False Hopes Only Lead to Tragedy : When will West face reality in the Balkans?

In the slow struggle toward peace in the Balkans, true hope will have to step across the corpses of at least three false hopes.

The first is that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic will seriously assist in restraining the Serb militants of Bosnia or Croatia. Milosevic, breaking past promises, has continued to supply the Serb rebels in both countries by air as well as by land. Incredibly, in view of this record, the U.N. Security Council--prompted by the five-power “Contact Group,” which includes the United States--may soon suspend its economic sanctions against Yugoslavia in exchange for a new promise by Milosevic to stop breaking his old promises and, in addition, to recognize the nations he has been trying to dismember. Milosevic will violate the new commitments as he did the old.

RUSSIAN SAVAGERY: The second false hope is that Russia will bring Serbia to the negotiating table. Russia and Serbia are linked, historically, by their adherence to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Unfortunately, Russia’s response to the Chechen uprising, a Muslim revolt within its own borders, implies only approval for Serb treatment of Bosnia’s Muslims. The Russian siege of Grozny exceeds in violence the Serb siege of Sarajevo. Like the Serbs, but with greater savagery, the Russians have directly attacked Muslim civilians.

Russia’s action has endangered a crucial $6-billion loan from the International Monetary Fund and awakened Islamic militancy along Russia’s southern border, but in Russia as in Serbia economic and diplomatic considerations have been swept aside by chauvinist militarism.

The point of this folly for Western leaders must be that, at least when conflicts at the margins of the First World involve Muslims, Russia must be regarded as a part of the problem rather than any reliable part of the solution. With respect to the Bosnian conflict, in particular, Chechnya has crippled Russia’s ability to play any significant role even as it has exposed the inability of the Russian military, for years to come, to pose any significant land threat to Western Europe.

EMPTY CEASE-FIRE: A third Bosnian hope that many, most recently Jimmy Carter, have entertained is that the Bosnian Serb leadership might be persuaded to accept autonomy rather than independence in a peace plan that ratifies many of its military gains. Sadly, the cease-fire that Carter brokered has never taken effect in Bihac, the besieged city that prompted his intervention and was to have been its main beneficiary. Worse, the Serbs are now preparing a similar siege for Srebenica, another of the cruelly misnamed Bosnian “safe areas.” The U.S. State Department recently decided to end official contacts with the Bosnian Serb leadership. Would that comparable realism ruled U.S. relations with Belgrade.

In 1995 the attempt to halt Serb aggression stands approximately where the attempt to halt German aggression stood in 1942. The hour is dark, in other words. But abandoning false hopes regarding Slobodan Milosevic, Russian mediation and Serb willingness to settle for a large but partial victory can only hurry the dawn.