Proposals for Bosnia

...There is no "right" to besiege cities...

...Croat emigres from Canada, Australia, and Germany voted...

...That refusal seems to be Washington's only coherent policy...

...The UN forces should disarm all persons within these zones, provide international (UN) supervision for the judiciary and police forces, and aggressively protect these zones from attack...

...The police did not find the guilty parties, but a statement was issued to the effect that this was not a politically motivated crime...

...The person most responsible for the Bosnian and Croatian wars as well as the destruction of Yugoslavia, the Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, is being recast as a force for peace...

...His last-minute tactical decision to press the Bosnian Serbs to sign the VanceOwen peace agreement is turning this Balkan bully into a "dove...

...President Clinton has delayed difficult decisions and created bad precedents...

...Today the mass media, especially television, have changed all that...

...The genocide in Bosnia must be unconditionally stopped...

...This mixture of cowardice and incompetence is exacerbated by the military's public mugging of the president and his proposed policy...

...relationship to its West European allies...

...After some time, with adequate protection, civil society and civic institutions should emerge in the safety zones...

...Through year-long atrocities, organized mass rape, and destruction of cities, mainly by the Serbian forces, they made this a self-fulfilling prophecy...

...The very worst feature of the plan is the certainty that it would lead to further "ethnic cleansing" under its dominant nationalists of each proposed Bantustan...

...Since this probably includes much of the urban population, something can be done to save lives now...

...That would lower the level of violence and be a step toward a gradual disarmament of all troops in BosniaHerzegovina, except for a gendarmerie to deal with what will obviously be widespread banditry in that country...

...By late May the United States had moved to a scandalous position, accepting a division of Bosnia into three ethnic states within the boundaries established by Serbian and Croatian aggression...

...His good advice was ignored and war inevitably followed...

...An obscene carnage in Bosnia, including the genoMAY 22, 1993 cide against its Moslems, has taken place even as we have been commemorating the Holocaust, There is a thick stench of hypocrisy in the air...

...At times the alibi for doing nothing was that it would jeopardize our friends in Moscow...

...The military hates the very idea...

...The central claim of the Serbian and Croatian nationalists was that it's impossible for the different national communities to live together in one state...

...Enforcement of this plan would be very expensive and would require around 70,000 troops—and it is doomed to fail even so...

...Substantial sentiment in both the European Community and the United States wished the danm Serbs would get it over with, finish off the Bosnian resistance, so the world could go on with more important business...

...We need continual international pressure, including the threat of sanctions, against Croat aggression in central Bosnia, not only because it has been largely unnoted and unpunished, but also because pressure against the Croats would make pressure against the Bosnian Serbs more credible...

...At each new UN-sponsored truce there is less of Bosnia and thousands more uprooted refugees...

...Croatian President Tudjman, a clumsy "revisionist" historian who has repeatedly minimized the number of Jewish and Serbian victims of the Croatian Fascists during the Second World War, is invited, at the suggestion of the State Department, we are told, to the Holocaust commemoration in Washington...

...The thousands of young thugs in the militias will not give up their arms to go on unemployment lines easily...

...Nobody even bothered to protest...

...As far as the Vance-Owen plan is concerned, Bosnian citizens, whatever their own desires, exist only as members of three communities: Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Moslems...

...So the Armenians were not saved, the death camps were not bombed, and the Jewish refugees who were allowed to leave fascist Romania were turned away by the British authorities in Palestine—sent back to die...

...There was always something...

...10038 Checks should be made payable to: IDSYugoslavia Fund, and they are tax deductible...

...The stated reason was that a referendum supporting secession would be held...

...The plan would further create a permanently powerless Bosnian government with equal representation from the nationalist leaders of all three communities...

...The endless delay in formulating a credible U.S...

...However, even with the best efforts and endless delays, the stubborn Bosnian Moslems refuse to vanish and thus remove this embarrassment...

...These should be airlifted to the Sarajevo and Tuzla airports...

...contingents...

...The Bosnian Serbs continued their war against the culture of their Moslem fellow Slays by wantonly destroying two priceless sixteenth-century mosques in their main city, Banja Luka...

...It is also a bad policy, shaped by the experiences of Vietnam...

...The protected zones should be established without negotiations with any of the local authorities...

...On what basis did the European Community choose to recognize secession from Yugoslavia...

