=========================================================== TODAY'S ISSUES==> TOPIC: MILITARY & ARMS Ref: C3DQ2405 Date: 03/09/95 From: STEVE SCHULTZ (Leader) Time: 09:40pm \/To: ALL (Read 8 times) Subj: "AGUSTA AFFAIR" BROADENS LT GEN Jacques Lefebvre, Royal Belgian Air Force, was found dead in a hotel room in Brussels yesterday, a day after he was implicated in what has become known as the "Agusta Affair". Brussels police said they are handling the death as an appearant suicide. A former Agusta representative has claimed that Lefebvre was involved in the incident when he was Air Force Chief of Staff. The incident revolves around the allegations that Belgian politicians accepted $1.5 million in bribes in 1988 from Agusta S.p.A. for awarding Agusta a $330 million contract. The Royal Belgian Army bought 28 A 109HAs and 18 A 109HOs for the 17th and 18th Antitank Battalions based in Bierset, Belgium. Three members of the ruling socialist party have been detained. The current N.A.T.O. Secretary General, Willing Claes, has not been charged and denies involvement. Claes was he Belgian Economics Minister at the time of the sale, and had the authority to approve the contract. (A.P./N.Y.T.) ================================================================= === TODAY'S ISSUES==> TOPIC: MILITARY & ARMS Ref: C3DQ3432 Date: 03/09/95 From: STEVE SCHULTZ (Leader) Time: 09:57pm \/To: ALL (Read 6 times) Subj: BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA UPDATE Earlier this year, C.I.A. completed a report on atrocities committed in Bosnia using aerial photography and "an enormous ammount of precice technical analysis." Classifed at what one official said was "an obscene level," the report concludes that 90% of the acts of "ethnic cleansing" were carried out by the Serbs, and that Serb leaders almost certainly played a role. The report states that while the Serbs were not the only ones committing such acts, they were the only party doing so in a systematic attempt to eliminate ethnic groups. It has reportedly been submitted to the DoD, the State Department, and the N.S.C. The report says that no conclusive evidence was found of direct involvement of Serbian leaders in the planning and carrying out of "ethnic cleansing" on a large scale, but that "the systematic nature...strongly suggests that Pale and Belgrade exercised a carefully veiled role in the purposeful destruction and dispersal of non-Serb populations." The report also contains specific evidence, such as instructions and admissions, that some Bosnian Serb leaders - including Radovan Karadzic - knew of the concentration camps in operation. The report also sates that Bosnian Muslims and Croats committed atrocities as well but that these actions "lack the intensity, sustained orchestration and scale of what the Bosnian Serbs did." The U.N. cut off all emergency relief food supplies to rebel Serbs in Croatia yesterday, to press them to open new access routes to nearby Bihac that avoid area controlled by Fikret Abdic. Some 70,000 people are affected. Also, Bosnian Serbs, appearantly worried about the implications of the U.N. withdrawl from Croatia, have demanded increased food supplies by March 15 and have threatened to blockade peacekeepers in eastern Bosnia if it is not delivered. (Roger Cohen and Alan Cowell/N.Y.T.) ================================================================= ==== Milwaukee Journal, Editorial, 12 Mar 95 SETTLING WITH SERBS STILL URGENT A new report on atrocities in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency and made available to The New York Times, is a valuable addition to the historical record of this terrible conflict. But at least two mistaken conclusions about the report need to be avoided. The CIA document, described as the most cormprehensive US assessment of war crimes in Bosnia, made two grave and important assertions: At least 90% of the atrocities in the war have been carried out by Serb nationalists, and Serb leaders almost certainly played a role in the war crimes. These findings are appalling, but they are neither new nor surprising. Similar conclusions about the "ethnic cleansing" of Bosnian Muslims and Croats by Serb militias have been reached by journalists, human-rights activists and other investigators. Still, the report is a useful and authoritative addition to the record becauyse it was prepared by the CIA on the basis of the enormous information-gathering resources available to it, including aerial photography. Because it was prepared by a US government agency, it is bound to have an impact on Clinton administration policy on this issue. It will also help demolish the insulting and preposterous distortion that the conflict in Bosnia is a civil war rather than a campaign of aggression and that all sides have been more-or-less equally guilty of human-rights violations. This misinformation has been propagated mainly by European leaders; but it has also been put forth on occasion by US officials, including Secretary of State Warren Christopher. The CIA report showed that while Muwslims and Croats have engaged in despicable acts, their actions "lack the intensity, sustained orchestration and scale of what the Bosnian Serbs did." Disturbing as it is, the CIA report does not justify pessimism about the prospects of negotiations with Sobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic and other Serb leaders who have been implicated in the atrocities. The fact that these men have blood on their hands doesn't mean they won't negotiate an end to the conflict if they can be persuaded that such negotiations are in their interest. Neither does the report justify a refusal to negotiate with Serb leaders. The very fact that they have been implicated in war crimes makes it all the more important to negotiate with them, so that the ethnic cleansing they have promoted can, at last, be ended. It is far from certain that negotiations will end the fighting in the Balkans. In fact, the possibility that United Nations peacekeepers will be withdrawn from Croatia threatens a widening, of the warfare. But the suffering in this conflict, documented in the CIA report, makes the need to try for a negotiated solution even more urgent. ================================================================= ===== Milwaukee Journal, 12 Mar 95 Washington D.C. - Western allies have struck a tentative treaty with Croatia that would allow a sharply reduced contingent of UN peacekeepers to remain in the country, senior administration officials said Saturday. Croatian President Franjo Tudjman had threatened to deny the 12,000 troops an extension or their mandate when it expired on March 31. US and European officials had worried that a pullout would require the help of tens of thousands of NATO troops, paralyze peacekeeping in neighboring Bosnia and cause the war to spread to other former Yugoslav republics. In return for dropping his threat, Tudjman has won a promise that the current UN contingent will be replaced by a force of 5,000 to 6,000 soldiers, of whom about 10% will guard border crossings into Bosnia and Serbia. The officials said they hoped that Tudjman would announce his decision on Sunday at a meeting with Vice President Al Gore in Copenhagen, where they are attending a UN conference on social development. But they acknowledged that the agreement could still collapse over details. "It's fair to say Tudjman will announce on Sunday that the peacekeepers can stay, but in dealing with the Balkans you always worry that thin a senior American diplomat said. IN PLACE SINCE '92 UN peacekeepers were placed between Croat government forces and rebel Serbs in Croatia in early 1992, after a devastating six-month war in which 10,000 people were killed. Tudjman has complained that the peacekeepers have shirked their mandate to disarm the secessionist Serbs and are in effect consolidating the Serbs' control over 30% of his country. But the United States and several European nations have warned Tudjman that his call to expel the 12,000 peacekeepers could not only set off a new war in Croatia but also worsen the conflict in Bosnia. Under the tentative deal, which