August/September 1992, Page 26, 82

While the World Watches, Serbian Genocide in Bosnia Continues

By Richard H. Curtiss

"I ask sometimes, does Europe know what is happening here? Do the European leaders know about the Serbian concentration camps, about the mass killings? Do they know about it or not?"

-Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, BBC, July 31, 1992

It is not the first time in the 20th century that Europeans have witnessed "ethnic purification" in which armed men enter houses and loot them before herding the occupants away at gunpoint. Some of the refugees are dumped across the border. Others are shot or stabbed to death outside their homes. Still others are packed into sealed boxcars where some may die of suffocation or dehydration.

Those who survive are herded into concentration camps where they are left to starve or await a slower death from exposure in areas where the first snows may arrive as early as September. Americans and Europeans who have grown up asking their parents or grandparents, "How is it possible that no one did anything?" need ask no more. Today's Americans and Europeans are the ones doing nothing.

What's happening in Bos nia re-enacts what happened first in Germany in 1938 and then all across Europe, from France to the Ukraine, because, at the beginning, "no one did anything." By the time World War II broke out, it was too late.

This time, when the bloodbath began in Croatia, U.N. peacekeepers were able to stop it. Only, however, after Serbs had seized a great many Croat towns, Croats had seized a few towns and villages occupied by Serbs, and thousands had died.

In only one of Yugoslavia's six constituent republics did Serbs, Croats and Slavic Muslims live not only in the same towns, but on the same streets and in the same apartment buildings. The result was that most of Bosnia's 4.4 million people, 44 percent of whom are Muslim, 33 percent of whom are Orthodox Serbs, and 17 percent of whom are Roman Catholic Croats, were determined to establish a pluralistic republic and resist efforts to divide Bosnia and its capital into ethnic enclaves.

Their unity did them little good, however, when Serbs of the former Yugoslav army, backed by planes, tanks and heavy artillery, blasted their way into Bosnian towns and villages, seizing 80 percent of the land. Special envoy for the U.N. High Commissioner for Yugoslavia, Jose-Maria Mendiluce, estimated on July 24 that 1.3 million Bosnians had been ejected or had fled from their homes, and another 1 million will flee in coming months, and that half a million Bosnians will die of starvation and cold once bad weather makes it impossible to reach them with food and heating oil.

Bosnians and Croats alike believe they will be slaughtered.

Meanwhile, if the U.N. maintains its embargo on weapons going into Bosnia, the isolated defenders of beleaguered Sarajevo may soon run out of ammunition and be forced to surrender to the well-supplied Serbs. Bosnians and Croats alike believe they will be slaughtered.

The uncertain U.S. reaction has only added to the chaos. When former U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was dispatched by the United Nations to try to mediate an end to the fighting, he said no foreign troops would be dispatched to stop the fighting.

Such assurances by Vance and subsequent Western visitors to the besieged Bosnian capital only convinced Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, a Communist from the previous regime who has effortlessly converted himself into a Serbian fascist, and his Bosnian Serb ally, Radovan Kavadzic, that they could complete the bloody dismantling of the Bosnian republic without outside opposition. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker proposed several punitive actions last April. When they failed to get much attention from the European Community, the U.S. disengaged.

French President Francois Mitterand made a daring one-day visit to Sarajevo in late June, shaming European countries into breaking the siege of the airport to bring in food for starving residents of the capital. U.S. military aircraft based in Europe have participated in the relief airlift, contributing an average of 2 of the approximately 20 flights per day, on days when the airport has been open.

Virtually nothing, however, has reached starving residents of dozens of other besieged Bosnian towns and villages. In mid-July, British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd spent an afternoon in Sarajevo, inadvertently reassuring Serbia's president again that "no country is willing to contemplate military invasion."

Meanwhile, the Canadian commander of U.N. peacekeeping forces for four months insisted on treating the Serbian aggressors and their Bosnian victims as merely two sides of the same problem. Unless both stopped shooting, he solemnly assured them, there would be no more relief shipments. Since the Serbs were receiving all the supplies they needed from Serbia, and only the Bosnians were starving, the Serbs routinely broke each new cease-fire in order to starve the capital's defenders.

