Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 4, 1993 TAG: 9305040469
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEPHEN S. ROSENFELD
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The Vance-Owen plan for Bosnia offers a political process. But notwithstanding the range of benefits it promises, the element of broad Serb rights has been only poorly grasped.
What? Serb rights? Are they not the villains of the piece? Is not to raise the subject of their rights a fatal break in the West's campaign to isolate the guiltiest party?
The Serbs deserve the full opprobrium their war crimes have brought down on their heads. Had they lost the war, they would have had to pay for it in sovereign coin. Even as the considerable winners they so far are, they will still have to pay for it in national disrepute.
The trouble is, Serbs are not only perpetrators on a large scale, but on a smaller but not insignificant scale, victims as well. They acted badly and disproportionately but, whether you call it a provocation or a pretext, a triggering event happened without which this whole tragedy might have been averted.
The event was the unilateral declaration of independence first by Croatia and Slovenia and then by Bosnia. Overnight, the large Serb populations in Croatia and Bosnia were converted from members of the favored Serb plurality in the old Yugoslavia to subordinate minorities in what they regarded as foreign countries.
Its new constitution made Croatia the state of the Croatian nation, reducing and alienating the 600,000 Serbs. "Thank God my wife is neither a Serb nor a Jew," declared Croatian President Franjo Tudjman. There are now 700,000 Serb refugees in Serbia, an eighth of the population.
Again, none of this excuses what the Serbs are doing. They have succumbed to what Slovenia's secessionist president, Milan Kucan, calls "a national drunkenness." By any faintly fair measure, they punished others many times over for what had befallen them.
But that does not alter the fact that, in this historical cycle, the original sin was committed not by Serbs but against Serbs. Subsequently, the Serbs moved on into the role of aggressor. But they did not thereby entirely cancel their claim to have their community interests somehow taken into account.
A Greater Serbia forcefully wrapping dispersed Serbs into a single ethnic-based state is out of the question. It is aggression, congealed and rendered permanent.
The Vance-Owen plan, which has been battered almost past the point of recognition, applies only to Bosnia and does not touch ethnic concerns in Croatia or Kosovo.
That leaves theoretically an approach I have come to think of as the Balkan massage: a comprehensive arrangement worked out over time among the several new states to afford each other's minorities special rights and protections within a loose structure looking suspiciously, in a geographic sense, like the old Yugoslavia.
Suppose, for instance, President Clinton set out to say: The Serb government has acted atrociously, but the Serb people have suffered and deserve their rights; what we Americans oppose is not Serb ethnicity and Serb safety but Serb criminal and warlike conduct.
I bounced this notion off a high official. He suggested that to grant Serbia's interest in other Serb communities even rhetorically is to step out on a slippery slope taking you uncomfortably close to the conclusion that Hitler had a fair claim to Czechoslovakia's German-populated Sudetenland.
But a president who chose his words carefully could avoid that trap.
At this minute Americans are engaged in selecting not only the means of policy but also the right ends. One of the ends must be to confront and deter aggression. Another must be to open a door a bit more deliberately to Serbia's eventual return to decent international company.
Perhaps Serbs are so consumed by ethnic lust or an inflated sense of their own victimhood that they cannot respond to that split-level message. They should be tested as we weigh the leap into force.
\ AUTHOR Stephen S. Rosenfeld writes for The Washington Post.
by CNB