...The most important thing to do in Bosnia is to immediately protect the civilian population...

...The United States is ready to use air power only to protect UN peacekeeping troops, which will not be joined by any U.S...

...No solution that proposes "ethnically pure" boundaries is remotely viable: it runs against the reality of constant population shifts, intermarriage, and the fact that the cities in Bosnia are impossibly heterogeneous...

...For that matter, except during the Second World War under the sponsorship of occupying fascist powers, there is no history whatsoever of war between Serbs and Croats...

...Books are still being published about the collaboration with the Nazis of the Vichy French, Dutch civil servants, even the local British authorities in the occupied Channel Islands...

...The United States should also immediately take in a fair share of refugees and victims of this war...

...ground troops should join the UN peace forces, which should be under UN command and control, perhaps delegated to NATO...

...Ignoring Croat complicity in Bosnia has not been helpful...

...Second, for mostly symbolic reasons, to make clear the distinction between the legitimate government and the aggressors, the Bosnian government should be given the right to obtain light and anti-tank arms...

...B.D...

...This was done against the explicit advice of Lord Carrington, the first mediator appointed by the European community, who cauSUMMER • 1993 • 283 tioned that no new state emerging out of Yugoslavia should be recognized before an overall negotiated settlement that would deal with issues of minority rights, property division, and other disputed questions...

...This coincided with the European Community's reluctance to take any firm measures to deal with the disaster it has helped bring about...

...Its initial organizing convention in the spring of 1992 was broken up by thugs and then prohibited by the police for "safety reasons...

...some Jews and Gypsies survived the Holocaust...

...During this misbegotten peace process, Serbian and Croatian nationalists have torn Bosnia apart, killing and raping tens of thousands...

...The first and unavoidable step to give credibility to any proposals whatsoever is to carry out air strikes against Serbian forces besieging Sarajevo and threatening Tuzla if they do not stop their aggression...

...Help should be sent to: Institute for Democratic Socialism 15 Dutch Street, Rm...

...Then democratic elections can elect genuine representatives of the Bosnians, who can begin participating in the determination of their destiny...

...SDU's members have been dismissed from jobs in the media, the economy, and civil service...

...Most urban cosmopolitans are more comfortable under Bosnian (mostly Moslem) rule than under either Croat or Serb nationalists, who are notoriously intolerant...

...286 • DISSENT An ultimatum should follow to all armies in Bosnia—Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian— to deliver their armored units and artillery to UN control or immediately withdraw them...

...This at the same moment when his troops were copying their Serbian rivals in murderous "ethnic cleansing" of Bosnian Moslems in central Bosnia and Herzegovina...

...Given all the obvious flaws of the Vance-Owen plan the real question is: why was it allowed to paralyze all other initiatives and draw out the agony of Bosnia for more than a year...

...Throughout May the destruction of the multicommunal city Mostar as a result of the fighting between the Moslems and Croats graced our television screens...

...The Vance-Owen plan is an unworkable and immoral proposal to accept the main demand of the 284 • DISSENT Serbian and Croatian nationalists and divide Bosnia into ten ghettoized Bantustans, called provinces...

...Yet the European Community hastened to recognize the breakup of Yugoslavia, rather than pressing for democratization and further decentralization of the country, which in retrospect would have been much the lesser evil...

...The democratic socialist Social Democratic Union (SDU) of Croatia, headed by Professor Branko Horvat, faces continued repression by both the authorities and informally organized superpatriots...

...We must end the war in the Balkans and begin developing reliable international instruments to prevent similar wars...

...The party has great problems in finding places willing to rent space for meetings and in raising even minimal funds to keep its paper and activities going...

...Clinton's personal style does not help: he appears unwilling to use the White House to educate the public about policies he wants to pursue...

...That destiny has now been abandoned to the self-elected tribal leaders...

...Its constant copout has been that it waited for Washington to assert leadership...

...Secretary of State Warren Christopher was given an impossible task: to convince the Europeans and Canadians to follow a flawed and unspecified policy for unworkable goals by a United States that would not even commit ground troops to the existing UN peacekeeping force...

...A secession should only be supported if it includes credible human and minority rights guarantees, freedom of speech and assembly, and access to media...

...Denial of atrocities is very difficult: destruction of cities, masses of civilian corpses, blinded and crippled children are daily on our television screens...

