========================================================== 56 THE ECONOMIST JANUARY 21ST 1995 EUROPE -- Croatia -- Deadly gamble IF the familiar conflicts of former Yugoslavia were not terrible enough, that unhappy part of the world now faces an unexpected threat which could tip it into the most savage round of warfare yet. This is a demand by Croatia's government that United Nations peacekeepers should leave its soil, where they hold the ring between Serbs and Croats in Krajina, the Serb-held part of Croatia. Born of frustration and anger with the UN for failing to bring justice as well as peace, the Croats' decision smacks of desperation: "liberty or death". They have made similar threats before, but this time, for the moment, the Croats seem to mean what they say the 15,000 UN troops must go, however dire the consequences. The UN's blue helmets began arriving in Croatia in 1992 after Croatia's Serbs, backed by the Yugoslav army directed from Belgrade, had managed to rip a third of Croatia from its government's control. Up to 300,000 Croats fled from what was to become the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina; perhaps the same number of Serbs left government-controlled Croatia. The UN mandate in Croatia, which allows its soldiers to patrol Krajina, expires on March 31st, but the Croatian government has given the UN another three months after that to complete its withdrawal. Technically, that does not affect the world body's peacekeeping mandate in Bosnia, though the UN is likely to move its headquarters for former Yugoslavia from Zagreb, the Croatian capital, possibly to Brindisi. One reason for the Croats'ultimatum is fear of what might happen now that the Contact Group (America, Russia, France, Britain and Germany) has accepted the Bosnian Serbs' demand to confederate with Serbia proper. That raises the possibility that the Krajina Serbs will demand, and get, the same thing. if that were to come about, it would make Croatia's loss of Krajina permanent. By threatening a new bout of mayhem, the Croats hope that the UN will press Serbia's president, Slobodan Milosevic, into recognizing Croatia's frontiers. There is scant reason to think that, in the foreseeable future, he will agree to do so. Under the terms of the 1992 plan which brought UN peacekeepers to Croatia, refugees were supposed to return home. Few have done so. Though they have talked about an economic agreement with Croatia, the Krajina Serb leaders still insist that they will never submit to Croatian rule. The way to prevent this, the Croats seem to argue, is to kick the UN out, thus breaking the stalemate over Krajina that the blue helmets have produced. The Croats say they will not start fighting again. But with the UN troops out of the way, a new round of warfare would be hard to prevent. Croatia's president, Franjo Tudjman, wants to believe that his army can beat the Krajina Serbs, that the Bosnian Serbs will not come to their rescue because they are tied down at home, and that Serbia would stay out of a rekindled war because it is keener on having economic sanctions lifted than on striving anew for a Greater Serbia. These calculations look suspect. The Yugoslav military commander who helped carve Krajina out for the region's Serbs was General Ratko Mladic. He is now the Bosnian Serbs'military commander. He has come to the aid of the Krajina Serbs before and would be unlikely to ignore them now. At a stretch, Mr Milosevic might let Krajina make do with autonomy within a federal Croatia if that were negotiated as part of a wider peace. But it is barely conceivable that he would stand by if it happened as a result of military force, or if Krajina's existence were to be threatened. According to the International institute for Strategic Studies in London, the Croats and Bosnian Croats together have 248 tanks, the Bosnian army (their nominal ally) perhaps another 40. Together, the Serbs of Krajina, the Bosnian Serbs and the now purely Serb Yugoslav army could go to war with more than 1,200. The Yugoslav air force has 284 combat jets; Croatia has 20. The Serbs could even bomb Zagreb or other Croatian cities spared in 1991. Mr Tudjman may calculate that, with the UN gone, the Krajina Serbs will "see sense". The trouble for Croatia's gambling president is that the exact opposite is just as likely to happen and the cards in his hands are deuces. ============================================= 48 THE ECONOMIST JANUARY 28TH 1995 Bosnia -- Blown Rose -- SARAJEVO IF GENERALS are shot at by their own side, it is normally by mistake. in the case of General Sir Michael Rose, the potshots over his one-year stint as commander Of UNPROFOR, the 24,000-strong United Nations force in Bosnia, have been deliberate. Many of his fellow Britons say he has done a pretty good job in impossible circumstances. But many Americans, as well as senior officials in the UN and NATO, have fiercely criticized his role in former Yugoslavia. And in Sarajevo itself many Bosnian Muslims accuse him of favoring the Serbs and compare him to Neville Chamberlain. is the criticism justified? General Rose began his year in Bosnia as a local hero. in February 1994, his tough negotiating tactics helped to persuade Serbs to withdraw heavy weapons from around Sarajevo. Since then, far fewer shells have fallen on the city. Under his command, UNPROFOR has helped to restore Sarajevo's water and electricity supplies and kept a ceasefire between Muslims and Croats in central Bosnia. It has also continued to assist the delivery of humanitarian relief. Yet the Bosnian Muslims do not offer General Rose much gratitude. They claim that he could have done far more to deter the Serbs during episodes such as the Serbs' attack on Gorazde in April 1994 and their push into the Bihac pocket last November. He should, they say, have been more vigorous in calling for NATO air strikes. in his defense, the general points out that he did call for air strikes -- but not many, because he had to worry about the safety of his own men and UNPROFOR's ability to carry out its humanitarian mission. After each Of NATO's modest air strikes, the Serbs kidnapped soldiers, blocked relief convoys or closed Sarajevo airport. General Rose argues that UNPROFOR cannot do its job unless it is seen to be scrupulously impartial; that it has neither the mandate nor the means to enforce peace; and that, if the West is unwilling to take on the Serbs, it is not reasonable to expect UNPROFOR to do it. Even so, the doubters persist. Since the Serbs all-but-overran Gorazde General Rose has sometimes gone to strange lengths in pursuit of even-handedness. For instance, when the Serbs have done something bad, he has often accused the Bosnian government of a similar misdemeanor, sometimes with scant justification. On January 14th General Rose declared open the airport road linking Sarajevo to the rest of Bosnia, which the Serbs had closed. Two hours later, the Serbs shut the road again. The general's office announced that unreasonable demands by the Bosnian government had provoked the closure. UN officials say the Bosnian government was not to blame. On October 8th Serb machine-gunners attacked a Sarajevo tram, killing one person and wounding 11 others. Two days later UNPROFOR officials said that, a few hours after the shooting, Bosnian soldiers had shot at and missed two Serb women. Senior UN officials accused General Rose's office of linking an incident of dubious authenticity to the tram attack. The office now says that it had been mistaken to link the two incidents, and that the second in fact occurred a day after the tram attack. The general's breezy style has not helped him to win the public-relations battle. He described the Serb attack on Gorazde as "not serious" when it began last April. As a result, many Sarajevans