U.S. Defense Secretary Richard Cheney sounded even more confused when he asked reporters: "Who is the enemy? How would we identify our military mission? Who would we fight? The Bosnians? The Serbs? We don't know."

Then White House press spokesman Marlon Fitzwater reinforced the impression that when it comes to Bosnia, the Bush administration is permanently out to lunch. Democratic presidential candidate William Clinton released a statement carefully crafted with vice presidential candidate Albert Gore. In effect, it depoliticized the issue by advocating U.S. aerial attacks on Serbian positions, if necessary, to get humanitarian aid to besieged Bosnians.

Fitzwater called the statement "reckless" and an example of the inexperience of the Clinton-Gore team. The White House spokesman halted his attacks when he was told that except for the ill-informed Cheney, most administration leaders favored the measures advocated by Clinton.

Continued Handwringing

European leaders continued their handwringing, while shells continued falling on Bosnians and the relief convoys trying to break through to them.

"When faced with concentration camps and sealed trains, we have done nothing," said former British Foreign Secretary Lord Owen on July 30. "We made that mistake with the Jews in the Second World War. . . Satellite and air reconnaissance could pinpoint any unauthorized military activity and retaliatory air strikes could be mounted from NATO airfields that ring Yugoslavia or by planes flying from aircraft carriers. This could be implemented within hours, not even days, once the requisite authority had been got from the U.N. Security Council."

Germany has been reluctant to contemplate sending its own armed forces into action, given the bitter Balkan memories that remain of German occupation during World War II. Said German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel in a newspaper interview, however: "I grant that we have so far been unsuccessful in stopping this terrible murdering and killing. I have always said that in the end military intervention should not and cannot be excluded."

Now French and Canadian peacekeepers at Sarajevo airport are being replaced by Ukrainian and Egyptian units. When Ukrainian troops arrived they set up a hilltop radar capable of pinpointing the source of firing anywhere in the area of the capital and its airport. They came under heavy Serbian mortar fire and five Ukrainian peacekeepers were wounded.

While all commentators deplore the Serbian depredations as more brutal than anything that has transpired in Europe since World War II, the Europeans have bogged down in characteristic squabbling. When the U.S. first suggested that it was an EC responsibility, and then that NATO take the lead if military action becomes necessary, the French insisted that the new nine-nation Western European Union should be the chosen instrument.

Europeans have been looking to the U.S. for their defense for so long, it appears, that they literally have forgotten how to lead. So, it appears, has George Bush, although Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovic risked his life flying out of Sarajevo airport to meet Bush in Helsinki. In a July 7 interview with New York Times correspondent John Burns in Sarajevo just before his trip, Izetbegovic outlined what he hoped to tell Bush:

"All across Bosnia and Hercegovina, in areas that are under the control of the Yugoslav national army and of the Serbian paramilitary terrorists who are their allies, non-Serbs are being forcibly separated from the Serbian population.

"After that, the non-Serb population-and I refer here to Muslims, Croats, Jews, gypsies and others-are being ordered to leave these areas within one or two hours, and being told that they can take only what they can carry. In my view, this is the worst kind of evil imaginable. From a human, psychological and political view this goes beyond killing, because it attacks the very basis of civilization itself.

"Unfortunately, we are not capable of resisting this evil by ourselves because we are a young nation, only three months old, and we don't have a strong army. Without the help of the international community, we can't resist this evil."

A former congressman who served with Bush in the House offers this only half-facetious explanation for Bush's characteristic indecision. "George Bush has 200 close friends," the Democratic politician said. "And he never makes a move until he has consulted every one of them."

Perhaps some of those 200 advisers will inform the U.S. president that what is happening in Bosnia is not a civil war, but an over-the-border invasion every bit as illegal, and brutal, as Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. And, although neither Serbia nor Bosnia has oil, the U.S. does have a vital interest there. As the world's only remaining superpower, which so far has remained idle in the face of an invasion that the U.S. and its allies could easily halt, the vital interest is American credibility.

For the sake of the battered Bosnians, for civilization, and for the already fraying "new world order," Americans should pray that their uncertain leader soon will complete his 200th call.

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