the shooting starts. Meanwhile, NATO has sought over the
past five years to avoid one of the dictates of history:
Alliances die when they win as often as when they lose. The fact
that an alliance is finished when it must hand over its sword is
obvious. But alliances also lose when they triumph, because the
threat that called them into action has been removed. Like a
company whose longtime market collapsed, NATO, after the cold
war ended, tried to find new products to sell to new clients: to
create a peace in Bosnia on one hand, and to expand eastward on
the other. Neither product has found customers. And the attempt
to sell them has put so much stress on the alliance that no one
can say whether it will survive. With a face as grim as Andrei
Gromyko's, Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev threw down
his gauntlet to the alliance: nyet to Eastern Europe in NATO,
even though those countries' foreign ministers had timidly
agreed to spend a year negotiating the terms for expanding the
alliance to the east. And to put teeth in his refusal, Kozyrev
also tabled the grandiose NATO-Russia cooperation plan -- a
program that was supposed to make expansion attractive to
Moscow. Would Kozyrev have done this if the alliance had not
been trapped by the war in Bosnia? Moscow has been very much
aware that Bosnia has put NATO into its worst fix since Suez in
1956, when the United States forced England and France to back
away from their intervention. A war of finger pointing has
broken out, in which each power seeks to blame others for the
fact that the Bosnians are losing, for the fact that "Greater
Serbia" is winning, for the fact that the West has been tried
and found wanting. London and Paris complain that the Americans
want to conduct the music but not play in the band. Washington
accuses its two oldest allies of cynicism in the tradition of
Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier in 1938 -- appeasement
of the strong at the cost of the Muslims. Both sides, the
Americans as well as the new British-French alliance, are right.
And the Germans? If they had only remained silent, as Defense
Minister Volker Riihe ironically noted: If Bonn is not making
any military contribution, "we lose the right to make any smart
suggestions about the Bosnian matter." But this diplomatic
competition in stupidity is not the real problem. The heart of
the matter is the return of history, which we believed we had
overcome. Serbian ambitions, which set off World War I in 1914,
have now set Russia marching against the Western powers and
divided the Western allies among themselves. The alliance is
buckling, and the UN is trying to out-trump this unholy alliance
in impotence. As London, Paris, Washington, and Bonn cast stones
at one another, Russia returns to its familiar role and once
again casts its veto against the West's strategic decisions. In
such times, we must keep our eyes on the things that matter. The
alliance must realize, in the wake of the Bosnia tragedy, that
it will have to limit itself to core issues. NATO cannot create
peace beyond its own borders, not even as an auxiliary force to
help out the UN, for even a Radovan Karadzic can make a joke of
this. It retains only its classical task of serving as a
security alliance for the United States and Europe and a bulwark
against the old-new Russia. In the sixth year since the Berlin
Wall fell, that will be work enough. The tragedy of Bosnia, the
triumph of the strong over the weak, is almost complete. The
alliance ought not compound this tragedy by destroying itself.
It will be needed-as Kozyrev has now demonstrated. -Josef Joffe,
"Suddeutsche Zeitung" (centrist),   Munich, Dec. 3,1994.


Judging Bosnia's Carnage


In early November, the international tribunal that was convened
in The Hague, Netherlands, to consider crimes in the former
Yugoslavia opened two cases involving the ethnic cleansing
carried out by Serbs in Bosnia. The tribunal's first indictment
was brought against Dragan Nikolic, the director of the Susica
camp, near Vlasenica, in eastern Bosnia. This officer, as well
as Dusan Tadic, a camp guard currently under detention in
Germany whom the tribunal intends to indict, is unknown to the
general public, which was perhaps expecting indictments against
top leaders such as Radovan Karadzic or General Ratko Mladic.
Nikolic is still at large somewhere in the Serbian sector of
Bosnia. The existence of the Susica camp, a former army depot
where 3,000 Muslims were killed between June and September,
1992, was revealed in the summer of 1994 in a series of articles
in the New York Times. The author of the reports bad spoken with
survivors and with a former guard who had deserted from the
Bosnian-Serb army in 1993. According to this witness, Nikolic, a
tall, thin man in his 30s, would go into the hangar where the
detainees were held and read lists of names. The men selected
were immediately taken outside the building and shot. Nikolic
was famous for plundering his victims' possessions, according to
other eyewitness reports published by the Times. The indictment
of Tadic, which is supported by 19 witnesses, would arise from
ethnic cleansing and its catalog of horrors. But Tadic could not
be indicted immediately. Chief prosecutor Richard Goldstone
simply requested that Germany keep the suspect behind bars until
he is indicted by the tribunal. Germany would have to modify its
laws to permit Tadic's extradition.