...The backers of the Bosnian government include not only Moslem Slays but many urban Serbs and Croats as well as those in mixed marriages, other minorities, and all those who refuse to be ghettoized into tribal reservations...

...Even worse repression takes place in Serbia, particularly in Kosovo, and horrible violations of human rights and mass rape take place in Bosnia-Herzegovina...

...That is, a civil state, not a tribal state...

...Was it a deliberate delay to allow the Serbs and Croats to get what they wanted and thus satiate the appetites of their nationalists...

...a substantial Serbian population survived in Croatia and Bosnia after the Ustashi genocide of 1942-1944...

...That was hardly the case in Croatia...

...We should press other European nations to at least match Germany, which took in more than a quarter million, or Sweden, which took in sixty thousand...

...It may be convenient to say that the war is merely an obscure Balkan ritual arising inevitably out of age-old hatreds, but this ignores the near half century of reasonable communal coexistence in Yugoslavia, above all in Bosnia-Herzegovina...

...They have been arbitrarily denied citizenship papers together with masses of Albanian, Serbian, and Gypsy longtime residents of Croatia...

...Why should there be any such support...

...The Clinton administration's record here is shameful...

...many Serbian citizens of Croatia could not...

...Further, the plan gives as many provinces (three) to the Croats, who number roughly 16 percent of the population, as to the Moslems, who number around 42 percent...

...These events are products of human agency and actions that were shaped by the European Community and our past and present administrations...

...Nor does it help that Clinton's secretary of state looks and sounds like a lawyer all too aware of the weakness of his case, and that his military establishment is emphatically not on board...

...The Bosnians—this is not a war among Serbs, Croats, and Moslems...

...That was safe, since leadership is a scarce commodity in Washington...

...It was on offer in Bosnia—and that is why the two nationalist tribes had to destroy the Bosnian state...

...500 New York, N.Y...

...Vance and Owen have warned repeatedly that any action whatsoever to stop the continued Serb or Croat military aggression would interfere with the peace process...

...He has also allowed the military to trespass into civilian policy areas...

...It is to signal that the delaying games are over...

...And yet until very late in the game it was possible to deny that it was even happening...

...There is a constant attempt to shift responsibility elsewhere—anywhere: to the Congress, to the weak-kneed European allies, to a public reluctant to support intervention in Bosnia...

...U.S...

...The Serbian-controlled rump Yugoslav government and the accused war criminals representing the so-called Serbian republic of Bosnia have proved masters of endless delay, giving the UN, the "West," and two U.S...

...The Bosnian Serbian referendum was of course a political farce, with a wholly predictable result...

...On the other hand, there is a century-and-a-half-long history of efforts by Croats, Serbs, and Moslems to create a union of south Slav peoples, a Yugoslavia, much to the annoyance of the then established powers...

...Two SDU members had their cars dynamited in front of their homes in January 1993...

...This is the essence of the French recommendation...

...The policy the White House has suggested (that is the strongest word one can use) is obviously flawed and, worse, directed toward the wrong aims The proposed Clinton policy would begin with the arming of the Bosnian government forces, move on to air strikes to protect these forces, and then possibly protect the remaining Bosnian cities by taking out the attacking artillery and declaring the cities safety zones...

...The Clinton presidency itself will be seriously injured if it proves paralyzed whenever it needs to act...

...It will lead to later wars to correct present injustices...

...All these genocides were inconvenient at the time to American and other Allied statesmen, who had other priorities...

...Those who argue that the destruction of Bosnia cannot be called an act of genocide ignore the fact that genocide is never neat and total...

...administrations what they really wanted—the illusion of progress toward some kind of peace settlement, even an unfair one...

...What clearly was not on offer in Croatia was a civic state of all citizens regardless of national identity...

...It was worded so that the word secession did not even appear...

...After all, said the noted Croatian nationalist writer Vlado Gotovac at the heavily boycotted PEN Congress held this April in Dubrovnik, "Since when is tribalism a crime...

...It may be too late to save Bosnia, but we must at least act to save the Bosnians...

...Why should the European allies follow an American leadership that is obviously unsure of what it wants to do about Bosnia, except that it wants to "lead...

