Friday 2 June 1995

NO UN PULL OUT FROM BOSNIA


New Statesman & Society leader, 2 June 1995
  
The UN must stay in Bosnia – but in the long term the answer to Radovan Karadzic is to let the Bosnian government have the arms to kick him out

The hostage crisis in Serb-occupied Bosnia has been waiting to happen since the very start of the deployment of United Nations forces to escort aid convoys in 1992.

From the beginning, the UN troops have been peace­keepers in a war zone. They have had to rely on the good will of the combatants to go about their business, and the enemies of the Bosnian government  –  initially both Croats and Serbs, since 1994 the Serbs  –  have used this to further their own interests. Aid convoys have been held up and pillaged, UN troops have been messed around and humiliated. It was always likely that, if Bosn­ian government forces started to gain military advantage or it seemed that the international community was plan­ning to intervene on the government side, the Serbs would take a desperate course of action. Which is pre­cisely what has now happened.

In the past few months, the military tide has turned against the Serb aggressors in Bosnia. Radovan Karadzic's brutal Bosnian Serb regime is beginning to crumble both economically and militarily. The Bosnian Serb troops retain the superiority in heavy weapons, which they inherited from the arsenal of the Yugoslav army, and which allowed them to seize 70 per cent of Bosnia in the first place. But that superiority is declining as the gov­ernment finds ways of evading the arms embargo imposed by the UN "on all sides", which came close to crippling Bosnian resistance to Serb expansionism.

To make matters worse, the dictator of Serbia proper, Slobodan Milosevic, decided last year that he had more to gain from the removal of sanctions on Serbia itself than from continuing to back Karadzic's refusal to make even the small territorial concessions demanded by the Con­tact Group plan for carving up Bosnia (to dignify it with the title of "peace plan" would be a travesty) .

Milosevic retains his dream of a Greater Serbia: contrary to what the British Foreign Office and others would have us believe, he has not suddenly changed into a dove and should on no account be encouraged, let alone trusted. But from Karadzic's point of view it appears that he has joined the ranks of the enemies of the "Republica Sprska". Since Milosevic started trying to bully him into accepting the Contact Group plan, Karadzic has felt that the whole world is conspiring against him.

Hence, after Nato aircraft struck last week against Serb military targets in a belated response to continued mur­derous artillery attacks by Karadzic's forces on unpro­tected civilians in Bosnian government enclaves, the Bosnian Serbs upped the ante, seizing hundreds of UN troops as hostages. In response, the Contact Group powers rushed further troops into Bosnia. As NSS went to press, each side was waiting for the other to blink.

The dangers in this stand-off are multiple – but, con­trary to the populist chorus in the Commons on Wednes­day, the greatest of them is not what might happen to the troops being held by Karadzic's forces. Worrying as their predicament is for them and their families, it is less so than the prospects for Sarajevo and the Bosnian govern­ment enclaves in eastern Bosnia if the UN troops are withdrawn. Unless Karadzic is more stupid than he has so far appeared to be, the hostages will come to no harm. The same, however, cannot be said of Sarajevo and the defenceless communities of eastern Bosnia, which will be destroyed by Karadzic's thugs if the UN pulls out. It is essential that the reinforcements sent this week are used to protect the Bosnian enclaves, not to facilitate UN with­drawal from Serb-occupied Bosnia.

But that can only be for the short-term. Critics of the UN deployments are right to argue that the international community cannot go on forever running food and other essential supplies into the besieged towns. Somehow, the sieges must be lifted and the besieged towns allowed to return to a normal peaceful existence.

The question is how. Karadzic and his cronies have this week shown just how naive were all those diplomats, from Lord Carrington on, who thought that the way to secure peace in Bosnia was to divide it on ethnic grounds, with Karadzic controlling the majority of territory. Never has it been clearer that the answer is to give the Bosnian government the tools and let it finish the job. Who cares if it upsets the Russians – it's way past time to lift the arms embargo on the Bosnian government.