The atrocities apparently started last spring, when Serbian forces began the “ethnic cleansing” of newly independent Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Serbs drove more than 1 million Muslims and Croats from their homes, torturing and killing some of them, abusing and terrorizing the rest. Some Muslims and Croats struck back with atrocities of their own. Now the grim results are finally showing up on television screens and the front pages of newspapers. Pictures sear the conscience of the world: a wailing baby beside a bullet-punctured window, the emaciated bodies of prisoners in the camps, an old woman shot down at her grandchild’s funeral. The struggle in what used to be Yugoslavia turns out to be not just a civil war but a ruthless campaign by members of one ethnic group to “purify” the land by driving out others. Suddenly the response of the outside world so far–a lot of hand-wringing and a few relief supplies for one besieged city, Sarajevo-looks pathetically inadequate.
Two defining events last week, the sniping at the funeral and the first press visits to Serbian detention camps, put pressure on George Bush to do something. Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher wrote in The New York Times that “Serbia should be given an ultimatum” to stop the aggression or face “military retaliation.” Bill Clinton staked out a position to the right of his presidential rival. “I would begin with air power against the Serbs, to try to restore the basic conditions of humanity,” he said. A NEWSWEEK Poll found a sharp increase in public support for airstrikes in defense of the relief effort (chart). But there was no guarantee that U.S. air power-or even a vast infusion of ground troops, if someone were willing to supply them-could stop the ancient feuds in the Balkans. Bush didn’t want to look heartless, but he was equally determined to stay out of a quagmire.
Faced with a political and moral dilemma, he groped for the safe middle ground. “The world cannot shed its horror at the prospect of concentration camps,” Bush said. But he was reluctant to send “somebody else’s son or somebody else’s daughter into harm’s way.” Instead, he asked the United Nations Security Council for a resolution authorizing the use of force, if necessary, to maintain the flow of relief supplies into Bosnia. Neither Washington nor its closest allies had any clear idea of how force could best be exerted. The administration was in deep disarray; it wasn’t known when vacationing Secretary of State James Baker would stop running foreign policy and start running Bush’s presidential campaign. And despite the outcry over Bosnia, Washington still lacked a sense of urgency. “Until the pressure of this week, we have not had this on the front burner,” admitted a senior State Department official. “And even now, there is no consensus on what the hell we should do, what we can do, to stop this nightmare.”
It’s been going on for a long time. The Balkans are scarred by the fault lines of history. Orthodox Christian Serbs face off against Roman Catholic Croats on roughly the same terrain where the Turkish invasion of Europe reached its high-water mark, leaving behind a residue of Islamic Slavs. Religion and nationality make the Balkans more a flash point than a melting pot. The unstable region provided the spark that set off World War I and produced some of the worst atrocities of World War II, when Croats backed the Nazis and Serbs became communist guerrillas. Today, after a long truce imposed by dictatorship, ambitious politicians still play on ethnic hatreds.
The present crisis was aggravated by miscalculations in Washington and Europe. Lawrence Eagleburger, the deputy secretary of state, admits that he misread Slobodan Milosevic, the thuggish leader of the Serbian Republic, the biggest remaining component of Yugoslavia. “I knew him when he was a banker,” says Eagleburger, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Belgrade from 1977 to 1981. “I thought him fairly sensible for a Marxist economist … Where I misjudged him in those early days was in not realizing that on the political side, he was clearly a Serbian nationalist of the worst sort.” Although Washington tried last year to keep Yugoslavia from breaking up precipitously, Eagleburger says that by early 1990 he recognized that the country was heading for a tragedy in which Milosevic would play a major role. “I have said for two years that this man was intent on building a Greater Serbia,” says Eagleburger. “But the question then and now is, how do you stop him? I didn’t then, and I still don’t, see how you do that.”
The Europeans had no answers, either. Some of them took sides. “For their own reasons, the Germans have a good deal of sympathy for the Croats, and the French and Russians feel some sympathy for the Serbs,” says an official at the British Foreign Office. “Our own view,” he adds, “is that while the Serbs have been the greatest destabilizing force, none of the parties has clean hands.” When Slovenia and Croatia became the first republics to declare their independence last year, the Germans pressed for early diplomatic recognition of the new countries, hastening Yugoslavia’s descent into chaos. Last winter, Bosnia’s Muslim and Croatian majority voted to secede from Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia. When Bosnian Serbs began their “ethnic cleansing” campaign, backed by Milosevic’s regime, the French at first resisted sanctions against Serbia, until Baker shamed them into it.
Two weeks ago, when Bill Clinton proposed that air power might be used, within the framework of U.N. resolutions, to protect the relief effort, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater called him “reckless.” But Clinton’s proposal wasn’t much different from the position Bush took in early July and warily readopted last week. U.S. forces are available for intervention from air bases in Italy and Germany and from warships, including the aircraft carrier Saratoga, in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. But it’s by no means certain that airstrikes alone can even protect the relief shipments, much less stop the fighting, and they might inspire Serbian attacks on the 1,600 lightly armed U.N. peacekeeping troops already deployed in Sarajevo.