...Lest we forget, there already was an intervention in Yugoslavia when, for good or for ill, the European Community and the United States agreed to the breakup of that multi-ethnic state and followed Germany's lead in prematurely recognizing Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina in their unilateral secessions...

...In the face of this cowardly betrayal of minimal decency the democratic community must raise its voice...

...That can be done by establishing Assertive Safe Havens in the major cities of Bosnia, protected by the UN forces with a new mandate: to actively protect the civilian population...

...Not just the "Moslems," but all civilians...

...Not all Armenians were killed in the genocide of 1915...

...The UN took some halting steps in that direction by May 1993, a year too late...

...The present military doctrine, that we go into nothing but near total wars and only under our own command and control, is an arrogation of presidential policy prerogatives...

...This despite the fact that 28 percent of the families are intermarried and large numbers of the urban young and secular citizens do not consider themselves communally identified...

...We need to help create genuine international forces under UN direction that can intervene in the dirty brush wars and lowintensity ethnic conflicts that are likely in the next decade or two: an international police force...

...The present administration's record on former Yugoslavia consists of the constant evasion of decisions and the creation of a near crisis in the U.S...

...This is both a moral and policy imperative...

...The zones would also include some cities presently under Serbian or Croatian authority...

...Nevertheless we ask Dissent readers and sympathizers to help our fellow democratic leftists in Croatia because it is essential for any prospect of a decent postwar society that democratic socialist, nonnationalist organizations survive...

...All aggression in the area, all attempts to change borders by force, and all "ethnic cleansing" must be resisted...

...Instead, every imaginable strategy has been used to avoid doing something to stop the war and the destruction of the Bosnian Moslem Slays as a community...

...It is also a proposal backed by many citizens' groups...

...It follows the Bush administration's cowardly failure to deal with Serbian aggression and the other disastrous consequences of the breakup of Yugoslavia...

...There are other measures that are urgently needed...

...But the Croatian referendum on independence was hardly a model exercise in popular deliberation either...

...It desperately needs help from friends abroad...

...What has the White House done to mobilize public support or even to inform the public or the Congress about the issues involved...

...The allied political leaders, press, and wartime propaganda did little to break the veil of silence...

...The United States's ability to argue for any policy of its own has been fatally weakened by its refusal to have its own troops participate in the UN peace forces...

...Once the agreement was ratified the United States would help police it...

...On December 17 one of SDU's trade union leaders, Milan Krivokuca, a member of the party's executive committee, was stabbed to death on his doorstep...

...Most Bosnians live in cities today and thus could be effectively protected by the same number of UN troops called for in the Vance-Owen plan, roughly fifty thousand to seventy thousand...

...Or was it another case of arrogant ignorance and incompetence along with a cronyish respect for Vance and Owen in their respective diplomatic establishments...

...This postideological and postmodern celebration of national identity in Croatia has mightily helped prolong and widen the war, since it reinforced Serbian tribalism...

...A campaign to dismiss a leading tenured SDU member, Professor Milan Pupavac, as well as a well-known friend, Professor Zarko Puhovski, is now underway in the Faculty of Philosophy of Zagreb, previously a stronghold of Marxisthumanist praxis...

...It is absurd for the European Community and the United States to claim that they have no responsibility for the catastrophe in former Yugoslavia...

...In January of this year one of SDU's candidates for local elections was suddenly mobilized and, although previously classified as an army telephonist because of poor eyesight, was reclassified as a sniper and sent directly into the enemy line of fire...

...This is the essence of the unwelcome and suppressed recommendation of the last SUMMER • 1993 • 285 commission of experts the Clinton administration sent to Bosnia...

...policy must stop...

...All this would presumably increase the pressure on the Bosnian Serbs to sign the Vance-Owen peace plan...

...otherwise they will become legitimate targets for air attacks...

...It is probably true that these strikes will only remove a major part of the Serbian artillery, but the message is also political...

...This also means that the UN troops should forcibly remove all artillery threatening the safe zones...

...This sentiment was echoed by that noted writer, Croatian President Tudjman, in his attack on sterile internationalism and rotten cosmopolitanism at that same congress...

...They could have prevented this from happening...

...Throughout the summer election campaign for the Croatian Parliament the SDU candidates were exposed to intimidation...

...The silences and implicit complicities with past genocides have added to a moral burden for postwar Western Europe and the United States that has never been lifted...