Mere Words Won’t Deter Them : Bosnia declaration out of Tokyo won’t scare anybody

The leaders of the world’s most powerful industrial countries, meeting in Tokyo, have solemnly reaffirmed their commitment to Bosnia’s territorial integrity and threatened unspecified woe to those--meaning Serbs and Croats--who seek to partition the multiethnic state without the consent of its nearly 2 million Muslim inhabitants. It would be one of this decade’s great political surprises if the men who run Serbia and Croatia and their allies in Bosnia deigned to take more than yawning notice of this warning.

At their summit conference last year the G-7 took a far tougher line, threatening direct military intervention if Serbian forces continued to make war on the Bosnian government. That threat was very quickly exposed as hollow. The brutal war went on.

Serbs now control 70% of Bosnia, the capital of Sarajevo is suffering appallingly under siege, and Serbia and its sometime ally, sometime enemy Croatia demand a division of the country that would leave Bosnia’s Muslims huddling in two indefensible enclaves. The Serbs, who quickly saw the lack of seriousness in last year’s stern G-7 warning, are not going to be impressed by this year’s finger-waggling.

The issue of Bosnia’s territorial integrity is now all but moot. Serbia and Croatia will pretty much get what they want, because Bosnia’s Muslims are too weak to stop them and because there is no international will to intervene, either to defend the Muslims or to uphold U.N. demands.

The United Nations has proved to be not just ineffectual in enforcing Security Council resolutions to control aggression in Bosnia but, worse, it suffers near-daily humiliations at the hands of Serb forces as it tries to carry out its humanitarian relief operations on the ground. The U.N. forces are in fact pretty much of a hostage, threatened by the Serbs with attack if tougher international actions should be undertaken. Last April President Clinton tried to get European support for his plan to lift the arms embargo on Bosnia’s Muslims and carry out air strikes against Serbian artillery positions. The Europeans--chiefly Britain, France and Spain--begged off, citing worries that the forces they have on the ground in Bosnia could be imperiled.

The carving up of Bosnia will not, of course, bring stability to southeastern Europe. As the diplomat-historian George F. Kennan notes in the current New York Review of Books, the outside world’s inability to prevent or halt aggression in Bosnia is likely to whet other appetites for pressing old territorial claims. Macedonia is the most likely arena, with Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and maybe even Albania potentially involved.

The international community, particularly the Europeans, says Kennan, thus faces two necessities. One, in the wake of the Bosnia war, is to define a new territorial status quo. The second is to intervene with outside mediation “and in all probability outside force” to enforce its acceptance. Kennan, ever the realist, recognizes that difficulties of finding the “necessary resolve” with its “attendant agonies” to confront this challenge. Why even try, then? Because, he writes, the alternatives to not taking action will clearly be worse. The chances are good, even overwhelming, that he’s right. It’s something the Europeans and the country they most look to for leadership in international affairs had better begin considering urgently.