The tribunal intends to take up only significant cases, but
various national courts run the risk of taking on more dubious
ones. In October, Austria became the first nation to initiate a
trial for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia. That
case was based on a single witness. In Denmark, a Bosnian Muslim
accused of war crimes against Muslims detained by Croatians
appeared before judges for the first time in November.
Psychiatric experts believed he was suffering from mental
disorders. -Helene Despic-Popovic, 'Lib@ration" (1@ftist);


Justice -- Or Peace?


It is freely acknowledged that there can be no justice without
an independent judiciary. So can there be an international
justice system if that supposed system depends on the goodwill
of a few nations? No. And that is why the actions of the
international tribunal in The Hague, set up by the United
Nations Security Council to investigate and prosecute "persons
presumed guilty of serious violations of international
human-rights law in the former Yugoslavia," raise a certain
amount of skepticism. The integrity and determination of
prosecutor Richard Goldstone and the 11 judges of the tribunal
are not in question. The problem lies in their status: Since
they are appointed and funded by the Security Council, the
accomplishment of their mission depends on the goodwill of the
countries on the council, beginning with its five permanent
members, What the council does today, it can undo tomorrow, and
the pursuit of justice may not always be a priority. One cannot
necessarily blame these powerful nations for choosing peace
without justice -- and with amnesty, as was recently seen in
Haiti -- over an impossible justice without peace. At most, we
can It the leaders of these nations for having deceived by
speaking of international justice. They had in mind only a
comfortable justice, a means of pressure designed to dissuade
the criminals from pursuing their activities and to persuade
those politicians responsible for crimes to be reasonable at the
negotiating table. In the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials following
World War II, only the defeated were judged. More recently,
though, "international justice" has evidenced a selective
indignation. Although Cambodia's Khmer Rouge were high on the
hit parade of horror, they were treated like respectable
negotiators when the peace accords were discussed. And it wasn't
because Iraqi President Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons
against the civilian Kurdish population that he was punished in
the Persian Gulf war. Countries that have signed the Geneva
Conventions of 1949 are obligated to prosecute all violators of
these international rules in their national courts. This
commitment is too little known. In countries that have an
independent justice system, those courts might be as effective
and more consistent than The Hague's tribunal. - Jacques
Amalric, "Liberation" (leftist), Paris, Nov. 8.1994


=====================================================================

Special Warfare (January 1995)

Ethnic, Nationalist and Separatist Conflicts: Finding the Right
Solutions

  by Benjamin Schwarz

  The American national-security community is greeting the
phenomenon of ethnic, nationalist and separatist conflicts, or
EN&SC, in much the same way that it greeted counterinsurgency in
the 1960s and low-intensity conflict in the 1980s: The U.S., it
is repeatedly asserted, must come to terms with "new" types of
conflict for which it is inadequately prepared. As was
the case with counterinsurgency and low-intensity conflict,
policy discussion of EN&SC revolves nearly exclusively around
how best to implement programs and policies. There is a
constant tinkering with organizational charts to achieve just
the right mixture of agencies, departments and programs, and
some of these agencies and departments are rushing about in an
effort to claim valuable new turf.  However, as they did with
counterinsurgency and with low-intensity conflict, these
programmatic approaches threaten to eclipse an examination of
the motivations and assumptions underlying American attitudes
and policy toward EN&SC and the analyses of how and if American
national interests are involved in such conflicts.

Definition

  Moreover, there is a danger in defining EN&SC as a generic
problem. Most of the policy discussions of EN&SC center around
quite specific concerns. For example, discussions regarding
Eastern European EN&SC usually produce a small set of scenarios
that directly affect American interests: a resurgent Russia
taking advantage of an aggrieved Russian minority in a bordering
state to reimpose control over that state; or a wave of refugees
escaping EN&SC engendering political instability in Germany. (It
might help to examine precisely why a nationalist Russia or a
politically unstable Germany would be cause for such anxiety,
but that is another matter.) In any event, it might be possible
to deal with these specific concerns without the United States
playing an active role in containing or quelling EN&SC in
Eastern Europe. Potential geopolitical threats do not necessarily
call for the United States to help protect minority rights or to
build a civil society in, say, Romania.

