And Still Another Phony Peace Plan

During President Clinton’s recent visit to France, the United States renewed its commitment to a peace plan assigning 51% of Bosnia-Herzegovina to its Muslim-Croat majority and 49% to its Serb minority. Inconveniently, the Bosnian Serbs now hold not 49% but 72% of Bosnia’s territory, which leaves one-fifth of the country in dispute. The Serbs are not going to give the disputed territory back. The French and Americans are not going to take it back. So much for the agreement.

At a tense meeting this week in Geneva, the belligerents agreed to a one-month cease-fire. This is inconsequential. Real forward movement is not likely to come either in wrangling over the details of the partition map or in the making and breaking of cease-fires.

In a daring economic move, Serbia has made its dinar convertible with the German mark. Some predict that after a brief boom, Belgrade--which has only a few months’ hard-currency reserves--will face a devastating economic collapse. Others, however, claim that this move coupled with a weakening European will to maintain the economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations on Serbia has made the sanctions moot. If the latter view is correct (and the next few months will tell), then the threat of lifting the sanctions is also moot as a form of pressure on the Muslims and Croats.

Meanwhile, U.S. congressional pressure for a unilateral U.S. breach of the arms embargo on the former Yugoslav republics continues to grow. On Thursday, ignoring pleas from the White House, the House of Representatives voted by a strong 244-178 margin to lift the embargo. The Senate has already voted 50-49 for the same action. Neither chamber is likely to override a Clinton veto, but Clinton may find the political cost of a veto prohibitive.

If both the sanctions and the embargo are abandoned, the Balkans war may evolve into a new kind of civil war pitting Serbia against a rearming alliance of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and, unofficially, Slovenia--with a fifth column of ethnic Hungarians and Albanians within Serbia. “The Geneva agreement is merely a one-month calm before an unprecedented storm and a prelude to total conflict,” the Bosnian Serb leadership’s SRNA news agency said late Wednesday.

The partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina has been urged as the best possible outcome under the circumstances. But since no coalition of major powers intends to impose the partition, this outcome becomes as moot as the sanctions and the embargo. In short, the war is overwhelmingly likely to escalate. And in that case, an unpleasant question could begin to become inescapable: Which side should the United States support? The current paradox is that all the major powers, by refusing to intervene and insisting on negotiations, have made negotiations virtually meaningless and neutrality increasingly difficult to maintain.