No Peacemaker Role for Slobodan Milosevic : New evidence that Serbian is wrong man for the job

There is blood on all hands in the Balkans. Yet, to quote from a highly classified CIA report leaked to the press this week, “Serbs carried out at least 90% of the ethnic cleansings in Bosnia.”

Are the Serbs 90% more bloodthirsty than the other ethnic groups of the former Yugoslavia? Surely not, but the Serb leadership in Belgrade, capital of Serbia, and Pale, headquarters of the separatist Bosnian Serbs, has been systematically and murderously aggressive. The CIA report says that “the systematic nature of the Serbia actions strongly suggests that Pale and perhaps Belgrade exercised a carefully veiled role in the purposeful destruction and dispersal of non-Serb populations.”

The point is a crucial one. Populations harboring ancient ethnic hatreds have not driven their leaders to war. No, to the astonishment of many if not all of the former Yugoslavs themselves, demagogic leaders have wakened in intermarried and otherwise heavily intermingled populations hatreds that might well have remained dormant. The Croat and Muslim leadership has much to answer for, but the Serb leadership has far more.

The timing of the CIA leak is not accidental. Clearly, some in the agency fear a British-French move to lift the U.N. economic sanctions against Serbia-Montenegro in the hope that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic might then change his ways and cooperate in seeking peace. The leak, exposing Milosevic, aims to dissuade the Clinton Administration from supporting any such move.

APPALLING MYTH: The Administration has had in hand all the intelligence it needs to see that Milosevic, a consummate demagogue, cannot be turned to as a peacemaker. Unfortunately, unwilling to take a leading role in the conflict, the Administration has seemed increasingly willing to acquiesce in appeasing Milosevic. Having at one point identified Serbia as the aggressor, the Clinton State Department has moved by degrees toward the blood-on-all-hands, ancient-ethnic-hatreds, civil-war reading of the conflict. This appalling myth, leveling all moral differences among the combatants, has had among its consequences a Russian de facto veto over Western policy in the region, and this in turn has prevented the allies from providing any significant deterrent to acts of aggression.

Milosevic has harshly rejected overtures from the West, most recently an offer to lift the sanctions in exchange for his recognition of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Backed by Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev, the Serbian president insists that the sanctions be lifted first and the recognitions come only thereafter. The leaking of the CIA report may well have been prompted by fears that this latest demonstration of Serb intransigence would be rewarded, as so many earlier ones have been, by Western capitulation.

TRAGIC SYMBOLISM: Whatever Britain and France choose to do, the United States should not lift the economic sanctions on Belgrade. Doing so would have tragic symbolic meaning, however eroded the economic effect of the sanctions may be by this point. Just as the CIA report was leaked, the U.N. Human Rights Commission--over strenuous Russian objections--adopted the longest resolution in its 50-year history, condemning the Serbs for “the systematic policy of ethnic cleansing and genocidal acts” in Serb-held areas of Bosnia and Croatia.

The tragedy of all-out war may be imminent in the Balkans, yet it is folly to yield to the principal war maker in hopes that, contradicting the entire pattern of his past behavior, he may lead the way to peace.