Keep the Cost of Aggression High : Watch out for the good cop / bad cop act

Diplomacy may always be full of ruse and stage management, but the show being mounted just now in the Bosnian theater is nonetheless remarkable. When the “Contact Group” of five major powers offered a last-chance peace plan in early July, the foreign ministers of Britain and France said that if the plan was rejected, the U.N. forces might have to withdraw. Then, last Monday, as the five met in Moscow, U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said that if the plan was accepted, the U.N. forces might have to withdraw.

Initially, the Muslims and Croats of Bosnia accepted the plan, while the Serbs rejected it. Then, after the Serbian rejection, the Muslims and Croats withdrew their acceptance. At this point, the Serbs began a countrywide military escalation, including attacks on U.N. personnel and new sieges overnight of Sarajevo and Gorazde. The return of the horror?

More likely an elaborate game of good cop/bad cop by Slobodan Milosevic, leading Serbia proper, and Radovan Karadzic, leading Serbian Bosnia. Though the 49% of Bosnia assigned to the Bosnian Serbs by the plan is less than the 70% they hold, this is not likely to be their real reason for rejection. No one--certainly not Boutros-Ghali--has ever believed that the agreement would for a certainty be observed. The Serbs could easily have accepted it and then disregarded it. Neither NATO nor anyone else would have stopped them.

What the Serbs are almost certainly seeking is the lifting of the economic sanctions that remain in place against Serbia proper. Good cop Milosevic, by elaborately and publicly distancing himself from bad cop Karadzic, has set the stage for a sudden rescue of the plan that now seems doomed by the bad cop’s uncontrollable rage. “I can barely control this guy,” the good cop says, “but I’ve got a deal I think he’ll go for. I just need a little help.”

The help he needs is the lifting of the sanctions. But this move, though it will be presented as part of normalization and a return to peace, would in fact remove the major continuing cost to Serbia for past aggression, including past ethnic cleansing, and the major deterrent against future aggression. Maintaining and even tightening the economic sanctions on Serbia is far more important to halting the spread of violence in the former Yugoslavia than rescuing the peace plan of the Contact Group. On the most optimistic reading, that plan would buy only a temporary peace and only in Bosnia, while peace is threatened throughout the former Yugoslavia.

The Bosnian Serbs are militarily overextended. Serbia’s debit-financed economic bubble may be about to burst. Whether the U.N. forces stay or go, now is not the moment for the major powers to let an aggressive minor power panic them into surrender.