It was a humiliating spectacle: an alleged Serbian war criminal boasting to a top U.N. military official of his latest conquest-and once again making fools of the West. The scene was Mount Bjelasnica, just outside the Bosnian capital, site of the largest Serbian victory in months in the area around Sarajevo. “All this territory is controlled by Serb forces,” a grinning Gen. Ratko Mladic, chief architect of “ethnic cleansing,” told his guest, Lt. Gen. Francis Briquemont, commander of U.N. forces in Bosnia. Overhead, NATO warplanes cruised; Serbian soldiers ignored them. “We have to make peace,” Briquemont practically whispered to his host. “I was born over there in Kalinovik,” gestured Mladic, without waiting for a translation of Briquemont’s comment.
As if to underscore Serbian contempt for the world body, two flags fluttered nearby at a ski-lift terminal that was a site of the 1984 Winter Olympics. One flag belonged to the United Nations and the other, higher up, to the Bosnian Serbs. Behind the terminal, Mladic had parked his Gazelle helicopter, in flagrant violation of NATO’s no-fly zone over Bosnia. But Briquemont didn’t snap any handcuffs on the Serb commander. “It’s not my responsibility,” he said.
The Serbs got the better of the West again last week. While Serbian troops were yanking the noose tighter around Sarajevo, NATO diplomats were meeting endlessly to thrash out their differences over how wide an air campaign they might launch from the Aviano air base in Italy and who would call the shots. “God,” moaned one senior British NATO officer, “why do the Americans always leave things to the last minute?” Some Pentagon planners wondered whether airstrikes would do any good at this late hour. Hitting the Serbs might prevent a humanitarian calamity in Sarajevo, or slightly strengthen the Bosnian government’s feeble hand at the peace table. But without massive infantry on the ground, bombing couldn’t prevent the fall of the city. And it would do nothing at all to revive a cause for which thousands of Bosnians have died–the idea of a democratic, multiethnic state.
It’s hard to pinpoint just when that dream died. For Marshall Freeman Harris, it all ended last week, when the State Department’s desk officer on Bosnia resigned in disgust to protest a U.S. policy “that accepts the forceful dismemberment of a European state and that will not act against genocide.” In fact, the West has already been retreating for months. The Vance-Owen peace plan it once supported, and the partition proposal it’s backing today, both envision carving up Bosnia into separate provinces for Muslims, Serbs and Croats.
How and where to separate the ethnic groups is still under heated negotiation in Geneva. The Serbs and Croats, victors in the 16-month-old war, would like to leave the Muslims with next to nothing. Washington wants to see a viable Bosnian ministate, with a protected corridor to the Adriatic coast to the southwest. “The maps [of the three combatants] are very, very far apart,” says one administration source. “And they are farthest apart on the future of Sarajevo.” The Serbs, he says, want to divide the capital, seizing the western half of the city for themselves and turning “downtown Sarajevo into a Muslim ghetto.” That may help explain General Mladic’s recent assault on Mount Bjelasnica and Mount Igman (map), from which the Serbs could train their artillery on particular targets with devastating accuracy. How to link Sarajevo with other Muslim enclaves around Bosnia? Let them dig a tunnel through the mountains, suggested Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. Outraged by the latest Serbian offenses, and emboldened by the threat of strikes, Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic walked out of the talks. But U.S. envoy Reginald Bartholomew warned Izetbegovic that airstrikes wouldn’t be ordered as long as the Muslims stayed away from the table.
Whether the United States could organize those airstrikes anyway was another question. After hesitating for months, the Clinton administration is now pushing hardest for bombing raids to contain Serbian aggression. It’s having trouble persuading allies in NATO to approve broad-based raids. But they’re having an even harder time with U.N. commanders, who demanded and won a major concession from Washington–the right to decide, along with NATO, any targets within Bosnia slated for airstrikes. General Briquemont, fearful of reprisals by Serbs against U.N. forces, has steadily derided the idea of a U.S.–led bombing campaign: “When it comes to making threats, it is easier to speak than to act.” Some U.N. officials have gone out of their way to appease the aggressor. The Bosnian Serb leadership recently released an open letter offering to unblock routes for humanitarian aid, restore utilities and withdraw from Mount Igman and Mount Bjelasnica. lt came to light last week that the letter was written by U.N. officers in Sarajevo in order to stave off Western intervention. “We drafted it, not Karadzic,” says a high-ranking U.N. official in Sarajevo.
Bosnian Muslims are counting on U.N. peacekeepers to act as a tripwire in any full-scale Serbian assault against the capital. But many residents believe that the spirit of Sarajevo, a place of tolerance for different ethnic groups, is already dead and buried. The city’s defenders still include thousands of Croats and Serbs. But war and savage atrocities have polarized people, pushing them to rely on blood ties. Enver Agic, 27, a Muslim reservist who rode out a 3,000-shell barrage on Zuc, has watched Serbs in his unit flee to their ethnic brethren on the other side. “I don’t trust them,” he mutters. “Every time they desert, we have to change positions and dig new trenches.” Too often, he says, desertions by ethnic Serbs have been followed by direct hits on former comrades.
Some Muslim-led paramilitary units have been guilty of brutal partisanship as well. In late June they murdered an elderly Serbian couple in reprisal for a mortar attack by Serb nationalists that killed seven children. Col. Jovan Divjak, the highest-ranking Serb in the Bosnian army, has been excluded from all planning meetings about actions around Sarajevo. His son was recently kidnapped and roughed up by Muslim militiamen who asked him, “Why aren’t you in Pale?”–headquarters for the Bosnian Serbs. A mere peace agreement won’t quell these passions. And there is nothing the United States can do, even with its smartest bombs, to change the minds of extremists on all sides.
