Bosnia’s ‘Peacekeepers’: Eunuchs at the Orgy : U.N.: Antipathy toward the Sarajevo government has led to collective international amnesia about the Serbs’ true intentions.

We have been down this road before. If the events in Bihac demonstrate anything, it is that the Bosnian Serbs understand the Western powers, NATO and the United Nations better than these nations and entities understand themselves.

At least at the siege of Srebrenica, U.N. officials could assert that they were moving in uncharted territory. By the time of Gorazde, a year later, that excuse was hardly sustainable. As for Bihac, its transformation from a relatively viable economic and social entity into a Muslim Bantustan literally recapitulates what happened to the main government-controlled enclaves in eastern Bosnia.

There are no excuses for the West’s inaction or for the United Nations’ failure to take a hard line; but there is nothing surprising about any of this either.

It is becoming clear that among the other ailments that afflict it where the former Yugoslavia is concerned, the international community, as it is rather inappropriately called, suffers from a collective failure of memory, a sort of moral Alzheimer’s disease that allows it to misconstrue over and over again the same challenge from the Serbs. This is not simply a matter of U.N. officials from Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan in New York to Yasushi Akashi and Gens. Bertrand de Lapresle and Michael Rose in the Balkans dusting off the same expressions of shock and horror they used prefatory to doing nothing a year, two years, three years earlier. That could be ascribed to cynicism, or bad faith, or the desire, when all is said and done, to see peace come to the Balkans even if that peace is nothing more than a Serb victory with a hint of humanitarian window dressing.

No doubt these hidden agendas do affect the way the U.N. Department of Peacekeeping Operations and the U.N. Protection Force (UNPROFOR) behave. But the more fundamental and, in a sense, the more shocking point is that these officials are also genuinely surprised by what is going on. That they get along well with Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic and the rest has been a given for a long time. Indeed, the difference between the cordial tone of most meetings between Akashi and Rose and the Bosnian Serbs and the tension of encounters between these officials and representatives of the Bosnian government is often remarked upon in private by U.N. and Red Cross officials who have been present at both. But there is a sense in which the United Nations’ antipathy toward the Bosnians not only blinds it to the justice of the Bosnian cause, but also leads it to misrepresent to itself what the Serbs are up to.

To hear U.N. officials tell it, it was only a Bosnian army offensive that changed the status quo in Bihac. In their rush to blame the victims--that oldest of U.N. specialties in Bosnia--U.N. officials ignore the more fundamental aspect of the situation, which is that Gen. Mladic intended to do away with the Bihac pocket all along. He was just waiting for the right time to strike.

On the Serb side, many people even say that the Bosnian force was lured out of the pocket, and that the Serb counterattack was already planned even as the Bosnians advanced beyond positions they had any hope of holding. Whatever the details, those whose memory functions are not impaired will remember that the Serbs used the same pretext of Bosnian army assaults in the Drina Valley to gain effective control of that area in late 1993 and then again in the spring of this year.

The conclusion is inescapable that the United Nations does not want to acknowledge what the Serbs are really up to. Just as the Bosnian army seems incapable of conducting military operations while keeping in mind that the Serbs will hit back, so the United Nations seems incapable of viewing Serb actions in a large historical context.

The importance of Bihac was clear early on to anyone following the development over the last few months of at least a partial rift between Belgrade and the Bosnian Serbs, and of a rising fear on the Bosnian Serb side and among the Krajina Serbs that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was thinking of selling out the Serb-held areas of Croatia as part of a “historic compromise” with Zagreb. With Bihac under Bosnian government control, the distinction between the Croatian Krajina and the Serb-controlled Bosanska Krajina remained a valid one. With Bihac neutralized, the separation of these two Serb-controlled entities became far more difficult, whatever Milosevic’s intentions.

But for UNPROFOR all this seems to have come as one more complete surprise in that long series of complete surprises that have marked U.N. peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia since 1991. Cyrus Vance was surprised when the U.N.-protected areas in Croatia became the Serbian Republic of the Krajina. Lord Owen was surprised when the Bosnian Serb Parliament in Pale turned down his plan. NATO was surprised when the assault on Gorazde took place despite NATO’s token air strike. And now Rose and Akashi profess surprise that the Serbs really mean to neutralize Bihac.

Boutros-Ghali--forced, it is said, by ambassadors from the Islamic countries to go to Sarajevo--was also surprised when Karadzic refused to come to the airport to meet with him. And yet this snubbing by the Bosnian Serbs was entirely predictable. Had Karadzic met with the U.N. chief, he might have had to give something up, or, at least, pretend to do so. And there is no reason for him to take such a risk. From the Serb perspective, everything is proceeding smoothly.

With the decision by the U.S. government to drop its opposition to the eventual merger of the Serb-controlled Bosnia with the rump Yugoslavia, almost the last obstacle to the plan concocted by Milosevic, Karadzic, Mladic and Milan Matic, the Krajina leader, has been eliminated. All that remains, they feel, is some mopping up on the battlefield. Bihac was one place this had to be done. The narrow strip of Serb-controlled territory is in the far northeast of the country; the so-called corridor around the town of Brcko is another. No doubt the fighting will start there in the not too distant future.

As for the United Nations, it is stuck. With the humiliation not only of one peacekeeping operation but of the entire concept of peacekeeping all but complete, the United Nations, for all Boutros-Ghali’s threats, cannot withdraw; the operation would simply be too costly. UNPROFOR would be fired upon by the Serbs and Bosnian government forces alike, eager to keep the equipment the foreign battalions brought with them.

The likeliest outcome is that as the Bosnian War is decided on the battlefield, and in the course of complicated negotiations among Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Pale and Knin, the United Nations forces--missionless, discredited and impotent--will remain as resentful and largely ignored onlookers. They will be, as the joke goes in Sarajevo, eunuchs at the orgy.

It is a disgraceful predicament, but one that the United Nations, through its incompetence, its inflexibility and, above all, its blind amoral adherence to a notion of impartiality that made no distinction between murderers and their victims, richly deserves.