November/December 1994, Pages 7, 65

Special Report

Leadership Is Key to Bosnia Solution

By Richard H. Curtiss

It was clearly stated that the side who rejected the plan would be punished, while the side who accepted the plan would be protected. The opposite has happened: Serbs rejected the plan, and they have been rewarded by the suspensions of sanctions. We have accepted the plan, and we have been punished by a complete blockade of Sarajevo.

—Bosnian President Aija Izebegovic, United Nations General Assembly, Sept. 27, 1994

Once again the European Union has avoided a showdown with Bosnia's Serbs. Once again the U.S., which talks a bold line on Bosnia, has acted so wimpishly that international gunslingers from Baghdad to Pyongyang can't resist challenging President Bill Clinton to draw. And, for the third year, the remaining 380,000 residents of Sarajevo face a ghastly winter of cold, starvation, and the daily threat of death.

The unlikely rescuer for the failed British and French policy of providing some measure of security around U.N.-protected Bosnian refugee collection points and some measure of enforcement of the heavy weapons exclusion zone around Sarajevo while Bosnian Serbs eject every last Muslim and Croat from the lands they have seized, is Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. He is the one-time communist strongman who switched to an especially virulent Serb fascism that called for grabbing all parts of former Yugoslavia that had any Serb inhabitants, and then uniting them in a "Greater Serbia" by "ethnic cleansing" of those areas and the land corridors linking them of non-Serbs.

Serbs now control about one-quarter of Croatia and 72 percent of Bosnia. To halt the fighting which began in April 1992 in Bosnia, a "Contact Group" made up of Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the U.S. has offered the Serbs, who constituted 31 percent of Bosnia's pre-1992 population of 4.5 million people, a "final offer" of 49 percent of the land. The Muslim 44 percent of the population and Croat 17 percent are to share the remaining 51 percent of the land, including the capital, Sarajevo.

The Bosnian Serbs refused the offer, just as they refused virtually the same offer when it was called the Owen-Stoltenberg plan, and the U.S. announced it would lift the arms embargo that keeps the Bosnian government from getting arms to defend itself unilaterally if the U.N. had not done so by Oct. 15. Then three things happened.

France and Britain said they would withdraw the 6,800 French and 3,300 British troops from the U.N. peacekeeping contingent if anyone lifted the embargo. Milosevic announced he would embargo shipments of fuel and war materials to the Bosnian Serbs until they accepted the final offer. And Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, pressured by the British and French threats of withdrawal, agreed to a delay of six months before the lifting of the U.N. arms embargo is implemented, to see if Milosevic's embargo on the Bosnian Serbs is serious.

Once again, the U.S. has abdicated responsibility for halting the genocide.

So, once again, the U.S. has abdicated responsibility for halting the genocide to someone else. That someone else, Milosevic, initiated the Serb attack in the first place by putting the Bosnian Serbs within the former Yugoslav army into autonomous units and sending them across the border, supported by Serbian army artillery and military aircraft, and rotating in and out of Bosnia other units of the regular Serbian army to provide logistical and technical support. His government still pays the salaries of Bosnian Serb officers, and Belgrade, his capital, still is home to many Bosnian Serb leaders.

However, although Milosevic has broken previous promises, he may have reasons to keep this one beyond hoping that the U.N. will end its embargo on Serbia proper. If peace is made on the basis of Serb retention of half of Bosnia, Serbia then can turn its attention back to absorbing the parts of Croatia held by Serbs, or to Kosovo or other areas where local Serbs also are anxious to do some ethnic cleansing so that those areas, too, can be securely incorporated into Milosevic's Greater Serbia.

Milosevic has made it extraordinarily difficult to find out if he is sincere. To patrol the 527 kilometers (320 miles) of border between Serbia and Bosnia he has limited the European Union to 135 international monitors and forbidden their use of helicopters. Experts say 500 to 800 observers are required to watch the heavily wooded river banks and mountain passes on an around-the-clock basis.

Nevertheless, if the U.N., which already has voted to relax the embargo against commercial flights to and from Serbia and against Serbian participation in international sports events, concludes that Milosevic is cutting off war supplies to the Bosnian Serbs, while Bosnia's Muslim-led government continues its ground attacks, the Bosnian Serbs eventually may have to withdraw to the 49 percent of Bosnia assigned as their share of the spoils.

If Milosevic breaks his pledge, one option is to punish the Serbs for their bad faith by declaring the Contact Group's plan null and void, decreeing that all displaced Bosnians are entitled to return to their original homes under U.N. protection, and using NATO aircraft to enforce the decree, bombing the bridges that link Serbia and Bosnia, and Serb military concentrations or installations that threaten the U.N. forces, if necessary. This makes the most sense, but it would require U.S. political will and leadership on a par with that exercised in organizing Desert Storm.