has been pushed by the United States and Germany, most of the remaining UN troops would remain along a 1,000-mile ceasefire line that separates Croat troops and Serbs in Croatia. But bowing to demands from Tudjinan, the plan envisions stationing more than 500 peakeepers at two dozen border crossings along the Sava and Danube Rivers that connect Croatia with Serbia and Bosnia. "For Tudjman this plan is important because it is a departure from the status quo and ends the creeping Cyprus-ization of his country," said a senior American official, in a reference to the Mediterranean island nation the has been divided for decades between Turkish and Greek sides. ====================================================================== The Economist, 11 March 95 MAKING RULES FOR WAR The world tries again The United Nations knows where the bodies are buried. The UN war-crimes tribunal at The Hague-the first big international effort to pass judgment on man's savagery to man since the Nuremberg trial in 1945-46-has records of some 150 mass graves in ex-Yugoslavia, each holding between five and 350 corpses. For good measure, it knows of 900 prison camps in the region, and about 90 murderous paramilitary groups. It has 65,000 pages of documents, plus 300 hours of videotape, all computerised on CD-ROM. In mid-February it at last took the logical next step, by indicting 21 Serbs for what happened in a camp at a place called Omarska; the 21 include the camp's commandant, accused of genocide. The Hague tribunal's problem is not lack of information. It is lack of political support. Consider one of its best pieces of evidence: one of those mass graves. In 1991, the UN reckons, the Yugoslav National Army and Serb irregulars shot about 200 Croats from Vukovar (a Croatian town that had fallen to Serb forces), and buried them in a field at Ovcara. Such killings cannot easily be hidden from forensic pathologists -- if they can dig. They cannot. They have tried. In October 1993, a group Of UN human-rights experts arrived in the Serb-controlled Krajina region of Croatia. The team was led by forensic experts from an Organisation called Physicians for Human Rights, with about 50 Dutch army volunteers. The team had written permission to dig from the self-styled authorities of the "Serb Republic of Krajina" in Knin; they were housed in a former UN peacekeepers'barracks (which happened to back on to a training ground for Arkan's Tigers, one of the most notorious Serb death squads); they even managed to clear the ground at the Ovcara site. So far, so good. But then they met the local Serb general. Beneath a portrait of Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia's president, the general suddenly withdrew permission to dig. Furious but powerless, the team had to leave. The grave is still undisturbed. That, in a nutshell, is the pattern for the efforts to set up a Balkan war-crimes tribunal: shocked outsiders, seeking justice and needing to be sure what has happened; self-protecting locals, anxious to keep their secrets. Still, the Hague tribunal plods on. The UN is setting up a second tribunal, with the same head prosecutor and appellate bench, for Rwanda. The Americans want to investigate the possibility of a third tribunal, for Iraq. one is a fluke; two a coincidence; three would be an institution. Will it happen? In principle, the idea is splendid. After a particularly atrocious slaughter, an international tribunal finds out the facts and impartially pins the blame on the individuals responsible, not vaguely on whole nations. No long-lasting reconciliation between ex-enemies, after all, can come about without a proper accounting for war crimes; peace is built upon truth. Such a process re-establishes confidence in the rule of law. It should also deter future killers. But only if it works. So far, the record is not encouraging. The Balkan tribunal's successes, such as they are, have been achieved by sturdy individuals in the face of fitful interest (America), foot- dragging (Britain, France, Russia) or outright obstruction (the accused parties). Supporters of a Rwanda tribunal, noting the experience of the Balkan one, are nervous. If such tribunals are to become a part of the international landscape, governments must provide something better than their current lip-service. WILL IT BE LEIPZIG OR NUREMBERG? The first modern experiment with a warcrimes tribunal, in Leipzig in 1921, was a debacle. After the first world war, the treaty of Versailles included four articles on the punishment of German war criminals, including Kaiser Wilhelm II. "Hang the kaiser!", people shouted. But more sober voices counselled caution. It would be wrong, they (correctly) said, to let the search for impartial justice come to look like the victors' revenge. And it would be a pity if the passions aroused by a trial upset Germany's chances of making a calm post-war transition to democracy. In the end trials were held, in Leipzig; but, of 901 cases, 888 were either summarily dismissed or resulted in acquittal. The kaiser, unhanged, died in exile in Holland. What lessons were to be learned? First, a war-crimes trial can have undesirable side-effects. Second, therefore, if a trial is to get off the ground, a few great powers must seriously decide that it is worthwhile. That happened a world war later. The idea of a war-crimes tribunal had not been discredited by Leipzig. In 1943, in the middle of the second world war, the allied powers fighting Germany, Italy and Japan set up a commission to investigate their enemies' crimes. It had a tiny staff, little money and no investigators. It spent its time arguing about the law, not chasing war criminals. Even so, the 1942 decision foreshadowed the post-war trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo. Those tribunals, unlike the present Balkan one, had great power. Germany and Japan were shattered and occupied; the allies could do whatever they wished. And these courts already had their accused men in custody. The Nuremberg one -- with over 100 prosecutors and a staff of 2,000 -- went right to the top of the German hierarchy. No fewer than 22 top Nazis, including Hermann Goering, Julius Streicher, Rudolf Hess, Hans Frank and Joachim von Ribbentrop, stood trial. Three defendants were acquitted; 12 were sentenced to hang. The Nuremberg trial sought to lay down several principles. One of them -- that aggression is a crime -- has not endured: the Hague tribunal looks at crimes committed in war, not at the act of starting a war. Two other notions emerging from Nuremberg have lasted better. Most people now accept that to already existing offences (such as shooting military prisoners) there should be added the concept of crimes against humanity, the mass murder of civilians. The Nuremberg trial also ruled that it was no excuse to plead "I was following orders." Although the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials were criticised by some as winners-versus-losers justice, they seemed to have started something new. But then Realpolitik, in the shape of the cold war, intervened. In a world divided into communist and non-communist camps no bloodiness -- not even the staggering crimes of the Khmers Rouges, shielded as they were by China's veto in the UN Security Council -- could be brought to globally accepted justice. ONAMERICA'S URGING Now a new attempt is being made in The Hague. The Balkan tribunal is no Nuremberg. The wars of ex-Yugoslavia rage on; atrocities are still being committed; those who commit them are mostly beyond the tribunal's present reach. And the demand for justice is less than full-throated. Only the United States has given even moderately consistent support to the Hague operation. Other countries have argued sotto voce that the pursuit of justice might clash with the desire to negotiate an end to the war. It is tricky, they say, to bargain with one hand and indict with the other. Britain, report American diplomats and some of the tribunal's people, has been particularly sticky. The tribunal, in fact, has had only one powerful friend, the United States. That is a mixed blessing, given that