Regional Outlook : ‘New’ Europe Watches Its House Burn : Ethnic wars and border disputes are forcing U.S. and allies to make hard choices. One option is intervention.

The artillery shells that rained on Sarajevo and the ethnic fighting elsewhere in what used to be Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union have shattered--perhaps beyond repair--the new world order that President Bush envisioned as a stable and peaceful era following the Cold War.

Just as the book was closing on more than 40 years of East-West ideological conflict, Europe erupted in what amounts to tribal warfare between ethnic groups that much of the world had long forgotten about, but which are now re-fighting blood feuds that go back centuries.

The increasingly bitter battles in the Balkans, and other parts of Eastern and Central Europe like Nagorno-Karabakh, Georgia and Moldova, will soon force the international community to make hard choices among equally unattractive alternatives--interfering, perhaps with military force, in the nationalistic aspirations of ethnic groups or standing by helplessly while intercommunal warfare splinters one country after another.

At stake is a tacit agreement, first established in the wake of World War I, to leave international borders unchanged, even if they appear, in retrospect, to be irrationally drawn. Although violated from time to time--most notably during and after World War II--this standard has created a welcome stability. With the breakup of Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union, the rush for redrawing borders is clearly on. If not braked, it will surely spread to Czechoslovakia and, perhaps later, to Africa where existing borders were drawn by colonial powers without much regard to normal ethnic boundaries.

Bush and the leaders of 51 other nations will have to tackle these issues when they meet in Helsinki, Finland, July 9 for a summit meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, an organization that includes the United States, Canada and all European nations, ranging from giants like Russia to vest-pocket states like Monaco and the Vatican.

The clear preference expressed by most CSCE leaders in advance of the conference is to strengthen the capacity of the organization to mediate disputes and to promote peaceful settlements. But, judging from the way the Yugoslav conflict has chewed up potential mediators, diplomacy may not be up to the challenge.

Already there is talk about turning the CSCE into a super military command, drawing troops from the countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the now-defunct Warsaw Pact. Bush and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin advocated just such an approach in the “Washington charter” they signed earlier this month. But it may be one thing to talk about such an international force on a theoretical level and quite another to put up the troops and prepare to enter what could be a military quagmire.

Regardless of whether the CSCE agrees to take military action, the United States and its European allies are faced with agonizing choices. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, U.S. and European officials have identified Serbia and Serbian militants in Bosnia as the aggressors. With Serbian militiamen still threatening Sarajevo--after killing thousands of residents and subjecting the rest to possible starvation--the Bush Administration said Monday that it would support the use of force if a contingent of Canadian troops is unable to peacefully secure a U.N. effort to reopen the city’s airport.

“If not here, where?” is the rallying cry of those who believe that strong nations have an obligation to protect the weak. Even though U.S. national interests are not directly involved in Bosnia, White House National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft said recently, “As the conflict goes on and defies attempts at solution, the risks of it directly impinging on the interests of the Euro-Atlantic community increase.”

But there is a cautious corollary that also applies: “If there, where else?”

A world consensus is developing that Serbia is at fault in Bosnia. But there is no similar agreement about who is to blame for the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh or the fighting between ethnic Russians and the government in Moldova, for instance.

At a theoretical level, all of the conflicts have similar elements: An ethnic minority demands greater independence within a state; when its demands are rebuffed, it seeks help from compatriots across the border. Thus Armenia claims to be protecting ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominantly Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, and Russia has provided backing for ethnic Russians in Moldova.

Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic insists that Serbian forces are in Bosnia and Croatia to protect ethnic Serbs, a minority in both republics, from oppression. The Serbs insist that the old Yugoslav republic borders must be changed to unite their communities, which are scattered across Croatia and Bosnia as well as in the republic of Serbia.

When Vladimir Lukin, Russian envoy to the United States, was asked recently about Russian support for ethnic Russians in Moldova, he bristled. Americans questioning Russian actions in Moldova, he said, should remember that Bush cited danger to Americans in Panama as a reason for the military action that toppled Manuel A. Noriega.