  Should the policy
community define EN&SC as a generic problem - and many signs
indicate that this is happening - policy-makers could be
creating enormous difficulties for themselves. If the United
States bases policy on the conviction that these conflicts pose
a danger to America because they threaten world order, then the
U.S. would be adopting the globalist doctrine that America can
be safe only when the entire world is made stable and is very
much like America. This concept would lead to an endless
multiplication of security "threats" and to imperial
overstretch.

  Perhaps the notion of attempting to understand
and define EN&SC as a "problem" should be jettisoned, and we
should instead concentrate on specific regional and subregional
analyses: Should the United States be concerned with region X
or with conflict Z? Why? How can the U.S. safeguard and
advance its specific interests in these areas? Such analyses
could lead to very different policy conclusions than would be
reached if America started with the premise that it should be
concerned with promoting stability, mitigating EN&SC and helping
to settle minority disputes.

  'Reasonable' solutions

  To examine EN&SC generically, we
must first look critically at the prevailing if the United
States bases policy on the conviction that these conflicts pose
a danger to America because they threaten world order, then the
U.S. would be adopting the globalist doctrine that America can
be safe only when the entire world is made stable and is very
much like America, notions of how to tame them. Discussions of
how to "solve" EN&SC generally begin by acknowledging that they
are complex and difficult situations and that outside
intervention to control them is rarely effective. Despite such
caveats, the discussions proceed to measures and techniques
that the U.S. and the world community can encourage affected
states to undertake. Included in these discussions is the
point that societies riven by such conflicts miist avoid
winner-take-all politics and should instead guarantee that
regardless of election results, the weaker faction will still
have a voice in national politics. To accomplish this, there
should be a guaranteed division of key offices and a system of
mutual vetoes to ensure that no crucial political decisions are
made without all parties agreeing. The policy recommendations
share the idea that coalition governments will help guard
against and ameliorate ethnic, nationalist and religious
divisions. And all agree that these divisions will be less
likely to erupt in violent conflict if threatened societies
tolerate minority groups' desire for cultural autonomy.

  All of these measures are reasonable, and they would indeed aid
in ensuring that politics within divided societies is not a
zero-sum game, a situation that invites and exacerbates
conflict. But the measures presume that the strongest group in
a society will be willing to make major concessions,
concessions that would, in fact, jeopardize that group's
preponderant position. The solutions presuppose agreement and
stability as much as they secure them. In other words, such
solutions, which are intended to alleviate conflict, can be
implemented only in the absence of conflict, and only if there
is a strong desire for compromise.

  Historical record

  This is not, however, how ethnic,
nationalist and separatist conflicts have usually been settled.
 As the English historian Louis Namier wrote in his discussion
of nationalist conflicts in Eastern Europe in the 19th century,
"States are not created or destroyed, and frontiers redrawn or
obliterated, by argument and majority votes; nations are freed,
united, or broken by blood and iron, and not by a generous
application of liberty."

  Given the historical record, why
do we place such stock in reasonable solutions? One important
reason is that our ideas about settling internal conflicts have
been heavily affected by an idealized view of America's own
history and politics. This is the melting-pot theory of
national political development, which holds that American
democracy assures a voice to each disparate group, and that from
each group's competing views, compromise is reached, if not
harmoniously, then at least nonviolently. This theory is a
misunderstanding of America's political development. At least
as much as other countries, America was formed by blood and
iron, by conquest and force, not by conciliation and compromise.
 Forming the American state required many years of bloody
Indian wars, one of the longest continuing ethnic conflicts in
history. That conflict was resolved not by powersharing but by
obliteration - the only way it could be resolved.

  Moreover, America's political development required that it fight
a brutal nationalist-separatist conflict, the Civil War, in
which one vision of America's political, economic and social
development was crushed by another. The conflict was followed
by military occupation to impose a new political, economic and
social order in the defeated land.

