Is Partition the Only Way? : Why Christopher seeks to help create a binational Bosnia

The Bosnian peace plan urged by the European Union and the United Nations has functioned for months as a self-fulfilling prophecy. What the great powers seemed to regard as inevitable--namely the tripartite, ethnic division of the Bosnian state--Bosnia’s Croats and Muslims, whose relations had initially been peaceful, also began to regard as inevitable. The two groups turned on each other, determined to acquire as much territory as possible going into the partition negotiations.

The Clinton Administration, while continuing to pay lip service to the partition plan, is now clearly trying to make the prevailing wind blow in the other direction. Secretary of State Warren Christopher is pushing Bosnia’s Muslim-dominated government and its Croatian minority to form a unified binational Bosnian state within still-to-be-determined though surely reduced borders.

The Muslim siege of Croatian Vitez in central Bosnia and the Croatian siege of the Muslim district of Mostar in southwestern Bosnia seem to mock Christopher’s new approach, but a Croatian-Muslim cease-fire has been announced for noon today, and unification talks begin in Washington this weekend.

A binational rather than tri-national Bosnia in federation with Croatia would give Bosnia the outlet to the sea it needs while providing Croatia with inland protection for its slender but lucrative Dalmatian coast. The newly proclaimed cease-fire is not backed by the threat of NATO reprisals for cease-fire violations, but some observers see a continuing spillover from the Sarajevo ultimatum.

Christopher has some leverage on both sides in the coming negotiations. The threat of U.N. economic sanctions worries the Croats. The Muslims know that it would probably fall to the Americans in any future peacekeeping force to protect them. Whatever this leverage yields this weekend, the Administration deserves credit for finding its way, however haltingly and belatedly, to a Bosnian intervention that honors ethnic mixing and the secular state.