Asking for Peace at Any Price? : Vance’s second plan for Bosnia is no better than his first

“Another such victory over the Romans, and we are undone,” said King Pyrrhus, after whom two millennia of Pyrrhic victories are named. Another such peace as Cyrus Vance engineered almost exactly a year ago between the Croats and the Serbs, and the Balkans may be undone. That peace consolidated Serbia’s 1991 expansion into Croatia and permitted the Serbs to concentrate on their 1992 military objective, Bosnia-Herzegovina. The peace now being forced upon Bosnia-Herzegovina in Geneva will consolidate the past year’s expansion and permit the Serbs to move in 1993 against Kosovo or, just as likely, against Macedonia.

As that next military move takes place, the violence that will continue in Bosnia-Herzegovina will match the violence that has continued in the Serb-held portions of Croatia. A part of the Croatian peace was to have been the return of Croat civilians to areas from which the Serbs had expelled them. That hasn’t happened. The Serb irregulars, in a new uniform, function as the police force in a police state, barring the return of Croats, harassing those who remain and declaring to any journalist who asks that the conquered territories are and will forever remain a sovereign Serb state.

So it will be, if the Geneva peace plan is adopted, in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The peace that Vance and Lord Owen, representing the European Community, propose for Bosnia makes no provision for the protection of the local population, and the genocidal “ethnic cleansing” of 1992 portends only the worst for 1993. As for round three, against ethnic Albanians--a 90% majority in the once autonomous Serbian province of Kosovo and numerous as well in the still mostly unrecognized republic of Macedonia--it is likely to be the most ruthless of all.

Nothing can be clearer than that Vance, a special U.N. envoy to the Balkans, thought that the Serbs would be appeased after he negotiated international acquiescence in their 1991 expansion--and that he was wrong. The greater tragedy, to judge from his otherwise inexplicable recent behavior, is that he has not learned from his mistake. He now thinks they will be appeased if he does them the favor a second time.

He is wrong again. The Bosnians, weak as they are, are gaining strength. Their forces are massed for an attempt to break the siege of Sarajevo, an attempt that, astoundingly, Vance has asked them to cancel. Trying to foil the Bosnian self-defense, Vance was driven to the questionable device of securing a (since retracted) promise from Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger that he would not meet with Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic.

Vance also asked Secretary of State-designate Warren Christopher, once his own assistant, to shun Izetbegovic. But Vance, despite his untarnished reputation as a man of principle, has no official claim on Christopher and no moral reason whatsoever to bar the path of a man fighting for the life of an entire nation.

Peace at any price is a euphemism for war. If such is the peace that Vance is promoting in Geneva, it deserves as little honor in Washington as in Sarajevo.