Serbs, Croats and Muslims Must Share for Peace to Last : Bosnia: However tempting partition seems, it will only prolong the fighting.

Croatia’s recapture of most its Serb-occupied territory has changed the strategic balance in the former Yugoslavia. While the continued heavy fighting may soon close the newly opened window for peace negotiations, that may not be a bad thing. Not just any settlement will bring a durable peace; the West must resist the urge to cut a deal with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Croatian President Franjo Tudjman at Bosnia-Herzegovina’s expense.

Though the Croat success encourages the Clinton Administration to think it can get Bosnia off the front pages before election season, it is not all roses. Everyone in the region has again concluded that force pays where Western diplomacy fails and that ethnic separation--well over 100,000 Serbs this time--is the name of the game. Remember, it was the London Conference’s failure to guarantee protection to the “safe haven” of Bihac, an area vital to Croatia’s security, that spurred Tudjman’s move.

There now is an effective Croatian protectorate over Herzegovina; Croatian flags fly there, not Bosnian ones. Bosnia’s Croats are more interested in uniting with their kinsmen in Croatia than supporting the U.S.-brokered Bosnia-Croat Federation. That the Croatians are still cooperating with the Bosnians is more a matter of tactics and U.S. pressures than of commitment. Though Croatia has smashed the notion that all Serbs of the region can be joined in a contiguous Greater Serbia, Serb forces still control eastern Bosnia, with the exception of the Gorazde enclave. Milosevic and Bosnian General Ratko Mladic, now feuding with his political leader, Radovan Karadzic, may welcome a settlement that freezes gains, permits territorial adjustments, lifts sanctions against Belgrade, and leaves the door open for eastern Bosnia’s accession to Serbia.

A carve-up of Bosnia between Zagreb and Belgrade may ultimately be too tempting for Tudjman and Milosevic to pass up. Tired Western governments and Russia may collude with Croatia and Serbia in what amounts to a negotiated partition. Though the four-day Croatian victory against the Krajina Serbs exposed the hollowness and hypocrisy of the West’s refusal to arm and train the Bosnians, there now is even less desire among Western governments to give them weapons.

The West is both promising the Bosnians reconstruction aid and long-term military cooperation and threatening them with loss of political and peacekeeping support. But Bosnians aren’t likely to accept a negotiated defeat; they will keep on fighting. Buoyed by captured arms and possibly fleeting victories, they have had a surge of confidence that makes it harder to persuade them to abandon hope of recapturing Banja Luka, Prijedor and other ethnically cleansed areas.

And any settlement that truncates Bosnia will not get the Bosnians to stop fighting. It will speed Croat and Serb secession. Imposing such a settlement could also have an enormous psychological impact on Islamic countries. It could spur militancy among the harshly repressed Albanian population in Serbia’s Kosovo province. That, in turn, risks tearing apart Macedonia, where the Albanian minority is uneasy about its place in a multi-ethnic state. Macedonian President Kiro Gligorov has said that any involuntary change of borders in Bosnia or Croatia would be highly destabilizing.

Unless the Bosnian Croats and Serbs remain part of Bosnia, conditions will not be ripe for a durable settlement. However difficult, the United States and its allies should insist on a settlement that leaves Bosnia intact and with adequate means of defense, not an ethnic ghetto or a large refugee camp. Moscow, after all, has not given the Chechens secession rights. The focus must be on establishing and implementing constitutional power-sharing arrangements among the Serb, Croat and Muslim populations. This could entail a federation or confederation relationship within Bosnia along territorial lines. All Bosnian citizens must be given some confidence that their rights will be respected whatever their ethnicity and wherever they live.

Preserving Bosnia within its U.N.-recognized borders will be more difficult to achieve than a settlement that simply partitions the country. But it is better to attempt a settlement that might last than, for expediency’s sake, to throw Bosnia out the window, consigning the former Yugoslavia to further war.