Sentiment is growing in Moscow that Russia itself must deal, either politically or militarily, with the proliferating crises around its periphery. After all, 25 million Russians live as ethnic minorities in the new states carved out of the Soviet Union.

“If Russia cannot protect Russians living a few hundred miles from Moscow,” St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak said recently, “how can we expect our pronouncements on Yugoslavia to carry any weight? This is a crisis of state power, and it is growing day by day without any solution.”

In the United States, where great-power status is not seriously questioned, pictures of atrocities in Bosnia have eroded some of the public’s aversion to sending Americans into combat.

But the Pentagon is hanging back, acutely aware of the tactical problems that would be faced by military units ordered to secure the Sarajevo airport and keep it open for relief flights or to take other action to relieve the pressure on the civilian population.

One Pentagon official acknowledged that “there’s a lot of contingency planning going on” within the office of Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Colin L. Powell. But the source cautioned that where some diplomats see an opportunity to strike a blow for world stability, Powell and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney see only military difficulties.

“This is certainly not a clean kind of circumstance,” a military planner said. “It’s difficult to see what the clear military objectives of such a commitment would be. How do you measure success, and at what point could you declare an end to the commitment and get out?”

Another senior Pentagon official said that holding the Sarajevo airport could prove to be as dangerous as the 1983 deployment of Marines at the Beirut airport, where they ultimately were victims of a terrorist attack that killed 241 U.S. servicemen.

“We are not looking for ways to get into that quagmire,” the official said of Yugoslavia. “There’s no reason to believe that either side wants it to end. It’s not a situation that lends itself to a military solution.”

Serbian leaders have threatened to deal with any foreign intervention as an enemy invasion. The Yugoslav army, now exclusively made up of troops from Serbia and its tiny ally, Montenegro, has 2,000 tanks, up to 400 combat aircraft and at least 300,000 men under arms, including allied guerrillas and mobilized reservists. Western forces are technically superior, but there clearly could be a heavy cost to any intervention.

Besides, the Serbian guns around Sarajevo are located in hilltop villages, which means that if Western forces try to knock them out, there would be appalling civilian casualties.

Nevertheless, the United States and most European countries have recognized Bosnia-Herzegovina as an independent nation that is entitled to have its borders respected. There have been exceptions but, as a general rule, the international community supports the integrity of independent states because to do otherwise would fuel the sort of pressures that could tear apart almost any nation in the world.

When the world leaders gather in Helsinki next week, the CSCE will stand both as a possible forum for settling ethnic disputes and as a dramatic symbol of the ethnic splintering that has already taken place.

In 1975, when the conference issued the historic Helsinki accords that, in effect, ratified Europe’s post-World War II borders, the organization had 35 member states. In 1989, when a CSCE summit in Paris created a permanent structure for what had been a loose-knit, ad hoc organization, it still had 35 members; although East and West Germany had merged into one, previously isolationist Albania had joined.

But this time, the CSCE will have 52 member nations in attendance. Fifteen independent states have replaced the Soviet Union, and the former Yugoslav republics of Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina have joined. Yugoslavia, now represented exclusively by Serbia and Montenegro, is a member, although it has been suspended from participation in any debates affecting the Yugoslav crisis and is subject to an American demand that it be expelled.

Despite the proliferation of new, ethnically based states, the disintegration has been confined, so far at least, to the inside of what had been the international boundaries. For instance, all 15 new nations created by the breakup of the Soviet Union fit within the old Soviet boundaries.

“Border disputes are a related issue to the brutality and simple inhumanity that is occurring in Bosnia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Georgia anyway,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former State Department official who was part of the U.S. delegation to the original Helsinki conference and is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Although Bosnia’s Muslim and Croat communities have appealed for international help to protect them from the Serbs, it is not at all clear that the area can ever be restored to its pre-conflict status as a relatively tolerant home for diverse ethnic groups.

After three months of incessant attacks on Bosnia and at least 7,000 deaths--some reports put the toll as high as 50,000--Western diplomats now wonder aloud if there will be any surviving desire for living together.

