Shall I carve? - President Clinton's policy on the former Yugoslavia - On The Scene

National Review, Oct 10, 1994 by Ivo Banac

On a A Windy, almost cloudless afternoon in late July I sailed with a group of friends from the island of Kolocep in the Adriatic Sea to Dubrovnik's new harbor. We were arguing whether the roar from the mainland was thunder or cannon. A mushroom of smoke from a nearby forest fire soon settled the argument. Radovan Karadzic's Serbs had fired more than fifty projectiles from Serbian-held eastern Hercegovina onto Croatia's southernmost coastal strip. Dubrovnik itself was spared, but its airport was targeted during the raid and in a series of lesser attacks that continued into late August.

It seemed that the shellings were not intended to cause serious material damage. The desired effect was subtler. It was the height of the vacation season, and most of the visitors - mainly Croats from Zagreb (the Croatian capital), along with a few daring Czechs and Hungarians - quickly left for the safer harbors of the northern Adriatic. Bozidar Vucurevic, Karadzic's warlord in eastern Hercegovina, sardonically commented that he intends to become Croatia's deputy minister of tourism. This murderous former truck driver - famous for stating in 1991 that should Dubrovnik be totally destroyed by Serbian bombing he would build a still more beautiful and "older" city - is not just boasting. He really has the power to disrupt nearly everything on Croatia's southern cul-de-sac. His brethren from the so-called Krajina, the Serbian-occupied inner rim of Croatia, hold equal power over practically every other part of the country.

Croatia's countermeasures consist of a combination of weak saber rattling and somewhat more determined (though hardly more realistic) bargaining with the Serbs. The first is the option chosen by Croatia's hawks - verbal warriors with huge rhetorical successes in the controlled media - who orchestrated last summer's marches of Croat refugees. These refugees were expelled by the "Krajina" Serbs under the gaze - and frequently thanks to the good offices - of the UN forces (UNPROFOR). According to the Vance plan of 1991, approved by the UN Security Council, UNPROFOR was to do precisely the opposite. Its mission was to disarm the various armies and militias in the "Krajina," prevent ethnic cleansing, and assure the return of all refugees. The refugee marches, civil protests, and blockades of roads used by UNPROFOR were aimed at reminding the bureaucrats in the glass house on the East River what their forces were supposed to be doing.

Various UN mandarins quickly reminded Croatia in turn that UNPROFOR FOR was prepared to leave on demand. Since a UN departure could possibly lead to a renewal of all-out warfare, with uncertain results, the Croatian government blinked. Refugees were shooed away and obliquely told, in the unromantic words of cartoonist Josko Marusic, that they should accept their fate and start "including themselves in certain processes," such as beginning new lives away from their old homes. Klaus Kinkel, Germany's foreign minister, underscored the permanence of territorial losses by reassuring Croatian leaders in late August that EU support would not be lacking should Croatia be realistic, effectively renounce Serbian-occupied territories, and live up to European political standards, with the possible exception of territorial integrity.

Croatian "realists" would quibble over this last item. They have thought all along that a better deal can be struck with the Serbs. Hrvoje Sarinic, lackluster chief of Croatia's national-security office, conceded in a mid-August interview that "in order to accept peace and some other solutions, Serbia must get something out of everything that has happened. I am thinking of a small |Greater Serbia.'" But he implied that the territorial sacrifice Croatia would be willing to make in exchange for peace would not include all the land now held by Serbs. Realism, then, means kowtowing to Slobodan Milosevic's elected red-brown dictatorship in Serbia, with its genocidal policies in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina. However, one can hardly blame a weak creature like Sarinic for mimicking the policies of most of the concerned powers. Never mind the special pleas of London and Paris, which seem to feel a need to spread a protective wing over the unpleasant regime in Belgrade. Leave aside for the moment the jackal policy of Moscow, meant primarily to maintain the illusion of power and a special interest in the Balkan region. What of Bill Clinton's policies? Despite the verbiage, their essence, too, is appeasement of Milosevic.

After his inauguration, Clinton went back on his promise to lift the arms embargo on Bosnia. His procrastination reassured the Serbs. His refusal to offer an alternative to the Vance- Owen carve-up of Bosnia fueled the self-defeating territorial war between Bosnian Croats and Muslims in which Croatia squandered the moral assets it had gained in 1991. Clinton's most positive contribution was the pressure he brought on Croatia to end this senseless war. It was under the aegis of the U.S.-sponsored Washington agreements of March 1994 that Croats and Muslims agreed on a federal Bosnia-Hercegovina. The federation, however, was described in the same breath as a confederation of Bosnia-Hercegovina and Croatia. Was this a hint to Karadzic's Serbs to pursue a partition of Bosnia by opting for their own confederal arrangement with Milosevic's Serbia?