DIVIDED BY HATE

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The Serbs of Croatia committed well-publicized atrocities in 1991, when they set up their own enclaves in the newly independent republic. The Croats paid them back in retaking two of those enclaves this year: Western Slavonia in May, Krajina in August. An estimated 160,000 Serbs fled those areas or were driven out. Croatian President Franjo Tudjman hardly needed to say, as he did in October, that "a mass return [of refugees] is out of the question." As in many areas of Bosnia proper, there is nothing left for refugees to return to. Nor has the killing stopped. U.N. officials in Zagreb charge that the Croats are slowly starving the few thousand Serbs left in Krajina, mostly old and sick people who also need medical care that they do not get.

All sides in the war have been guilty of appalling inhumanity. A few U.S. officials agree with U.S. Air Force General Charles Boyd, who until this summer served as the Pentagon's No. 2 man in Europe, that "there are no qualitative differences" among the three sides. "All have committed unspeakable atrocities." Nevertheless, it was the Serbs who set up concentration camps for Muslims, raped Muslim women and systematically killed civilian Muslim men. A 1995 cia report estimated that Serbs perpetrated 90% of all the atrocities in Bosnia. And the cia's calculation predated the Serb conquest of the supposedly U.N.-protected "safe area" of Srebrenica in July, which was followed by particularly hideous massacres.

How can people who have committed such horrors on one another now live together? Officially, at least, the answer in part is that the worst killers and rapists will be hauled to the Hague for trial and imprisonment. That supposedly will satisfy the demand for justice (and the understandable thirst for vengeance) and reassure refugees that the lands they return to are no longer ruled by murderers. To that end, the pact pledges the parties to give war-crimes investigators free rein to hunt for evidence. All parties are further required to arrest those indicted and hand them over to the tribunal.

Judge Richard Goldstone, the South African who is the tribunal's prosecutor, notes that failure to comply would violate the U.N. Security Council resolution that set up his court and would subject the violator to the reintroduction of the economic sanctions lifted after Dayton. Certain sanctions--those that restrict access to international financial institutionsh--ave not yet been lifted, and the U.S. has threatened to keep them in place if the parties don't comply. State Department officials speculate that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic just might hand over Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the leaders of the Bosnian Serbs, to avoid reimposition of the sanctions that strangled his economy and pushed him to negotiate peace.