  The American Civil War is an
apt example of how reasonable solutions to EN&SC seldom work.
When the United States was established, the North and the South
recognized each other as effectively two distinct economic and
political entities. As the country developed, these two
entities grew farther apart: the North was capitalist,
industrial, liberal-bourgeois and commercial, while the South
was aristocratic, precapitalist and agricultural. To dampen
the internal conflict, the Constitution guaranteed the South a
voice - a disproportionate voice - in national politics. Yet
this "guaranteed outcome," so lauded by policy analysts today
as a means of forestalling internal conflict, could never have
worked in the long run. The South not only wanted its view
accorded respect, it also wanted to determine its own future
and not to be subordinate or dependent upon an opposing
ideological, economic and social system.

  Compromise

  In general, minorities - nations within nations - do not want
 respect alone. They do not wish to be considered appendages to
the majority's nation-state. The Sudeten Germans were provided
respect and a disproportionate voice by a democratic interwar
Czechoslovakia.  The Quebecois are given the same treatment in
Canadian national politics, and in many ways, the minority
receives the same from a democratic Israel. Nevertheless,
significant numbers within these minorities are have been
unsatisfied with this arrangement. The argument that a
Slobodan Milosevic is merely exploiting and exacerbating ethnic
antipathies is irrelevant Demagogic nationalist leaders can
play the nationalist card only because it is so powerful.

  Solutions that grant special guarantees to a minority are
actually asking the minority to accept less than it wants.
Another solution that is often touted is transforming
nation-states into civil states in which political power is
determined by membership in the majority's ethnic, nationalist
or religious group - is to demand that a majority accept far
less than it wants and already has. To many within the
majority, such a solution means sacrificing a living, breathing
national character to an abstract and bloodless notion of a
single political community.

  For example, Israel
operates under a system of majority rule in which an Arab
minority, comprising 18 percent of the population of Israel's
pre-1967 territory, is granted its civil rights, but whose
members are nonetheless second-class citizens, since the Israeli
state is by definition a Jewish state. It is an unspoken rule
of Israeli politics that no Arab or Arab-dominated party be
invited to participate in a political coalition. It is
unimaginable that Israel, motivated by a desire to ameliorate
ethnic conflict would jettison its national character by
agreeing to dismantle that which defines its statehood.

  Stumbling block

  This brings us to the great stumbling
block of these apparent solutions. Divided societies face a
conundrum: dissatisfied minorities want, at a minimum, a real
voice in determining their future, but a real voice for the
minority means a real sacrifice for the majority. While the
majority's long-term interest in civil peace should perhaps
direct it to accept such solutions, Canada's experience
illustrates the majority's reluctance to do so.

  The Charlottetown Agreement was a model of reasonable techniques
for handling ethnic conflict, a set of arrangements that all
experts believe should work. In accordance with the guaranteed
outcomes solution, Quebec was guaranteed 25 percent of the
seats in the Federal House of Commons, three of the Supreme
Court's nine judges would be drawn from Quebec, and federal
bills affecting the French language would require a double
majority of votes by Francophone senators and the Senate as a
whole. These "solutions," which might assuage the Francophone
minority, were roundly rejected by Anglophone Canada for the
understandable reasons that Quebec would be given too much
power and that the majority would be correspondingly weakened.

  If these solutions and compromises are unworkable in a Western
democracy, there is no reason to assume they will work in the
emerging unstable states that currently concern American
policy-makers. Nor can we look to a global democratic makeover
as a solution to what are truly the intractable problems of
EN&SC: first, because, as John Stuart Mill observed, it is next
to impossible to build a true democracy in a multiethnic
society; and second, because democracy often exacerbates
internal tensions and conflicts and does not, as the American
ideal would have us believe, usually ameliorate them. Democracy
does not immunize a society against internal conflict and
separatism, as the 620,000 dead in America's Civil War attest.

  Logic of force

  Prince Bernhard Von Bulow, a former German chancellor, wrote
in 1914, "In the struggle between nationalities, one nation is
the hammer, the other the anvil; one is the victor and one is
the vanquished." Once internal conflicts become violent,
usually only the logic of force can put civil differences to
rest. The logic of force in these kinds of conflicts usually
means the triumph of the stronger group.

