The Secretary Ducks a Rather Clever Trap : Christopher says, rightly, ‘no, thank you’ to Lord Owen

Lord David Owen and Cyrus R. Vance, representing the European Community and the United Nations in the Balkans peace negotiations, changed more than a mailing address when they moved from Geneva to New York last week. Having failed to persuade the belligerents to accept their peace plan, they are now out to persuade the United Nations to impose it.

Owen says of his plan, by which Bosnia-Herzegovina would be cantonized along ethnic lines: “This isn’t just the best act in town, it’s the only act in town.” It would be more accurate to say that this particular town is now without an act. The Bosnian Muslims have rejected the Vance-Owen plan. The Bosnian Serbs have mocked it by, in effect, rewriting its key provisions and accepting their own rewrite. The Bosnian Croats have accepted it, but just as they were doing so their brothers in Croatia proper were tossing aside the earlier Serb-Croat peace upon which it is allegedly modeled. The contempt for the plan in the Balkans may be measured by the escalating attacks there on U.N. personnel.

Those attacks would escalate to the point of war if the United Nations were to impose the despised plan by force of arms. And because no pacification force could dispense with U.S. participation, the peace plan would become, at that point, a U.S. war plan. Owen scarcely troubles to pretend otherwise. “One of the best things President Clinton could do,” he says, “to demonstrate his commitment to Bosnia, to add credibility to a peace settlement, (would be) to have some Americans on the ground.”

Owen’s attempt to turn his and Vance’s failure into Clinton’s failure is just outrageous enough to suggest a paradoxical intent. That is, if his demand for a U.S. military rescue of the plan is rejected, Washington might seem, like the European Community, to have finally acquiesced in Serb aggression. Or so the ruse would go.

Happily, Secretary of State Warren Christopher seems to have foiled it. Without ruling military action either in or out, Christopher has returned attention to the plan, which is, as he says, unenforceable and which the United States, therefore, should not attempt to enforce. But Christopher, not out to antagonize the mediators, supports their attempts to come up with a better plan later.

A better plan would be, first, one that did not reward Serbia for arming and supplying the Bosnian Serbs for “ethnic cleansing”; second, one that did not use the United Nations to consolidate Serb gains in Bosnia, freeing Serbia for new “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo; third and most important, one that did not require the massive external enforcement that the current plan would require.

The situation on the ground is changing. An overextended Serbia is decreasingly able to arm and provision Serb irregulars in Bosnia. A better-armed Croatia is poised to reassert control over territories lost during the Serb-Croat fighting of 1991. Bosnia, better-armed despite the arms embargo, is carrying the fight to the Serbian enemy. If negotiating with the aggressor on favorable terms is the key to a lasting peace, then now is not the time for a quick, made-in-New-York settlement.

While the New York talks continue, the Clinton Administration should consider sponsoring a separate, bilateral initiative with Russia. A Russian-sponsored initiative, for historic reasons, would carry unique weight in Serbia, while a snubbed, excluded Russia could begin arming Serbia. Rather than a part of the problem, Russia should be made a part of the solution.