At Last, the West Shows Some Spine : Positive developments quickly follow jet attack

On Monday U.S. F-16 fighters flying for NATO shot down four Serbian warplanes returning from a bombing raid on a Bosnian munitions plant. On Tuesday, after talks in Moscow, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic said that for the first time in two years his forces will allow aid flights into the besieged Muslim town of Tuzla.

Did the air attack cause the change? NATO and Russia were sharing (or competing for) credit. Karadzic linked the opening of the Tuzla airport not to the NATO attack but to a Russian commitment to send peacekeepers to Tuzla to keep out military deliveries.

U.S.-SPONSORED PACT: The airport opening thus parallels the silencing of the Serb artillery around Sarajevo as an action that places Russia and NATO in de facto cooperation. Washington and London welcomed the Tuzla announcement, and Russia, significantly, did not condemn the NATO attack. Bosnian Muslim skepticism about the benevolent intent of Russian troops on Bosnian soil is understandable, but more important, perhaps, is the fact that both Karadzic and Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev described their talks as difficult. For the Serbs, the new developments in Sarajevo and Tuzla may be a retreat rather than a defeat, but a retreat is still a far cry from victory, and the Tuzla announcement occasioned no Serb elation.

While the Bosnian Serbs, under Russian pressure, were opening the Tuzla airport, the Bosnian Muslims and Croats, under U.S. pressure, were signing an agreement in Washington for a binational, Muslim-Croat Bosnian state in federation with Croatia. The three-way ethnic partition of Bosnia proposed by European Union negotiators has now clearly been set aside. Monday’s NATO attack, though directed at Serbian planes, seems to have strengthened the shaky Croatian-Muslim truce in areas where there had been fighting even as negotiations grew more serious in Washington.

NO VIETNAM: This should not come as a huge surprise. The Balkans are not to be compared with Vietnam in population, strategic location or political position. Vietnam, with three times the Balkans’ population, is halfway around the world from the United States and during the Vietnam War enjoyed the advantage of secure overland supply lines and the backing of a superpower only too happy to see its rival bogged down in an unwinnable war. The Balkans lie next door to Italy, a NATO member, and lack secure supply lines and the ability to play one superpower against the other. All that had been wanting to make these factors yield peace was a demonstration that the major powers were prepared to use their overwhelming military advantage. As this demonstration has come, the impact has been dramatic and immediate.

The lesson to be drawn is painfully obvious. One can only regret that it was not drawn two years ago, on behalf of Croatia as well as Bosnia, sparing Europe thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees, not to speak of a debilitating doubt about the state of its collective security.