Using Force in Bosnia War Won’t Lead to a Vietnam : Balkans: Portraying the fighting as the result of ancient hatreds has handicapped the West’s response and helped Serbian tough guys.

Events in the Balkans are hurtling toward an unwanted--and probably unnecessary--climax. U.N. negotiators can’t sell their proposals for splitting Bosnia-Herzegovina into coexisting cantons. Television and print reports tell stories of people freezing to death in Sarajevo while the living beg U.N. troops for bread. Winter’s deadly end-game has begun.

All this has added to the already considerable pressure on the West to act, and the sentiment for some kind of military intervention is congealing. After all the talk, after all the missed opportunities for earlier action, U.S. and European leaders seem to be on the brink of concluding that only force will still the guns in former Yugoslavia.

It is a conclusion long overdue. The West has shunned involvement out of a fear that Bosnia could become another Vietnam. Such studied hesitation, however, reflects a common but significant misperception of the nature of the Yugoslav conflict.

The conventional wisdom is that war in the former republic was inevitable--an upwelling of ancient ethnic hatreds released by the fall of communism. Not quite so. Serbs and Croats and Muslims have long harbored animosity toward each other, to be sure. But to suggest that the war was preordained by their mutual ill will overlooks important facts.

For one, Yugoslavs before the war considered themselves, by and large, to be Yugoslavs first, Serbs, Croats or Muslims second. Intermarriage was common. By some estimates, one-third of Yugoslav families are headed by parents of different ethnic origins. Sarajevo, Belgrade and Zagreb were true melting pots. To be a Serb or a Croat in cosmopolitan Sarajevo was of little more consequence than to be a Greek or an Italian in Chicago, hard as that may be to imagine today.

Second, war came to Yugoslavia less by spontaneous combustion than by design. It is, in reality, a manufactured war, planned and prepared for mainly in Belgrade. Years before the fighting began, the Yugoslavia army repositioned itself, shrinking some bases here, enlarging others there. Curiously, those that were reinforced marked a line closely parallel to the frontier of what has since become Greater Serbia. Traveling that line in 1991 before the war, I witnessed a series of odd events--like those in Pakrac, a town of 10,000 in southeastern Croatia.

Armed Serbian separatists had seized the local police station. When Croat authorities sent in reinforcements, the terrorists fled to the Yugoslav army base at the center of town. Provocateurs fanned out through the countryside, knocking on the doors of Serbian villagers and warning them that the “Croat police are coming to kill you.” Thousands of people fled in convoys of buses that were conveniently available.

The exodus was duly recorded by a flock of journalists from Serbia’s state-controlled media, under such headlines as “Bloodbath at Dawn” and “Massacre of the Innocents”--who just happened to be visiting this inconsequential province. Never mind that no one was seriously injured in the fray. Tanks rolled in to keep the peace--the army had long ago scheduled “maneuvers” in the area, explained a federal spokesman at the time--and they never left. Similar incidents were staged in other towns on other days before the war broke out.

Serbs argue that Croats and Muslims touched off the fighting by illegally declaring independence. That’s partly so. But Milan Panic, the freshly ousted Yugoslav prime minister, not long ago told me a revealing anecdote. Soon after arriving in Belgrade, he concluded that a clique of several thousand “uglies” had orchestrated the war. Most were ex-communist apparatchiks, aging army generals and rural ultranationalists allied with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. “Liquidate them,” a Serbian deputy proposed, true to the spirit of the old regime. “I can’t,” replied Panic. “I’m a liberal democrat!” The striking thing was not the unacceptable solution, but rather the relatively small number of “uglies” Panic targeted as the problem.

The implications for U.S. policy are significant. If the Yugoslav war originally was mostly the work of a few, rather than a mass uprising of ancient hatreds, then military intervention in Bosnia may result less in a Balkans Vietnam than a Balkans Iraq--the humiliating defeat of Serbia strongmen. Had the United States and its European allies sunk Serbian gunboats bombarding defenseless Dubrovnik during the summer of 1991, or acted more forcefully when Serbia invaded eastern Croatia, fighting might not have engulfed Bosnia. Had they enforced sanctions approved by the U.N. Security Council, and not allowed them to be flouted, Belgrade would be paying a dearer economic price for its “ethnic cleansing.”

Discontent might have grown in the Serbian capital, fostering an anti-war movement and, possibly, altering the outcome of last month’s elections. Perhaps Panic, the candidate of peace, could have defeated Milosevic, the principal architect of war.

Such “what if” thinking isn’t entirely fanciful. If we consider what the judicious use of force might have accomplished earlier, we will be better prepared to wisely deploy it now. Limited use of military power might still help end the conflict, as long as the goals are also limited. It is probably too late to stop “ethnic cleansing.” Serbia’s forces hold 70% of Bosnia and have achieved nearly all their military objectives. But a more targeted use of force could compel Serbs to become better democrats.

Since Milosevic took power in 1989, Serbia has retrogressed from Westernized, progressive communism to become Europe’s last bastion of Stalinism. Media and the economy are almost totally controlled by the state. Warlords and security police run roughshod over laws and civil liberties. Irrational nationalism has replaced tolerance.

Boycotts and the cost of the war have clearly taken a toll on Serbia. But even so, it has suffered relatively little compared with its neighbors. The citizens of Belgrade live in unsettling ignorance of the consequences of their leaders’ actions. For many, the war has taken place at a surreal and distorted distance. “Ethnic cleansing” is what Muslims and Croats do to Serbs in Bosnia, not vice versa. All too often they appear to know little about the atrocities committed by their troops, or dismiss them as propaganda.

This would radically change if the West should use force and should relieve Sarajevo by deploying U.S. and European troops to establish and safeguard at least one land corridor from the Adriatic Sea to the Bosnia capital. Enforcing the U.N. “no fly” zone would be a useful symbol of Western resolve as well. But air power should also be used to enforce international sanctions.

If Serbia were truly cut off from the world and experienced the pain it has inflicted on others, the hands of U.N. negotiators would be strengthened. There are many in Serbia who hate this war and remember better days when the country was not consumed by hate. With time, and a determined intervention by the West, perhaps they will find their voices and overthrow a ruinous dictator.