are reluctant to believe good news from him even when it is true. He and his team talk of the Bosnian government's "communist methods and mentality" (government ministers admit to tapping his telephones). They in turn were incensed when, after the Serb advance on Gorazde, he said Bosnian forces had run away; and when, this month, he accepted as a liaison officer at Tuzla airport a Serb colonel- who the Muslims say is a war criminal. NATO, too, has become frustrated with the general. Earlier this month its Naples headquarters, responsible for flights over Bosnia, found that he had told the Bosnian Serbs how many NATO aircraft would be flying over their land (though not the flight paths). That annoyed NATO, which suspended- pended the provision of that information to UNPROFOR. For his part, General Rose complains that "the NATO nomenklatura" has failed to understand his successes. General Rose's belief in his ability and achievements is irrepressible. He likes to use the word "heroic" to describe UNPROFOR'S mission in Bosnia. But, trained in Britain's Special Air Service, which puts a premium on swift, decisive action, he has lacked some of the painstaking qualities needed for what has been, essentially, a political job. His placement, General Rupert Smith, will need to master these diplomatic skills if he is to join those described by Pope: "Our Gen'rals now, retired to their estates, Hang their old trophies o'er the garden gates, in life's cool evening satiate of applause." ============================================================== WORLD PRESS REVIEW FEBRUARY 1995 In a desperate race to avert a bigger bloodbath, Western policy on Bosnia is focusing on a contentious strategy of "peace at all costs." With Sarajevo bracing for a third winter under siege, the panic in Western capitals over Bosnia has reached fever pitch. NATO struggles to the top of the hill marked "air strikes," takes a nervous peek at the other side, and races back down to say, "Only joking." The United Nations, France, and Britain shuffle to the edge of the precipice marked "withdrawal," peer into the abyss, and back off, proclaiming, "We didn't really mean it." Yet this sorry spectacle of empty threats and promises and international buck-passing has produced a realignment of international diplomacy and a revision of the mediation strategy that may yet clinch a peace deal. The key shift wrought by the Serbian siege of Bihac has been the US administration's abandonment of the moral high ground, its capitulation -- in the interests of NATO unity -- to British and French demands for a peace at all costs. In the eyes of many, that means a bad peace. In the view of the Bosnian government, it is an unjust peace. The peace-at-all-costs position hurts the weak -- the Bosnians -- and favors the strong -- the Serbs. The third party, the Croats, will seek to extract maximum advantage from whatever settlement might emerge. Last summer, the five-nation contact group the US, Russia, Britain, France, and Germany] unveiled a settlement plan and said take it or leave it. The Bosnians, the Croats, and President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia took it. The Bosnian Serbs left it. They are now being offered an infinitely better deal. The intransigence of the Bosnian-Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, has paid off. He is now offering to reopen peace talks and claims to be heartened by the "new interpretations" of the peace plan from Western mediators. The so-called final peace plan proscribed any merger of Serbian-held territory to defeat the aim of an expanded pan-Serbian state across Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia. Now the Serbs are being told that the partition map can be redrawn and that their areas of Bosnia can 'confederate" with Serbia. Karadzic has been told he need not cede any of the territory he holds until the constitutional details of the deal are negotiated, giving him an international license to delay any pullback. He enjoys international backing for his demand for a formal Bosnia-wide cessation of hostilities that would freeze current front lines in his favor. In short, as far as Moscow, London, Paris, and now Washington are concerned, the Serbs have won. The priority is to rubber-stamp that victory to reverse Bosnia's corrosive impact on NATO, prevent it from undermining the West's relations with Russia, and destroy the case for a disastrous UN retreat from Bosnia. The cumulative effect is a coup for Karadzic-all ostensibly because of Bihac, an obscure corner of northwest Bosnia that the UN pledged to protect. When push came to shove, the UN admitted that the pledge was irredeemable and scurried to get its peace keepers out of harm's way. -Ian Traynor, "The Guardian" (liberal), London, Dec. 15, 1994. A War's Grim Lessons Bosnia has changed many things, in ways that we do not yet fully understand. It has caused a rift in the transatlantic alliance, raising questions about NATO's future. It has exposed as pious pipe dreams the ambitions of the United Nations to be an effective peacekeeping agency in the new era beyond the cold war. It has served as a vehicle for a newly assertive Russian foreign policy that challenges Western interests. It has left European Union claims of common foreign and security policies looking risible. It has left an estimated 200,000 people dead, tens of thousands more maimed, countless more traumatized, and 2 million homeless and displaced. And it has rewritten Europe's good-conduct rule book, showing in the case of the Serbs that if you are determined to establish an ethnically based blood-and-soil state, willing to prosecute that aim consistently with a terrible resolve and damn the consequences, you can get away with it. Meanwhile, there will be more pogroms, more sieges, another wretched winter in what has largely been a war against civilians and in which ethnic cleansing has been the central and paramount aim, not a byproduct of warfare. The war seems at a turning point. As a result of Jiinmy Carter's foray and the agreement to resume negotiations, there is again a prospect of a settlement of sorts emerging. If that fails -- and recent history suggests it will -- the outlook is for a decade of "low intensity" guerrilla warfare as the Muslims seek to reclaim their inheritance. They seem to be convinced that they can keep losing the battles, as in the fall's at Bihac, but still win the war. For if at bottom, over the past 32 months, the Serbs have proved that might is right, that is a lesson not lost on the Muslims, who, however grudgingly, have done most of the things the international powers have asked them to do. Similarly, the Croats have also reluctantly conformed to the international powers' bidding, refraining from force to regain Serb-held Croatia and bowing to US pressure to enter a Muslim-Croat federation. Such virtue has to be its own reward, for they see the international powers, in their desperation for a settlement, moving to reward Serbian recalcitrance and agreeing to renegotiate a peace plan that only a few months ago was deemed nonnegotiable. -Ian Traynor, Dec. 22, 1994. "NATO's Waterloo" However the endgame in Bosnia plays out, December's turning point was crucial. The United States, giving in to its European allies, agreed in effect that the Serbs had won the war and would get more concessions to make peace. What forced President Bill Clinton to change his policy? The latest World Press Review Opinion Index suggests that global editorial opinion, which both reflects and influences official policy, had concluded with near unanimity that the United Nations and NATO peacekeeping efforts were such a total failure that the future of both international bodies was in danger. As seen by the world's press, the emperors have no