BOSNIA: AN EVER MORE HUMILIATING CRINGE BY THE GREAT POWERS

by Anthony Lewis

(The Herald Tribune, 17/18/06/95)

NEW YORK - The Western alliance, the greatest military and political force on earth, has cringed before a gang of nationalist terrorists. That is the meaning of recent events in Bosnia.

When the Bosnian Serbs took United Nations soldiers hostage, the West vowed to be strong. There would be no negotiations with the kidnappers. A new road, protected by a determined new force from NATO countries, would be built to get food to Sarajevo. Serbian blockades of relief convoys would not be tolerated.

All those firm words have evaporated. Sarajevo remains besieged, its food reserves exhausted; there will be no new road. No convoys getting through to desperate enclaves in eastern Bosnia.

A chief UN accomplishment, the exclusion of heavy weapons from zones around Sarajevo and other "safe areas," has effectively been abandoned. The Serbs have taken almost all the weapons from UN storage depots.

The UN mission is not just negotiating with the Serbs; it is begging. Its chief, Yasushi Akashi, scaled down UN force activity after a promise from the Serbian leaders to let some relief trucks through. He said this would "stabilize the situation. " The Serbs immediately broke the promise.

The Serbs evidently have obtained an understanding that there will be no more NATO air strikes. They are now essentially dictating to a humiliated UN force.

The lesson is: Hostage-taking works. Or it works with a Western alliance that does not have the will to resist ruthless aggressors in Europe. NATO, and most notably its American leaders, have turned their faces away from, among other things, one of the worst outrages in the Western world: the siege of Sarajevo.

When large numbers of Bosnian government troops massed this week for what looked like an attempt to break the siege, President Bill Clinton urged restraint. The Bosnians must allow more time for diplomacy to work, he said. But why will weakness bring success to diplomats who are already a plaything for the Serbs?

The reasons for the weakness are not military. Bernard Trainor,

a retired marine general now at Harvard, wrote recently in the Boston Globe that a proper Western military campaign with heavy air support would make " short work" of the Bosnian Serbs. Mr. Trainor is no hawk on Bosnia.

No, the weakness is in political leadership, most of all America's. President George Bush made the disastrous initial mistake when he shrugged off Serbian aggression against Croatia in 1991. Mr. Clinton promised much to Bosnia but has avoided any action that might actually stop the aggressors.

What drives Mr. Clinton's policy is not the need to stop the first genocidal aggression in Europe since the Nazis. It is notthe wish to prevent humiliation of the Western alliance. It is the urgent desire, for domestic political reasons, to keep U.S. troops out of Bosnia. Mr. Clinton promised to supply up to 25,000 soldiers to help the UN forces withdraw if they decide to do that. So he is doing all he can to keep the UN mission going, however useless it is, however much it has to beg the murderous leaders of the Bosnian Serbs for permission even to supply its own forces.

The president says that Americans will not stand for U.S. involvement. But he has not told them what is at stake: a civilized country being ravaged in a war of aggression fomented by politicians maddened by power and nationalism.

President Jacques Chirac of France told the truth at a dinner of European leaders. When the Greek prime minister urged understanding of Serbs fighting for religion, Mr. Chirac said: "Don't talk to me of wars of religion. These people have no faith and know no law. They are terrorists."

The other day I had a letter from a Sarajevan who fled to Germany, Dr. Milan Stem. He is Jewish, he said, and his wife, Leila, is Muslim. His 9-year-old daughter, Sehna, said the Americans would save them. Dr. Stem wrote this small poem:

America

You my moonflights

You my Woodstocks

You regret.

Why make children

Dream of freedom

And then tell them

To forget?