Confusion Course? Or Collision Course? : French, British: Forceful but neutral

Last Wednesday, U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali presented four policy options for Bosnia to the Security Council.

Britain and France have now combined the third and fourth of these options, which the secretary general prepared at the request of French President Jacques Chirac.

As a result, the U.N. forces in Bosnia are about to have their defense improved by the dispatch of a small (5,000-member), multinational but mostly French and British rapid-reaction force. Against the preferences of Boutros-Ghali, these troops will officially still be U.N. forces rather than a separate expeditionary force, but the secretary general and his special envoy to Bosnia, Yasushi Akashi, will not have operational control over them. Instead, they will take their orders directly--and presumably more rapidly--from the French commander of all U.N. troops in the former Yugoslavia and the British commander of the U.N. troops in Bosnia.

NATO could long since have done what this new force will do. As an ad hoc alternative to NATO, the new force thus has implications beyond the Balkans. But the immediate questions are practical ones: What will the new force do? How far will it go?

As still part of the U.N. force, it must maintain the United Nations’ official neutrality in this war. Yet one of the warring parties, the Bosnian Serb party, has declared that the United Nations is its enemy. Realistically, then, the new force will have to regard the areas controlled by the Bosnian government as its base of operations.

But if the U.N. force as a whole now retreats from even more of the Serb-held or Serb-surrounded areas where the need for relief is greatest, it can no longer be effective in its humanitarian role. And confined to government-held areas, the United Nations can scarcely seem credible in the role of intermediary.

Credibility will accrue to the new force if it abandons neutrality and takes the fight to the Bosnian Serbs, choosing when and to whom the United Nations will bring relief and defying the Serbs to interfere. But will domestic opinion in the sending countries permit the defense of official Bosnia even in this form? Not if casualties result, and casualties would surely result.

The likelier scenario is that the new force will not aggressively force the pace of the relief effort. Rather, too small and restricted to change the course of the war, it will simply slow the Bosnian Serb advance long enough for UNPROFOR to stage an orderly evacuation.

Though British Prime Minister John Major agrees with Boutros-Ghali that evacuation is the worst case, Lord David Owen, resigning last week as the European Union’s chief negotiator for the former Yugoslavia, barely stopped short of calling this worst case inevitable.

If he is right, and we suspect he is, Bosnia-Herzegovina will soon be left to fight its own war to its own conclusion.

The question that will then arise is one that could all too easily be raised now. Should the international community maintain moral and political neutrality in this war?

Some seem to think so. We disagree. Whether or not the official Bosnian government deserves to be the West’s dearest friend, the Bosnian Serbs have at this point rightly earned the right to be treated as among its clearest enemies. The United Nations has indicated recently that it expects to indict the Bosnian Serbs’ two key leaders, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, for war crimes, and rightly so.

The newly created rapid-reaction force would be more effective were it free to abandon neutrality and conduct itself as a defense force. But the neutrality question, postponed for now, will become the central question if and when this force proves too little too late.