  Historically, the most stable and lasting solution to EN&SC
has been ethnic cleansing and partition. The Czech Republic and
Poland made ruthless decisions following World War II to cleanse
themselves forcibly of the German minorities that had caused them
so much trouble during the interwar years. Today the two states
are far more stable, with a greater likelihood of democracy
triumphing within them. Cyprus has been far more stable since
its de facto partitioning by the Turkish Army in 1974, which
involved the forced relocation of 200,000 people, mostly Greek
Cypriots. This division is now reinforced, ironically, by
United Nations peacekeeping troops.

  Reasonable power-sharing solutions sometimes do emerge in divided
societies, but usually only after the opposing sides have become
exhausted by bloody conflict. The struggle between Colombia's
liberals and conservatives finally resulted in a textbook
solution of how civil difference should be settled. Both
factions were assured a voice in national politics; in fact,
there was a prearranged deal that the office of the presidency
would alternate between the two parties.  Unfortunately, the
two groups reached this compromise solution only after more
than 250,000 Colombians had been killed in civil war.

  Although EN&SC remain latent in some societies, we must assume
that the U.S. - and certainly the U.S. military - will concern
itself with EN&SC only when violence is present or is likely.
In advising those military forces that may be called upon to
intervene in these types of conflicts, planners must bear in
mind this truism: foreign instabilities can be durably quelled
only by native solutions, and these solutions can take
centuries and will often be bloody. Once violence begins,
probably the best course of action for the United States and the
international community is to proffer their good offices,
awaiting the time when combatant exhaustion or the triumph of
one group over another creates an opening for intervention in a
purely peacekeeping capacity.

  This is not to argue that external
intervention in EN&SC is ineffective. Should the U.S. have a
geopolitical stake in the outcome of an ethnic conflict, we
should remember that outside intervention can be effective.
External forces are not effective in building civil societies or
in pacifying such conflicts, but they can help one side of a
conflict impose its will on the other, as demonstrated by
Turkey's intervention in Cyprus. That sort of task is not
exactly what would be called peacemaking, but it is what
militaries do.

---

Benjamin Schwarz is a staff member of the international policy
department of the RAND Corporation. Before joining RAND, he
worked for the Brookings Institution. He has written RAND reports
on such diverse topics as American policy toward El Salvador and
U.S. grand strategy after the Cold War. Schwarz's work has appeared
in publications such as Foreign Policy, The New York Times and The
Atlantic Monthly. He was educated at Yale Uniuersity and, as a
Fulbright scholar, at Oxford University.

=================================================================
=====

Special Warfare (January 1995)  'Not Quite War': A Situation
Report from the Former Yugoslavia



by Mercer M. Dorsey Jr.



    Author's note: This report represents a snapshot of the
situation  in the former Yugoslavia during the spring and early
summer of 1994.   The situation there is dynamic and may have
changed since that time.   The views expressed are my own and
not those of the U.S. Army, the  Department of Defense or the
United Nations.



    Duty with the United Nations Protection Forces in the former
Yugoslavia provides one with a close-up look at operations other
 than war. To the warring parties involved, these operations
look a  lot like war.  To the U.N. forces, the situation is not
quite war,  but it's a lot closer to it than maintaining a
demarcation line in  the Middle East.  It isn't peacekeeping,
peacemaking or peace enforcement, either.  Perhaps it is
"confrontation control."      As chief of security for the U.N.
Protection Forces, Former  Republics of Yugoslavia, or UNPROFOR,
I am responsible for the  personal security of Yasushi Akashi,
special representative of the  U.N. secretary-general, and for
the security of U.N. people,  installations and property
throughout the area.  My other  functions include identifying
security needs; coordinating for  proper security forces; and
investigating incidents ranging from attacks on U.N. civilians
by one of the warring parties, to car  accidents and black
marketeering.

    The headquarters for UNPROFOR is located in Zagreb, the
capital  of Croatia. The UNPROFOR security section, as well as
the U.N. mission  itself, is still in its formative stage.  The
total strength of the security section is expected to be
approximately 150, and the total  strength of the U.N. mission
around 46,000.

