Srebrenica Succumbs

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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 thunderous crash of Serbian artillery, its cannon and mortars trained on the Muslim town of Srebrenica, its shells primed for airbursts, which would cause maximum carnage. When one of those barrages lifted early last week, the shattered bodies of the dead, among them 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 the people trapped in Srebrenica — confronted German 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 watching 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 from Srebrenica painted a picture of final hours fraught with confusion and continued bloodletting. Efforts by Muslim commanders

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

to bolster the morale of their outnumbered and battle-fatigued fighters had long since faltered as the soldiery foraged for scarce food alongside starving civilians and Serb shells rained on the town. "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 shattered when Serb gunners pounded the town with shells. There were reports of hand-to-hand fighting even as Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic issued another of his Orwellian statements. "We don't want to take Srebrenica," he said. "We want only to pacify it." Those subject to this brutal pacification huddled under cover as best they could and awaited an uncertain fate. "Srebrenica is lost," announced Murat Efendic, a member of the town's leadership.

While the Serbs pushed their final assault on one of only three Muslim enclaves left in eastern Bosnia after a year of systematic ethnic cleansing, the Muslim-led government in Sarajevo lambasted the U.N. for being "a passive witness and accomplice in tragedy." It urged the Security Council to authorize the deployment of NATO ground troops to stem the Serb tide. "We appeal to you on behalf of the people of Srebrenica, who are threatened with extinction," came the cry from Sarajevo. "Thousands of women, children and elderly are going to be massacred. Do you understand this fact?" Perhaps the Western powers were making the oft repeated mistake of believing the Serb leadership's pronunciamentos of peaceful intentions. The hard fact of Serb shelling on Saturday, however, impelled the Security Council, meeting in emergency session, to vote in new sanctions on Serbia, including the freezing of Serbian assets outside the country. The sanctions will take effect April 26. Friday night, after eight hours of tense deliberation, the Council's 15 members unanimously agreed to declare Srebrenica a safe haven for Muslim civilians and warned the Serbs to advance no farther. While the cease-fire negotiated in Sarajevo by U.N. envoy Cyrus Vance promised that wholesale massacre would be avoided in Srebrenica, neither that agreement nor the sanctions significantly raised the cost of aggression.

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 Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to pressure his Bosnian acolytes into signing on to the Vance-Owen peace plan. Washington did not want to force an anti-Serb vote that might discomfit Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who faces Russian nationalists generally sympathetic to the Serb cause in an April 25 referendum. 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 Security Council's five permanent members, 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 U.N.-prescribed arms embargo and allow them to acquire the means to defend themselves. "There is nothing moral or right about leaving a people defenseless," she told the House of Lords. "We cannot just let things go on like this. It is evil."

The British government, chary of any action that might invite Serb attacks on the 2,800 British troops serving with the U.N. peacekeeping contingent in Bosnia, was inclined to dismiss the Iron Lady's logic. While Defense Secretary Malcolm Rifkind labeled Thatcher's outburst "emotional nonsense," British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd argued, "We will be saying to them, 'We have not helped you toward a peaceful settlement, so we will leave it to you to fight it out."' But by that time, the emotion had apparently spread to Washington. President Bill Clinton, though wary of foreign entanglements at a time when America's domestic agenda cries out for attention, had started to talk tougher too. He expressed his "outrage" at events in Bosnia and warned 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. At a news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa in Washington, Clinton said he "would not rule out any option" short of the deployment of U.S. ground forces in the Balkans. "I hope that the gravity of the situation will develop a consensus among the United Nations partners," he concluded.

In any event, the consensus once again was for something less than militant action. The Serb assault on Srebrenica had 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.

If their past disdain for international opinion is any guide, the Serbs will probably do so — and with impunity. For the time being they actually have no need to force the pace. On Saturday a vanguard of 60 Canadian blue helmets from Tuzla and an aid convoy from Belgrade both failed to reach Srebrenica. The soldiers were turned back by Serb soldiers who said they were unauthorized to allow the U.N. troops to pass; the aid trucks returned because of reports of shelling in the town. The Serb assault troops, most of them no doubt oblivious of the U.N.'s declared safe haven, sat back within sniper range of the town and savored their victory. With the U.N. setting up thousands of tents 65 kilometers northwest of Srebrenica in Tuzla and gathering 50 trucks to begin a mass evacuation of the enclave, there appeared to be no reason for the Serbs to exert themselves any further by moving into the town itself. "Just imagine them with 60,000 starving and frantic refugees on their hands," said Milos Vasic, a military-affairs correspondent for the opposition weekly Vreme in Belgrade. "They have elegantly dumped the problem on the United Nations, which will carry out the ethnic cleansing for them."

The dilemma confronting the U.N. in Srebrenica is acute. The organization has a mandate to bring humanitarian assistance to the victims of the war in Bosnia; contingency plans for a mass evacuation of Srebrenica were drawn up weeks ago, long before the Security Council declared the town a safe haven. Given the propensity of the Serbs to pour artillery fire onto civilians with little or no warning, evacuation remains a sensible option. Last week's deadliest bombardment, after all, came just minutes after the local Serb commander had agreed to abide by a cease-fire. But with a key Muslim foothold at stake, the Bosnian authorities themselves are 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, at least, relief officials on the ground are treating evacuation "as a last resort," said Foa. If the troops are eventually let in, the hope is that the U.N. soldiers will help quell panic among Srebrenica's population and thus make a massive evacuation unnecessary. The Canadians will also serve as what Commander Barry Frewer, a U.N. spokesman in Sarajevo, described as "the eyes and ears" of the world as it watches the fate of Srebrenica, and overseers of any laying down of arms. At the back of everyone's mind is the need to stop a massacre by the Serbs. "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."

But so far they have risked that wrath frequently — and remained unpunished. The sorry history of the past year shows that the incremental methods of diplomacy are no match for Serb military action on the ground. "The steps the international community have taken are all worthy ones," says one 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 so far not measurably weakened the Belgrade regime's resolve — and are not likely to, under the siege mentality Milosevic foments. Indeed, the Bosnian campaign 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.

In the end, the creation of that state — by the means Christopher so excoriated more than two months ago — appears to be the only effective strategy currently afoot in Bosnia. The Vance-Owen plan, the sole overreaching | policy the international community has proffered for Bosnia, is a shambles. Under that scheme, which calls for dividing Bosnia into 10 provinces drawn along ethnic lines, Srebrenica is supposed to be in a Muslim-controlled province. But the notion that the Serbs might willingly roll back from the 70% of Bosnia they now control to the 43% the plan allots them has become ludicrous. Lord Owen himself, co-purveyor of that scheme, acknowledged last week that bombing Serb supply lines in Bosnia may be necessary after all. "If they are hell-bent on taking other towns," he said, "then we will have to meet this assault on Muslim towns with military action."

That option cannot and should not be lightly considered, since armed intervention would no doubt bring an end to the aid effort that is keeping hundreds of thousands of Bosnians alive — though the Bosnians say they could deliver the aid themselves if given arms to fight with. 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 Bosnias waiting to happen elsewhere — demands no less.