U.S. warplanes could strike at Serbian artillery positions, but with a huge risk of hitting innocent bystanders-or hitting nothing at all, given the mobility of the Serbian guns. Air power is not the best way to knock out artillery; counterbattery fire is more effective, but that requires gun crews and forward observers. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney strongly opposes the deployment of Americans on the ground, and Bush has not warmed up to the idea of using force in any form. Other options are no more appetizing. They include:
The relief effort would be much more effective if it did not depend on planes landing at Sarajevo’s airport. The answer might be one or more land corridors into besieged cities from places like the port of Split on the Adriatic. But again, air power alone cannot do the job. The Bosnian mountains are full of choke points that make convoys vulnerable to ambush. Ground forces would have to pacify large parts of the country. Canadian Maj. Gen. Lewis MacKenzie, the former commander of U.N. peacekeeping forces in Sarajevo, said last week that such an operation would require 600,000 to 800,000 troops “as a starting point.” No one is volunteering for that job. “It’s tragic,” Cheney said in a recent interview with CNN, “but the Balkans have been a hotbed of conflict … for centuries.”
The Bosnians are badly outgunned by the local Serbs, who get help from the Yugoslav armed forces. “I completely agree with Mr. Bush’s statement that American boys should not die for Bosnia,” Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, a Muslim, told an interviewer last week. “We have hundreds and thousands of able and willing men ready to fight, but unfortunately they have the disadvantage of being unarmed. We need weapons.” Washington strongly disagrees. “There are enough arms there already,” Bush said last Saturday. “We’ve got to stop the killing some way, and I don’t think it’s enhanced by more and more [weapons.]”
In a meeting at the White House last week, American Jewish leaders suggested to Brent Scowcroft, the president’s national-security adviser, that airstrikes or other carefully targeted military action could be used to punish Serbia itself if Milosevic doesn’t quickly open the detention camps, which remind many Jews of the Nazi Holocaust. “He agreed that that is a reasonable proposition that the administration should consider,” said one participant in the meeting, Henry Siegman, executive director of the American Jewish Congress. In her op-ed piece, Margaret Thatcher argued that “even installations on the Serbian side of the border may be attacked if they play an important role in the war.” But the Serbs are tough fighters, and the Yugoslav arsenal, including surface-to-air missiles, could make U.S. warplanes pay a steep price for any punitive campaign. “The Serbs may be able to absorb a lot of airstrikes without giving way,” says a Pentagon planner. And retired Gen. John Galvin, a former NATO commander, points out that the Bosnian Serbs “are not … entirely under the control of Milosevic. They are irregulars,” he says.
Many Europeans think it may be impossible for all of the displaced Muslims, Croats and Serbs to return to their homes in Bosnia. The only permanent solution, they say, is to carve the republic into ethnic cantons. The Economist recently called for “the least inequitable redrawing of boundaries that is compatible with resettling the maximum number of refugees.” But partition would reward aggression and validate “ethnic cleansing” by allowing the Serbs to retain control over much of the territory they have seized in recent months. It would leave many Muslims permanently dispossessed, making them the Palestinians of the Balkans. U.S. officials expect a confrontation with the Europeans on this issue. “For the civilized Western world to accept the principle of cantonization at this stage,” says a senior American, “is to ask it to happen everywhere else in the former East bloc where one country decides it wants a hunk of its neighbor’s territory.”
For now, Washington will concentrate more on diplomacy than on military action. “The closest thing we have to a game plan is to try to get the shooting stopped, then work on a political solution,” says the senior official. The process will continue this week in various U.N. forums and later this month at an international conference in London. If the outside world cannot figure out some way to stop the fighting, clean up the detention camps and feed the starving, the struggle in Bosnia could inspire other ethnic struggles-elsewhere in Yugoslavia, in divided East European nations and in the former Soviet Union, where dozens of resentful nationalities are jostling for position. Once again, the volatile Balkans could provide the spark for conflicts engulfing millions of Europeans.
If Serbian forces continue to block relief efforts to Bosnia, should the U.S. take the lead in seeking U.N.-backed air strikes against them? Current 53% Yes 33% No July 31-Aug. 2 35% Yes 45% No Should U.S. air units participate in U.N.-backed air strikes? 50% Yes 37% No For this NEWSWEEK Poll, The Gallup Organization telephoned 755 registered voters Aug. 6-7. Margin of error is +/- 4 percentage points. “Don’t know” and other responses not shown. The NEWSWEEK Poll (COPYRIGHT) 1992 by NEWSWEEK, INC.
