The bridge on the Drina - the war in Bosnia

National Review, June 7, 1993 by Chandler Rosenberger

The fate of Serbs living in Bosnia has come down to questions about the banks of the Drina River. Will the river mark a border between an independent Bosnia and the rump Yugoslavia, or merely a border between two parts of "Greater Serbia"? Who will be blamed for the brutal ethnic cleansing that took place there last summer? And will the Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic be able to keep his own radical nationalists from driving across the river to help their Bosnian cousins?

Most Serb politicians in the old Yugoslavia have followed Milosevic in cutting the political bridges from the river's eastern bank. It is Bosnian Serb intransigence, they insist, that is prolonging the war. The Belgrade government, they say, is willing to risk embarrassment at home in order to push their cousins back to negotiations over the Vance-Owen peace plan, which would turn the region into one of ten semi-autonomous regions in an independent Bosnian state.

Bosnian Serb politicians, dismissive of the plan, have been hacking away at the connections from the river's western bank. Their self-declared "state within a state," the Serb Republic of Bosnia, has rejected both Bosnia's official government in Sarajevo and Belgrade's endorsement of the Vance-Owen plan. From their makeshift government offices in ski resorts above Sarajevo, even Bosnian Serb "moderates" such as Dr. Radovan Karadzic now talk of deciding alone with whom, if with anyone, they will form a larger confederation.

Unheard in the debate, except over occasional amateur radio broadcasts from the besieged town of Srebrenica, is the voice of the large Muslim community that once also lived along the Drina. Because their villages separated Bosnian Serbs from the rump Yugoslavia, they were herded into a few enclaves during some of the past year's most savage ethnic cleansing. But their fate, if not their vote, plays a significant role in the wranglings between the Bosnian and Yugoslav Serbs. With pressure mounting in the West to "do something" about the atrocities, Milosevic's Serbs are pointing their fingers across the Drina. And, surprisingly, the Bosnian Serbs unapologetically, even suicidally, accept the blame.

Belgrade has made both substantial and petty gestures to cut off the Bosnian Serbs. Milosevic has promised to ban all but humanitarian aid; Yugoslav soldiers on the border at Zvornik conduct what appear to the untrained eye to be thorough searches of trucks heading west across the river. And when Bosnian Serb leader Biljana Plavsic tried to visit her Belgrade villa two weeks ago, she was stopped crossing the same bridge. (She reportedly later crossed on a barge.) A Yugoslav army spokesman condemned the "adventurism" of "a few prosperous Bosnian Serbs."

Leading members of Milosevic's Socialist Party eagerly distinguish between their objectives and the aims of the Bosnian Serbs. Despite Western reports, the Serb president has never been committed to a "Greater Serbia," according to Michalo Markovic, ideologue and moving spirit of the party. "His goal has always been smaller than that - that Serbs outside of Serbia be assured of being an equal party in any peace process."

Milosevic was satisfied, said Markovic, that the plan represented Serb interests once it had been "corrected" to prevent Muslims from returning to their communities armed. The Bosnian Serbs rejected the plan, he said, because they would prefer to negotiate any swap of territory in direct negotiations with the Muslims and Croats.

That approach, said Markovic, unfortunately didn't appreciate that the world would have difficulty distinguishing between the different Serb communities. "The difference between Milosevic and the Bosnian leaders is not that they do not represent the interests of the Bosnian Serbs," he said. "It is that they do not take the interests of all Serbs into account."

That revisionism suits the government of an exhausted and frightened nation. Two months ago, the 5,000-dinar note was a joke; now 500,000 dinars will get you a cheap lunch. It was once the West started threatening air strikes that Belgrade pointed to the river separating it from more likely targets. And only international observers will be able to check how carefully Yugoslav patrols on the 48 border crossings search the trucks heading west.

From his government's headquarters in Pale, south of Sarajevo and near the guns that a Western Alliance would probably hit first, Karadzic defended his government's decision to hold a referendum on the Vance-Owen plan. The Bosnian Serbs would probably reject the peace plan, since it would require that half of them live in Muslim or Croat regions, while the other half would have to survive in enclaves "like Nagorno-Karabakh" (the Armenian enclave in former Soviet Azerbaijan). The Serbs, he said, could not give up the status quo the fighting had resulted in. "That's our country," he said of certain regions the plan would turn over to autonomous Muslim administration. "We have property there. We own it."