clothes. The Index sampled editorial opinions about Bosnia from 50 leading overseas dailies during the first two weeks of December. The consensus was both massive and harsh. Forty-six of the 50 agreed in editorials that the UN-NATO mission in Bosnia had been not just a failure but a debacle. That's a disapproval rate of 92 percent, and the editors used such terms as "impotent," "absurd," "irrelevant," "shame," and "humiliation." Only two of the 50 grudgingly endorsed the peace keepers' actions as having done at least some good or prevented greater evil. Two others published no editorials on the subject. The World Press Review Opinion Index is a systematic gauge of global views on international affairs, interpreting editorial comment from daily papers representing a broad range of ideologies and regions. They are chosen for their national and international influence. The peace keepers' image had already been frayed by misadventures in Somalia before the blue helmets stumbled into Bosnia. But when they mounted only popgun reprisals against Serbian forces flouting their rules, when they were treated with open contempt and even taken hostage, and when UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali him- self was snubbed by the Serbs and booed by the Muslims he went to protect, the image of futility became indelible. The liberal Le Monde of Paris said NATO had been "discredited" and added that "European defense rests for the moment on myth." London's liberal Guardian suggested that this might be "NATO's final decade." "Together with the Bosnian corpses," said the conservative ABC of Madrid, "the world is burying a mummified UN . . . and a divided NATO." Editorials from Africa, Asia., the Middle East, and Latin America were equally damning. The independent Nation of Bangkok called the Bosnia record a "moral abdication" that sent a clear message: "Aggression pays." But especially in Europe, some papers seemed resigned to that, concluding that Serbia has won the war and the best hope now is to salvage NATO. In Warsaw, the respected Gazeta Wyborcza said, "Bosnia has turned out to be NATO's Waterloo." Among NATO members, the paper added, there is widespread agreement that even if it is too late to rescue Bosnia, the alliance should be saved. By that reasoning, a divided Bosnia -- or even total conquest by the Serbs -- may be the inevitable price for reuniting NATO. The UN was also heavily criticized, although many papers called for peace-keeping troops to stay in the region as long as the arms embargo remains in force. "The United Nations, however maligned, has had modest success in promoting peace" and assisting war refugees, said Toronto's Globe and Mail, one of the two papers cautiously approving the policy (the other: London's Independent). "Without it, things would probably be much worse." At the other end of the spectrum was La Stampa of Turin, which said, "The international community is not giving proof of impotence, resignation, or passivity. It is giving proof of active complicity with the Serbian strategy of conquest and genocide." To all the leaders of the international community, such a solid global consensus against their policies would be seen as a real danger signal, undermining both NATO and the UN as significant players in the post-cold-war era. Naked emperors are figures of ridicule, not power. In the end, Bill Clinton saw little choice but to send his predecessor Jimmy Carter to make the key concession-reopening bar- gaining on who gets which parts of Bosnia-and paste a smiley face on it. Among other memorable opinions gathered by the Index: Aftenposten, Oslo: "President Clinton ... made it clear that from now on the Europeans must take the lead in Europe. ... Maybe the solution is a NATO not watered down by expansion but a NATO supplemented by tailored agreements with individual countries in the East." Corriere delta Sera, Milan: "Restoring motivation and dynamism to the transatlantic relationship is the priority challenge posed to the West in the post-cold-war era by the Bosnian slaughterhouse. To place before this challenge a plan for NATO expansion to Eastern Europe, an appropriate but not urgent matter . . . .means condemning the North Atlantic alliance first to irrelevance and then to self-destruction." Straits Times, Singapore: "The failure of Atlantic unity, the sharp reminder of Russia's capacity for intransigence, the grim reality of the aggressor walking away with rewards: These are the lessons of Bosnia, . . . a case study in how not to go about keeping the peace." Jerusalem Post: "Who would believe that a squabbling bunch of Balkan militias could make utter fools of all the major powers on Earth, destroy the reputation of NATO . . . and paralyze the United Nations? . . . It is going to be a long time before the United States, Europe, Russia, the UN, or NATO recovers from this humiliating debacle." -LARRY MARTZ Back to Basics For the Alliance (Suddeutsch-Zeitung) In recent weeks, lightning has crackled across the skies, illuminating, in its pitiless glare, the real shape of politics in Europe -- the situation of the great powers in Bosnia, NATO, and the United Nations. The insights we have gained from these glimpses have led to sobering conclusions. Gone is the euphoria felt when the Berlin Wall fell, when dreams soared and when we believed that the UN -- "the world community" -- would ensure order, that right would prevail over might, and that the Western alliance would survive the end of the cold war. Nothing but illusions-just look at Bosnia, where the great powers and their institutions have failed. The future is not in their hands; instead, the past holds them firmly in its grip. The UN has once again been exposed as nothing more than what it always has been: a federation of nations that possesses not a single microgram more power than those nations permit it. The Serbs held 400 blue helmets as virtual hostages. And all that Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali could threaten was to completely withdraw his forces -- and lose all his power. What are we to make of an army, now almost 40,000 strong, whose function has become an absurdity? Is it in Bosnia to guarantee peace? It can't do that even in the official protected zones, such as Sarajevo, where shelling has once again become routine, or Bihac. Is it there to create peace by fighting? That it may not do, although, along with NATO, the UN could at least have prevented a Serbian victory. All that remains for the UN is a function that could not be more shameful: Troops that were sent to protect others protect only themselves, like a police force that runs for cover when the shooting starts. Meanwhile, NATO has sought over the past five years to avoid one of the dictates of history: Alliances die when they win as often as when they lose. The fact that an alliance is finished when it must hand over its sword is obvious. But alliances also lose when they triumph, because the threat that called them into action has been removed. Like a company whose longtime market collapsed, NATO, after the cold war ended, tried to find new products to sell to new clients: to create a peace in Bosnia on one hand, and to expand eastward on the other. Neither product has found customers. And the attempt to sell them has put so much stress on the alliance that no one can say whether it will survive. With a face as grim as Andrei Gromyko's, Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev threw down his gauntlet to the alliance: nyet to Eastern Europe in NATO, even though those countries' foreign ministers had timidly agreed to spend a year negotiating the terms for expanding the alliance to the east. And to put teeth in his refusal, Kozyrev also tabled the grandiose NATO-Russia cooperation plan -- a program that was supposed