“After all that has happened, there may have to be some border changes and relocations to separate the communities,” a Western diplomat in Belgrade said. “Aggression that has inflicted this much suffering has a tendency to inspire revenge.”

Three months of conflict have resulted in a de facto ethnic division of Bosnia, because Muslims have been forced to flee most of the areas taken by Serbs. But the Muslims continue to oppose any diplomatic endorsement of the division, warning that a dangerous precedent would be set if Serbian rebels are allowed to win territory by force.

Redrawing borders to unite scattered ethnic groups or to redress perceived historical wrongs poses great risks for many countries in Europe. If Serbs in Croatia are allowed to annex their communities to Serbia, Hungarians in Romania’s Transylvania region and in the Slovak areas of Czechoslovakia can be expected to demand the same right. Countries like Poland that won new territories as reparation for victims of this century’s two world wars also grow nervous as the punitive elements of postwar peace treaties come under new scrutiny.

In the former Soviet Union, ethnic tensions were suppressed for 74 years by the Communist authorities in Moscow. Moreover, Soviet leaders, primarily Josef Stalin and Nikita S. Khrushchev, redrew the internal borders of the Soviet republics for reasons that had nothing to do with the republics themselves.

For all its complexity, however, the border question is a surface issue. Beneath it lies the much more difficult problem of creating nation-states out of what were administrative districts of the Soviet Union and, before that, of czarist Russia. Nationalism, much of it raw and thirsting, is replacing the failed socialism in virtually all of the old Soviet republics as the foundation principle for the newly independent states.

This nationalism then drives the domestic pressure against minorities and produces the anti-Russian foreign policy that most of Moscow’s neighbors seem to be adopting.

“It has become completely clear that these former Soviet republics have not only withdrawn from the Soviet Union but have moved away from Russia,” said Vitaly Tretyakov, the editor of the influential Moscow newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta. “Even such hardened democrats as (former Soviet Foreign Minister) Eduard A. Shevardnadze, who has been thoroughly tested in relations with the West and who now heads Georgia, cannot do anything about it.”

Times staff writers Melissa Healy in Washington, Carol J. Williams in Belgrade and Michael Parks in Moscow contributed to this report.

The ‘New’ Europe’s Danger Zones * CONFLICTS ALREADY UNDERWAY:

1. Croats, Muslims and Serbs in Bosnia--Herzegovina

2. Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian island in Azerbaijan

3. Ethnic Russians and Ukrainians on the east bank of the Dniester River opposed to the ethnic Romanian majority in Moldova

4. Ossetians in northern Georgia who want to join their fellow Osetians in the Ossetian ASSR, which is part of Russia.

5. Azerbaijanis in Nakhichevan, the Azerbaijani enclave bounded by Armenia, Turkey and Iran.

* THE NEXT HOT SPOTS?

A. Albanians in Kosovo, the province in southern Yugoslavia with a majority Albanian population, but under Serbian rule.

B. Hungarians in Transylvania--the heavily ethnic Hungarian region of northwestern Romania.

C. Russians in Crimea--the largely Russian-populated peninsula handed over to the Ukraine in what is now a highly controversial act by former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

D. Slovaks, who want to seperate from Czechoslovakia; also the Hungarian minority in southern Slovakia, which is chomping at the bit.

E. Ethnic Germans in western Poland.

F. Russians in the newly independent Baltic states.

G. Turks in Bulgaria.

H. Greeks in Albania.

I. Hungarians in Vojvodina province of Serbia.

Military Options in Sarajevo: A Test Case in Europe

1. In order to protect any humanitarian aid effort into the besieged capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the hills around the city, and especially around its airport, would be cleared of Serbian-backed artillery units through intimidation or air attack.

2. With the artillery units silenced, troops would have to secure the airport and maintain a protected perimeter to ensure the safety of arriving relief flights.

3. To deliver relief supplies, ground forces would clear and protect a corridor from the airport into the heart of Sarajevo.

4. An aid distribution center in the city would be established and protected from attack.