Munich All Over Again?

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

In international politics, Munich is a word of shame. The 1938 conference at which Britain and France agreed to let Adolf Hitler's troops occupy a big chunk of their ally Czechoslovakia made the city's name synonymous with a cowardly sellout to aggression. So it is no surprise that the organizers of the international conference on the Balkans that is scheduled to meet in London this week staunchly deny they will countenance a rerun. Just the opposite, says British Deputy Foreign Secretary Douglas Hogg: the conferees will "make it absolutely plain to the Serbs that they are not going to be allowed to retain the land they have grabbed" in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The conference will consider tightening sanctions against the Bosnian Serbs' patrons in Belgrade and may approve a plan to assign 10,000 fresh United Nations troops to escort relief convoys from the Adriatic port of Split to the besieged capital of Sarajevo. "The Serbs may discover that it is in their interest -- you have to persuade them that it is in their interest -- to negotiate," says U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. "Theirs is a pariah state now."

But when asked what sort of settlement this kind of pressure might eventually produce, European diplomats sketch an arrangement that sounds suspiciously like a 1992 version of Munich: essentially a division of Bosnia into three highly unequal parts. Bosnia's Serbs might not hold on to quite all of the territory they have conquered; their leader, Radovan Karadzic, asserts that they would settle for 64% of Bosnia rather than the 70% they now occupy. Croats would get most of the rest. Bosnia's Muslims would be left with little more than the few towns and slivers of countryside they now hold. The Serb, Croat and Muslim cantons might even theoretically join in a confederation that would be called Bosnia. But that would be a pious fiction; in reality Serbian, and to a lesser extent Croatian, aggressors would have extinguished any independent, multiethnic Bosnia.

But no one expects an official solution to be reached at the London conference. Even if all the main factions show up, the conference will include representatives of so many nations and groupings, from the European Community to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, as to constitute what a Dutch diplomat calls "about as unwieldy a group as they come." Prospects that the three-day meeting can accomplish much are minimal.

British diplomats, though, hope the conference will at least begin a process of negotiation eventually leading to a partition into ethnic cantons such as Lebanon's -- not because they like it but because they see no other way to stop the war. The brute fact is that the Serbs have won on the ground; reversing that victory would require military intervention far beyond anything any Western power will even consider. For all the relief efforts, Hogg warned Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic two weeks ago that he could not hope for military help to save the remaining Muslim areas from Serbian conquest. In the British view, the formation of cantons would avoid a total Serbian victory and avert another looming nightmare: mass deaths -- perhaps 200,000 to 300,000 -- among refugees inside the former Yugoslavia who might not survive the rough Balkan winter. An end to the fighting would enable international relief organizations to supply food, shelter and clothing that would keep the refugees alive.

The U.S., however, is "absolutely opposed" to cantonization, says Lawrence - Eagleburger, who will attend the London conference as Acting Secretary of State. He fears setting a dangerous precedent of accommodating aggression. In fact, while Eagleburger voices hope that the London conference "may begin to find some new diplomatic approaches that may over time bring the bloodshed to an end," others in the Bush Administration sound unhappy about negotiations now. "Pushing negotiations in the midst of the horrors being perpetrated on the ground is bizarre," says one official. But the U.S. may well be unable to stop the unequal partition of Bosnia. The Administration's ideas, chiefly a tightening of sanctions against Serbia, seem pitifully inadequate to bringing about any happier end.

Unfortunately, setting up cantons might not stop bloodshed in the Balkans any more than the Munich agreement headed off World War II, which exploded a year later. Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic has already announced plans to resettle 140,000 Serb refugees in Kosovo, a province of Serbia. Western officials are worried that he may well clear room for them by "ethnic cleansing" of the province's majority Albanians and then attempt a conquest of independent Macedonia in the guise of protecting a Serb minority there. Reports are filtering in to London of ethnic purges carried out by both Serbs and Croats in Serbia's sister republic of Montenegro: Croatia might also try to annex by force the Croat-populated northwestern corner. Any of these moves could touch off a general Balkan war drawing in Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey -- making the parallels to Munich uncomfortably close to complete.

With reporting by William Mader/London and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington