How to Arrest Madness : Security Council needs to consider Yugoslavia intervention

The 72-year-old, Eastern European multiethnic state first proclaimed the “Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes” and renamed Yugoslavia in 1929, is coming apart rapidly. Every day brings some bloodcurdling development. Friday there were reports of shelling near Dubrovnik, the picturesque and historically significant seaport. Tomorrow, surely, it will be some new horror. The trend is toward bloody chaos--with a spillover of refugees and Eastern European instability of unpredictable proportions.

It’s very tempting to confine the world’s reaction to expressions of concern and hope, however sincere, that the heretofore fruitless efforts of European mediators will somehow succeed. That prospect seems increasingly unrealistic, and if there’s any validity to the concept of a new world order, the United Nations needs to become more involved.

Neither the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) nor the European Community has the military muscle to threaten to insert some measure of temporary international peace force there. But the Security Council ought to explore just that possibility. Perhaps the very prospect of such a U.N. intervention will help cool down the overheated warring parties enough for negotiations to begin to work.

In any event, it would be immoral to reject the idea of a peace force entirely. People are dying. Central European security is threatened. It deserves discussion.

Any overall U.N.-brokered settlement needs to aim for the recognition of existing borders, a return of all forces to the stations they had before hostilities broke out and possible recognition of the various republics, within a loose Yugoslavian confederation. That won’t be easy to achieve, but perhaps the brandishing of a stick by the Security Council might reverse the slide toward self-destruction.