Srebrenica Succumbs

By JAMES L. GRAFF VIENNA

"Bold tyrants and fearful minorities are watching to see whether 'ethnic cleansing' is a policy the world will tolerate. If we hope to promote the spread of freedom or if we hope to encourage the emergence of peaceful multiethnic democracies, our answer must be a resounding no."

-- U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, announcing the Clinton Administration's initiatives on Bosnia, Feb. 10, 1993

Bold tyrants take heart. Fearful minorities take heed. As NATO jet fighters assigned to Operation Deny Flight screamed impotently across the skies of Bosnia last week, what resounded around the world was the thunder of Serb artillery, its cannon and mortars trained on the Muslim town of Srebrenica, its shells primed for airbursts, which would cause maximum carnage. After the deadliest barrage last week, the shattered bodies of the dead, including 15 children, lay in mute testimony to the world's age-old ability to turn its face away from the suffering and subjugation of others.

Even as fighting eased in Srebrenica under a cease-fire agreement brokered in Sarajevo late Saturday night, painful memories were being evoked half a continent away, in Poland, where preparations to mark the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising were under way. In 1943, 60,000 Jewish survivors of starvation and deportation -- roughly the same number as those trapped in Srebrenica -- confronted Nazi troops in a final, hopeless battle. Back then the outside knew little and could do less about what was afoot. But the horror of the last days of Srebrenica could not be ignored by a world kept abreast of every twist and turn in the bloody Bosnian conflict. Despite a hardened stance forged in an emergency Security Council session on Saturday night, the guardians of the much touted new international order appeared at a loss to bring a definitive end to a war that has already claimed at least 134,000 dead and missing and created 2 million refugees.

Fragmented accounts painted a picture of final hours fraught with confusion and bloodletting. "In the name of God, do something!" cried one of Srebrenica's ham radio operators on Friday. The next day began with an eerie silence that was shattered when Serb gunners opened fire again and the town took cover as best it could.

As Srebrenica succumbed, the Bosnian government in Sarajevo lambasted the U.N. for being "a passive witness and accomplice in tragedy" and urged the Security Council to authorize the deployment of NATO ground troops to stem the Serb tide. That was not to be. When the Council finally met in emergency sessions on Friday and Saturday, it stopped short of anything resembling Bosnia's request. What emerged was an agreement to declare Srebrenica a safe haven, a warning to Serbs to advance no farther, and a tightening of sanctions on Belgrade including the freezing of Serbian assets abroad.

Earlier in the week, the Council, at U.S. insistence, had postponed yet again a resolution that would have toughened economic sanctions against Serbia and, it was hoped, would have persuaded its President, Slobodan Milosevic, to pressure his Bosnian Serb acolytes into signing on to the Vance-Owen peace plan. Washington did not want to force an anti-Serb vote that might discomfit President Boris Yeltsin, who faces Russian nationalists generally sympathetic to the Serb cause in a referendum April 25. The U.N. looked set to content itself with its early decision to assign NATO to enforce a long-declared no- fly zone over Bosnia, but the relentless shelling by the Serbs around Srebrenica on Saturday advanced the vote on the new sanctions, from which Russia and China abstained. Putting the best face on a week rife with diplomatic hesitancy, French U.N. ambassador Jean-Bernard Merimee called the action "the proper response coming at the right time."

Yet after the carnage of the week and the Serbs' relentless assault on Srebrenica, hopes had begun to rise that the U.N. would show itself to be made of still sterner stuff. In Britain, one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, public sympathy was running in favor of more determined action, led by an impassioned plea from Lady Margaret Thatcher to exempt Bosnian Muslims from the arms embargo and allow them to acquire the means to defend themselves. "There is nothing moral or right about leaving a people defenseless," she fumed. "We cannot just let things go on like this. It is evil."