the Americans are increasingly critical of much of the UN's otherwork (and are about $600m behind in their UN dues). It is no surprise that the tribunal's creation, first mooted in 1992, has been a long series of near-death experiences. "You see all sorts of things that are clearly designed to make the tribunal not get off the ground," says Cherif Bassiouni, a law professor in Chicago and the American member of the "commission of experts", the body set up by the UN to compile evidence for the tribunal. Mr Bassiouni blames Britain and other European countries for interfering with the tribunal, often through the UN bureaucracy. Some of the resistance has been overt, as when UN officials told the commission not to pursue Mr Milosevic or Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs. At other times it was more subtle, as when the UN'S office of legal affairs held up the commission's funding. In that case Mr Bassiouni, indignant, arranged for the money himself: $1.4m from the Soros and MacArthur foundations, plus voluntary donations from governments. But not a penny came from France, Britain or Russia, and only $500,000 from America. Most countries have been slow to open their military and intelligence files to the tribunal or its commission of experts. In September 1993 the commission's chairman resigned, complaining of lackof support from France and Britain. And the commission was eventually shut down by the UN bureaucracy three months before it was due to finish its work. The next step, the selection of a chief prosecutor, was hugely important. A weak prosecutor would mean failure; a forceful one might spell success. Half a century ago the United States showed its commitment to the Nuremberg process by sending a Supreme Court justice, Robert Jackson, to be chief counsel there. This time, too, the Americans favoured a forceful prosecution. The Europeans preferred milder candidates, men who would not disrupt the peacemakers' search for a magic solution to the war. The result was a 14-month struggle of Byzantine silliness, the UN at its worst. In August 1993 the Security Council was torn between two candidates: John Duncan Lowe, a Scottish law officer, and Mr Bassiouni. Russia, France and Britain backed Mr Lowe; the United States and the non-aligned countries supported Mr Bassiouni. The Bosnian government hoped the decision would not go to a tiptoeing sort of prosecutor. The UN's secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, tried to force the issue by formally nominating Mr Bassiouni. Britain squawked. America gave up. Both candidates were tossed out. The embarrassing led to the ridiculous. Mr Boutros-Ghali suggested the attorney-general of India. That of course was shot down by Pakistan. The Russians made it clear they would not tolerate a prosecutor from a NATO country: out went an American candidate and a Canadian one. In October 1993, heartily sick of the whole thing, the Security Council settled on Ramon Escovar Salom, the attorney- general of Venezuela. A man of "all talk and little action", complained the Organisation called Human Rights Watch-Helsinki. No matter: last February, Mr Escovar dropped the job to become Venezuela's interior minister. THE MAN NOT THE MONEY Things looked grim; but at this point came a stroke of luck. Enter Richard Goldstone, a South African judge who had run a commission on political violence in the most delicate stages of his country's transition to democracy, and had vigorously attacked the South African police force's dirty tricks. No one dared play politics with such a man. Last July Mr Goldstone breezed through the Security Council, 15-0. Then came a budget fight. Mr Goldstone reckons that investigation is his vital task, and that he needs twice the staff of 85 people he has at the moment. The UN at first offered about $32m for 1994 and 1995, ofwhich only $562,300 was for investigations. The United States has given $3m, plus 22 investigators and prosecutors; Britain $30,500 and one staff man (and $250,000 more is promised); France nothing. Incredibly, Mr Goldstone has no budget f6r 1995. After frantic negotiations last December, he got $7m from the UN for three months of work; the UN is now hearing his request again. But even if it had a big enough staff and enough money, the search for Balkan war criminals has one built-in weakness. You cannot try people you have not arrested. Of course, to indict people for war crimes, even if they never get brought to trial, does have some deterrent effect. Once indicted, the accused cannot travel outside his home country without the risk of being picked up by Interpol. That may not worry minor thugs, but it is a problem for the higher-ups. And the responsibility for war crimes can reach very high up the political ladder. A man cannot hope to be a world-class politician, Mr Goldstone pointedly notes, if he is stuck inside a single country. A trial would be better, of course. But the tribunal dealing with the wars of ex-Yugoslavia, unlike a national court, cannot compel suspects to appear in front of it. They are unlikely to go there voluntarily. "I will go to a war- crimes tribunal when Americans are tried for Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Cambodia, Panama!", says Zeljko Raznjatovic, better known as Arkan, the leader of those ferocious Tigers. The government of Serbia says that the Hague tribunal is biased. It had already blocked one investigation by the UN, and another by the Conference on (now Organisation for) Security and Co-operation in Europe. Mr Goldstone has been allowed into Belgrade to discuss what he wants to do (while there, he refused to meet Mr Milosevic, a potential suspect). Serbia has organised a farcical show-trial of a drunken thug in Sabac, west of Belgrade. But that is all. Mr Goldstone says nobody on the political or military ladder is immune, even at the top. But he is starting near the ladder's bottom. All of the 22 people so far indicted (one last November, 21 in February) were Serb camp commanders or guards. Only one of them is in custody: Dusan Tadic, a Serb held in Germany, who is due to be extradited to The Hague. Mr Tadic, who survivors say worked in the Omarska camp, is charged with murder, rape and making his prisoners mutilate each other. The other 21 suspects are still at large, presumably in Serb-held territory. Mr Karadzic has said he will not turn them over. Those who do not co-operate with the Hague tribunal (which chiefly means the Serbs) are in theory subject to UN sanctions. But the idea of imposing sanctions arouses no enthusiasm in most of the west's capitals. Anyway, it is argued, the world's attempt to negotiate a peace between the Serbs and their enemies may involve an amnesty for war-crimes suspects-- or trials by the suspects' own national courts, which might amount to the same thing. Madeleine Albright, America's UN representative, says the United States is against an amnesty, but State Department officials admit that this could change. Britain is studiously non-committal. And Mr Goldstone? He holds himself above politics, and says the Security Council will have to shut the tribunal down to stop his work. AND NOW RWANDA? WELL, MAYBE The other scene of current horror the war-crimes specialists are looking at is Rwanda. The UN is in the process of setting up a second tribunal to deal with the slaughter that happened there, with the same Mr Goldstone as its chief prosecutor. In one way, Rwanda is easier than ex-Yugoslavia. The killing has ended and the Tutsis, its chief victims, have won the war. So, though plenty of the people suspected of taking part in the attempted genocide are now refugees in Zaire and elsewhere, some are in detention, available for trial. Even so, supporters of a Rwanda tribunal look at the ex-Yugoslavia mess and cringe. Alain Destexhe, the secretary-general of Medecins san Frontieres, an aid group that worked in Rwanda, has more confidence in justice from national courts. Last August Faustin Twagiramungu, the new Rwandan prime minister, called for Rwandan trials rather than waiting "more than three years for the United Nations to organise