More Harm than Good

By Bruce W. Nelan

The agony of Yugoslavia keeps replaying itself with new bombardments, massacres, rapes and "ethnic cleansings." At each horrifying recurrence, world opinion is outraged and opinion leaders call for an end to the barbarism. And each time the West, led by the U.S., shows itself unwilling to intervene with force. Last week it happened again. While the Clinton Administration was preoccupied with its airdrops of food and medicine into eastern Bosnia, rebel Serbs mounted a furious artillery-and-tank offensive against the same Muslim enclaves the U.S. Air Force was trying to hit with parachuted supplies.

The Serbs have shown exquisite calibration in cranking up the carnage to just below the point where the West will react. The war is about religious differences as well as territory and politics; it involves Serbian Orthodox, Bosnian Muslims and Croat Catholics. Serb militias now occupy 70% of Bosnia and Herzegovina, leaving only Sarajevo and isolated pockets in the hands of Bosnia's mainly Muslim government. Among the most desperate are the besieged Muslim towns in eastern Bosnia, near the frontier with Serbia. It was their plight that prompted Clinton to order the airdrops over the snow-covered town of Cerska.

Just hours after the first three U.S. C-130s dumped their cargo from 10,000 ft., Serb guns went into action. Artillery and mortars pounded dozens of small villages in the area, then followed up with tanks that blasted and set fire to the ruined houses and mosques. Thousands of civilians fled into the frozen countryside.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees informed the Security Council that Serb forces were attacking the settlements around Cerska and Srebrenica and driving out the villagers. "Civilians, women, children and old people are being killed, usually by having their throats cut," reported the High Commissioner, Sadako Ogata. In fact Ogata, like other U.N. officials and foreign journalists, had no firsthand knowledge of what was happening. The world was relying on what ham-radio operators in the Muslim towns were broadcasting. But, she said, "if only 10% of the information is true, we are witnessing a massacre."

A local Serb commander in Bosnia responded that such reports were "wrong and malicious," and offered safe passage out of the region for the thousands of refugees, many of them camped in the open. But amateur-radio broadcasters continued to report heavy artillery fire falling on dozens of blazing hamlets. One Bosnian army officer in Cerska appealed for international help at least to "save 2,500 wounded, if nobody cares about the genocide of 52,000 people in this area."

Serbs often offer safe passage out of areas they are attacking, but Bosnian and U.N. officials regard the ploy as part of the Serb campaign to rid the area of non-Serbs. Serb officials seemed to confirm that with a statement that Muslims and Serbs "will not live together ever again." In spite of the U.N.'s reluctance to assist in the "cleansing," General Philippe Morillon, head of the peacekeeping force in Bosnia, went to Cerska on Friday to try, apparently unsuccessfully, to negotiate an evacuation.

Surprised by the Serb onslaught and its timing, officials in Washington insisted that the U.S. airdrops had not triggered the attack. Pentagon and State Department spokesmen argued that the Serbs were carrying out battle plans made long before. But another Administration expert on Yugoslavia sees it differently. "Of course there's a connection," he says. "From the Serb viewpoint, the best way to stop the airdrops is to 'cleanse' the area." The delivery of food may have encouraged Serb fighters, who had been trying to starve the Muslims out of territory Serbs wish to occupy, to mount a more aggressive assault. If the Muslims are evacuated to escape the bloodshed, the Serbs will have gained their objective.

Defense Secretary Les Aspin had explained the drops as a way to demonstrate the West's determination to get relief supplies into the Muslim enclaves by ) any means possible, so the Serb forces might as well unblock the roads and allow the U.N. truck convoys to pass. Though a considerable part of each U.S. drop fell on or near Serb positions, the Serbs apparently decided to cut off entirely the resupply of their enemies by seizing the enclaves.

Despite the questionable impact of the operation, the U.S. intends to continue it. Aspin appeared to announce a pause last week, but Clinton quickly corrected him, saying the missions would go on. The hope, says Reginald Bartholomew, U.S. envoy to the Bosnian negotiations, is that the drops will "contribute toward achieving a diplomatic solution."

Part of the diplomacy involves keeping Russia on the West's team. President Boris Yeltsin is under heavy pressure from parliament to join forces with Russia's traditional Slav allies, the Serbs. A way to strengthen the existing bond, Washington has decided, is to bring the Russians into the airlift. Moscow has agreed, and five U.S. Air Force officers are to fly there this week to plan Russian participation, which will include flying cargo missions to Bosnia from NATO bases in Germany and Italy -- the first U.S.-Russian joint operations since World War II.

But the larger diplomatic effort last week was at the U.N., where negotiators Cyrus Vance and Lord Owen continued to push their plan to carve Bosnia into 10 ethnically determined, semiautonomous provinces. The mediators are never certain from day to day which leaders of the three factions will show up, much less what their stance will be. The talks were apparently making progress when the Bosnian Muslims agreed to the military disengagement portion of the agreement in return for a promise that U.N. peacekeepers would take control of Serb artillery and heavy weapons. A day later, the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, said his forces would never hand over their big guns to the U.N.

The largest stumbling block to a negotiated settlement remains the map of the 10 ethnic enclaves that Vance and Owen propose. Even if Bosnian President Alia Izetbegovic were to accept it, as he hinted last week, Karadzic says he will not. The patchwork state as now drawn would require the Serbs to cut back their territorial holdings from 70% to 42% and leave almost a third of all Bosnian Serbs in provinces controlled by Muslims or Croats. Karadzic vows not to surrender a single Serb village, and his militias have shown their ability to turn other villages into Serbian strongholds almost at will.

With its chances of success so dim, the Vance-Owen peace process would not receive so much attention if it were not the only visible way out -- not for Bosnia, but for the West. Washington is talking about tightening sanctions on Belgrade, but Bosnia is beyond the point where such leverage can make a difference. Although Clinton campaigned with a call for more help to the Muslims, he has found no backing for military intervention. Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, says flatly, "There is no support in the international community for armed intervention, and nothing that has happened in the past few days changes that."

No voices are being raised inside the Administration demanding action. No initiatives are circulating at State or at the Pentagon and the National Security Council, where the center of gravity on Yugoslavia policy has moved. There is no ground swell for intervention in Congress. In fact, Congress would vote against sending troops to Bosnia and might do so even if the troops were to be used only to monitor an agreement accepted by all the warring parties. Bosnia is effectively finished, and the best its leaders can hope for is a Vance-Owen settlement -- and the thousands of American and European soldiers that would be required to police it.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: NO CREDIT

CAPTION: TALLY OF TERROR

With reporting by James L. Graff/Gorazde and J.F.O. McAllister and Bruce van Voorst/Washington