The second option does not require such a high degree of political risk. While waiting six months for the arms embargo to expire, what is to stop the U.S. from organizing the training of Bosnian soldiers at U.S. bases in Europe or in the U.S., Jordan, Egypt, Turkey or Saudi Arabia on the American weapons they will be receiving when the embargo is lifted?

And, if the Bosnian Serbs continue to lob shells and mortars into Sarajevo and U.N.-protected areas, what is to stop NATO aircraft from striking not only at the Serb positions from which the missiles have come, but also command-and-control positions and Bosnian Serb military and political headquarters in Pale, from which the orders to violate U.N.-protected areas and exclusion zones come? For its part, the U.S. seems ready, if Secretary of Defense William Perry's Sept. 28 statements to a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Seville are to be believed:

When we go in, I want to go in with compelling force. Force not necessarily just proportionate to the act at stake, but enough to make it clear that there is a heavy price to pay for violating these rules that NATO has established...Some of us, like myself, have been pushing for much more robust use of NATO air power, and I hope we can agree on a set of conditions under which that more robust use will take place.

Key NATO defense ministers at Seville seemed to agree, including the defense minister of France, which had not sent a representative to such a meeting for the previous 28 years. "If we want to avoid the lifting of the arms embargo...then we must pay the price and increase the diplomatic and military pressure on the Serbs," French Defense Minister Françis Leotard later told reporters. "We have to harden our response to the violations which occur...There has been a real deterioration in the last few weeks."

"There will be no more pinprick airstrikes," echoed British Defense Minister Malcolm Rifkind. Said Defense Minister Volker Ruehe of Germany, "NATO will react more consistently to infringements. We need stronger coordination between NATO and the United Nations."

A good way to start dealing with the last problem is to get rid of the present U.N. military commander in Bosnia, Lt. Gen. Sir Michael Rose, who arrived eight months ago in an aura of klieg lights and vows to get tough, but eventually succumbed to a case of Stockholm syndrome. Apparently warned by British political leaders to stop stirring up the Serbs, he turned his righteous anger on the U.S. instead.

"If someone wants to fight a war here on moral or political grounds, fine, great, but count us out," Rose said in September. "Hitting infrastructure, command and control, logistics, that is war and I'm not going to fight a war in white-painted tanks."

Responded a U.S. official, "General Rose is waging a diplomatic war with the United States, not with the Serbs."

In fact, however, it is U.N. special representative Yasushi Akashi who has veto power over requests for airstrikes from his U.N. personnel on the ground and has exercised it so often that, although there have been NATO planes patrolling the skies over Bosnia daily for more than a year while Serbs have been taking potshots at U.N. bluehelmets below, only six relatively genteel airstrikes have been permitted, some after Serbs had been warned to clear the area to be attacked.

So egregious is Akashi's own case of Stockholm syndrome that, after months of being contradicted, berated and humiliated by Bosnian Serb military leader General Ratko Mladic and Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, Akashi has disgraced himself further with a false report that Bosnian government forces had committed the kind of atrocity for which Serbs are justly famed.

After government forces overwhelmed a Serb command post Oct. 6 on Mount Igman, overlooking the one road open between Sarajevo and government territory, Akashi charged that Bosnian forces had slit the throats of the defenders, shot each in the head, and then mutilated the bodies. What Akashi didn't know at the time was that six wounded Serbs taken prisoner in the attack could corroborate the government account of a standard commando operation in which four Serb sentries were silently knifed to death, enabling the government forces to surprise and wipe out the command post with heavy firepower that left 12 more Serb soldiers and 4 Serb nurses dead. Caught lying, the U.N. withdrew Akashi's false charge the next day but, regrettably, hasn't yet withdrawn Akashi.

The Akashi problem was deftly summarized by columnist Jim Hoagland in the Oct. 6 Washington Post: "Politically the United States has chosen sides in Bosnia. But militarily, it is the captive of a U.N. bureaucracy that does not believe in choosing sides. This is a road map to a dead end."

In any case, in the highly unlikely event that Milosevic's embargo on the Bosnian Serbs is genuine, the war may end within months. If it is not, however, the civilized world's dilemma is summed up in a Sept. 30 Wall Street Journal editorial:

"There may be no clear way out of the predicament, but the U.S. can certainly improve the odds. Lifting the arms embargo would be a step in the right direction. A rigorous application of air power to enforce the exclusion zones would be another...The operative word here is enforcement: By refusing to enforce the laws it devises, the U.N. is sabotaging any hope for a solution."