an international tribunal". But John Shattuck, America's assistant secretary of state for human rights, pushed for an international tribunal too, and Rwanda relented. One argument for an international tribunal for Rwanda is that Rwanda's own judicial system has been destroyed. It is reckoned that fewer than 15% of those under detention in Rwanda have even appeared before a court. A better argument is that the attempt to set up an international law against war crimes requires the relative impartiality of an international court. The winner of a war must not set himself up as judge over the loser. There have been the predictable headaches. Part of the new Rwandan government's objection to an international tribunal was that no UN court would use the death penalty. Mr Goldstone's brief now is to secure the prosecution of 50-100 people accused of leading the genocide, who if found guilty will merely go to jail (whereas lower- level killers could face death in Rwanda's own courts). He will cover only crimes committed in 1994, even though some reckon the genocide was planned as early as 1992. France is uneasy because it was a notable backer of the Rwandan government of that time. Still, there should be fewer international complications over Rwanda than there were over the Balkan killings. THE START OF SOMETHING BIGGER This bid to outlaw some of war's worst horrors faces great obstacles. Yet it trudges on. A dogged prosecutor is patiently and quietly at work. In Rwanda, at least, a lot of suspects are available for trial. So what are the lessons of the experiment's rough start? First, the case for an international trial must capture the imagination of at least one great power -- in this case America (or, more precisely, Mr Shattuck and Ms Albright) -- otherwise the project is doomed. Second, the nervous and the reluctant can be nudged in the right direction by energetic supporters of the idea. That role has been played in this instance by the Soros and MacArthur foundations, Physicians for Human Rights, Medecins sans Frontieres, Human Rights Watch and Messrs Bassiouni and Goldstone. They have done admirable work, and they have got results. And, lastly, take comfort: the process may become easier. Every effort at justice in this field, from Leipzig to The Hague, builds on the previous ones, as the world gradually becomes accustomed to the thought that there should be a court to deal with those who use the machinery of state for mass murder. The idea is taking root. If a few of the world's main countries show courage and creativity, the rest may follow. ====================================================================== ========================= FOREIGN POLICY ========================= ========================= SPRING 1995 ========================= ====================================================================== AMERICA'S LEADERSHIP, AMERICA'S OPPORTUNITY By Warren Christopher U.S. Secretary of State (excerpt of portion pertaining to the Balkans) The NATO alliance will remain the anchor of American engagement in Europe and the linchpin of transatlantic security. That is why we must keep it strong, vital, and relevant. For the United States and its allies, NATO has always been far more than a transitory response to a temporary threat. It has been a guarantor of European democracy and a force for European stability. That is why its mission endures even though the Cold War has receded into the past. And that is why its benefits are so clear to Europe's new democracies. The North Atlantic Treaty has always looked to the addition of members who shared the alliance's purposes and its values, as well as its commitment to respect borders and international law, and who could add to its strength; indeed, NATO has expanded three times since its creation. In January 1994, President Clinton made it plain that "the question is no longer whether NATO Will take on new members, but when and how." Under American leadership last December, the alliance began a steady, deliberate, and transparent process that will lead to NATO expansion. During 1995, we look forward to coming to agreement with our allies on the process and objectives, and we will share our conclusions with the members of the Partnership for Peace. When NATO is ready to turn to the question of candidates and timing, each nation will be considered individually. No non-member of NATO will have a veto. Expanding the alliance will promote our interests by reducing the chance of conflict in Europe's eastern half -- where two world wars and the Cold War began. It will help ensure that no part of Europe will revert to a zone of great power competition or a sphere of influence. It will build confidence and give new democracies a powerful incentive to consolidate their reforms. And each potential member will be judged by present-day realities, not by accidents of history, according to the strength of its democratic institutions and its capacity to contribute to the goals of the alliance. As the president has made clear, the United States has a major stake in ensuring that Russia is engaged as a vital participant in European security affairs. We are committed to a growing, healthy NATO-Russia relationship and we want to see Russia closely involved in the Partnership for Peace. Recognizing that no single institution can meet every challenge to peace and stability in Europe, we have begun a process that will strengthen the OSCE and enhance its conflict prevention and peacekeeping capabilities. The quest for stability in Europe cannot rely on security institutions alone. Economic integration is critical as well. Central and East European countries must become full members of the world's trading system through accession to the WTo and cooperation with the OECD. We have made clear our hope that the association agreements the EU has signed or will sign with Central European states will, before long, lead to full EU membership. Together with our West European partners, we must continue to lower trade barriers that limit exports by the new democracies. As we work with our allies to shape Europe's future, we must also confront the demons of its past. The wounds of the Cold War are nowhere more tragically clear than in the shattered empire and splintered states of the former Yugoslavia. We are all frustrated by the intractability of the Bosnian war. But unilaterally lifting the U.N. arms embargo would be dangerously shortsighted. We have always believed that the arms embargo is wrong and counterproductive, but going it alone would be worse. It would Americanize the conflict and lead others to abandon the sanctions on Serbia. It would cause a serious rift between the United States and our NATO allies, and a confrontation with Russia. It would undermine the authority of all U.N. Security Council resolutions, including sanctions on Iraq and Libya. And on the ground, it would help no one it was designed to assist -- not the Bosnian government, not the innocent civilians, not the cause of peace. The president and I are determined to continue pursuing an active diplomatic track with our Contact Group partners to contain and resolve the murderous war in Bosnia and to preserve Bosnia as a sovereign state within its internationally recognized borders. Only a negotiated solution has any chance of lasting. And the war in Bosnia makes ever more clear the need to adapt Europe's security institutions to deal with ethnic conflicts and to bring stability to Central Europe. --------------------------------------------------------------------- RELEARNING INTERVENTION By Charles William Maynes Editor of Foreign Policy (excerpt of portion pertaining to the Balkans) In traditional interstate conflicts, the number of rational and accountable leaders on each side can be identified and is limited. A handful of officials at the top are able to give orders and have them obeyed. These officials order troops to fight and they order troops to lay down their arms. Usually, the troops follow orders. That fact dramatically influences the way that the international community orchestrates its efforts at preventive diplomacy or