Don’t Ask Gorazde to Surrender : Bosnia: The Serbs don’t want only the territory; they want it ‘cleansed.’ <i> Realpolitik </i> would offer peace without security.

The rape of the Bosnian “safe haven” town of Gorazde has come as grim vindication for those who have urged the view that the Bosnian Serbs have won, the Bosnian Muslims have lost and further resistance is futile. Columnist Jim Hoagland spoke for many, particularly in the diplomatic community, when he argued last week “for Clinton’s joining the Europeans in a Realpolitik solution of accepting the Serb victory in Bosnia and shutting this war down now. That in turn means dropping the smoke-screen talk of lifting the arms embargo while negotiating the best surrender terms possible for the vanquished Bosnian Muslims.”

Hoagland deserves credit for using the word surrender. Too few have. But can official Bosnia-Herzegovina--heavily but by no means entirely Muslim--afford to surrender? The question may seem a strange one. What choice do the defeated have but surrender? Are they to fight until the last man, woman and child is dead or captured? Surely, surrender is preferable to that. This is where Realpolitik and idealism conflict most sharply. Fighting to the last man is false idealism, the stuff of mythology, not of modern warfare.

But consider the position in which Bosnia actually finds itself.

The central feature of any imaginable surrender agreement will be territorial partition along ethnic/religious lines. But will the Serbs accept their victory? The terms most recently proposed by the European Union’s David Owen and the United Nations’ Thorwald Stoltenberg are sure to be revised in the Serbs’ favor, given their military strength and the mood of defeat in the European Union and the United Nations. But even then, will the Serbs be satisfied? There is every reason to doubt this. The Bosnians must be prepared for them, instead, to disregard the terms of a surrender agreement just as they have disregarded the terms of so many cease-fires. Post-surrender, whatever remains of the Bosnian state will almost certainly come under immediate Serbian attack.

But what of enforcement of the agreement by the United Nations or NATO? After Gorazde, can such a question even be asked? The declaration of safety for the haven cities--a dry run for the enforcement of a surrender agreement--was a modest promise that the United Nations has failed to keep. The Serbs have repeatedly manipulated the United Nations into providing cover for their aggression, a point made with bitterness and shame by the U.N. commander in Bosnia, Sir Michael Rose. NATO, in the moment of truth, has twice run from the fight, and many hundreds have died as a result. If the surrender terms are to be enforced only by these bodies, the Bosnians must expect the terms simply to be unenforced.

But why not, even then, surrender and hope for the best rather than fight on to certain defeat? Because the Serbs’ declared and already substantially implemented political program is genocidal. Documentation on this point is abundant. Post-surrender, the Bosnians must plan not on the excesses of soldiers in the heat of battle but on a cold and considered policy aimed at what former Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, formally investigating the matter for the United Nations, did not shrink from calling “extermination.” Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s election slogan was “Mobilization and Homogenization.” Redrawing the Serb/Bosnian border in Bosnia is thus not like redrawing the French/German border in Alsace-Lorraine. The French and the Germans fought to control land and people. The Serbs want the land without the people. In the name of homogeneity, they have expelled those they could expel and slain the rest. As the last local refugee havens fall and no foreign havens open, slaughter will necessarily become the tactic of choice.

Faced with this choice between, analogously, Auschwitz and an endless Warsaw Uprising, Realpolitik recommends Auschwitz. No one should be surprised, however, if the Bosnians themselves choose the Warsaw Uprising even knowing that eventual annihilation awaits them. In their position, what would you do?

Jim Hoagland, whose integrity is beyond reproach, does not intend to urge extermination as a peace settlement for the Bosnians. That much should go without saying. But just as the methodological exclusion of morality and morale from the political calculus led the United States astray in Vietnam, so it could do so again in the Balkans. A people with nothing left to lose but life itself should be expected to fight on, and it is wishful thinking to suppose otherwise, to suppose, in other words, that merely declaring them defeated will “shut this war down.”

Wars are not won by air power alone. But neither are they won by ground and air power together. They are won or lost by human beings in all their complexity, and the besetting temptation of Realpolitik is to leave out some of that complexity--above all the complexity of desperate emotion. Ismet Briga, Gorazde’s mayor, said at the peak of the siege: “We have only two choices: We can be slaughtered, or we can fight and die with dignity. The town will not fall as long as there is anybody alive in it.” In some wars, in some sieges, a statement like his might be dismissed as bravado. In this one, it should not be. It has just the kind of psychological realism about it to which classic Realpolitik has so often been blind.

“Surrender and be done with it” is not the voice of reason. The Bosnians, whatever their losses, dare not surrender, and we shall none of us soon be done with it.