June 1992, Page 14, 92

The New World Order

Bosnia 1992 and Palestine 1948: An Eerie Parallel

By Nathan Jones

"When Saddam Hussain sent his divisions plunging into helpless little Kuwait, President Bush proclaimed an inviolable principle: Aggression would not stand. . . The world now looks to the aggression, every bit as cruel and unprovoked, by Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic against Bosnia and Hercegovina. That newborn state has no oil-and no defenses. Will the U.S. and Europe stand up for principle as strongly as they did for petroleum?"
-The New York Times editorial, April 23, 1992

In six weeks of 1992, well-trained and equipped military forces, most of them members of the regular Yugoslav army, fighting in the name of the Serbs who make up 31 percent of the population, have seized 70 percent of the Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina, creating an estimated 670,000 mostly Muslim refugees. U.N. peace negotiator Marrack Goulding has been delayed for hours at Serbian roadblocks, shot at by snipers and shelled by Serbian mortars as he shuttled in and out of the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo in a vain attempt to halt the fighting.

Forty-four years earlier, well-trained and equipped military forces, most of them veterans of World War II, fighting in the name of the Jews who made up one-third of the population, seized 78 percent of the Mandate of Palestine, creating an estimated 750,000 mostly Muslim refugees. U.N. peace negotiator Count Folke Bernadotte was delayed for hours at roadblocks, shot at by snipers, and eventually assassinated by Yitzhak Shamir's Jewish extremist Stern Gang as he shuttled in and out of Jerusalem in a vain attempt to halt the fighting.

Happily, there also are differences in these two eerily parallel stories. In 1948, the U.S., from the first, supported the U.N. partition of Palestine, and then was shamelessly biased on behalf of the well-organized Jewish militias that seized for their future state of Israel more than half of the land that had been assigned by the U.N. partition plan to the future Palestinian Arab state.

The result was an unsolved problem that, for 44 years, has poisoned U.S. relations with the entire Islamic world, and plunged the Middle East into five major wars.

By contrast, in 1992, the U.S. at first opposed partition of Yugoslavia but, when it became inevitable, joined with the 12-member European Community in recognizing each of the new republics willing to stay within its pre-partition boundaries. Now, however, as the new Yugoslav Federal Republic, comprising Serbia and Montenegro, seeks to absorb part of the territory of two of its neighbors, the U.S. is moving with the EC to block the aggression.

The 51-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe admitted Bosnia on April 30 as a full member, but has postponed a decision on whether to recognize the new Serbia-Montenegro union as the legal successor state to the old six-republic Yugoslav federation. All member states approved both decisions unanimously. The EC recognized Bosnia-Hercegovina on April 6, as did the United States on April 7. The U.S. also stated that it "strongly supports the territorial integrity of Bosnia-Hercegovina."

Both the EC and the U.S. have refused to recognize the new Yugoslavia, warning that it can be barred not only from the CSCE but also from the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and other international organizations if it does not move to halt the attacks on its Bosnian neighbor.

If the U.S. and all of the countries of Europe now back up their diplomacy with tough sanctions, armed peacekeeping forces, and whatever else it takes to halt the Serbian aggression first conducted against Croatia and now against Bosnia-Hercegovina, a Balkan cancer that could divide Catholics and Protestants throughout Europe, or Christians and Muslims throughout the world, can be expunged.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, dispatched by the U.N. to try to broker a truce, said in mid-April that "continued fighting is going to benefit nobody. It will be a disaster and there will be no winners in any such situation."

It is not the first turn at the center of world attention for Bosnia-Hercegovina, whose name derives from the Bosna river and the title "herceg" (German Herzog, English Duke). Long before it became the Duchy of Bosnia it was a Roman province. Then it was settled by Slavs in the seventh century A.D.

It was Hungarian-ruled when the Turks invaded Bosnia in 1386 and it became a Turkish province in 1463. The conversion to Islam of a large part of the Slavic population, who did not differ ethnically or linguistically from the Roman Catholic Croats or the Christian Orthodox Serbs, dates to the more than 400 years of Ottoman Turkish rule.

After the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78, Bosnia-Hercegovina was occupied by Austria-Hungarian forces, although officially it remained a part of the Ottoman Empire. A move to annex it to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1908 thrust it into the center of the conflicting Russian, German and Turkish nationalisms that were part of the background to World War I.

The catalyst for that war, in which millions died between 1914 and 1918, was the June 28, 1914 assassination of Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb student.