humanitarian aid. The United Nations, regional organizations, and neighboring states attempt to pressure the small circle of accountable leaders to persuade them to follow a conciliatory policy. Those efforts may or may not be successful, but no one doubts where pressure must be directed. That is what Washington has becn trying to do in North Korea. But who are the real leaders in Bosnia or Haiti or Somalia? Can the Bosnian Serb leaders successfully order their troops to cease fighting? Can the Bosnian government command Muslim soldiers to stop struggling to return to homes from which they were driven by force? In fact, in many intrastate conflicts, popular passions make elite compromise difficult. Conflicts become less a matter of calculation at the top than of mass emotion at the bottom. Leaders may rise up to exploit those emotions, but the kind of leadership they display resembles a man running ahead of a stampeding herd who maintains that he is in charge. He may be able to lead the herd to move to the right or the left but he cannot halt it. If he turns around to stop it, he will be trampled. In intrastate conflicts, religious or ethnic hatred is often so strong that dialogue becomes virtually impossible. The opposing side is unfortunately viewed as almost subhuman. Extermination of the heretic, expulsion of the outsider is declared to be God's work or a patriot's duty. It is suggested that if the other side prevails, one's own side may well disappear. Only one way of life is likely to survive. In such situations, all individuals, old or young, male or female, are identified as combatants. The Indians in the American West knew that the arrival of an unarmed farm family was in effect a declaration of war. It was the advance troop of a larger army to follow that would make the traditional Indian way of life impossible. Several centuries ago in Ireland, the Catholic inhabitants may well have viewed Protestant settlers as an even greater threat to the welfare and security of the Catholic Irish than the British soldiers who protected those settlers. The settlers represented another way of life that would suppress or even eradicate their own. The struggle was therefore to the knife. Modern ethnic and religious conflicts regrettably have not lost this savage character. Palestinians and Israeli settlers on the West Bank or various ethnic groups in Bosnia struggle like the ancient Irish and for many of the same reasons. Each outsider, no matter how young or infirm, is seen as a mortal danger. That is the rationale for 'ethnic cleansing," which has persisted throughout history. Another characteristic of internal conflicts is that each side seeks total victory. Surrender is almost always unconditional. Victory for one means oblivion for the other. There is therefore a desperate quality to civil wars that makes them particularly hard to control once they start. In such struggles, when accountable actors do step forward and adopt unpopular positions, they often find that their own lives are in danger. The United States suffered terribly from its civil war, but it did have the good fortune that when one side prevailed, the losing army was commanded by a leader who could order his troops to cease fighting and gain compliance. Robert E. Lee deserves his reputation for greatness because he told his generals it was time to stop fighting and restore the nation. In many other civil wars such calming advice is not given or is not accepted. The leaders of the Irish uprising during and after World War I knew it was risky to seek a compromise with the British. Michael Collins, the Irish guerrilla leader, presciently stated that he had signed his own death warrant when he agreed to leave the six most northern counties under British control. He was assassinated eight months later. The Palestinians over the years have eliminated leaders who threatened to compromise with Israel. Today, Yasir Arafat may be in danger. Afghanistan, Somalia, and Bosnia suffer in part because it is difficult to identify accountable actors. There are too many who claim to be accountable but cannot deliver their people. Those who truly try may be pushed aside or eliminated. It is instructive that in Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic is not the most extreme proponent of Serbian nationalism. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- REASSEMBLING YUGOSLAVIA By Flora Lewis Columnist, New York Times Syndicate (excerpt of portion pertaining to the Balkans) After all, the only solution to Yugoslavia is Yugoslavia. That is certainly not everybody's view as the war in Bosnia rumbles on to the end of a third year, the ceasefire in Croatia is being questioned, and the Balkans remain generally unstable. But some have been convinced all along that it was a dreadful, avoidable mistake for the six republics in the former Federation of Yugoslavia to cut all ties, and more are coming to see the restoration of key links, including not only trade and communications but also legal and political ties, as the only basis for a durable peace. The American-brokered agreement between the predominantly Muslim Bosnian government and the Bosnian Croat leaders is the pivotal point for reversing direction and building a new confederal basis to end the war. The accord is not yet firmly founded and institutionalized because continued hostilities with the Bosnian Serbs leave borders and areas of responsibility unsettled. But included in the negotiation was the prospect of special, constitutional-type ties with the Croatian state. That can become part of a settlement only when the Bosnian Serbs accept a plan for a Bosnian federation, and then they surely will insist at the least on confederal provisions with Serbia that are no weaker than those the Bosnian Croats have with Croatia. Such ties would be a strong inducement to the Bosnian Serbs to accept a settlement that would not separate them from the rest of Bosnia. On such a basis, Serbia and Croatia themselves would restore a loose integration that could provide a satisfactory solution to the demands of the Croatian Serbs in Krajina. Montenegro would certainly follow Serbia, and Macedonia, which never really wanted to be left all alone and is having a desperate time facing Greek embargo and hostility, would doubtless be delighted to sign back on with its former partners. Then, mirabile dictu, Yugoslavia would be back on the map again, the same old Yugoslavia -- minus Slovenia -- as be, fore the 1991 breakup, but with rather different, much less constraining intemal relations among the constituent republics. Such a loose confederation is exactly what the Slovenes and Croats had been demanding for several years before they finally gave up in frustration at Serbian intransigence and proclaimed independence in June 1991. It is what Europe and the United States should have insisted upon, associating Russia with the mediation much earlier, instead of the futile and hypocritical pledge to support whatever settlement the Yugoslavs accepted among themselves. It was obvious to all that the Yugoslavs, without outside pressure and inducement, were not going to agree on even a peaceable divorce. Indeed, war broke out immediately and conflict has been raging ever since. When the powers decided to recognize independent Slovenia and Croatia in early 1992, the United Nations was able to gain acceptance for a ceasefire on fighting there and dispatch peacekeepers to monitor the lines established between ethnic Serbs in Croatia and the Zagreb- led republic. But that line will not now be accepted as a border by Zagreb, which is growing impatient with the U.N. because its presence consolidates the partition of the state. Peace will require some kind of agreement on the integrity of Croatia with significant constitutional guarantees and autonomy for its ethnic Serbs. Such provisions will be far more feasible within the framework of a loose new Yugoslav confederation than with the establishment of several totally independent successor states. It was the recognition of an independent Croatia that left Bosnia with the choice of remaining in a rump