PERSPECTIVE ON BOSNIA : A Forced Peace Is Worth Trying : A truly humanitarian policy would be for the West to bring an end to the fighting, even if it is an unjust end.

When Paris recently told Washington that Western efforts to end the war in Bosnia weren’t working, and weren’t going to work as currently structured, the French were right. The French worry that an indefinite prolongation of the war--five, 10 years or more--will seriously debilitate European security. And, they point out, our “humanitarian aid” merely helps the combatants. A truly humanitarian policy would be for the West to try to bring an end to the fighting, even if that means an unjust end.

The international community must try something new. Instead of rebuffing Paris out of hand, Secretary of State Warren Christopher now has an opportunity for serious, constructive dialogue. If he does not seize it, he risks a grave rupture in U.S.-European security relations.

Let’s take a fresh look at the situation:

The net effect of international relief operations in Bosnia is to slowly strengthen the Bosnian Muslim army. We are kidding ourselves when we talk about humanitarian aid. Everything we send either goes directly to the army or substitutes for goods the army would take from civilians anyway.

Let’s not kid ourselves either about the nature of the Bosnian government. It used to be a moderate, inclusive regime that enjoyed substantial support from the Bosnian Croat and Serb communities. Bosnian Croats and Serbs held key positions. Over the past year, however, under the pressures of the war, it became a 95% Muslim entity. That is not good, it is not something the Muslims themselves wanted, but it happened. Today, Sarajevo is the capital, as the Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic told me recently, of a Muslim state. It is only to the outside world that the Bosnian government maintains the fiction of its “multiethnic” character, for the obvious reason that a multiethnic state is more likely to get international aid.

Over the past several months, the Bosnian Muslim army has made gains, through vicious fighting, against Croatian forces in central and south-central Bosnia. Croatian villagers in areas of Bosnian army control are scared, with reason. Muslim atrocities occur more frequently. The question forces itself on the West: Do we support Muslim politics of revenge?

The logic behind the Bosnian assault is twofold: Remove unreliable, potential fifth-column Croatians, and take from them a swath of land down to the coast, that is, the access to the sea promised in the Geneva talks, but which the Bosnians believe they will not get unless they take it for themselves.

Hard-line Muslim military commanders, a majority in the army, would go further, to roll back Serbian and Croatian forces from all the territory of the former Bosnia.

It was one thing for the international community to seek to help the side (the Muslims) that suffered disproportionately from aggression, so long as the Muslims were losing. But our support for the Muslims finally tilted the local balance in their favor. The danger, the French point out, is that our support encourages the Muslims to cross some invisible threshold that will bring in Croatian and Serbian forces from outside. At that point, Muslims will lose more than they have already lost.

The international community passed up every opportunity to restore Bosnia as a multiethnic state. The damage has already been done of allowing an example of aggression to succeed. The best we could hope for is to put an end to the fighting, an unjust armistice, that would spare the civilian population further suffering and keep the conflict from spreading through the Balkans.

The international community faces three choices: Pull out of Bosnia; keep muddling on, or attempt to use force to bring about territorial division and an end to the fighting.

Pulling out would be a catastrophe. Fighting would escalate and the Muslims would lose. Chances are 50-50 that misguided American interventionists, who still think the Bosnian government is multiethnic, would push the U.S. government into arming the Muslims. Any such arming, overt or covert, would bring into the conflict for the first time a set of outside powers backing different favorites. It is World War I again.

Withdrawal would also tell the rest of the Balkans something they don’t need to hear: The way to settle your political differences is to fight it out. The last man standing wins. Just because the entire peninsula hasn’t blown up yet doesn’t mean it won’t.

If we want a Balkan domino effect, this is how to get it. Muddling on only postpones the day of reckoning. The war will go on. Meanwhile, our “humanitarian aid” operations cost a lot of money--perhaps between $3 billion and $4 billion. For what? We are dreaming if we think we have helped set the stage for a peacefully negotiated settlement in this century.

So forcing a settlement on all the parties starts to look like it’s not such a bad idea. Exactly how to do that would be difficult to work out. Honestly, it may not prove possible, but it’s worth a try. All the French are saying is, let’s sit down and have a serious look at the mess we’re in. Washington should cooperate.