AS OF NOW, SERBIA WINS, EUROPE LOSES AND THE FUTURE IS DARK

by William Pfaff

(The International Herald Tribune, 17/07/95)

PARIS - President Jacques Chirac's offer of French reinforcements to fight for Gorazde and Sarajevo has only embarrassed the White House and infuriated Downing Street - and, no doubt, Mr. Chirac's own prime minister, Alain Juppé, an architect of the policy France has followed until now.

Mr. Chirac is a man of passion and action, who recognizes what has been at stake in Bosnia, but he has come to power too late for Bosnia, and too late for Europe.

Eugen Weber, in "The Hollow Years," his history of France in the 1930s, remarks that in 1930 the postwar years were ending, but some already "speculated that the prewar years were now beginning. "

The same must be said in 1995. The great power order imposed on Europe after the Second World War did not end with the fall of communism in 1989, but with the fall of Srebrenica in 1995, to the forces of nationalism, ethnic hatred and political obscurantism. The prewar years have begun.

Since communism's collapse in 1989, the United States has moved slowly toward a withdrawal of its protection from Europe. In Washington eyes, Europe is now the Europeans' affair - as indeed it should be. However, the governments of what in an earlier day were called the European great powers have chosen not to assume the responsibilities that Washington has gradually renounced.

The ambition that Europe could collectively do so, by means of a united European foreign and security policy, has provided the European governments with an excuse for their abdication of individual responsibility for Europe's peace and political order.

In the absence of American leadership, Europe's governments have sought to make them~ selves agents of a consensus without a leader. That Britain and France are permanent UN Security Council members has not been taken as imposing any individual leadership obligation upon them. The very success of European economic unification has proved an obstacle to individual political action.

This unification nonetheless has provided Western Europe with a formidable collective moral authority, as well as a latent political authority, which people on both sides of the Atlantic believed could have a decisive in- fluence on the future of Eastern and Balkan Europe and of Russia. This authority has been wasted in Yugoslavia, and in the lies told to avoid responsible action there.

Other governements have obviously been implicated in the lies and evasions, including the American. The UN Security Council, however, was dominated on the Yugoslav issue by its European permanent members, and London and Paris, with Bonn, are mainly accountable for what has, and has not, been done in Yugoslavia.

The American political class, as a whole, has from the start demonstrated a more realistic view of what this war implies than have the French, British or Germans. The American government was initially inhibited by its belief that Yugoslavia was Europe's affair, assuming that Europeans would perceive that they stood to suffer the principal consequence of Yugoslavia's descent into chaos and evil.

Washington maintained that the Bosnians had a right to arms to defend themselves.

The American government also saw that the new Bosnian state represented the principle of nonethnic, nondiscriminatory, parliamentary government - the fundamental principle of WesternEurope's Union.

The Europeans' incomprehensible indifference to this fact, and their insistence that victims and aggressors in Yugoslavia be treated impartially, without moral differentiation, are responsible for the catastrophe which now has arrived.

The United Nations embargo effectively disarmed the geographically encircled Bosnians, and was powerless to halt arms supplies to the Bosnian Serbs, whose lines of communication (and control) from Serbia proper were never broken.

Conclusions must now be drawn from all this. My own are the following:

The United States should unilaterally lift the arms embargo on Bosnia, as called for by Senator Bob Dole and others.

It should arm the Bosnian army, or facilitate its arming, if a reasonably accountable Bosnian goverwnent survives this crisis and is indeed prepared to continue the struggle.

The United States should also provide or facilitate for the Bosnians sufficient air support as to deter or destroy Serbian air in- tervention against them. The purpose of this policy would be to provide the Bosnians with an equal "killing field" (the objective hotly opposed by Britain's former foreign secretary, the unspeakable Douglas Hurd, at the start of this war).

The purpose would not be to win the Bosnians' war for them - still a tragic illusion clung to by the Sarajevo government. (It was in Vietnam that the United States set out to win someone else's war.) The Bosnians will have to win their own war. It must be said that they are more likely than not to lose it. But if they wish to continue the war, they should be provided the means to do so.

The European governments have promised to withdraw their troops if the United States changes policy. The Europeans, certainly the British, have seemed determined to withdraw anyway, before winter, and would undoubtedly welcome a change in U.S. policy that lifted from them the onus for their ignominious abandonment of Yugoslavia's victims. That objection to an American policy shift may therefore be disregarded.

The Clinton govermnent has promised to contribute as many as 25,000 troops to an extraction of the UN force. It is at this moment asked to supply transport for the reinforcement of Gorazde and Sarajevo. Should it do so? Of' course it should; the former is a' commitment of national honor, the latter a final chance to influence not this crisis so much as' the next one.

If Congress should oppose either course, choosing dishonor as it may - this would simply add an American betrayal of its allies to the allies' betrayal of those Yugoslavs who have wished to govern themselves according to the norms of liberal democracy. The shame would then be complete.

In that case, I would still think 20,000-plus European professionals, reinforced by the two largest and best armies and navies in Western Europe, the British and French, better able to look, after themselves, as they flee the Serbs, than those Bosnian refugees trying to escape the collapse of enclaves where, until now, those same Europeans had promised them protection.

Srebrenica's Bosnian defenders were disarmed by the United Nations 30 months ago, in exchange, for the assurance that their enclave, would be protect--d. At the end of last week, UN peacekeepers in Gorazde resisted the efforts of Bosnian defenders to reclaim the heavy weapons taken away from them by the UnitedNations.