A Tale of Two Sorry Truces : IRA violence pales next to the awfulness of Bosnia’s failed cease-fire

The 1993-94 holiday season is proving to be, among other things, a tale of two truces. Neither truce makes for a happy tale, but the difference between them is instructive.

The first truce is the Bosnian one that, running from Dec. 23 to Jan. 15, was to include both the Croats’ Roman Catholic and the Serbs’ Eastern Orthodox Christmas. What the interval has become, instead, is a ferocious push for territory in the last days before a perhaps fateful round of negotiations begins.

On Christmas Day alone, the Serbs pumped 689 artillery shells into Sarajevo, including several that landed near Kosevo Hospital, according to monitors from the United Nations. The Sarajevo toll for the Dec. 23-26 period was 11 dead and 99 wounded.

Another U.N. monitor reported 100 Croat shells fired into Muslim eastern Mostar on Christmas Day. The religious element in this quasi-religious war has never shown an uglier face.

The second truce was the traditional 72-hour Christmas truce of the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland. The IRA observed the truce but, 16 minutes after its expiration, fired a mortar shell at a police station in a village west of Belfast. Further attacks then came in quick succession, including Thursday’s slaying of a British soldier, hit by a single sniper bullet as he patrolled.

The recent Anglo-Irish Joint Declaration on Northern Ireland had been fueled by a hope that the IRA, showing the way to the “men of violence” on the other side, might be ready to call a halt to arms. Those who from the start scoffed at this hope can only seem vindicated by these holiday season attacks.

But the calculated mockery by the IRA means infinitely less than the superficially comparable actions in Bosnia, for the Anglo-Irish Joint Declaration represents a harmony among ancestral enemies in the British Isles that has no counterpart in the Balkans. Northern Ireland was once as Bosnia now is. Once, alleged outlaws actually did the bidding of legitimate governments. Now, the outlaws on either side are without official support and with a steadily shrinking base of unofficial support. In isolation and with their number declining, they can still kill, but they cannot win; in time they will see this. The joint declaration rests on a consensus that no sniper can bring down.

A comparable reconciliation in the Balkans is no doubt years or decades away, and yet let no one declare it impossible. The post-Cold War world may seem fissiparous and seething with new antipathies, but in a longer look back, forgotten reconciliations return to memory.

Reconciliation between the Castilians and the Catalans in Spain once seemed impossible, but despite as many as a million deaths it was achieved. Reconciliation will come in Ireland too and someday--however unimaginable this seems as 1994 opens--even in South Slavia.