Let Bosnia Be the Starting Place : Way is open for new German responsibilities

“Literally the whole world has united to force us to accept what they want,” Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic complained Tuesday. Let’s hope he is right.

The “whole world” is, effectively, a coalition whose members are the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Russia. The five have called on the Bosnian Serbs and the Muslim-Croat federation to accept a peace plan assigning 49% of Bosnia-Herzegovina to the Serbs and 51% to the Muslims and Croats. Muslim-Croat acceptance is likely, Serbian acceptance much less so.

Momcilo Krajisnik, speaker of the secessionist Bosnian Serb parliament, has said that the Serbs, who now control 70% of the country, are unwilling to accept a peace map that requires them to give up so much. “The strain of economic sanctions,” Krajisnik said on Tuesday, “cannot be compared to the supreme sacrifices we have made in liberating Serbian land.” Krajisnik was alluding to the apparent willingness of Slobodan Milosevic, president of Serbia, to see Serb-held territory within Bosnia sacrificed if, in exchange, the economic sanctions still imposed on his country were to be lifted.

With impressive unanimity, the five major powers threaten that if the Bosnian Serbs reject the peace plan, the arms embargo against Bosnia may be lifted and the U.N. forces may withdraw. The five powers should maintain the economic sanctions against Serbia with comparable unanimity, for Milosevic, by making the Yugoslav dinar convertible with the German mark in a few months, took a great gamble. Now may be the very worst moment to ease the pressure.

Milosevic is, by any measure, a gifted politician, skilled at making and unmaking coalitions and playing on hopes and fears inside and outside his country. His public coolness to Karadzic may be no more than a tactical maneuver, the prelude to later solidarity and further aggression. Before lifting the sanctions, the group of five should demand not just unequivocal acceptance of the peace plan but demonstrated compliance with it and with the cease-fire that was renewed on Tuesday.

If and when all that can be achieved, an enlarged U.N. force will still be necessary. Happily, Germany’s highest court has now freed Germany to contribute troops to international peacekeeping missions. Having pressed for the early recognition of Slovenia and Croatia, Germany bears some responsibility for the collapse of European collective security in the former Yugoslavia. On Monday, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl said to the visiting President Clinton that Germany “cannot simply sit back and let others do the work.” Let that work begin in Bosnia.