to make expansion attractive to Moscow. Would Kozyrev have done this if the alliance had not been trapped by the war in Bosnia? Moscow has been very much aware that Bosnia has put NATO into its worst fix since Suez in 1956, when the United States forced England and France to back away from their intervention. A war of finger pointing has broken out, in which each power seeks to blame others for the fact that the Bosnians are losing, for the fact that "Greater Serbia" is winning, for the fact that the West has been tried and found wanting. London and Paris complain that the Americans want to conduct the music but not play in the band. Washington accuses its two oldest allies of cynicism in the tradition of Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier in 1938 -- appeasement of the strong at the cost of the Muslims. Both sides, the Americans as well as the new British-French alliance, are right. And the Germans? If they had only remained silent, as Defense Minister Volker Riihe ironically noted: If Bonn is not making any military contribution, "we lose the right to make any smart suggestions about the Bosnian matter." But this diplomatic competition in stupidity is not the real problem. The heart of the matter is the return of history, which we believed we had overcome. Serbian ambitions, which set off World War I in 1914, have now set Russia marching against the Western powers and divided the Western allies among themselves. The alliance is buckling, and the UN is trying to out-trump this unholy alliance in impotence. As London, Paris, Washington, and Bonn cast stones at one another, Russia returns to its familiar role and once again casts its veto against the West's strategic decisions. In such times, we must keep our eyes on the things that matter. The alliance must realize, in the wake of the Bosnia tragedy, that it will have to limit itself to core issues. NATO cannot create peace beyond its own borders, not even as an auxiliary force to help out the UN, for even a Radovan Karadzic can make a joke of this. It retains only its classical task of serving as a security alliance for the United States and Europe and a bulwark against the old-new Russia. In the sixth year since the Berlin Wall fell, that will be work enough. The tragedy of Bosnia, the triumph of the strong over the weak, is almost complete. The alliance ought not compound this tragedy by destroying itself. It will be needed-as Kozyrev has now demonstrated. -Josef Joffe, "Suddeutsche Zeitung" (centrist), Munich, Dec. 3,1994. Judging Bosnia's Carnage In early November, the international tribunal that was convened in The Hague, Netherlands, to consider crimes in the former Yugoslavia opened two cases involving the ethnic cleansing carried out by Serbs in Bosnia. The tribunal's first indictment was brought against Dragan Nikolic, the director of the Susica camp, near Vlasenica, in eastern Bosnia. This officer, as well as Dusan Tadic, a camp guard currently under detention in Germany whom the tribunal intends to indict, is unknown to the general public, which was perhaps expecting indictments against top leaders such as Radovan Karadzic or General Ratko Mladic. Nikolic is still at large somewhere in the Serbian sector of Bosnia. The existence of the Susica camp, a former army depot where 3,000 Muslims were killed between June and September, 1992, was revealed in the summer of 1994 in a series of articles in the New York Times. The author of the reports bad spoken with survivors and with a former guard who had deserted from the Bosnian-Serb army in 1993. According to this witness, Nikolic, a tall, thin man in his 30s, would go into the hangar where the detainees were held and read lists of names. The men selected were immediately taken outside the building and shot. Nikolic was famous for plundering his victims' possessions, according to other eyewitness reports published by the Times. The indictment of Tadic, which is supported by 19 witnesses, would arise from ethnic cleansing and its catalog of horrors. But Tadic could not be indicted immediately. Chief prosecutor Richard Goldstone simply requested that Germany keep the suspect behind bars until he is indicted by the tribunal. Germany would have to modify its laws to permit Tadic's extradition. The tribunal intends to take up only significant cases, but various national courts run the risk of taking on more dubious ones. In October, Austria became the first nation to initiate a trial for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia. That case was based on a single witness. In Denmark, a Bosnian Muslim accused of war crimes against Muslims detained by Croatians appeared before judges for the first time in November. Psychiatric experts believed he was suffering from mental disorders. -Helene Despic-Popovic, 'Lib@ration" (1@ftist); Justice -- Or Peace? It is freely acknowledged that there can be no justice without an independent judiciary. So can there be an international justice system if that supposed system depends on the goodwill of a few nations? No. And that is why the actions of the international tribunal in The Hague, set up by the United Nations Security Council to investigate and prosecute "persons presumed guilty of serious violations of international human-rights law in the former Yugoslavia," raise a certain amount of skepticism. The integrity and determination of prosecutor Richard Goldstone and the 11 judges of the tribunal are not in question. The problem lies in their status: Since they are appointed and funded by the Security Council, the accomplishment of their mission depends on the goodwill of the countries on the council, beginning with its five permanent members, What the council does today, it can undo tomorrow, and the pursuit of justice may not always be a priority. One cannot necessarily blame these powerful nations for choosing peace without justice -- and with amnesty, as was recently seen in Haiti -- over an impossible justice without peace. At most, we can It the leaders of these nations for having deceived by speaking of international justice. They had in mind only a comfortable justice, a means of pressure designed to dissuade the criminals from pursuing their activities and to persuade those politicians responsible for crimes to be reasonable at the negotiating table. In the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials following World War II, only the defeated were judged. More recently, though, "international justice" has evidenced a selective indignation. Although Cambodia's Khmer Rouge were high on the hit parade of horror, they were treated like respectable negotiators when the peace accords were discussed. And it wasn't because Iraqi President Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against the civilian Kurdish population that he was punished in the Persian Gulf war. Countries that have signed the Geneva Conventions of 1949 are obligated to prosecute all violators of these international rules in their national courts. This commitment is too little known. In countries that have an independent justice system, those courts might be as effective and more consistent than The Hague's tribunal. - Jacques Amalric, "Liberation" (leftist), Paris, Nov. 8.1994 ===================================================================== Special Warfare (January 1995) Ethnic, Nationalist and Separatist Conflicts: Finding the Right Solutions by Benjamin Schwarz The American national-security community is greeting the phenomenon of ethnic, nationalist and separatist conflicts, or EN&SC, in much the same way that it greeted counterinsurgency in the 1960s and low-intensity conflict in the 1980s: The U.S., it is repeatedly asserted, must come to terms with "new" types of conflict for which it is inadequately prepared. As was the case