Background

    The U.N. arrived here in 1991, but the fighting had actually
begun  in 1989 with the demise of the Soviet Union.  Marshal
Tito,  Yugoslavia's communist leader from 1943 to 1980, was a
Serb, and the  Serbs had dominated the Yugoslavian communist
party.  Without Tito and  the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia began to
fall apart. Croatia, Serbia,  Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Macedonia and Montenegro were the  republics making up
Yugoslavia.  Serbia and Montenegro formed the  Republic of
Yugoslavia (this entity still has not been formally  recognized
by the United States), but Slovenia and Croatia wanted
independence.  After a short confrontation, Slovenia's
independence  was allowed, but when Croatia asserted its
independence, Serbia  objected, and a war began between the two.
 This war later stagnated,  and when Bosnia-Herzegovina became a
separate nation, Croatia and  Serbia began supporting their
surrogate warring factions in BosniaHerzegovina.

    Croatia is shaped somewhat like a halfmoon, with its upper
horn  pointing east and its lower horn pointing south.  The
eastern point  of the upper horn of the moon is truncated, and
its blunt northsouth edge borders the Serbian province of
Vojvodina.  The moon's  lower horn tapers into a point that
touches Montenegro. BosniaHerzegovina sits within the inner arch
of the half-moon.  Croatia  is bordered to the north by Hungary
and Slovenia and to the west by  the Adriatic.

Sectors       Serbian ethnic populations dominate 27 percent of
Croatia.   Serbian ethnic-populated areas, which are separated
into four sectors, are neither neatly adjacent to Serbia nor are
they  monoethnic.  Sector East is on Croatia's eastern border
adjacent to the province of Vojvodina, and Sector West is near
Croatia's center.   Sectors North and South are located on the
lower horn of the moon,  adjacent to the western border of
Bosnia-Herzegovina; they cut a  swath along the horn's eastern
rim.       When the Croatians moved to establish control of
these Serbianpopulated areas, the Serbs resisted and were able
to stymie the  Croats.  The Serbian government supported the
separate Serbian  pockets but was not able to link them to
Serbia.  If the Serbian  sectors are granted autonomy, Croatia's
geographic area will be  significantly reduced.  In any event,
Croatia lacks the necessary  military force to take control: Its
terrain is extremely rough, and the Serbian minorities are
extremely stubborn.  Left as is, the  situation no doubt will
lead to many crises; it is unlikely to change unless one side
manages to dominate or unless reason and  compromise prevail and
the sectors are reintegrated into Croatia.

    The four sectors actually represent the geographical
boundaries of  the ethnic minorities.  They are under U.N.
protection because of the  extensive fighting and the attempted
"ethnic cleansing" by both Serbs  and Croats.  In his book The
Fall of Yugoslavia, Misha Glenny argues  that the issues in
Yugoslavia are neither ethnic nor religious, but  nationalistic.
 But the depth of the atrocities demonstrated by both sides is
not usually associated with pure nationalism - it appears to  be
far more personal and deeper than that.

    Although Croatia and Serbia maintain a war posture against
each  other, there is little actual fighting between the two.
Most of the  fighting in Croatia is concentrated in Sectors
North and South, which are controlled by the Krajinian Serbs.
Cease-fire violations occur  regularly.

Conflicts      At this time (spring 1994), Bosnia-Herzegovina is
the area of  greatest conflict.  It is bordered on the north and
west by Croatia  and on the east and south by Serbia and
Montenegro.  Opposing factions include the Bosnian Serbs, or
BSA, and the Bosnian Muslims, or BiH.   The BiH are subdivided
into opposing camps: the Abdic forces and the  BiH 5th Corps.
Both of these BiH factions are surrounded by Serbs:  the BSA to
the south and the Krajinian Serbs to the north in Croatia.   The
Bosnian Croats, or the HVO, are the other major faction in
BosniaHerzegovina.  The HVO and the BiH appear to have formed
something of  an alliance against the BSA and have actually
conducted coordinated operations against them.  The Krajinian
Serbs, however, are providing  support (including artillery) to
the Abdic forces of the BiH.  They  must also be allowing
resources into the BiH 5th Corps, since the 5th  Corps has been
entirely surrounded for months and should have depleted its
supplies a long time ago.  Multiple fronts and suballiances
exist,  and all the factions shoot at each other from time to
time.       Although there is continuous fighting in the region,
most of the  major offensives and counteroffensives are
invisible to the Western  media, since they focus on the
populated areas.  In late May, for  example, the BiH launched a
major offensive in northeast BosniaHerzegovina in an attempt to
seize a transmitter tower on a high  mountain.  Apparently,
major BiH attacks and BSA counterattacks have been taking place
ever since.  According to recent reports, the  Muslims are still
in possession of the key terrain.  In recent  fighting on an
extended front in the neighborhood of Tuzla, more than  1,300
rounds of heavy artillery and mortar fire were exchanged, as
recorded by U.N. military observers.  The BiH seemed to be on
the offensive and appeared to be doing quite well.  On June 8,
1994, a  "truce" was signed, and the fighting slowed down
temporarily.   Unfortunately, by early July, the cease-fire was
no longer apparent.

