Public opinion in the West reluctantly is turning towards support for military intervention in the former Yugoslavia. The immediate demand is for action to open Serbian prisoner or concentration camps to inspection, and to protect United Nations and other humanitarian programs among the civilian population. These would seem self-evidently desirable measures. They also promise to satisfy public opinion while minimizing the political risks to Western leaders.
To do this, however, would be a mistake. Any Western intervention should have as its political objective the establishment of the principle that the democracies will not tolerate military aggression in contemporary Europe or practices of the kind that can be described as ”ethnic cleansing.” It would aim to halt the war, re-establish an independent and secure Bosnia-Herzegovina, and obtain a negotiated settlement of Serbia`s claims upon its neighbors.
The West could not reasonably expect the last goal to be obtained without collapse of the Milosevic government, or of the Serbian army, neither of them currently very solid. The other objectives are in principle achievable through military action.
Such a military intervention would presumably take the form of air and naval attack upon Serbian airpower and the Serbs` heavy weapons and armor inside Bosnia-Herzegovina. This could be accompanied by exemplary attacks upon military and logistical targets inside Serbia itself.
The immediate objectives would be to destroy or expel the Serbian invasion forces that remain inside the internationally recognized legal frontiers of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and to interdict the Serbian (and Croatian)
governments` support to the irregular forces of their nationality now fighting in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Since only ground forces could pacify Bosnia, the Bosnians would have to be armed and supported in clearing the enemy from their own country. This, in principle, is achievable. The effort could produce negotiations, given the altered balance of forces and the changed international context. It could also produce a hideous and inconclusive guerrilla struggle.
Any military intervention in support of Bosnia should be accompanied by a guarantee that the Bosnia-Herzegovinian government remains pluralist in composition and accepts the Council of Europe`s human rights principles, submitting itself to the jurisdiction of the European Commission on Human Rights and the European Court. (This is better than any more generalized adhesion to UN human rights standards because the latter have no enforcement machinery, and in practice are not enforced.)
If there is to be an intervention, the UN forces now in Bosnia must be pulled out before they become hostages. Those in Sarajevo are in the most danger and are in a deteriorating situation where they now are accomplishing little. They should be withdrawn immediately.
It must be recognized that the shock of intervention could simply drive the Serbs even farther into the paranoid conceptual universe they now occupy, where they consider that a third world war has broken out with them its guiltless victims. However, their capacity to do harm would at least be reduced by a Western intervention.
There is a case for doing nothing. Intervention enlarges the war even if it offers to shorten it. The risks are substantial. My own view is that Serbia`s thus-far successful territorial aggression, mass expulsions, and practice of ”ethnic cleansing,” poses an unacceptable threat to the future both of ex-Communist Europe and the Western democratic community.
It does so in a practical way, since if Serbia succeeds in Bosnia, as it is now doing, Serbia and Montenegro will next be ”cleansed” of their alien minorities, generating new masses of refugees, and an effort will be made to
”cleanse” Kosovo of its ethnic Albanian majority, with war between Serbia and Albania, and possibly others in the Balkans, all but certain to follow.
It does so politically. For the Western powers to accept what Serbia has done would imply the dissolution of that union of purpose in the defense of common values that animated the creation both of the Western alliance in the first place and of the West European Community. This solidarity has defeated the two great 20th Century totalitarian systems and produced, until now, nearly a half-century of peace in Europe-the place where the world wars come from.
I would like to think the United States and NATO capable of taking the lead in this, but George Bush is against it-or so he tells us. That leaves it to the governments of John Major and Francois Mitterrand. They are the only two leaders of major nations in a position to act. They would certainly have the military support of Italy and the politico-logistical backing of Germany, as well as the support of a consensus of popular opinion among the democracies. But have they the will?
