A Symbolic Action That Matters

After long hesitation, U.S. tells Belgrade it must end its assault on Bosnia

Yugo is a Serbo-Croatian root meaning south. Yugoslavia is a word coined to mean “Land of the Southern Slavs.” There are, as the world now knows, several varieties of southern Slav. The Serbs are the most numerous; and while Yugoslavia existed, they were dominant. The Yugoslav communist regime, which to this day has not been overthrown in Belgrade as such regimes have been in every other once-communist capital in Europe, was Serb-dominated. So was--and is--the Yugoslav army.

The war of the Serbs against the Croats, the Muslim Slavs, the ethnic Albanians of the Serbian province of Kosovo and, briefly, the Slovenians is an enactment in miniature of the war that some feared would follow the breakup of the Soviet Union. If the Kremlin bureaucracy and the Red Army had set out to unite the Russians scattered among the various Soviet republics in a new nation intended to be something between a Greater Russia and a rump Soviet Union, then they would have done on a grand scale what Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic and the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav army have been doing to the southern Slavs.

This week the Bush Administration ended a months-long hesitation to break unmistakably with Milosevic and with Serbia’s attempt at a new southern Slav federation. The turning point came on Wednesday when Secretary of State James A. Baker III warned Belgrade that unless it stops its assault on the Republic of Bosnia in the next 14 days, Washington will seek Serbian exclusion from the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

That action would mean, symbolically, that Serbia could expect neither to be the successor to Yugoslavia in international forums, as Russia has been the successor to the Soviet Union, nor even to function as the equal of the other southern Slav republics. What looms instead is the status of international pariah.

The Serbian leadership has justified its aggression against Croatia as the defense of a persecuted Serbian minority against a neo-fascist regime. No such justification has been offered for the invasion of Bosnia. None can be.

There are limits to what moral suasion can accomplish. But we wholeheartedly support Secretary Baker’s new willingness to coordinate symbolic action with European allies.