Contrasts       The region's complex state of affairs can be
illustrated by the  contrasts one encounters while traveling in
the cities and in the countryside.  The chief of security's
activities require a great deal  of traveling, and most of the
time U.N. personnel have freedom of  movement.  Zagreb, in
Croatia, could be any peaceful southern  European city - signs
of war are invisible.  Sarajevo, on the other  hand, in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, is still somewhat under siege, with
confrontation lines dividing it in a confusing manner.  Entire
residential areas around the airport have been destroyed and
abandoned.  In the modern sector of Sarajevo, skyscrapers have
been  so pounded upon by artillery and tank fire that they seem
to have  melted in on themselves.  Although the situation in
Sarajevo is quiet  now, which means that none of the factions is
launching a major  attack, stray mortar, artillery and
small-arms fire are an accepted  norm.  In one incident, a
random 120mm mortar round hit a marketplace, killing 60 people
and wounding more than 200.  The marketplace was  small and
tucked between tall buildings.  The fact that only one  mortar
round was fired and hit such a small area was a tragic act of
fate, not good gunnery.       I recently traveled to the
beautiful city of Split, about 200 miles  southwest of Zagreb on
the Adriatic coast.  Split serves as the major  logistics entry
point for U.N. forces and as the logistics rear area  for U.N.
forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina.  The terrain, the surrounding
villages and the sea remind me of Greece: Rugged limestone
mountains  covered by scrub brush rise sharply from the coast.
After leaving Split, I drove through Sectors South and North and
stopped at their  headquarters in Knin and Topusko to lay the
groundwork for  establishing a security office in each location.
        Inland, the country is mountainous and heavily forested.
Deep  valleys contain towns and small farms - the terrain is
somewhat like  that of Pennsylvania. There are areas untouched
by war, with mountains  and countryside as beautiful as any in
the world; in other areas,  every village for miles has been
abandoned and destroyed.  Many houses  have been intentionally
blown up, not by a conquering army, but rather  by neighbors who
are trying to get even for transgressions committed  generations
before them - a tragic reminder about tribalism and man's
inability to live together.       During a visit to Sectors West
and East, I drove the breadth of  northern Croatia - from Zagreb
to the easternmost border, which now  rests on the Danube.
Northern Croatia is essentially a fertile plain  with occasional
minor mountain masses.  It is beautiful and productive  and
could be anywhere in Ohio, Illinois or Missouri.  Again, the
contrast was between the Serbian sectors, which are economically
 austere, and the Croatian sectors, which are bustling with
activity.   It is a shock to drive for miles through peaceful
villages and then suddenly encounter miles of destruction, or to
find destroyed villages  located in perfectly peaceful settings.
 Within some villages, only  one block may have been destroyed,
or within a block, one house may  have been shot to hell, while
the houses on either side may not have  a single scar.
While in Sector East, I had occasion to visit the city of
Vukovar.   Before the war between Serbia and Croatia, which
actually started in  Sector East, Vukovar was a major city.  As
the Yugoslavian Army  withdrew from Croatia, it supported the
local Serbian militia in  seizing Vukovar.  There was an
extended siege, and the city was nearly destroyed.  According to
the Croats, it was razed.  In reality,  the city is badly
damaged, perhaps a bit worse than Sarajevo, and the  Croats
still find the destruction almost unbearable.       There are
thousands of Croats missing from the Vukovar region.   Before
the conflict began, the population was about 60 percent
Croatian and 40 percent Serbian. Current data reflect that the
percentages have at least reversed, and the Serb population may
now  be as high as 80 percent.  A brick wall built in memory of
Vukovar rings the UNPROFOR headquarters in Zagreb.  The wall is
13 bricks high  and more than 300 yards long; each brick carries
the name of one of  the missing or dead from the region.  Croats
light candles and lay  flowers daily at the wall in memory of
the lost.  The site on which  the wall was constructed generates
a neat piece of propaganda: It  naturally shifts the people's
frustrations to the U.N. A more  appropriate site for the wall
might have been the Croatian parliament.   Clearly, the problems
in this region can only be solved through the  efforts of the
conflict's participants.  The U.N. is not responsible  for the
prosecution or the cause of this war, and it cannot take  sides.