with counterinsurgency and low-intensity conflict, policy discussion of EN&SC revolves nearly exclusively around how best to implement programs and policies. There is a constant tinkering with organizational charts to achieve just the right mixture of agencies, departments and programs, and some of these agencies and departments are rushing about in an effort to claim valuable new turf. However, as they did with counterinsurgency and with low-intensity conflict, these programmatic approaches threaten to eclipse an examination of the motivations and assumptions underlying American attitudes and policy toward EN&SC and the analyses of how and if American national interests are involved in such conflicts. Definition Moreover, there is a danger in defining EN&SC as a generic problem. Most of the policy discussions of EN&SC center around quite specific concerns. For example, discussions regarding Eastern European EN&SC usually produce a small set of scenarios that directly affect American interests: a resurgent Russia taking advantage of an aggrieved Russian minority in a bordering state to reimpose control over that state; or a wave of refugees escaping EN&SC engendering political instability in Germany. (It might help to examine precisely why a nationalist Russia or a politically unstable Germany would be cause for such anxiety, but that is another matter.) In any event, it might be possible to deal with these specific concerns without the United States playing an active role in containing or quelling EN&SC in Eastern Europe. Potential geopolitical threats do not necessarily call for the United States to help protect minority rights or to build a civil society in, say, Romania. Should the policy community define EN&SC as a generic problem - and many signs indicate that this is happening - policy-makers could be creating enormous difficulties for themselves. If the United States bases policy on the conviction that these conflicts pose a danger to America because they threaten world order, then the U.S. would be adopting the globalist doctrine that America can be safe only when the entire world is made stable and is very much like America. This concept would lead to an endless multiplication of security "threats" and to imperial overstretch. Perhaps the notion of attempting to understand and define EN&SC as a "problem" should be jettisoned, and we should instead concentrate on specific regional and subregional analyses: Should the United States be concerned with region X or with conflict Z? Why? How can the U.S. safeguard and advance its specific interests in these areas? Such analyses could lead to very different policy conclusions than would be reached if America started with the premise that it should be concerned with promoting stability, mitigating EN&SC and helping to settle minority disputes. 'Reasonable' solutions To examine EN&SC generically, we must first look critically at the prevailing if the United States bases policy on the conviction that these conflicts pose a danger to America because they threaten world order, then the U.S. would be adopting the globalist doctrine that America can be safe only when the entire world is made stable and is very much like America, notions of how to tame them. Discussions of how to "solve" EN&SC generally begin by acknowledging that they are complex and difficult situations and that outside intervention to control them is rarely effective. Despite such caveats, the discussions proceed to measures and techniques that the U.S. and the world community can encourage affected states to undertake. Included in these discussions is the point that societies riven by such conflicts miist avoid winner-take-all politics and should instead guarantee that regardless of election results, the weaker faction will still have a voice in national politics. To accomplish this, there should be a guaranteed division of key offices and a system of mutual vetoes to ensure that no crucial political decisions are made without all parties agreeing. The policy recommendations share the idea that coalition governments will help guard against and ameliorate ethnic, nationalist and religious divisions. And all agree that these divisions will be less likely to erupt in violent conflict if threatened societies tolerate minority groups' desire for cultural autonomy. All of these measures are reasonable, and they would indeed aid in ensuring that politics within divided societies is not a zero-sum game, a situation that invites and exacerbates conflict. But the measures presume that the strongest group in a society will be willing to make major concessions, concessions that would, in fact, jeopardize that group's preponderant position. The solutions presuppose agreement and stability as much as they secure them. In other words, such solutions, which are intended to alleviate conflict, can be implemented only in the absence of conflict, and only if there is a strong desire for compromise. Historical record This is not, however, how ethnic, nationalist and separatist conflicts have usually been settled. As the English historian Louis Namier wrote in his discussion of nationalist conflicts in Eastern Europe in the 19th century, "States are not created or destroyed, and frontiers redrawn or obliterated, by argument and majority votes; nations are freed, united, or broken by blood and iron, and not by a generous application of liberty." Given the historical record, why do we place such stock in reasonable solutions? One important reason is that our ideas about settling internal conflicts have been heavily affected by an idealized view of America's own history and politics. This is the melting-pot theory of national political development, which holds that American democracy assures a voice to each disparate group, and that from each group's competing views, compromise is reached, if not harmoniously, then at least nonviolently. This theory is a misunderstanding of America's political development. At least as much as other countries, America was formed by blood and iron, by conquest and force, not by conciliation and compromise. Forming the American state required many years of bloody Indian wars, one of the longest continuing ethnic conflicts in history. That conflict was resolved not by powersharing but by obliteration - the only way it could be resolved. Moreover, America's political development required that it fight a brutal nationalist-separatist conflict, the Civil War, in which one vision of America's political, economic and social development was crushed by another. The conflict was followed by military occupation to impose a new political, economic and social order in the defeated land. The American Civil War is an apt example of how reasonable solutions to EN&SC seldom work. When the United States was established, the North and the South recognized each other as effectively two distinct economic and political entities. As the country developed, these two entities grew farther apart: the North was capitalist, industrial, liberal-bourgeois and commercial, while the South was aristocratic, precapitalist and agricultural. To dampen the internal conflict, the Constitution guaranteed the South a voice - a disproportionate voice - in national politics. Yet this "guaranteed outcome," so lauded by policy analysts today as a means of forestalling internal conflict, could never have worked in the long run. The South not only wanted its view accorded respect, it also wanted to determine its own future and not to be subordinate or dependent upon an opposing ideological, economic and social system. Compromise In general, minorities - nations within nations - do not want respect alone. They do not wish to be considered appendages to the majority's nation-state. The Sudeten Germans were provided respect and