The British government, wary of anything that might invite Serb attacks on its peacekeeping contingent in Bosnia, dismissed the Iron Lady's appeal as "emotional nonsense." By Friday, however, the emotion had apparently spread to Washington. President Bill Clinton had begun to talk tougher too, expressing his "outrage" at events in Bosnia and warning that it was time for Western nations to consider taking stronger measures, including those "that previously have been unacceptable." Clinton's advisers and the Pentagon were debating the pros and cons of arming the Muslims or even flying U.S. air strikes against Serb artillery positions and lines of communication. Clinton said he "would not rule out any option" short of the deployment of U.S. ground forces.

In any event, the consensus once again was for something less than militant action. The Serb assault on Srebrenica forced nothing more than what had been all but agreed upon -- and pushed off -- earlier in the week. The Council did what it has done so often to such poor effect: it drew a line in the blood- soaked soil of the Balkans and defied the Serbs to step over it. They lost no time in obliging. On Saturday a vanguard of 60 Canadian blue helmets en route to Srebrenica from Tuzla and an aid convoy from Belgrade failed to cross Serb lines. The soldiers were turned back by local Serb commanders; the aid trucks returned because of shelling in Srebrenica.

The dilemma confronting the U.N. was acute. Although Srebrenica had been declared a safe haven by the Security Council, the propensity of the Serbs to pour artillery fire onto civilians spoke in favor of a speedy evacuation. But with an important Muslim foothold at stake, there was also the risk of abetting, albeit unwittingly, the Serb goal of ethnic cleansing. The Bosnian authorities themselves were not pressing for a mass exodus, save for 500 badly wounded soldiers in need of hospital treatment. Said U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees spokeswoman Sylvana Foa: "They are very frightened, because they know, as we've seen, that the life expectancy of a Bosnian soldier on Serb territory is very short."

For the moment, relief officials on the ground were treating evacuation "as a last resort," said Foa. If U.N. troops do reach Srebrenica, the hope is that they will help quell panic among the population and thus make a massive evacuation unnecessary. They will also serve as what a U.N. spokesman called "the eyes and ears" of the world, and overseers of any laying down of arms. "People don't do dirty things in the night when international observers are walking around," said Foa. "I don't think the Serbs will risk the wrath of the world by moving in."

Yet they have risked that wrath frequently -- and remained unpunished. "The steps the international community has taken are all worthy ones," says a Western diplomat. "But each has come far too late, in fact so late that they've only reaffirmed to Milosevic that he needn't fear force." The Western allies' decision to ignore Yeltsin's potential problems and push on over the weekend for an immediate deepening of sanctions against Serbia only repeats that pattern. Sanctions have not measurably weakened Belgrade's resolve, and are not likely to. Indeed, the campaign in Bosnia is so unquestioned in Belgrade that the nominally democratic opposition last week hailed a plan to install a new parliament representing Serbs in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Croatia -- a.k.a. Greater Serbia.

Sadly, the creation of that state, by the means Warren Christopher so excoriated, appears to be the only strategy currently effective in Bosnia. The Vance-Owen plan, the sole overreaching policy the international community has proffered, is an ineluctable shambles. Lord Owen himself, co-purveyor of that % scheme, which proposes to divide Bosnia into 10 provinces drawn along ethnic lines, acknowledged last week that bombing Serb supply lines may be necessary after all. "If they are hell-bent on taking other towns, then we will have to meet this assault on Muslim towns with military action," he said.

That option cannot and should not be lightly considered, since armed intervention could end the humanitarian aid effort that is keeping hundreds of thousands of Bosnians alive. But having schooled the Serbs for so long in the idea that it is unwilling to translate threat into action, the West, with Clinton at the fore, faces the crunch: talk of force in Bosnia has cheapened to worthlessness, leaving force itself the only effective option. The prospect for freedom and peace in Bosnia -- and in the Bosnias waiting to happen elsewhere -- demands no less.

With reporting by Bonnie Angelo/New York, William Mader/London, J.F.O. McAllister/Washington and Michael Montgomery/Sarajevo