U.S. Aide Sees Little Hope for Balkans Talks
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LONDON — An international conference that begins Wednesday is unlikely to devise any effective way to end the violence in the Balkans, a senior U.S. official said Monday.
The United States is adamantly opposed to dividing Bosnia-Herzegovina or other former Yugoslav republics into ethnic cantons, even if that seems to be the only short-term method of ending the fighting, according to a senior State Department official. The official was aboard the plane that brought Acting Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger here for the conference.
Eagleburger, a former ambassador to Yugoslavia, said he harbors no illusions that he or anybody else in the West will be able to stop the violence in the Balkans before thousands more die. The senior official said that regardless of what the London conference may decide, “it will be some months, if not longer, before we see the end of this awful mess.”
The official, who briefed reporters on the understanding that his name would not be used, said that proposals to divide Bosnia into separate Serbian, Croatian and Muslim cantons, advanced by some European powers as the only way to stop the violence, are unacceptable to the United States.
Such a plan would “reward the aggressor,” the official said, by permitting Serbian forces to gain permanent control of the regions they seized by force and emptied of rival groups through the policy of “ethnic cleansing.”
He conceded that “refusing to accept cantonization does not get (Serbian forces) out of the areas they now hold.” But he said there may be no immediate way to do that without the use of outside military force, a step that Washington and its allies have ruled out.
The official chided Muslim countries for doing no more than complaining about the attacks on Slavic Muslims in Bosnia. “A lot of them could be more generous in terms of the relief effort,” he said.
The official said there is no doubt that Serbia is the main offender in Bosnia. But he said other parties also must share part of the blame. For instance, he said, Bosnian Muslims “on occasion take potshots at people” with the hope that the attacks will be blamed on the Serbs.
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