Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, December 2, 1994 TAG: 9412020037
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A16 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The answer, however, is neither to embroil ourselves in a Balkans ground war, nor to put our heads in the sand to hide from the world's horrors. The current shambles of a course can't be sustained, either.
Let's assess where we stand. On the positive side, the U.N. presence in Bosnia has protected some civilians; many have been fed and kept alive. The West in general and the United States in particular have avoided being sucked into a brutal and protracted Balkans conflict with an uncertain end. Spread of the war beyond a limited area of the former Yugoslavia has been, so far, prevented. These aren't negligible achievements.
The negatives, unfortunately, are more numerous; some of them, truly awful. Since this bloodbath began, the West's only consistent commitment has been to indecision. The allies have bickered, collectively sucking their thumbs while Serbs took U.N. hostages and dispersed and killed Bosnian men, women and children because of their religious heritage.
Folly and tragedy have fed on one another. U.N. "peacekeepers" were sent in without any peace to keep. "Safe havens" such as Bihac were set up to protect Muslims fleeing from the violence, then were not kept safe. Retaliation was threatened against the murderous Serbs if they did this or that; the threats were scorned and undelivered. The U.N. presence did not deter aggression - but did deter NATO airstrikes (because of fears of retribution against Europeans in the U.N. forces).
In other words, the first major post-Cold War challenge to peace in Europe has been miserably botched. NATO has been revealed as a paper tiger, its future left uncertain. The United Nations' credibility is in tatters. The Atlantic alliance is divided. Russian nationalists and militarists everywhere are emboldened. Borders have been redrawn by force. Genocide has resurfaced. The world has failed to defend the ideal of a multi-ethnic state against the idea of an ethnically pure state.
Welcome to the New World Order.
What now? The siege of Bihac is terrible to watch, but reversal seems unlikely. Secretary of Defense William Perry as much as concedes the war is lost. "The Serbs have occupied 70 percent of the country," he said the other day, and "there's no prospect . . . of the Muslims winning that back."
More to the point, Europe remains opposed to major intervention on the Muslims' behalf. And Americans themselves are indisposed to sacrifice lives in a Balkan war.
Avoidance of war, however, need not require the kind of fraud and betrayal the West's policies have perpetrated so far. At the least, we can stop issuing threats we don't intend to back up. Stop calling places safe havens if we're not going to protect them. Stop, in general, the charade. If the end is inevitable, we should focus on stopping the fighting and trying to salvage what is salvageable for the defeated Muslims.
Just as important, avoidance of war must not occasion an attempted withdrawal from the disorderly world's stage. When Sen. Robert Dole, the majority leader to be, warns that "the president is going to have to stop relying on the United Nations and start looking at whether we are going to be a part of NATO," he may be fueling a natural but dangerous response to the Bosnian tragedy - an isolationist sentiment already swelling in America.
Of course Europe should shoulder the primary burden of Eastern European security. But our allies remain reluctant to follow our calls for airstrikes and an end to the arms embargo when we have refused to include any U.S. troops among the U.N. forces that are now targets rather than peacekeepers in Bosnia.
If anything, failure in the Balkans speaks to the need for greater preparedness to avoid future Bosnias, and greater U.S. engagement abroad. And the alternative to military interventions that we don't want is greater reliance on the United Nations. That's possible only with a concerted effort to make the U.N. a more effective instrument of peace and a stronger deterrent to the kind of evil whose triumph the world is now permitting.
by CNB