Talk Loudly, Wave a Weak Stick : U.N. secretary general means well but overplays his hand

Clearly frustrated by the deadlock in Bosnia peace talks among Serb, Croat and Muslim representatives in New York and by the failure of U.N. resolutions to have any significant effect, U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali last Sunday waved the big stick to try to force Serbian withdrawal from Muslim areas of Bosnia.

His threat of military intervention was aimed at pressuring the Serbs, if not to withdraw immediately from Muslim areas, then at least to allow relief shipments to reach starving Muslim communities. Boutros-Ghali’s humanitarian concerns are above reproach. In this case, though, his political sense must be strongly faulted.

For the threat he made--to dispatch an international army of as many as 50,000 men to compel an end to Serbian aggression--was transparently and thus foolishly unenforceable. The secretary general commands no army ready to march at his bidding. No such army exists. So far, at best, there is only a willingness expressed by NATO to commit an allied force of 40,000 or so, under NATO--not U.N.--command, to help keep the peace once hostilities in Bosnia end, a far cry from trying to impose a peace by taking offensive action.

Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic dismissed Boutros-Ghali’s threat out of hand. The Clinton Administration, more diplomatically, reaffirmed that U.S. policy is not to take a military role to help drive Serb forces out of Muslim parts of Bosnia. If NATO goes in to enforce the proposed plan to divide Bosnia into 10 autonomous provinces, U.S. troops will, and should, take part. But committing ground troops to repel Serbian aggression is not on NATO’s or Washington’s current agenda, as Boutros-Ghali well knows.

Noting all this, the fact remains that the Serbs’ contempt for U.N. resolutions must not go unpunished. Armed international intervention remains a non-starter, but that doesn’t mean the world is powerless to act. Clearly much more can be done through economic and political embargoes to isolate Serbia and punish the Serbs for their aggression. Surely a new effort toward that end, led by the secretary general, is now in order.