Yugoslavia with Serbia and Montenegro, in effect accepting full Serbian hegemony, or of declaring its own independence in turn. The government of Sarajevo was well aware of the risks, and urged the outside powers not to consecrate the demise of Yugoslavia, to no avail. Indeed, both Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia and Kiro Gligorov of Macedonia openly opposed the breakup of Yugoslavia. So, at foreign urging and with no acceptable visible alternative, Bosnia held a referendum on independence. The Serbs boycotted the vote, the Muslims and Croats voted in favor, independence was declared and recognized, and fighting began. This tragic scenario was foreseen and publicly discussed. What had not been foreseen was the extraordinary ferocity, the cruelty, the wanton and deliberate massacre of civilians launched to redefine the area's demography. "Ethnic cleansing" was introduced to the modern political vocabulary of horrors. It could only be brutal because populations were largely mixed and no amount of creative map-making could have produced a mutually acceptable map of separation. Because of mixed marriages over several generations, many people did not know what allegiance to profess and had to be convinced to choose sides with relentless force. Foreign intervention -- the dispatch of humanitarian aid and the establishment of protected areas -- has now produced a kind of status quo but not peace. Hostilities go on and on since the foreign intervention prevents a military resolution of the conflict. The serial attempts at mediation have all failed, and there is no reason to think that any new mediation rooted in the same assumptions -- that territory must be apportioned to separate people so they can form "self-governments" on distinct ethnic or religious lines -- will work any better. Whatever the allocation of land, it will rest on injustice and there will be resistance. Whatever the rules of division, there will be a search for support from kin and sympathizers on the other side of the new lines. There must be a new approach to the conflict. THE NEW OPPORTUNITY There have been two major changes in circumstances since the war began. One is that Serbia, hurt by the international embargo despite its many leaks, is no longer quite so bellicose and determined to show the world its power. Slobodan Milosevic is still its undisputed leader, but he has had some trouble controlling the wild nationalists and thugs he unleashed. He has less room for maneuver than he had anticipated. While he makes the most of foreign denunciations to mobilize resentful, insulated Serb opinion, his country's isolation has proven a costly burden. This relative moderation of Serbian ambition and aggressiveness may be temporary, to gain a respite and recoup strength; but it is a new factor in the situation and could be reinforced in an attempt at an overall settlement. The second change is ttic fury, hatred, and thirst for revenge that have inevitably built up as the atrocities have continued. It is a nasty little myth that Yugoslavia was an "artificial" state that could not have been expected to hold together without sheer force. The South Slavs had a disparate, eventful history and never had a chance to form a state together until the Austro-Hungarian empire was demolished in the First World War. But Yugoslavia's coming a bit late on the European state scene did not make it a less authentic country than, say, Germany or Italy, which had formed unified states only a few decades earlier. People forget the Catholic and Protestant split in Germany or the very different political characters of southern and northern Italy. "These people have been fighting each other for centuries," a phrase used by President Bill Clinton, is a formula consciously or subconsciously devised by leaders who need an excuse to shrug off the outbreak of a major war in the heart of modern Europe and avoid intervention. It is simply untrue. There is no comparison in the historical record of hostilities, however measured, with the amount of fighting that once went on between French and Germans, or French and English, who have now joined their political fate to the European Union. The one real precedent of terrible bitterness among the South Slavs was in World War II, when the Nazis formed a puppet state in Croatia that rivaled the S.S. for cruelty. Alongside national resistance to the Germans, there was a very niean civil war, but the divide was ideologicat -- communists versus monarchists -- and crossed all religious, ethnic, and territorial lines. A new book by Robert Donia and John Fine, Bosnia and Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed, sets the record straight in great, scholarly detail. It recounts that a "centuries-long tradition of accommodation and mutual coexistence of different religious communities and nationalities" characterized Bosnia until only recently, along with "historical patterns of coalition politics and compromise, coupled with deeply-rooted traditions of cooperation and coexistence in everyday life." The people are of the same stock, but because of Turkish policies during the centuries of occupation, city-dwellers and landowners tended to become Muslim while peasants remained Croat or Serb. There was no real consciousness of distinct ethnic identity until the first provincial peasant rebellion in 1875, a phenomenon of social position, not of nationality. Now it is undoubtedly going to be much harder to recreate a sense of community. How many people would want to return to the homes from which they were "cleansed" by their neighbors is an unanswerable question at this stage. What kind of judicial punishment and retribution for crimes against humanity will be required to preclude bloody waves of private vengeance is difficult to foresee, and it is even more difficult to see how trials and reparations can be carried out under the necessary conditions of compromise that are the only hope for peace. There is not going to be any unconditional surrender. But the hardest part is finding the terms for ending the war. If that can be done, healing the wounds is another kind of enterprise that can develop its own momentum, just as making war did. EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE One of the people who has been arguing from the start for a reconstituted Yugoslavia is Boris Vukobrat, a wealthy Serb businessman who was bom in Croatia, married a Bosnian Muslim, and now lives in Paris. He has established the Peace and Crises Management Foundation, and he works tirelessly to promote the cause among powerful statesmen, intellectuals, and whoever offers support. He has published a small book, based on the work of a committee of international experts, entitled Proposals for a New Commonwealth of the Republics of ex-Yugoslavia. It contains draft declarations on fundamental rights of all citizens and rights and freedoms of ethnic groups; a draft constitution for the constituent regional republics, leaving open whether the commonwealth tinking the republics would be based on a constitution or a treaty; a plan for creating a number of regions (like counties or shires) within the republics not based simply on ethnic criteria; and a document on economic reconstruction emphasizing the need for coordination of monetary and credit policies. Vukobrat is realistic enough to present his proposals as a staged plan for gradual implementation, not as a blueprint. But even offering it for discussion is a step toward filling the vacuum that prevents an end to the war. It provides a vision of what might come next, an incentive to move on from fighting to planning how life will then go on. In June 1994, he attended a conference in Geneva of distinguished intellectuals from all parts of the former Yugoslavia. They issued a statement of the principles on which peace can be established, including democracy, human rights, free communications, and rejection of any border changes by force. Vukobrat's continuing efforts have brought no concrete results as yet, but they have created a core group of people eager to look beyond the battlefield and