BOSNIA FIASCO: WESTERN HYPOCRISY AND FAILURE OF WILL

By Brian Beedham

(International Herald Tribune, 28-11-1994)

The eyes-averted tiptoe through horror that the West calls its Bosnia policy is drawing to an end in the worst possible way.

That Bosnia's Muslims, the chief victims of the war, are pretty clearly being left to their fate is bad enough.

That an internationally recognized state is thus being demolished by armed force is in one way even worse, for it gives future demolishers elsewhere a precedent they will relish.

Worst of all is that, while this happens, we of the West say one thing and do another, promise action but do not provide it, and use transparently false arguments to excuse our inaction. In short, we compound failure with hypocrisy.

It is hypocritical to say that we should not give help to the Muslims because this would be "taking sides." We took sides long ago, when we proposed first the Vance-Owen peace plan and then the current, weaker peace project. Both were based on the proposition that Bosnia's minority of Serbs had abused Bosnia's other people and that the abuse should be at least partly rectified by a Serbian withdrawal from occupied land.

That was a taking of sides. The question was whether we would do something to make the Bosnian Serbs withdraw, or just hope that words would puff them away. The answer is now brutally clear.

There is growing hypocrisy in the claim that, if we will not make them pull back, Serbia's President Slobodan Milosevic will save us the trouble by doing the job for us. It is almost four months since Mr. Milosevic imposed his "blockade" on the Bosnian Serbs. The machinery for checking the honesty of that blockade is patently frail. This month's assault by the Bosnian Serbs on the Bihac "safe area" - another phrase to squirm at - shows that they still have abundant arms, fuel and ammunition. It is highly dubious, to put it mildly, whether we can leave an honest peace to Mr. Milosevic.

A familiar queasiness therefore resurfaces when it is said - for instance, by the British lieutenant general Sir Michael Rose - that after the past month's battles the West's aim should be to return Bosnia to its "status quo." That "status quo" is a war which goes on killing people but for which no even passably just outcome now seems in prospect.

If the West intends to take no further serious action, it would be better, as well as more honest, to say so now. The victims might then accept defeat without further struggle. The "status quo" condemns them to more bloodshed, without hope.

Hypocrisy is the ultimate sin in the making of foreign policy. A failure of calculation can be survived; even defeat by superior armed force is endurable. Both can become a challenge to do better next time. Hypocrisy is an acid that eats away the ability to do better next time, because it destroys other people's trust in those whose deception is duly revealed and the self-deceiver's belief in himself.

There are vulnerable people in various parts of today's world who might hope to call on the West's aid if they came under unjustified attack. Imagine what these people think when they see "peace plans" unsupported by any will to make the plans work; "safe areas" which remain open to sniping, bombardment and assault; above all, a refusal by West European governments to do anything more because it might put some of their soldiers in harm's way.

This repeated washing of hands, while the West claims to be still earnestly in pursuit of justice, dismays the vulnerable of the world. It encourages those who would like to exploit their vulnerability. That is one part of the cost of hypocrisy.

The other part is what it does inside the West itself. The democracies of Europe and America, by so often saying one thing and doing another, have damaged their own self-confidence. They now believe that they are capable of achieving less in the world than is in fact the case.

They still have great economic and military power. They could have used it to much greater effect in ex-Yugoslavia. By behaving as they have behaved, they have persuaded themselves otherwise.

This is why it is already being said that NATO will never again venture into a peacemaking operation outside its own borders. That will probably prove to be false. For the world's sake, one hopes it is. But the chances of its being proved false are certainly diminished by what NATO has done to itself in Bosnia. He who flinches once usually, alas, flinches the next time, too.

The one glint of hope in this sorry story is that, as sometimes happens, the chemistry of the human spirit will produce the necessary reaction. A sense of shamed embarrassment may yet overcome the danger of self-perpetuating weakness, of the continuous flinch. If this is to come about, the West will have to understand that it has neither thought clearly enough nor acted bravely enough in the debacle of ex-Yugoslavia.

The intellectual error was the West's failure to see that it could have brought the horror under control if it had acted promptly enough. It is now widely accepted that the deployment of a modest military force back in 1991, coupled with precise diplomatic action, might have prevented much of what has happened since then. That chance having been missed, each successive stage of the war harder to cope with. This was the failure of clear thinking.

The failure of will runs deeper, because if the will had been there the thinking would have been sharper. To avoid the shame now descending upon us, we should have had to reject the very thought of letting medieval brutality reassert itself so close to Rome and Vienna. We could then have sumoned up the courage to do what was necessary. By failing to do so, we set ourselves on the road to hypocrisy and ineffectuality.

Brian BEEDHAM