The Atrocity of the Food Weapon : Will West continue to let the Bosnians be starved by their genocidal foes?

Bosnia is starving. On Tuesday, the United Nations confirmed numbers reported by Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic: During December, people in Bosnian-controlled territory got about 5.5 pounds of U.N.-delivered food each. In Serb-controlled territory in Bosnia, people got more than nine pounds. In Croat-controlled territory, 21 pounds. A U.N. official attributed the discrepancy to Serbian and Croatian military superiority: U.N. food is a weapon that the Serbs and Croats had been using aggressively.

Serbian and Croatian interference with U.N. relief deliveries to the Bosnians has been ratcheted up sharply during the last three months in a patent attempt to force the Bosnians to accept the partition of their country that has been urged upon them by the European Union and the United Nations itself. The Bosnians are asked to trust, with no evidence, that if they agree to a partition the West will enforce it. They have declined to agree, maintaining bitterly that the suspension of U.N. relief shipments to central Bosnia at the instigation of U.N. peace negotiator Thorvald Stoltenberg shows U.N. complicity in the effort to force Bosnia’s hand.

Whatever the U.N. intentions, the effect is clear: Bosnia is starving, and panic is beginning to set in. On Wednesday, a relief convoy passing through central Bosnia under government escort was set upon by a desperate mob.

NATO has promised air strikes should Bosnia be threatened with “strangulation,” and on Tuesday Britain, France and the United States called on Boutros Boutros-Ghali to press ahead with planning for the strikes. The U.N. secretary general has not done so, however; and on Wednesday, to keep up the pressure on him, President Francois Mitterrand and Prime Minister Edouard Balladur of France went a step further. Rather than just call for air strikes, they insisted that the United Nations had the authority to call for NATO troops to relieve the besieged towns of Tuzla and Srebenica.

The American response to the French statement has been confused. Though President Clinton has stressed that great harm will be done if the NATO threat proves idle, the State Department has bitterly criticized the French demands on the illogical ground that the proposed partition of Bosnia is unacceptable. The peace proposal is indeed unacceptable, and the American demand that NATO ground troops in Bosnia be European remains reasonable. But these positions can be distinguished from support for a proposal to militarily guarantee relief deliveries and so avert impending genocide.

France deserves credit for holding NATO to its word and the United Nations to some accountability. President Clinton should recognize that his own credibility will suffer as much as that of NATO or the United Nations if this proposal falls to American sniping.