establish a basis for postwar coexistence and cooperation. These people are not just looking ahead; they are trying to break the impasse that makes peace impossible for lack of a common view of what it should bring. The list of participants was an impressive mixture of some 30 artists, professors, business and community leaders, journalists, and even a Catholic priest. Their recommendations were unanimous. Each participant spoke on his or her own but with the knowledge and encouragement of many others. That kind of thinking is not encouraged by the people who hold power and are conducting the conflict, but it keeps surfacing when the opportunity arises. The New York Times's Roger Cohen reports the "outrage" of Mimo Sahinpasic, a popular Sarajevo radio show host, when the Bosnian minister of culture ordered him to stop playing "aggressor music," that is, songs performed by Serbs. "There are Serbian singers -- like Djordje Balasevic -- whose antiwar songs have done more for Bosnia than 80 percent of our leaders," the show host said. "So I ignored the letter. I'm in Bosnia to fight for what's left of the Yugoslav idea, not to live in a one-party state." Such attempts at attitude control by authorities and resistance to that control are mounting, creating tensions even within the Bosnian governing party. Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic wrote a letter of protest against growing authoritarianism, using as an example of its effect the humiliation he felt as a child because his father wanted to listen to Voice of America but had to make sure the neighbors could not hear because it was forbidden by the communist authorities. In the atmosphere of inflamed emotion, which leaders need to keep their people mobilized and which foes promote with renewed attacks, it is difficult to measure how much support could be won for the idea of a commonwealth. It takes courage to speak out against prevailing storms of passion inside what was Yugoslavia, but people do, in virtually all the republics. Those who do are coming under mounting official pressure. Recently, Milosevic took over Borba, the one remaining independent Belgrade daily. Its staff tried to defy the order, but deprived of money, a distribution system, and regular printers, it was reduced to little more than an underground publication that nonetheless found eager readers when the journalists themselves took to selling it on the streets at three times the usual price. The widely known dissident Mihajlo Mihajlov, who was persecuted in communist days for his democratic views, has written against the danger of accepting ethnic or religious partition as the basis for solving the conflict. "Acceptance of the nationalistic version of self-determination, which in practice is the international community's posture today, comes in the end to an acceptance of genocide," he said. He denounces as a myth the idea that it was the fall of the dictatorship that unleashed ethnic conflict. "In 1987 -- before democratization began -- the press in each of the Yugoslav republics was already becoming much more nationalistic. In all of the republics, the major media were monopolies of the republican authorities (as they continue to be today). As one Yugoslav writer said, 'Before anyone was killed by bullets, they were killed ten times over by words."' Mihajlov points out that what happened in Yugoslavia was not a breakdown of normal relations among people after the communists lost power, it was the replacement of a communist dictatorship by nationalist dictatorships, necessarily rivals. That is a most important part of the development, which was ignored by the many Western observers who scarcely noticed Yugoslavia until the killing began. Yugoslavia faced a dilemma of transformation not so different from that in Russia and the East when communism could no longer serve as the organizing principle of power. And -- this is really the crux of the matter -- to escape transformation to democratic principles and the free market, key leaders shifted to nationalism as an alternative base that would maintain the authoritarian state. It was the refusal to move toward real reform that made nationalism necessary, and that continues to make it dominant. Serbia's Milosevic was the first to grasp the idea of that approach, stirring historic Serb sentiment about the rise of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Even moderate, well-educated people responded to his appeal because they felt Serbs were being pushed out of their venerated heartland and that it had to be stopped. But, of course, skewing the regime inherited from josip Broz Tito to make Serbian nationalism do the job of the discredited Communist party made it impossible to maintain the federation. Milosevic knew that all along, and maneuvered around it, just as Boris Yeltsin knew when he planned to challenge Mikhail Gorbachev's leadership by becoming president of Russia that his success would doom the Soviet Union. If the largest, strongest part of a multinational or multiethnic state is persuaded to make its own specific traditions and ambitions the basis of power, the other parts will also look inward and to their specific past to protect their share of identity. That is what happened to Croatia, where Franjo Tudjman built himself up by more or tess mirroring the Milosevic strategy. (Something similar happened in Slovenia, but its circumstances are different. It is more Alpine than South Slav, and more homogeneous than much of Yugoslavia.) There were people in the federal government who tried valiantly to head off the collision that Milosevic and Tudjman were engineering, but they were neither strong nor charismatic, got little outside support, and in the end were undermined and swept away. Today, after so much blood has flowed with so few positive effects, their voices may carry further. It is nonsense to claim that weak gestures to sustain the federation by then president George Bush and then secretary of state James Baker gave Milosevic the green light to go to war, ostensibly to "save Yugoslavia." On the contrary, Milosevic complained bitterly that the State Department was "anti-Serb." He was out alt atong to blow up the country, create a "greater Serbia," and damn the rest. Naturally, the war has done nothing to promote the shift to democracy and market economy that was the alternative to Yugoslavia's intensifying problems during the 1980s, the alternative that the promotion of rival nationalisms was designed to avoid. Tito teft an intricate system of regional checks in order to prevent the rise of another Yugoslav dictator in his own image. In that sense, he succeeded too well. Since the central authority coutd not dominate, the republics went off in their own directions. White he was alive, Tito could settle frictions and disagreements by the personal force of his own position. His successors could not. Trains had to be stopped at the republic borders to change locomotives because the local officials demanded the right to provide their own. Republics printed the federal currency on their own, without reference to the central bank, bringing hyperinflation and undermining the promising federat currency reform at the end of the decade. At one point, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), asked to help with a stabilization program, found that nobody could answer its question about the total of Yugoslavia's foreign exchange debt. Various republic authorities had borrowed abroad without bothering to tell each other or the center. It took the IMF, on its own initiative, to collect and add up the essential information. The total debt was a staggering $20 billion. Officials in Belgrade, in Zagreb, and in Ljubljana complained in the mid-1980s about the impossibility of making things work in this uncoordinated way. It seemed there were only two obvious ways of dealing with the problem: Either restore a central dictatorship, which would revive the discipline of central planning, or establish a democracy and a free market as an approach to economic and political coherence. Neither one was acceptable to the people in