As Sarajevo Goes, So Goes Armenia? : West’s indecisiveness may foster other atrocities

The fall of besieged Sarajevo is now just a matter of time, and we should expect it to be followed by a blood bath. In Belgrade, according to Times correspondent Carol J. Williams, Serbian police and politicians are collaborating with organized crime in a manner reminiscent of the Nazis in the 1930s. All religious and social minorities--homosexuals no less than Muslims--are prey to gangs of officially sanctioned thugs. So it will be, with a vengeance, when Sarajevo falls. All Western eyes are on Moscow, fearful that intervention in Bosnia would somehow strengthen the Russian right wing. For the Serbs poised to take the Bosnian capital, the moment could not be more propitious.

Could it have been otherwise? A cogently argued essay by arms expert J. P. Mackley in the Washington Post recently refuted, one by one, every argument that a late, limited air offensive would have had no effect but that of drawing the United States into an endless guerrilla war. Mackley shows that Bosnia is far better suited for the use of unmanned aircraft like the Tomahawk missile than Iraq was. As for a ground engagement, “After touring a number of abandoned Serb positions, Capt. Scott Buren (of Marine artillery) concluded that the Serbs were using the same tactics that were used to fight the American Civil War. (Thus) it would be a simple matter for U.S. Marines to handle the Serbs by air or on the ground.”

The Western powers have, in effect, disarmed themselves by continuing to see post-Cold War threats to world stability as if they were Cold War threats. At one time, the menace of a Soviet superpower determined to take every Western military intervention as a provocation restricted Western ability to conduct true police actions; the risk of escalation frustrated even interventions aimed at maintaining peace. But a Bosnian intervention, had one taken place, could have been vastly different, for no superpower, not even Russia, was initially ready to back the Serbian side. Tragically, the Western powers failed to take conscious control of their own freedom of action, and the result has been vastly expanded military autonomy for such demagogues as Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic.

And not only in the former Yugoslavia is this so. Last week, Yelena Bonner, Andre Sakharov’s widow, said that conditions in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, are like those in the besieged Leningrad of 1942. A blockade by Azerbaijan on the east, sabotage of fuel lines through Georgia on the northwest and tacit complicity in these actions by Turkey on the southwest have placed Yerevan in a position as desperate as that of Sarajevo. The city is dying.

The West may be on the verge of missing a train in Armenia that is like the one it missed in Bosnia. And at the rate things are deteriorating elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, we may be in the station for a long while.