Rohrabacher Faults Serbs, U.S. in Yugoslavia Crisis

After visiting the scene of battle between secessionist Croats and Serbian rebels, California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher said Tuesday that American policy toward war-torn Yugoslavia has been “about 180 degrees wrong.”

“The old centralized, Communist-controlled Yugoslavia is absolutely a thing of the past,” the Republican lawmaker from Long Beach said. “We (the United States) should not be giving any encouragement to those people in Belgrade who still have that dream.”

Rohrabacher, whose 42nd District encompasses a large Croatian immigrant population, blamed Serbia for the escalating ethnic conflict and called for intensified Western pressure on the largest Yugoslav republic to force it to compromise on a new federation.

While he appealed for better Serbian commitment to democratic development and sharing of power, Rohrabacher’s self-directed diplomatic initiative was addressed only to the Croatian side.

He is the first U.S. congressman to visit Croatia’s hotbeds of ethnic discord since fighting broke out this summer. One American official said Rohrabacher had been advised by the State Department against involving himself in the volatile conflict.

Rohrabacher minced no words in criticizing Washington’s handling of the Yugoslav crisis, accusing the Bush Administration of allowing Serbia to proceed unimpeded with a blatant “land grab” under the guise of trying to hold the crumbling federation together.

“The perception that Serbia is promoting a unified Yugoslavia is ridiculous. They are simply proposing the same old centralized, Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia,” Rohrabacher said in an interview. “That’s not going to work in the Soviet Union, and it’s not going to work here.”

He toured the town of Sunja, about 40 miles south of Zagreb, to examine homes and buildings pockmarked by Serbian mortar fire and deemed the gun battles that have inflicted civilian casualties “acts of state terror.”

If sincere negotiation on a new alignment of sovereign Yugoslav republics fails to start soon, the United States should recognize Slovenia and Croatia as independent states, Rohrabacher said.

Just the threat of Western support for the breakaway republics would likely force Serbia to soften its stand, the congressman said.

“I found a great deal of leeway in the Croatian leadership, an attitude that could lead to creation of a new Yugoslavia,” Rohrabacher said after meeting with Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and other officials of the Zagreb government.

More than 200 people--mostly Croatian police officers and national guard troops--have been killed in clashes with Serbian militants since Croatia and neighboring Slovenia declared independence on June 25.

Croatia, a republic of 5 million, is home to about 600,000 ethnic Serbs, many of whom staunchly oppose the declared pullout from Yugoslavia as it severs them from Serbia.

Armed Serbian guerrilla units have already seized huge swaths of Croatian territory that they say can never be part of an independent Croatia.

The Serbian guerrillas agreed to a cease-fire a week ago, but sporadic mortar fire has been reported daily, and at least nine more people have been killed.

The truce has bought time for Serbia’s Communist President Slobodan Milosevic to press for a redrawing of the Balkan map to create a smaller Yugoslavia or a so-called Greater Serbia that would be under his nationalist government’s control.

The relative lull in the fighting has also allowed peasants in the most volatile regions to bring in the harvest to sustain them through what is shaping up as a long winter of fighting.

But as Serbs continue to control about 15% of Croatian territory, pressure has been mounting on Zagreb’s embattled leadership to launch a counterattack to retake the lost land. That has raised fears that fighting could break out at any time.