A Preference for the Better Bosnia : Backers of democratic ideals deserve U.S. favor

A few weeks ago, the Financial Times of London spoke of the hope in Washington “that Moscow would exert pressure on its Serbian allies to make compromises.” It continued, “But the corollary of such a policy is that Washington, too, should try to persuade its Muslim proteges to adopt a more flexible approach.”

Serbian allies? Muslim proteges? This is 1993, not 1953. And yet Bosnia-Herzegovina as a multiethnic, citizenship-based state may well deserve American preference.

Miroslav Lazovic, president of the Bosnian Parliament and a member of the Bosnian peace delegation in New York, is a Serb. Ivan Misic, Bosnia’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, is a Croat. Oslobodjenje, the extraordinary newspaper of Sarajevo, is a Serb-Croat-Muslim venture that, publishing daily throughout the siege, has kept its reporting objective and admirably free of ethnic hatred.

TWO BOSNIAS: Svebor Dizdarevic, writing last month in Le Monde Diplomatique of Paris, laments that the proposed division of Bosnia into 10 ethnic cantons--three each for the Serbs, the Croats and the Muslims, with Sarajevo as a joint holding--misses much of the Bosnian reality.

There are two Bosnias, he insists, and the better one, “civil, multiethnic and secular,” has been ignored. In March of 1992, he reports, the Serb political party in Sarajevo erected street barricades, followed quickly by the Muslim and Croat parties. But tens of thousands of Sarajevans opposed to ethnicization then descended into the streets and forcibly removed the barricades. This last effort by the other Bosnia was defeated only by the Serb sniper fire that, “ignored by the international community,” began the war.

Dizdarevic clearly hopes that France, the country that all but gave the word citizen to the world, may belatedly remember the Bosnians who share French ideals. But the United States, as a nation that literally cannot survive without ethnically neutral citizenship, has even more reason to favor Bosnia. Dizdarevic’s “other Bosnia” does not deserve “evenhanded” treatment by the United States. It deserves forceful and unapologetic preference.

LEGALISTIC FARCE: For the time being, U.S. preference can perhaps only come as the withholding of any but the most temporary consent to ethnic cantonization. The Croats and Muslims of Bosnia have now agreed to the U.N. cantonization plan. The Bosnian Serbs continue to hold out for more territory. But with luck, this falsely “realistic” plan may yet die of endless revision.

Thursday, as an all-but-farcical Balkan war crimes trial began in The Hague, defenseless Muslims were fleeing for their lives in Eastern Bosnia. Firm Euro-American policy denies them the arms to defend themselves and, when they seek asylum abroad, complains of recession and denies them entry.

War crimes? The judges should join the plaintiffs in the dock, for it is their abandonment of the Western ideal of citizenship that, almost as much as Serb artillery, has rewarded fascism, brutalized a fragile democracy and sentenced thousands to genocide.