PERSPECTIVE ON BOSNIA : Have We Forgotten the Lesson of Guernica? : Once before, the West watched a town like Bihac being destroyed, without challenging fascism’s spread.

Since the so-called international community decided to capitulate and abandon the U.N.-proclaimed “safe zone” of Bihac to the Serbs’ brutal onslaught, there is more interest in the press for the unity of the United Nations and NATO, which proved to be so impotent in Bosnia’s case, than for the fate of 180,000 civilians in that remote Bosnian town. But in those rare news stories about the continuing terror, one element didn’t change. Almost seven days after the U.N. commander announced with certain relief that the “Serbs can take Bihac at their will,” the Serbs occupied only 30% of the area and were still “a few hundred yards” away from the town’s hospital, shelling patients. This means that the defenders of Bihac, armed just with light personal weapons against a huge military force--tanks, cannons, rocket launchers, mortars and anti-aircraft guns--managed to keep their lines much longer than did the international institutions that were supposed to protect them.

There is strong symbolism in that. The defense of Bihac is not just a fight for the survival of 180,000 desperate people “paralyzed by fear” and with no place to go. It is also the last line of defense of the most basic rules and principles on which the international new order was supposed to rest. It is also the testing ground of the forces of ultranationalism, racist “ethnic purity” and genocidal “ethnic cleansing” to check if there is anything to oppose their quests for greater states, starting with “greater Serbia.” But they dream, like Russia’s Vladimir Zhirinovsky, about the “orthodox empire from Vladivostok in Russia to Knin in Croatia.” And then it won’t be “just” Bosnia or Bihac but many other borders, states and towns that will be disputed, contested and targeted because they don’t fit in the maps developed by Milosevic-Karadzic-Mladic-like conquerors.

This is why in listening to the reports about Bihac I see Picasso’s “Guernica.” That painting depicted the town bombed and terrorized during the Spanish Civil War without anyone recognizing that it was fascism marching on its way to the most terrible crime in history. Marching unchallenged like the Serbian genocidal forces in Bosnia.

It is not only shameful but also frightening for the future of the Balkans and the whole of Europe to see the institutions of the new world order powerless, humiliated and defeated in Bosnia and even conspiring to make the best out of that failure and, instead, producing face-losing formulas. There are more and more signs that the abandonment of the Bihac “safe zone” was a deliberate, calculated and coordinated decision to speed the “final solution” for Bosnia, to force it to surrender, and then to present its capitulation as the peace settlement and permanent cease-fire.

But they miscalculated at one crucial point. Even under the blackmail of abandonment, Bosnians can’t surrender because they have no place to go and they don’t have the British and French colonial arrogance of proclaiming someone’s country someone else’s. They will fight for the survival of Bihac, for the survival of the country and for high principles, which were so easily sacrificed in this case.

With the experience of Bosnia, which was prevented by the arms embargo from protecting itself and was openly told that no one will protect even the “safe zones,” it is cynical to discuss expansion of NATO or European security. What kind of all-European “partnership for peace” can these institutions guarantee to the newly born European democracies, when they proved to be so tragically impotent in protecting even a small Bosnian town? That’s why Bihac might not be just an “episode that shouldn’t affect the future of the alliance,” as Secretary of State Warren Christopher put it in Brussels.

Bihac is the symbolic beginning of the whole post-Cold War history, and now that all institutions of the collective security have failed so miserably, those who had any power to stop genocide in Bosnia must take care as to which side of that history they want to be recorded as being on: the side of marching ultranationalism and genocidal “ethnic cleansing,” or the side of international law and order defended now only by the heroic defenders of Bihac?