Serbian Good Faith? Don’t Count on It : A reckless lifting of sanctions could have dire effects

After the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina seceded from a disintegrating Yugoslavia in 1991, Serbia invaded, using the Bosnian Serb minority as local allies. The undisguised goal of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was to keep as much of the original Yugoslavia as possible under Serb control and to “cleanse” captured territory of non-Serbs.

As the war has gone on, however, the independence of the Bosnian Serbs has grown. Just as Milosevic has easily distinguished his goal of Serb unification and expansion from his support for Bosnian Serb leaders, they, as time went, have returned the favor. For the Bosnian Serbs, union with Serbia in a reconstituted Yugoslavia has remained a goal; support for Milosevic is another matter.

In May, 1992, Milosevic announced that the official Yugoslav army had withdrawn from Bosnia, though supply lines remained open and public support by Milosevic for Radovan Karadzic, president of one of the two self-declared Bosnian Serb states, remained high. However, when the Bosnian Serbs rejected a U.N.-sponsored plan for an internal partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Milosevic ostentatiously announced that his support for them was at an end.

There was never any reason to believe that if the Bosnian Serbs had accepted the U.N. peace plan either they or the Serbian Serbs would have observed its terms: The record of past scorned agreements makes that clear. Nonetheless, the Bosnian Serbs clearly departed from Milosevic’s script by formally rejecting the peace plan. And the result of that rejection has been that U.N.-imposed sanctions barring trade with Yugoslavia have remained in place and may even be tightened. Milosevic obviously hoped that his well-orchestrated break with Karadzic would lead to a quick and complete lifting of the sanctions, but it has not had that effect.

Should it? We do not think so. Five major powers--Britain, France, the United States, Russia and Germany--are continuing a meeting in Berlin today to discuss this question. Russia will demand an immediate end to the sanctions. The United States and Germany may well support an easing--not a complete lifting--of sanctions if Yugoslavia will permit the stationing of international monitors along its supply routes to the Bosnian Serbs. Yugoslavia has rejected this option unless the monitors can come from the two nations, Russia and Greece, that blatantly disregarded the sanctions all along.

Monitoring by Russians and Greeks may be defended by some as a compromise between no monitoring and no change whatever in the sanctions, but this move should really be seen as a capitulation. A progressive easing of sanctions could be defensible, given strict monitoring and the certainty that any violation would lead to immediate reimposition. But the good faith of the Yugoslav Serbs is not to be naively presumed. According to widespread reports, supplies have continued to flow from Yugoslavia to the Bosnian Serbs, who in recent days have returned to large-scale “ethnic cleansing” in northeast Bosnia and commenced a shelling of Sarajevo that Tuesday prompted a prudent Pope John Paul II to cancel his scheduled visit.

We believe that President Clinton should, even now, lift the U.S. arms embargo on Bosnia-Herzegovina unilaterally. But even those who disagree must recognize, at the very least, that any reckless lifting of the Yugoslav economic sanctions will make the Bosnian arms embargo virtually impossible to maintain.