Editorials
COMMONWEAL No happy outcome housands of people in Bosnian towns and cities live under siege. The spectacle evokes a medieval war, yet its horror is graphically transmitted around the world. News...
...Moreover, it is difficult to gauge the potential of military action...
...If analogies are ever useful, perhaps a better one is to be found in the fudging of military realities and the appeasing of Germany by England and France in the 1930s...
...8-9...
...The second, mightily resisted by the West, is to open fire against the Serbian militias in Bosnia and to silence the guns shelling Sarajevo and other towns...
...That the Serbs earlier got away with these tactics against Vukovar, Dubrovnik, and other Croatian cities can only raise the specter of more to come once they are in possession of Eastern Bosnia...
...The structural and financial weaknesses of the EC and the UN hamper efforts either to force negotiations or to end the hostilities...
...Vietnam, Afghanistan, and even Northern Ireland have been cited as examples of the dire consequences...
...When General MacKenzie and the British evenhandedly blame all parties for the current hostilities, they refer to this long history...
...Northern Ireland has never been and is not now the same as Vietnam...
...Nothing yet devised to end the carnage seems to work: international sanctions against Yugoslavia, international rejection of Serbian pretensions to pose as the successor state, UN flights to relieve the looming starvation of the people of Sarajevo, visits from world notables, and numerous, but failed, cease-fires...
...This would not be a happy outcome, but it seems the least destructive of the alternatives, both for the Bosnians and for all of those ethnic hot spots waiting to see whether the international community will at last develop the will and evolve the mechanisms for stopping wholesale civilian slaughter...
...The history of this part of the world has given us the word "Balkanization," used everywhere to characterize the internecine struggles of ethnic and national groups that end in partition, fragmentation, and bitter memories which fester and then feed the next round of hostilities...
...If the Serbs should then turn to low-intensity conflict, and some form of guerrilla tactics, history suggests that those Muslims, Serbs, and Croats who favor an independent Bosnia will know how to respond in kind...
...The first, currently in effect, is to punish Yugoslavia with an economic embargo, to encourage the resignation of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, and to keep the Bosnians from starving...
...To do nothing about Bosnia only invites more civilian deaths, an enormous increase in refugees, and further adventures by the Serbs in Kosovo and Macedonia (see pp...
...They remember, after all, that it was Gavrilo Princip, a Serb, who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, and launched the mad slaughter of World War I. Any European with a sense of history would hesitate to imagine an easy resolution of the Balkan question, for this history cannot be erased...
...For a variety of political ^ ~~~~~ 14 August 1992: 3 and military reasons, this is a step no major power seems willing to take...
...Nor can the citizens of any Western nation easily be rallied into supporting another military effort when they remain uncertain that the last one against Iraq is really over...
...The UN commander in Sarajevo, Major General Lewis MacKenzie, accuses both Bosnians and Serbs of prolonging the fighting...
...Two means have been proposed for doing this...
...Pleas to "take out" the Serbian artillary shelling Sarajevo and other Bosnian towns with air strikes proposed what appears to be a strictly limited military move...
...Even if successful, they argue, bomb and missile attacks would only further incite the Serbs, perhaps to turn to guerrilla warfare, which would then lead to calls for Western ground troops...
...British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd and Lord Carrington, representing the European Community, have both seemed to speak as if a Serbian victory is inevitable and that the Bosnians are at fault for failing to enter political negotiations with their tormentors...
...Stopping the shelling and ending the siege with UN- or EC-authorized air strikes by France, England, and the United States would, at the very least, lower the level of civilian carnage in Bosnia...
...For ordinary people everywhere else it is not hard to make the empathic leap and ask: If them, why not us...
...News accounts, photos, and TV footage force us to confront the plight of ordinary citizens in ordinary places being shelled, shot, burnt, and murdered for no other reason than that they cling to their homes and their homeland and resist the madness of something called "ethnic cleansing...
...Serbians justify their siege of Eastern Bosnia with the recitation of centuries of betrayal, sacrifice, and warfare with all of their neighbors...
...The Serbian forces have clearly violated every moral and legal norm in their cruel and unremitting attacks on Bosnian civilians...
...This international weakness is magnified by the domestic political troubles of Helmut Kohl, Francois Mitterand, and George Bush, all of whom, in better times, could have collectively appealed for international resolution of the fighting...
...These do not, of course, represent a unitary lesson...
...Yet no military strategist seems to think that will end the killing...
...The siege of cities and towns must be brought to an end...
...Yet, at the moment it is the Serbs of Yugoslavia and a minority of Bosnian Serbs who are terrorizing a multi-ethnic civilian population including other Bosnian Serbs, Muslims, and in some areas Bosnian Croats...
Vol. 119 • August 1992 • No. 14