a disproportionate voice by a democratic interwar Czechoslovakia. The Quebecois are given the same treatment in Canadian national politics, and in many ways, the minority receives the same from a democratic Israel. Nevertheless, significant numbers within these minorities are have been unsatisfied with this arrangement. The argument that a Slobodan Milosevic is merely exploiting and exacerbating ethnic antipathies is irrelevant Demagogic nationalist leaders can play the nationalist card only because it is so powerful. Solutions that grant special guarantees to a minority are actually asking the minority to accept less than it wants. Another solution that is often touted is transforming nation-states into civil states in which political power is determined by membership in the majority's ethnic, nationalist or religious group - is to demand that a majority accept far less than it wants and already has. To many within the majority, such a solution means sacrificing a living, breathing national character to an abstract and bloodless notion of a single political community. For example, Israel operates under a system of majority rule in which an Arab minority, comprising 18 percent of the population of Israel's pre-1967 territory, is granted its civil rights, but whose members are nonetheless second-class citizens, since the Israeli state is by definition a Jewish state. It is an unspoken rule of Israeli politics that no Arab or Arab-dominated party be invited to participate in a political coalition. It is unimaginable that Israel, motivated by a desire to ameliorate ethnic conflict would jettison its national character by agreeing to dismantle that which defines its statehood. Stumbling block This brings us to the great stumbling block of these apparent solutions. Divided societies face a conundrum: dissatisfied minorities want, at a minimum, a real voice in determining their future, but a real voice for the minority means a real sacrifice for the majority. While the majority's long-term interest in civil peace should perhaps direct it to accept such solutions, Canada's experience illustrates the majority's reluctance to do so. The Charlottetown Agreement was a model of reasonable techniques for handling ethnic conflict, a set of arrangements that all experts believe should work. In accordance with the guaranteed outcomes solution, Quebec was guaranteed 25 percent of the seats in the Federal House of Commons, three of the Supreme Court's nine judges would be drawn from Quebec, and federal bills affecting the French language would require a double majority of votes by Francophone senators and the Senate as a whole. These "solutions," which might assuage the Francophone minority, were roundly rejected by Anglophone Canada for the understandable reasons that Quebec would be given too much power and that the majority would be correspondingly weakened. If these solutions and compromises are unworkable in a Western democracy, there is no reason to assume they will work in the emerging unstable states that currently concern American policy-makers. Nor can we look to a global democratic makeover as a solution to what are truly the intractable problems of EN&SC: first, because, as John Stuart Mill observed, it is next to impossible to build a true democracy in a multiethnic society; and second, because democracy often exacerbates internal tensions and conflicts and does not, as the American ideal would have us believe, usually ameliorate them. Democracy does not immunize a society against internal conflict and separatism, as the 620,000 dead in America's Civil War attest. Logic of force Prince Bernhard Von Bulow, a former German chancellor, wrote in 1914, "In the struggle between nationalities, one nation is the hammer, the other the anvil; one is the victor and one is the vanquished." Once internal conflicts become violent, usually only the logic of force can put civil differences to rest. The logic of force in these kinds of conflicts usually means the triumph of the stronger group. Historically, the most stable and lasting solution to EN&SC has been ethnic cleansing and partition. The Czech Republic and Poland made ruthless decisions following World War II to cleanse themselves forcibly of the German minorities that had caused them so much trouble during the interwar years. Today the two states are far more stable, with a greater likelihood of democracy triumphing within them. Cyprus has been far more stable since its de facto partitioning by the Turkish Army in 1974, which involved the forced relocation of 200,000 people, mostly Greek Cypriots. This division is now reinforced, ironically, by United Nations peacekeeping troops. Reasonable power-sharing solutions sometimes do emerge in divided societies, but usually only after the opposing sides have become exhausted by bloody conflict. The struggle between Colombia's liberals and conservatives finally resulted in a textbook solution of how civil difference should be settled. Both factions were assured a voice in national politics; in fact, there was a prearranged deal that the office of the presidency would alternate between the two parties. Unfortunately, the two groups reached this compromise solution only after more than 250,000 Colombians had been killed in civil war. Although EN&SC remain latent in some societies, we must assume that the U.S. - and certainly the U.S. military - will concern itself with EN&SC only when violence is present or is likely. In advising those military forces that may be called upon to intervene in these types of conflicts, planners must bear in mind this truism: foreign instabilities can be durably quelled only by native solutions, and these solutions can take centuries and will often be bloody. Once violence begins, probably the best course of action for the United States and the international community is to proffer their good offices, awaiting the time when combatant exhaustion or the triumph of one group over another creates an opening for intervention in a purely peacekeeping capacity. This is not to argue that external intervention in EN&SC is ineffective. Should the U.S. have a geopolitical stake in the outcome of an ethnic conflict, we should remember that outside intervention can be effective. External forces are not effective in building civil societies or in pacifying such conflicts, but they can help one side of a conflict impose its will on the other, as demonstrated by Turkey's intervention in Cyprus. That sort of task is not exactly what would be called peacemaking, but it is what militaries do. --- Benjamin Schwarz is a staff member of the international policy department of the RAND Corporation. Before joining RAND, he worked for the Brookings Institution. He has written RAND reports on such diverse topics as American policy toward El Salvador and U.S. grand strategy after the Cold War. Schwarz's work has appeared in publications such as Foreign Policy, The New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly. He was educated at Yale Uniuersity and, as a Fulbright scholar, at Oxford University. ================================================================= ===== Special Warfare (January 1995) 'Not Quite War': A Situation Report from the Former Yugoslavia by Mercer M. Dorsey Jr. Author's note: This report represents a snapshot of the situation in the former Yugoslavia during the spring and early summer of 1994. The situation there is dynamic and may have changed since that time. The views expressed are my own and not those of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense or the United Nations. Duty with the United Nations Protection Forces in the former Yugoslavia provides one with a close-up look at operations other than war. To the warring parties involved, these operations look a lot like war. To