BOSNIAN SERBS ARE TALKING TOUGHER THAN THE WEST

by Anthony Lewis

(The Herald Tribune, 25 july 1995)

NEW YORK - "By autumn, we'll take Gorazde, Bihac and in the end Sarajevo, and we'll finish the war in Bosnia." So says General Ratko Mladic, commander of Bosnian Serb forces.

The London "agreement" to bomb the Bosnian Serbs if they threaten the safe area of Gorazde raised hopes at first that the West might finally be drawing the line against their genocidal aggression. But a closer look leaves little reason for confidence. The very word "agreement" has to be in quotes because it is not clear what the Western allies actually agreed to in London on Friday.

U.S. officials, sounding tough, said any attack on Gorazde would be met by major air strikes. But the statement of the conference chairman, Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind of Britain, said there would be a " substantial and decisive response" but made no commitment to air strikes.

There are other ambiguities. One crucial question left unanswered is whether the British general commanding the UN Protection Force in Bosnia, Rupert Smith, will be able to call in NATO aircraft without the approval of UN civilians.

That dual-key system has until now frustrated air action and made a mockery of General Smith's firm purpose.

What if General Mladic's men take UN soldiers hostage, as they have before and almost certainly will again? American officials said the bombing would go ahead anyway. But there are no Americans on the ground in Bosnia. Will NATO really bomb if British or French soldiers are taken and their governments object?

Nor is it clear exactly what targets NATO planes would attack, after first strikes on radar and other air defenses. NATO military officers began discussing that complex issue only after the London meeting of foreign ministers.

The single greatest failure of the London conference was its evident inability to reach even a vague consensus on anything except Gorazde. The ministers said nothing at all about two far more important "safe areas," Sarajevo and Bihac.

Again, U.S. officials said the strong language about Gorazde would be applied elsewhere, but others made no such commitment. Sarajevo, which was a cosmopolitan European city, has been subjected to Serbian bombing and shelling for three years.

The targets are civilian: apartment houses, hospitals, offices. People there are living in ways that we in the outside world have scarcely understood - without electricity or water, with the airport closed, under constant gunfire.

The real test of Western resolution, for me, is whether anything will be done about the strangulation and pounding of Sarajevo. And that is not just a humanitarian need. It is an urgent military and political necessity, for the plain intention of General Mladic's grinding tactics is to destroy the will of theinhabitants and take the city.

When he says he will capture Sarajevo, as he did the other day, he must be taken seriously. He tends to carry out the threats he makes, and he has no compunctions about the human cost.

What the Mladic forces did after taking the "safe area" of Srebrenica is a fair measure of his, and their, humanity. They wore United Nations uniforms, called refugees to come out of the woods, then shot them. They slit the throats of boys and gang-raped women.

Thousands of men from Srebrenica are missing and said to be in prison camps, but General Mladic has refused to let the Red Cross or anyone else see the camps.

After Srebrenica, the UN spokesman in Sarajevo, Alexander Ivanko, said the Bosnian Serb army would probably go down as not only the greatest perpetrators of ethnic cleansing "but as the fastest and most efficient

If the West is going to deal with Ratko Mladic, it has to have a convincing strategy: what it will do, how he is likely to respond and how it will match his moves. It must let him know that it has looked ahead and made those plans. There is no sign that it has done anything of the sort.

The movement of elements in the new allied rapid reaction force to Sarajevo over the weekend could be a signal of seriousness. But the London meeting seemed to be more about looking than being tough. If so, General Mladic will not take long to call the bluff. I hope I am wrong.