DIVIDED BY HATE

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FROM THE FURIOUS DEBATE IN THE U.S. Congress and the press, one might think the Bosnian accord is an exclusively military agreement on separation of forces, to be policed by 20,000 American G.I.s and 40,000 other NATO troops. But in fact the agreement reached near Dayton, Ohio--which will be signed this week in Paris unless the French derail it over an unsettled dispute about the fate of two French pilots shot down in August--envisions a process of peace and reconciliation in which ethnic cleansing will stop. The estimated 2 million people driven out of their homes will either return to them or receive compensation. The murderers and rapists who turned Bosnia and Herzegovina into a slaughterhouse are to be arrested and extradited to the Hague for trial by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Finally, the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Bosnian Serbs' Republika Srpska, though remaining largely autonomous, are to join in forming a new, federated Bosnia. U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher has said that such successful multiethnic nations as Switzerland and Belgium "are frequently created this way, indeed, in a sense, I suppose our nation as well."

Switzerland? If Christopher expects the Dayton agreement to transform Bosnia into a placid land of bankers and cuckoo clocks, he should listen to the recollections of Smail Hodzic, a farmer from Srebrenica. When Bosnian Serbs overran the town last July, he was taken to a basketball gym a few miles away, where at least 2,000 men were being held. Eventually, he was blindfolded, given some water--which he said had something in it that affected his vocal cords so that he could only whisper--and taken away by van with 15 or so other prisoners. "We had to get out, and the soldiers lined us up. We got scared and tore the blindfolds down. We were in a big field covered with dead bodies. Instantly, the soldiers opened machine-gun fire at us." Hodzic threw himself on the ground, and bodies toppled over him. Soldiers, he says, walked around finishing off the wounded, but did not notice him. He hid in a forest, traveling for five days until he reached safe territory.

The experience of Hodzic and thousands like him has left a legacy of hate and fear in Bosnia that makes the ideals of the peace accord--refugees returning home, justice for war criminals, a multiethnic government--look like fairy-tale dreaming. The horrors of the 44-month war have permeated down to the smallest village, in cycles of brutality begetting retribution begetting counterretribution. It seems idle to think Muslims, Serbs and Croats can ever again live together peaceably. Far more likely: if the U.S. and NATO troops pull out in a year or so, they will leave behind a country split--in fact if not in name--into two or three ethnically monolithic, antagonistic parts where refugees still live in makeshift homes and where war criminals still rule.