the U.N. forces, the situation is not quite war, but it's a lot closer to it than maintaining a demarcation line in the Middle East. It isn't peacekeeping, peacemaking or peace enforcement, either. Perhaps it is "confrontation control." As chief of security for the U.N. Protection Forces, Former Republics of Yugoslavia, or UNPROFOR, I am responsible for the personal security of Yasushi Akashi, special representative of the U.N. secretary-general, and for the security of U.N. people, installations and property throughout the area. My other functions include identifying security needs; coordinating for proper security forces; and investigating incidents ranging from attacks on U.N. civilians by one of the warring parties, to car accidents and black marketeering. The headquarters for UNPROFOR is located in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. The UNPROFOR security section, as well as the U.N. mission itself, is still in its formative stage. The total strength of the security section is expected to be approximately 150, and the total strength of the U.N. mission around 46,000. Background The U.N. arrived here in 1991, but the fighting had actually begun in 1989 with the demise of the Soviet Union. Marshal Tito, Yugoslavia's communist leader from 1943 to 1980, was a Serb, and the Serbs had dominated the Yugoslavian communist party. Without Tito and the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia began to fall apart. Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro were the republics making up Yugoslavia. Serbia and Montenegro formed the Republic of Yugoslavia (this entity still has not been formally recognized by the United States), but Slovenia and Croatia wanted independence. After a short confrontation, Slovenia's independence was allowed, but when Croatia asserted its independence, Serbia objected, and a war began between the two. This war later stagnated, and when Bosnia-Herzegovina became a separate nation, Croatia and Serbia began supporting their surrogate warring factions in BosniaHerzegovina. Croatia is shaped somewhat like a halfmoon, with its upper horn pointing east and its lower horn pointing south. The eastern point of the upper horn of the moon is truncated, and its blunt northsouth edge borders the Serbian province of Vojvodina. The moon's lower horn tapers into a point that touches Montenegro. BosniaHerzegovina sits within the inner arch of the half-moon. Croatia is bordered to the north by Hungary and Slovenia and to the west by the Adriatic. Sectors Serbian ethnic populations dominate 27 percent of Croatia. Serbian ethnic-populated areas, which are separated into four sectors, are neither neatly adjacent to Serbia nor are they monoethnic. Sector East is on Croatia's eastern border adjacent to the province of Vojvodina, and Sector West is near Croatia's center. Sectors North and South are located on the lower horn of the moon, adjacent to the western border of Bosnia-Herzegovina; they cut a swath along the horn's eastern rim. When the Croatians moved to establish control of these Serbianpopulated areas, the Serbs resisted and were able to stymie the Croats. The Serbian government supported the separate Serbian pockets but was not able to link them to Serbia. If the Serbian sectors are granted autonomy, Croatia's geographic area will be significantly reduced. In any event, Croatia lacks the necessary military force to take control: Its terrain is extremely rough, and the Serbian minorities are extremely stubborn. Left as is, the situation no doubt will lead to many crises; it is unlikely to change unless one side manages to dominate or unless reason and compromise prevail and the sectors are reintegrated into Croatia. The four sectors actually represent the geographical boundaries of the ethnic minorities. They are under U.N. protection because of the extensive fighting and the attempted "ethnic cleansing" by both Serbs and Croats. In his book The Fall of Yugoslavia, Misha Glenny argues that the issues in Yugoslavia are neither ethnic nor religious, but nationalistic. But the depth of the atrocities demonstrated by both sides is not usually associated with pure nationalism - it appears to be far more personal and deeper than that. Although Croatia and Serbia maintain a war posture against each other, there is little actual fighting between the two. Most of the fighting in Croatia is concentrated in Sectors North and South, which are controlled by the Krajinian Serbs. Cease-fire violations occur regularly. Conflicts At this time (spring 1994), Bosnia-Herzegovina is the area of greatest conflict. It is bordered on the north and west by Croatia and on the east and south by Serbia and Montenegro. Opposing factions include the Bosnian Serbs, or BSA, and the Bosnian Muslims, or BiH. The BiH are subdivided into opposing camps: the Abdic forces and the BiH 5th Corps. Both of these BiH factions are surrounded by Serbs: the BSA to the south and the Krajinian Serbs to the north in Croatia. The Bosnian Croats, or the HVO, are the other major faction in BosniaHerzegovina. The HVO and the BiH appear to have formed something of an alliance against the BSA and have actually conducted coordinated operations against them. The Krajinian Serbs, however, are providing support (including artillery) to the Abdic forces of the BiH. They must also be allowing resources into the BiH 5th Corps, since the 5th Corps has been entirely surrounded for months and should have depleted its supplies a long time ago. Multiple fronts and suballiances exist, and all the factions shoot at each other from time to time. Although there is continuous fighting in the region, most of the major offensives and counteroffensives are invisible to the Western media, since they focus on the populated areas. In late May, for example, the BiH launched a major offensive in northeast BosniaHerzegovina in an attempt to seize a transmitter tower on a high mountain. Apparently, major BiH attacks and BSA counterattacks have been taking place ever since. According to recent reports, the Muslims are still in possession of the key terrain. In recent fighting on an extended front in the neighborhood of Tuzla, more than 1,300 rounds of heavy artillery and mortar fire were exchanged, as recorded by U.N. military observers. The BiH seemed to be on the offensive and appeared to be doing quite well. On June 8, 1994, a "truce" was signed, and the fighting slowed down temporarily. Unfortunately, by early July, the cease-fire was no longer apparent. Contrasts The region's complex state of affairs can be illustrated by the contrasts one encounters while traveling in the cities and in the countryside. The chief of security's activities require a great deal of traveling, and most of the time U.N. personnel have freedom of movement. Zagreb, in Croatia, could be any peaceful southern European city - signs of war are invisible. Sarajevo, on the other hand, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, is still somewhat under siege, with confrontation lines dividing it in a confusing manner. Entire residential areas around the airport have been destroyed and abandoned. In the modern sector of Sarajevo, skyscrapers have been so pounded upon by artillery and tank fire that they seem to have melted in on themselves. Although the situation in Sarajevo is quiet now, which means that none of the factions is launching a major attack, stray mortar, artillery and small-arms fire are an accepted norm. In one incident, a random 120mm mortar round hit a marketplace, killing 60 people and wounding more than 200. The marketplace was small and tucked between tall buildings. The fact that only one mortar round was fired and hit such a small area was a tragic act of fate, not good gunnery. I recently traveled to the beautiful city of