After World War I, Bosnia-Hercegovina became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and, following a brief period under the rule of a German-dominated Croat state during World War II, it became one of the six federated people's republics of Yugoslavia, which had a combined population of 23 million at the time of their breakup.

Of the 4.4 million Bosnians, 44 percent are Muslim, 31 percent are Serbs and 17 percent are Croats. Bosnia's President Alija Izetbogovic, Vice President Rusmir Mahmutcehajic, and Foreign Minister Haris Siladjzic are Muslims. As Yugoslavia fragmented, the Muslims and Croats supported independence for a Bosnian Republic, while many Serbs opposed it.

These Bosnian Serbs, led by Radovan Karadzic, formed their own militias. Encouraged by hard-line Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, and closely supported by the 100,000 Yugoslav troops who remain in Bosnia-Hercegovina, the Serbs began seizing territory and laid siege to Sarajevo.

Mixed Neighborhoods Save Lives

To date 1,320 people, most of them Slavic Muslims, have been killed and 6,700 wounded in six weeks of fighting, according to incomplete Bosnian government figures. What has kept the death toll from climbing higher is the fact that throughout much of Bosnia-Hercegovina Muslims and Serbs, and in some areas Croats as well, have lived in mixed neighborhoods, and often in mixed apartment buildings.

Initially, Serb gunners were reluctant to rain shells upon neighborhoods where Serbian families lived among Muslims. This was not the case in earlier fighting in Croatia, where Serbs and Croats lived separately. There an estimated 10,000 died and up to a million Serbs and Croats were driven out of their homes in what has become a de facto exchange of populations as Serbs seized a third of Croatian territory.

Ironically, Bosnia's Muslims generally supported Yugoslavia's communist rulers, who repressed both Serbian and Croatian nationalists and, in the 1960s, officially created a Muslim-Slav nationality for the first time. Now, however, those same hard-line communist rulers, who have retained power in Belgrade, are repeatedly breaking U.N.-arranged cease-fires, while denying that they are supporting the seizure of more towns and villages by Bosnian Serbs.

Despite months of warnings, the government of Bosnia-Hercegovina seems to have made few preparations to defend itself. Members of its popular defense force, who include not only Muslim Slavs but also Croats and some Serbs, wear paper emblems on their uniforms and in some places have no uniforms at all.

There is no currency, so all are volunteers in forces that include both police and convicted criminals. Many predict that, if the U.N. ignores the Bosnian government's call for peacekeepers like the 14,000-man force dispatched to Croatia to separate the combatants, Sarajevo, with only 300,000 of its 600,000 residents still in the city, may soon have to surrender. If that happens, Bosnian Muslims say, they will defend their independence from their mountains. This is no idle threat in a country that consists of little else, and where the German occupiers of World War II never were able to root the partisans out of their mountain hideouts.

Although in dire economic straits, the Serbian government has defied international sanctions. "Milosevic cannot be broken by economic sanctions alone, he is an absolute fighter," Dragan Veselinov, leader of a Serbian opposition party, told Washington Post correspondent Blaine Harden. "His regime will strictly limit information about Serbia's isolation. It will attack the whole world as wrong, as Khomeini did in Iran and Saddam Hussain does in Iraq."

Harden describes a joke Serbs tell on themselves about a Serb driving the wrong way on a busy European highway. As other motorists swerve out of his path, he switches on the car radio and hears a warning: "Attention! There's a madman driving in the wrong lane on the highway." Angrily the Serb shouts, "There are at least 10,000 madmen out here. This radio station must be anti-Serb." Then he turns off the radio and floors the accelerator.

Another joke making the rounds is that odd-numbered world wars begin in Bosnia. That seemed grimmer when a report reached Sarajevo that Serbs and Croats meeting in Graz, Austria, were planning to divide Bosnia-Hercegovina among themselves, leaving only a small "pashalik" for the Muslims.

U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, who proposed several punitive actions against Belgrade in April, now is reported to have "disengaged" from the problem.

With Bosnia's Muslims and Croats, compromising 61 percent of the population, calling for a single multi-ethnic state with strong human rights safeguards, the solution is to give the majority exactly what it wants. With the U.S. and EC already agreed, and all of Europe supporting their solution, securing prompt justice and security for a new nation of 4.4 million people seems an appropriate task for new world order.

Nathan Jones, who has spent many years in the Middle East, now reports from Washington, DC.

 

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