Not Another Holocaust : How the West can save Bosnia’s Muslims

In 1944, when Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt was running for reelection to the presidency against Republican Thomas E. Dewey, the election was big news, much bigger than reports of Nazi death camps and mass slaughters of the Jews. In 1992, that memory should give us pause, for on Thursday of last week, The Times ran a story by Stanley Meisler with the sickening headline “Bosnia Muslims Face Extinction.”

Meisler was citing a major, official report by Tadeusz Mazowiecki, former prime minister of Poland, to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva.

As the severe Balkan winter comes on, the Bosnian Muslims expelled from their homes, when not killed outright by Serbian and Croatian fascists, are “virtually threatened with extermination,” the Polish diplomat said. And he is not making it up.

What can be done? Nothing, some say. We say:

1. Lift the arms embargo on Bosnia-Herzegovina. Because it is death that awaits the Bosnians if they surrender, they are clearly prepared to fight to the death if given the chance. The chance should not be denied them.

2. Withdraw diplomatic recognition from Croatia, and impose on Croatia the same economic sanctions now imposed on Serbia. These actions should be accompanied by the clearest declaration that neither nation, if expanded by the annexation of Bosnian territory, will ever enjoy U.S. diplomatic recognition.

3. Propose (an American proposal) that NATO shall create and militarily secure relief corridors to the towns to which the Bosnian Muslims have fled.

4. Propose further that, if the delinquent heads of the European states cannot find a way to accept significant numbers of Bosnian refugees, then NATO shall create refugee zones on Serbian and Croatian territory. If Kosovo were chosen as the site of the Serbian refugee zone, the local population would back the rescuers overwhelmingly against their Serb rulers.

5. Propose, finally, that, so long as the relief and rescue operations are not interfered with, no action shall be taken against Croatia and Serbia themselves but that, in the event of armed interference with the operations, countermeasures shall be taken.

In Russia, at this moment, a neo-fascist movement is gathering around the principle that all Russians, wherever they are, must by sacred right live together under Russian rule. This principle, unchecked, is quite literally a recipe for war. A demonstration of collective will against that principle now, in the Balkans, may save the world from far greater horrors later in larger theaters of ethnic conflict.

Should this emergency be a part of the presidential election? Should the Holocaust have been part of the 1944 election? The question answers itself.