Needs       Despite their neutrality, U.N. peacekeeping forces
do suffer  casualties.  Their principal threat, besides being
shot at by the  opposing sides, is mines.  Most casualties occur
when a vehicle drives  into an unmarked or newly emplaced
minefield. Mines are not yet being  used against the U.N. to
interrupt supply lines, as in Somalia.   However, should peace
come to the area, the mines will present a major  problem, and
determining where all the mine fields are will be  difficult.
There is a need here for a wide-area, remote minedetection means
to help locate mines and to confirm the extent of  mined areas.
      Most of the sniping at U.N. forces usually comes from
positions  along the front lines.  Snipers here are not firing
from crowds, but  into crowds.  The best deterrent is rapid
response - the British do that well - but an antisniping system
would be invaluable.  Of  course, body and vehicle armor is in
great demand.  In fact, the U.N.  is installing armor kits on
all of its civilian field vehicles.       An antimortar system
would also be invaluable, not only to detect  and engage weapons
precisely, but also to aid in the enforcement of  cease-fire
agreements.  The system would provide an immediate means of
identifying which side was responsible for a cease-fire
violation.       An instant voice translator would also be
useful to the U.N.  forces, which now include Jordanian,
Egyptian, Nigerian, French,  British, Danish, Swedish, Argentine
and Spanish soldiers.  Such an impressive array of forces is a
coalition advocate's dream come true.       In June, my deputy
and I traveled to Austria.  We drove north  through Slovenia to
Kibnetz, just across the Austrian border.  The  economies and
appearances of the towns and villages provide a striking
contrast.  Austria is neat, bright and booming.  As one drives
south,  it is like turning down a dimmer switch.  Slovenia
appears to be  progressing, but is "dimmer" than Austria.  And,
of course, Croatia is  yet darker.  Bosnia-Herzegovina is in a
state of economic suspension -  there is no economy. None of
this has to do with the potential of the  people or of the land,
but only the war.  Political instability does  not attract
capital.  If a peace agreement could be reached, perhaps  the
country would boom.

Impressions

    As one enters this troubled environment, initial impressions
nearly  overwhelm the senses.  A person's observations are only
one perception  of reality based on a brief snapshot in time,
and anyone would have to  be very arrogant to believe that such
impressions provide real  insight. My experiences have provided
no blinding flashes of new  wisdom.  As each day goes by, my
view of the U.N. and of the conflict shifts.  The U.N. is a
tremendously important human experiment.  It  has not yet
matured - its organization has a long way to go before it  is as
effective and as professional as it should be - but its concept
is not flawed.  U.N. intervention gives warring parties an
excuse not  to fight, and while it may not solve the problem, it
slows down the  killing.  The U.N. or its successor is really
our world's only  alternative to domination of the weak by the
powerful, to the rule of  force of arms.  Personally, I feel
that my experience here is not a  waste.  "May we live in
interesting times," someone said.  I think I  am.

---

  Mercer M. Dorsey was severely wounded in July 1994, shortly
after  writing this article.  While on duty with the UNPROFOR,
he was flying  in an aircraft that was hit by ground fire.  He
is recovering at  Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington,
D.C. - Editor)

---

    Mercer M. Dorsey Jr. retired from the Army in January 1994 as
a  Special Forces colonel and arrived in Zagreb, Croatia, in
April 1994  to serve as chief of security for the U.N.
Protection Forces, Former  Republics of Yugoslavia.  His last
Army assignment was deputy  commandant of the JFK Special
Warfare Center and School.  His other  special-operations
assignments included service at the Special Forces  detachment,
company and battalion levels and service as chief of staff for
the U.S. Army Special Operations Command.  His more than 30
years  of military service included two tours in Vietnam,
participation in  Operation Desert Storm and service in the U.S.
Marine Corps from  1958-1961.  Dorsey holds a bachelor's degree
from the University of  Arizona and a master's degree from Clark
University in Worcester, Mass.