Balkan Bullies Put the U.N. in Retreat

A CIVIL WAR HAS TO REACH A HIDEOUS CODA TO scare off the rest of the world; Yugoslavia has achieved that state of savagery. Calling the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina "tragic, dangerous, violent and confused," U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali seemed to admit that the international community has lost any hope of controlling the desperately bloody dispute , among the enraged republics that formerly made up Yugoslavia. The U.N., he ruled, cannot send more peacekeeping troops into the Balkans because the fighting is too ferocious. All the West can do is tighten the diplomatic thumbscrews and listen to the screams.

Every one of the European Community ambassadors, along with American envoy Warren Zimmermann, left Belgrade to protest Serbia's continued attacks on neighboring Bosnia. But no amount of home-capital "consultations" is likely to wind down the latest act in Europe's fiercest bloodletting since World War II. Though the West's opprobrium has landed squarely on Serbia's fiercely nationalistic president, Slobodan Milosevic, he continues to proclaim that all he wants is peace.

His newly independent neighbors in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia may feel differently. Bosnia's Serbs, who wish to remain part of a greater, Serbian- dominated Yugoslavia, have taken over two-thirds of the republic's territory with the indispensable aid of the federal army and free-lance gunmen from Serbia. In the process, an estimated 1,300 people have died in Bosnia, and hundreds of thousands have left their homes.

Milosevic continues to pretend that the army units in Bosnia are not doing his bidding. But he has sanctioned a purge of 40 generals that put the army even more firmly under his control. Army ordnance has relentlessly pummeled Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, and other cities. Shells and sniper fire make a target of anyone not cowering in a basement; food supplies are dwindling to a dangerous level. Jovan Divjak, head of the mainly Muslim Bosnian Territorial Defense force, called on non-Serb Sarajevans to fight "even if you have no weapons."

Further muddying the waters were signs that Serbia and Croatia are hatching plans to carve up Bosnia between themselves, leaving the Muslims -- 44% and thus the core of Bosnia's population -- with next to nothing. Croatia, which counts heavily on its friends in Bonn and Vienna, might be persuaded to desist. Stronger sanctions against Serbia, however, including a total trade embargo or a freeze of foreign assets, might only encourage Milosevic to hunker down even more. Short of large-scale military intervention, a prospect no one countenances, it appears, sadly, that no force exists with sufficient power and pluck to halt the slaughter.