Not a U.S. Problem? Don’t Bet on That : There’s a real threat the Balkan agony won’t ‘stay home’

Must the agony of Bosnia-Herzegovina be regarded, with whatever regrets, as somebody else’s trouble? We don’t think so, but the arguments on behalf of that view deserve answers. Among them are the following:

The Balkan conflict is a civil war and unlikely to spread beyond the borders of the former Yugoslavia. Wrong. Belgrade has missiles trained on Vienna. Tito’s Yugoslavia claimed, by way of Macedonia, that Greece as far south as Thessaloniki belonged under its sovereignty. That claim may return in some form. “Civil” war pitting non-Slavic Albanians against Serbs could spread to Albania, Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece.

The United States has no strategic interest in the Balkans. Wrong. No peace, no peace dividend. Unless the West can impose the view that ethnic purity can no longer be the basis for national sovereignty, then endless national wars will replace the Cold War. Fascism has appeared in genocidal form in Bosnia. If it cannot be contained here, it will erupt elsewhere, and the Clinton Administration’s domestic agenda will be an early casualty.

If the West intervenes on behalf of the Bosnians, the Russians will do so on behalf of the Serbs, and the Cold War will be reborn. Wrong. The Russians have more to fear from “ethnic cleansing” than any other people on Earth. Nothing would reassure them better than a new, post-Cold War Western policy of massive, early response against the persecution of national minorities, including the Russian minority found in every post-Soviet republic. The Russian right may favor the Serbs, but Russian self-interest lies elsewhere.

This is an unwinnable war. Even the Nazis couldn’t pacify the Balkans. True, but think of the Serbs as the Nazis and the Bosnians as the resistance and that argument can be upended. Sanctions, already painful in Belgrade, can be made to hurt worse. Western military aid to the Bosnians will save lives in the long run by sapping Belgrade’s will to continue expansion by conquest.

The Serbs also have their grievances. They do, but their way of responding to these grievances, says the State Department’s just-issued annual human rights report, “dwarfs anything seen in Europe since Nazi times.” Via the Genocide Convention, armed intervention is legal as well as justified.

The U.N. peace plan is the only alternative. Wrong. The plan is hopelessly cart-before-horse. It proposes the reorganization of Bosnia-Herzegovina, followed by a cease-fire. A better first step would be a U.N. declaration that any nation or ethnic group proceeding to statehood on the principle of ethnic purity is an outlaw state and will be treated as such. The current U.N. peace plan, with a map of provinces that not one party to the conflict accepts, is really a plan for continued “ethnic cleansing.”

This is Europe’s problem. Someday it will be, but the West is in transition. So long as NATO is the major guarantor of peace in Europe and so long as the United States is a NATO member, it is by definition America’s problem--and President Clinton’s.