Peacemakers No Match for Ancient Balkan Hatred : Yugoslavia: The Serbs lost the Battle of Kosovo 600 years ago, and they are determined to get revenge--no matter how long it takes.

“If the League of Nations means that we will have to go to war every time a Yugo-slav wishes to slap a Czech-slav in the face, then I won’t follow them,” Theodore Roosevelt said in 1918. Suddenly, with the U.N. Security Council authorizing “all necessary measures” to get relief supplies to Bosnia, Americans have to decide whether or not they agree with Roosevelt.

Headlines are full of unpronounceable Yugoslav names; the news is full of unspeakable Yugoslav atrocities, and Americans, startled to realize that our forces are closer to fighting a war in Europe than at any time since 1945, are asking three questions: Who are these people? Why do they hate each other? What, if anything, should the United States do? Unfortunately, none of these questions has a simple answer.

“Don’t know much about history,” Sam Cooke sang; it could almost serve as the American national anthem. But history is everything in the Balkans: A history known to every child in the former Yugoslav republics is driving the crisis, and Americans who want to understand what is happening will have to brush up.

The story begins, more or less, with the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, when the Turks crushed the Serbs, conquered the Balkans and inaugurated 500 years of repressive Ottoman rule. The Eastern Orthodox Serbs suffered the worst: forbidden to take part in politics; cut off from world trade; taxed into poverty by a corrupt government. The Serbs shunned the cities--with their arrogant Turkish rulers and voracious tax-gatherers--and kept embers of their culture alive in countryside. Bands of robbers--Serbian Robin Hoods fighting Muslim Sheriffs of Nottingham--haunted the hills, while poets sang of vanished glories.

The Roman Catholic Croats had a better time. Croatia enjoyed special privileges under the Ottoman Turks and, in 1699, much of present-day Croatia came under the control of the Catholic Hapsburgs. Although the Croats suffered some discrimination under the Hapsburg Empire, they were not rebels like the Serbs.

In Bosnia, Kosovo had another impact. Many Bosnians were Christian “heretics,” persecuted by Orthodox and Catholics alike. For them, Turkish rule was an improvement. In fact, those who converted to Islam were granted legal equality with the conquerors in the Ottoman Empire. Some Bosnians--especially the upper classes--took advantage of the opportunity. To Orthodox Serbs hiding in the hills, the Bosnian Muslims seemed a combination of Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, Imelda Marcos and the IRS. Resentment had 600 years to mature.

Both the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires collapsed at the end of World War I, giving the Southern Slavs their first chance since Kosovo to settle their affairs without interference from powerful neighbors. Unfortunately, Turkish oppression, poverty and isolation had created a Serbian nationalism that was passionate and idealistic but incapable of dealing with the national feelings of others. While Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims disagree heatedly on what happened next, this much is clear: Serbian heavy handedness--abetted by complementary pigheadedness among the neighbors--meant the Yugoslavs hated each other more than ever once they were united in the same kingdom.

The chance for revenge came in World War II. When the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia, in 1941, a handful of Croatian fascists set up a puppet government in “Greater Croatia” intent on mass murders and forced conversions of Serbs. Historians estimate the murders in the range of 300,000; another couple of hundred thousand were “received” into the Roman Catholic Church, thanks to persecution.

Yugoslavs of all nationalities resisted the invaders and the Germans responded with vicious reprisals. In October, 1941, the Germans murdered 7,000 civilians--including schoolchildren--to retaliate for the deaths of 10 German soldiers.

In the postwar years, the ruling Yugoslav communists were officially hostile to all of Yugoslavia’s national aspirations. After all, atheistic communists could not help but regard differences among Muslims and Christians as superstitious holdovers from the past, fated to wither away.

They didn’t wither, however. The old hatreds just went underground. Serbs worked to dominate the state--especially the armed forces--and the other nationalities resisted. With the disintegration of the communist center, there was nothing--other than common sense and human decency--to hold Yugoslavia together, and the nationalities reverted to type: murdering parents and harassing the orphans.

This time it is the Serbs, not the Croats, who come off as the heavies, but the Serbs do have a point. There is nothing sacred about the boundaries of Croatia or, even more, Bosnia; and history justifies Serb fears of oppression under the rule of their neighbors. Of course it also justifies Croatian and Muslim fears of the Serbs and the patterns of settlement are such that no boundaries can be drawn that will satisfy all of the groups.

Worse still, Balkan wars have a habit of spreading. Albanians have some bones to pick with the Serbs, and Macedonia is a time bomb. Muslim countries, shocked by atrocities in Bosnia, and stunned by the West’s apparent indifference, are talking about sending relief and possibly military aid to their embattled brethren.

So--now what? Debate is, basically, about three options. Option 1 is the rhetorical route: We deplore the aggression, we invoke human rights, we mail CARE packages to the orphans, we vote symbolic sanctions in the United Nations. Americans are good at all this, but it is obvious, even to us, that it doesn’t add up to much. Option 1 exposes our hypocrisy to the Muslim world; it also shows aggressors everywhere that all the talk about New World Order was nothing but hot air.

Option 2 is scarier: We don’t just mail CARE packages, we provide a delivery service. Optimists think this can be accomplished with air power, but optimists are wrong. As generations of Serbian hill bandits knew, Bosnia is ideal for guerrilla warfare; narrow canyons, mountains and caves make hit-and-run raids against ground convoys easy. Option 2 looks like the slow road to Vietnam: an unwinnable, open-ended ground war against entrenched guerrillas.

Option 3 is intervention. It probably won’t work. Adolf Hitler couldn’t beat Serbian guerrillas; Josef Stalin couldn’t bend them to his will. We aren’t willing to be as brutal as Hitler, and we don’t have as many economic and political sticks as Stalin. Our allies won’t be much help. Germany, thanks to its own criminal past in the region, can’t help us fight, and nobody else wants to. The hard truth is that the American people, however disturbed they are by the news from Yugoslavia, do think like Roosevelt; they are not willing to fight--and they are possibly unable to win--a long war in Yugoslavia, and there aren’t any short ones there.

Option 1 is a gesture, 2 an illusion, 3 a disaster. Welcome to the New World Disorder. We live in hard, ugly times when there are not only no easy answers, but sometimes no answers at all. The cycle of killing that started at Kosovo has a long way to run. Whether we stand aside or jump in, the killing is likely to go on and on and on.