Split, about 200 miles southwest of Zagreb on the Adriatic coast. Split serves as the major logistics entry point for U.N. forces and as the logistics rear area for U.N. forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The terrain, the surrounding villages and the sea remind me of Greece: Rugged limestone mountains covered by scrub brush rise sharply from the coast. After leaving Split, I drove through Sectors South and North and stopped at their headquarters in Knin and Topusko to lay the groundwork for establishing a security office in each location. Inland, the country is mountainous and heavily forested. Deep valleys contain towns and small farms - the terrain is somewhat like that of Pennsylvania. There are areas untouched by war, with mountains and countryside as beautiful as any in the world; in other areas, every village for miles has been abandoned and destroyed. Many houses have been intentionally blown up, not by a conquering army, but rather by neighbors who are trying to get even for transgressions committed generations before them - a tragic reminder about tribalism and man's inability to live together. During a visit to Sectors West and East, I drove the breadth of northern Croatia - from Zagreb to the easternmost border, which now rests on the Danube. Northern Croatia is essentially a fertile plain with occasional minor mountain masses. It is beautiful and productive and could be anywhere in Ohio, Illinois or Missouri. Again, the contrast was between the Serbian sectors, which are economically austere, and the Croatian sectors, which are bustling with activity. It is a shock to drive for miles through peaceful villages and then suddenly encounter miles of destruction, or to find destroyed villages located in perfectly peaceful settings. Within some villages, only one block may have been destroyed, or within a block, one house may have been shot to hell, while the houses on either side may not have a single scar. While in Sector East, I had occasion to visit the city of Vukovar. Before the war between Serbia and Croatia, which actually started in Sector East, Vukovar was a major city. As the Yugoslavian Army withdrew from Croatia, it supported the local Serbian militia in seizing Vukovar. There was an extended siege, and the city was nearly destroyed. According to the Croats, it was razed. In reality, the city is badly damaged, perhaps a bit worse than Sarajevo, and the Croats still find the destruction almost unbearable. There are thousands of Croats missing from the Vukovar region. Before the conflict began, the population was about 60 percent Croatian and 40 percent Serbian. Current data reflect that the percentages have at least reversed, and the Serb population may now be as high as 80 percent. A brick wall built in memory of Vukovar rings the UNPROFOR headquarters in Zagreb. The wall is 13 bricks high and more than 300 yards long; each brick carries the name of one of the missing or dead from the region. Croats light candles and lay flowers daily at the wall in memory of the lost. The site on which the wall was constructed generates a neat piece of propaganda: It naturally shifts the people's frustrations to the U.N. A more appropriate site for the wall might have been the Croatian parliament. Clearly, the problems in this region can only be solved through the efforts of the conflict's participants. The U.N. is not responsible for the prosecution or the cause of this war, and it cannot take sides. Needs Despite their neutrality, U.N. peacekeeping forces do suffer casualties. Their principal threat, besides being shot at by the opposing sides, is mines. Most casualties occur when a vehicle drives into an unmarked or newly emplaced minefield. Mines are not yet being used against the U.N. to interrupt supply lines, as in Somalia. However, should peace come to the area, the mines will present a major problem, and determining where all the mine fields are will be difficult. There is a need here for a wide-area, remote minedetection means to help locate mines and to confirm the extent of mined areas. Most of the sniping at U.N. forces usually comes from positions along the front lines. Snipers here are not firing from crowds, but into crowds. The best deterrent is rapid response - the British do that well - but an antisniping system would be invaluable. Of course, body and vehicle armor is in great demand. In fact, the U.N. is installing armor kits on all of its civilian field vehicles. An antimortar system would also be invaluable, not only to detect and engage weapons precisely, but also to aid in the enforcement of cease-fire agreements. The system would provide an immediate means of identifying which side was responsible for a cease-fire violation. An instant voice translator would also be useful to the U.N. forces, which now include Jordanian, Egyptian, Nigerian, French, British, Danish, Swedish, Argentine and Spanish soldiers. Such an impressive array of forces is a coalition advocate's dream come true. In June, my deputy and I traveled to Austria. We drove north through Slovenia to Kibnetz, just across the Austrian border. The economies and appearances of the towns and villages provide a striking contrast. Austria is neat, bright and booming. As one drives south, it is like turning down a dimmer switch. Slovenia appears to be progressing, but is "dimmer" than Austria. And, of course, Croatia is yet darker. Bosnia-Herzegovina is in a state of economic suspension - there is no economy. None of this has to do with the potential of the people or of the land, but only the war. Political instability does not attract capital. If a peace agreement could be reached, perhaps the country would boom. Impressions As one enters this troubled environment, initial impressions nearly overwhelm the senses. A person's observations are only one perception of reality based on a brief snapshot in time, and anyone would have to be very arrogant to believe that such impressions provide real insight. My experiences have provided no blinding flashes of new wisdom. As each day goes by, my view of the U.N. and of the conflict shifts. The U.N. is a tremendously important human experiment. It has not yet matured - its organization has a long way to go before it is as effective and as professional as it should be - but its concept is not flawed. U.N. intervention gives warring parties an excuse not to fight, and while it may not solve the problem, it slows down the killing. The U.N. or its successor is really our world's only alternative to domination of the weak by the powerful, to the rule of force of arms. Personally, I feel that my experience here is not a waste. "May we live in interesting times," someone said. I think I am. --- Mercer M. Dorsey was severely wounded in July 1994, shortly after writing this article. While on duty with the UNPROFOR, he was flying in an aircraft that was hit by ground fire. He is recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. - Editor) --- Mercer M. Dorsey Jr. retired from the Army in January 1994 as a Special Forces colonel and arrived in Zagreb, Croatia, in April 1994 to serve as chief of security for the U.N. Protection Forces, Former Republics of Yugoslavia. His last Army assignment was deputy commandant of the JFK Special Warfare Center and School. His other special-operations assignments included service at the Special Forces detachment, company and battalion levels and service as chief of staff for the U.S. Army Special Operations Command. His more than 30 years of military service included two tours in Vietnam, participation in Operation Desert Storm and service in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1958-1961. Dorsey holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona and a master's degree from Clark University in Worcester, Mass.