Are the Serbs Humiliating NATO?

“The United Nations has made a catastrophic mistake,” Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic said last week of last Sunday’s NATO air strike against Serbian forces besieging Gorazde. “We have won. That is why they are angry with us. With this they have put their last card on the table. Now they will have to send land forces to fight with us.”

The statement, over Serbian radio, was a preemptive rhetorical strike. The Serbs may, in fact, be terrified of a sustained NATO air onslaught. But they know the Americans are loath to begin a ground war. By equating air war with inevitable ground war, Karadzic sought to stop both at once.

As of late Friday, the tactic was working. U.N. officials in Gorazde were reporting imminent Serb victory there. But U.S. officials, refusing to accept the U.N. reports, said that no NATO strikes were in prospect.

If the Serbs do take Gorazde, they will have humiliated NATO as well as the United Nations and, in the bargain, mocked the Russians, whose negotiator, Vitaly Churkin, had claimed as recently as Wednesday, “I got assurances from the Bosnian Serb leadership that it was not in their intention to conduct offensive operation in the Gorazde area or shell the town.” That Bosnian Serb mockery of Russian mediation will permit Vladimir Zhirinovsky and the militarist Russian right to mock President Boris N. Yeltsin and call for a more aggressive stance toward the West. NATO, its lack of resolve laid bare, will deter such moves less effectively. The United States will also be seen as weaker outside Europe.

On Friday, ironically, the official U.N. commission on war crimes in the former Yugoslavia concluded in its final report that the Serbs had committed genocide against the Muslims in northern Bosnia. The Serbian goal, to quote a Serbian election slogan, is “Mobilization and Homogenization. “ That call for homogenization constitutes a death sentence against non-Serbs not metaphorically but, as the U.N. report proves, literally. With death by ethnic cleansing their only alternative to death in a guerrilla war, the Bosnian Muslims are likely to fight on as long as they have a bullet left to fire. Nothing NATO does or fails to do will change that fact.

Russia, offended by NATO’s action last Sunday, has backed away from President Clinton’s NATO-adjacent Partnership for Peace. A Russia-NATO partnership--if, against the odds, one could be forged in the crucible of this moment--could surely impose a cease-fire in Bosnia and dictate terms that none of the parties could reject. But with or without Russia, NATO would be wise to call Karadzic’s bluff, abandon the pretense of neutrality, step into the breach opened by the besieged, conflict-ridden and collapsing United Nations and sharply escalate the air war against the Serbs. By now, the situation may be lose-lose, but the greater loss will be what now impends: capitulation to a band of thugs trying in every way to conceal their vulnerability to open-ended air war.