Back Off on the Witch Hunt : Bosnia: Insisting that war crimes have priority undermines the peace-building effort.

Catching war criminals in Bosnia has become an American obsession, a media-fed crusade being pressed by Bob Dole and other Republican presidential contenders that may derail the effort to achieve the larger, more important goal: a durable peace.

The horrifying crimes committed in the name of ethnic purity are repugnant and should be punished. The question is, when and how? The visceral answer is, round up the guilty now and punish them harshly. Insisting on that, however, creates an atmosphere of distrust and blame that is undermining the many sensitive tasks of reconstruction and reconciliation in Bosnia. The plain fact is that prosecuting war criminals is only one of many needs in Bosnia and not the most urgent.

Consider how the heightened tensions of the war-criminal hunt affect the other tasks of peace-building in Bosnia:

* Refugees. More than 2 million people must be returned to their homes. A large number of them are intended to go back to villages from which they were “cleansed”--driven away because they are ethnically different from whomever had the upper hand that week. The wave of relief and joy that followed the Dayton agreement is now submerged under renewed ethnic hostilities--suspicions, accusations and vows of retribution--that will dissuade many of the refugees from feeling secure enough to go home.

* Law and order. Assuring the personal safety of the refugees and others is an enormous undertaking. It must be done by local constabularies, but they are either poorly trained or still under the control of ethnic hotheads. Creating a secure environment requires professional policing (something the U.N. is supposed to help provide but has yet to find enough volunteers for), which requires a climate of calm and trust.

* Reconstruction. An estimated $5.5 billion is needed for homes, schools, roads, utilities and so on. The aid, which is now at a slow trickle, will go to municipalities, but it can be blocked if Western officials believe a community is harboring war criminals. A single accusation could make disbursement politically impossible. This could hold up vital assistance to the Bosnian Serb areas in particular.

* Government. Elections for a new Bosnian parliament are meant to be held no later than September. Registering the refugees and assuring free and fair elections is a daunting task. Even if the mechanisms of the elections can be installed, the voting is likely to reinforce ethnic politics, particularly if old ethnic tensions are ratcheted up by the war-criminal hunt. The result could be a democratically elected but bitterly divided (and dysfunctional) parliament.

* Arms control. The Dayton accords are meant to bring troop and weapons strength into a rough balance among the various factions. As long as the ethnic tensions are astir, the last thing any party will do is give up its guns. The United States is already putting the arms control process at risk by providing weapons and training to the Bosnian Muslims, a clear act of bias against Croats and Serbs.

The United States and its European partners do not face a Hobson’s choice on the war crimes issue. War criminals can and should be brought to justice once law, order and some normalcy have been established. What is at stake here is not our willingness to prosecute war criminals but our intent to rebuild Bosnia.

The Dayton agreement is a legal document, a complex mix of rights and obligations. But legalisms, however necessary, are not sufficient to bring peace. Bosnia also needs healing, reconciliation and trust. They are elusive and fragile qualities. And they take time.

The hunt for evidence of war crimes and the braying for the heads of those responsible as virtually the first priority sends a chilling message to innocent Serbs and Croats: that the international force is there for vengeance, not peace. Their instinctive reaction, just as it was when Yugoslavia began to collapse years ago, is to retreat into ethnic politics. The consequence of such polarization, one fears, will be renewed violence, possibly on a massive scale, an injustice far worse than the law’s delay.