power, and the rest of the people were not allowed to voice their opinions. A Croat who had spent 40 years in exile because of the communist regime and who had returned to serve as a Zagreb diplomat after independence said that in the late 1980s there were more political prisoners in Yugoslavia than in all the East European states of the Soviet bloc combined. Show trials of dissidents and outspoken writers ended in heavy sentences. Even Bosnia, which looked toward democracy after the communists were ousted and independence proclaimed, is turning back to the authoritarianism that Serbia and Croatia never really left. Slavko Santic, a commentator for the struggling independent Sarajevo paper Oslobodenje, told reporter Roger Cohen that the Party of Democratic Action (headed by Izetbegovic) "is on its way to becoming a totalitarian party, just like the Communists were. We have no political opposition to speak of here, police are everywhere, and state jobs increasingly require party membership." Others have also warned that Bosnia is turning into a one-party state. Ethnic and religious fury is needed to sustain cohesion in the absence of democratic pluralism. "Demons must be created, and heroes, to justify senseless suffering," Cohen writes. "The alternative is to look the enemy in the eye and recognize a brother, ethnically indistinguishable and condemned to inhabit the same tand." That is particularly true of Bosnia, where people are so mixed, but it has been true of Yugoslavia in general and it could be true again. The overall issue is a free society, and in that circumstance there is so much that people have in common, so much they need from each other, that there is a real incentive to reconstitute something that could be called Yugoslavia. All of the breakaway republics desperately want to join the European Union because they know they have little chance to develop and prosper on their own, closed to their neighbors. For now, they ignore the obvious reality that they will have to trade, communicate, and let people come and go once the fighting stops. They behave as though they expect to be part of the big European community while denying community with neighbors who once again will be indispensable partners. But pushed, most ardent defenders of separate and complete sovereignty say they will of course have to have economic ties, some kind of common market at the least, and probably more. The basic issue remains borders and the protection of minorities, just as it was when the war began. And the solution has to be Yugoslav-wide, rejecting all border changes imposed by force and guaranteeing the rights of minorities. That is the one way to find a peace that can last and to satisfy moral imperatives that would be mocked by drawing up new lines of partition. As people from several republics point out, all the plans proposed so far by one or another set of representatives of the "international community" boil down to dividing up Bosnia, and they fail because the combatants are not persuaded that accepting a divided peace is better than continuing to fight for their aims. The Vukobrat plan undoubtedly has flaws and is not meant to serve as a definitive solution, but the underlying idea comes closer to a constructive direction than anything in Vance-Owen, Owen-Stoltenberg, Contact Group, or other proposals. There are aspects of the plan that enjoy support from one side or another, though the idea of a new Yugoslavia does not yet resonate on the world scene. For example, a senior Croat official points out that Zagreb would favor the idea of linking Bosnian Serbs in a Bosnian federation that would have special ties with both Croatia and Serbia because it would give a kind of insurance against the possibility of Bosnian Croats being overwhelmed by Muslims who might tend toward fundamentalism in a smaller republic. Already, on occasion, Croats and Serbs in Bosnia have joined in fighting the Muslim-dominated forces, despite the federal agreement. As to the place of the minority Serbs in Croatia, they were at one point offered dual citizenship in Croatia and Serbia if they chose, providing they gave up the demand to change Croatian borders made at the outset of the war when the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army thought it was an irresistible powerhouse that could take what it wanted. Dual citizenship is not the same as being part of a confederal Yugoslavia, but it is a step in that direction. The main argument against looking to Yugoslavia again is the trauma of the war and its atrocities. Branko Salaj, Croatia's ambassador to France, points out that his country would have been quite satisfied with some kind of confederal settlement in the first place. He is an unusually reasonable man who spent 40 years in exile, mostly in Sweden, because he was anticommunist all along. He notes in half- joking irony that Milosevic's nationalist extremism helped democrats in the other republics because their communist leaders realized they had to offer reforms to win public support. But now, proclamations of sovereignty have aroused their own enthusiasm and, perhaps more to the point, have established political leaders who want no limits on the power they have gained. Obviously, it will not be easy to reverse gears and persuade people to try to live alongside each other again. But the prospect would provide hope for the many who are disgusted with war but feel they are offered no honorable or tolerable alternative. A battlefield solution is conceivable if everybody else decides to get out of the way and let the fighters slaughter each other until one side or the other cries uncle. That is what the French accuse the Americans of doing with the proposal to end the embargo on arms for Bosnia, and they are almost certainly right that it would lead to reinforcement with more arms and fighters -- if necessary, from Serbia, and probably from Russia -- and widen the war. In any case, it is a way to make sure that only might matters, that world order comes only out of the barrel of the gun, and that the twentieth century ends with no more sense of humanity and decency than it knew at its worst. Furthermore, it is a way to make sure that the vanquished will seek to turn the tables another day. It is not possible to say at this point whether a confederal Yugoslavia or a Yugoslav Commonweatth will work. Nothing else has so far, and there is not the slightest sign that what has been proposed as yet by outside powers can bring a settlement. One thing that practically all the people directly invotved agree on is that a settlement is not to be found in smatter and smatter fragments, focusing in turn on what to do about Bihac, what to do about Gorazde, what to do about Sarajevo, and so on. It is to be found in moving up the scale, not down, trying to unite interests rather than dividing them into ever more limited pieces. It is true that the United Nations, NATO, Europe, the United States, and the "international community" look terrible in their impotence and indecision in the face of this war. They, too, would have much to gain by helping the people of Yugoslavia find themselves Yugoslav again. =========================================================== TODAY'S ISSUES==> TOPIC: MILITARY & ARMS Ref: C3JN2849 Date: 03/15/95 From: STEVE SCHULTZ (Leader) Time: 07:47pm \/To: ALL (Read 7 times) Subj: BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA UPDATE Nine French Army peacekeepers were killed and four injured yesterday when their truck plunged off a road south of Sarajevo. The vehicle was traveling on Mt. Igman when it went off the road and toppled 120 feet down the mountain. It is the largest number of U.N. peacekeepers killed in any single incident in Bosnia. French Defense Minister Fran‡ois Leotard plans to fly to Sarajevo. Flights into Sarajevo remain suspended after an aircraft carrying U.N. Special Representative Yasushi Akashi was hit by anti-aircraft fire on Sunday. Gunners opened fire around the airport at another aircraft on Monday, which was landing to pick up Indonesian President Suharto. The aircraft was not hit. (A.P./N.Y.T.)