The Guns Talk Too

By Bruce W. Nelan

The peace map that mediators Cyrus Vance and Lord Owen have drawn labels the northwest corner of Bosnia and Herzegovina "Province No. 1." The cold, hungry people who live there call it the Bihac Pocket. Surrounded by Serb- ( controlled territory, the 300,000 inhabitants -- mostly Muslims -- have survived seven months of isolation and almost nightly bombardment from Serb guns. Homes have no electricity, schools are closed, and jobless workers peddle smuggled cigarettes. Thousands in the region would have starved by now except for the sporadic arrival of humanitarian-aid shipments.

Though people are under daily threat of death from shelling, the residents here would rather fight on than accept the dismemberment of Bosnia into 10 ethnic enclaves put forward by the Vance-Owen plan. It is a measure of their desperation that some Bihac dwellers still believe President Clinton's decision last week to join the peace process might yet rescue them from that plan. Irfan Ljubijankic, head of the local leadership committee, denounces Vance-Owen as a potential "win for Serbia," and clings to the hope that Clinton's new policy "is more radical than it appeared." He is convinced that the U.N.-ordered arms embargo will eventually be lifted, so that Bosnian fighters can be re-equipped. "Fighting is not our will," he says. "It is an imperative to survive."

Even with the arms embargo, the Bosnian army's Fifth Corps in Bihac is holding its own against the Serbs. Its commanders loudly reject the Vance-Owen proposal. "If they try to impose that plan," says Captain Ramiz Drekovic, "we will continue our war until we liberate Bosnia and Herzegovina. It could take a year, five years, 10 or a hundred."

He has only to look at the plight of the Muslims of Banja Luka, deep in the belly of the Serbian stronghold in Bosnia. The disenfranchised Muslims there already know what is in store for them if their homeland is officially deemed a Serbian statelet. For 10 months, they have seen their kinfolk murdered and driven from their homes by the hundreds of thousands. They experience terror nightly as drunken thugs prowl Banja Luka's icy streets. They have lost their jobs and most legal status: they need special papers just to walk freely under the open sky.

Most of the non-Serbs who have remained in Banja Luka will go if the Vance- Owen plan is implemented. Radoslav Brdjanin, a government "minister" in the self-proclaimed Serbian Republic relishes the prospect and laughs at the demand that Serbs return to the Muslims any land taken. "Wherever there stands a Serbian army boot, that is our territory," he says. "Bosnia does not exist anymore. Our task is simply to clarify the divisions."

That, the Clinton Administration made clear last week, is pretty much what the U.S. intends to do. On the stump and during the presidential transition, Clinton said he would consider tougher action against Serbian aggression and criticized Vance-Owen for in effect rewarding the Serbs for their "ethnic cleansing." He said in recent weeks he wanted to give Bosnia's Muslims a better deal and make the Serbs give up more of the territory they have seized.

But when the time came to settle on a workable policy, Clinton found himself completely boxed in: by the West's past failures to act, by circumstances on the ground, by the public criticism from Owen and by European allies and the U.N. Security Council, which opposed any use of force. The options contracted further when Britain, France, Russia and others accepted the mediators' plan, even if the Muslims and Serbs who live there did not. Clinton considers ethnic division in Bosnia neither fair nor workable, but he was left with little choice unless he wanted to strike out on his own, and that was not realistic. "I do not believe that the military of the U.S. should get involved unilaterally," he said at his televised public meeting in Detroit. "We have to work with these other countries."

That left Washington to mount a friendly takeover of the Vance-Owen negotiations in the vague hope it could somehow make them turn out better. How much Clinton expects to change the existing plan is uncertain, though U.S. officials did vow not to force anything on Bosnia's Muslims, Serbs and Croats. Secretary of State Warren Christopher put the best gloss he could on the importance of "bringing the full weight of American diplomacy to bear." The U.S. was for the first time taking a direct role in the negotiations. Washington will send its own envoy, veteran diplomat and current Ambassador to NATO Reginald Bartholomew, to take part in the talks. His first stop was Moscow, to persuade Russia to join the peacemaking effort. Meanwhile, the U.S. will step up humanitarian-aid shipments to Bosnia and try to tighten economic sanctions on Serbia.

In other words, everyone back to the bargaining table. But what can more talk produce, especially now that the U.S. has forsworn the use of military force? After criticizing the Vance-Owen plan for shortchanging the Bosnian Muslims, Washington is not promising to increase their slices of the partitioned state. Instead, Christopher calls for a settlement "that the parties have voluntarily reached," which would be a minor miracle. Then, if that outcome could somehow be arranged, the U.S. and its armed forces would help enforce it and police the gerrymandered borders. U.S. officials claim that their willingness to defend a settlement with force will make it easier for the parties to reach one.

Although Pentagon officials say publicly the U.S. is willing to participate in a multilateral peacekeeping force, in private the tone is distinctly different. General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his colleagues at the Pentagon have been extremely reluctant to commit ground troops to Bosnia for any purpose. Military planners say they are examining contingencies for using American air power to enforce a no-fly order over Bosnia if the Security Council ever orders it and to "reinvigorate" relief efforts by flying air cover for truck convoys. "But that's it, max!" says a defense official.

Military officials suggested they supported Christopher's promise to help police a peace settlement because they do not believe such an agreement will be reached. "This is the biggest facade since Potemkin took Catherine the Great for a ride," said an Administration official. The likely size of an effective army of peacekeepers is also a sticking point. Vance and Owen estimate it will take 20,000 troops to patrol the 10-division patchwork. European defense ministries and NATO headquarters put the figure at 60,000 -- and that assumes an uneasy peace in which everyone stops fighting. If they do not, the requirement would rise to 200,000 or more. The European allies are insisting that at least one-third of any such force must be American.

Clinton has committed the U.S. to the Vance-Owen premise of dividing Bosnia into ethnic cantons. He might pay heed to the last plan that Vance negotiated in Croatia in January 1992: it provides an object lesson for anyone contemplating a similar solution for Bosnia. In spite of a formal truce between Serbs and Croats and the presence of 14,000 U.N. peacekeepers, a new round of warfare exploded in Croatia last month. Rival militias have rearmed, refugees who were supposed to be allowed to return are still far from their homes, and ethnic cleansing continues.

Serbian forces were to be cleared from large parts of Croatia: they still illegally occupy hundreds of square miles. Last month Croatian-army assault troops attacked them at strategic points in Dalmatia, and Serbian units brushed aside U.N. peacekeepers who were guarding stores of heavy weapons to retrieve their howitzers and other artillery pieces. Serb-Croat skirmishes have been going on in Croatia almost constantly ever since.

The lesson to be drawn for Bosnia, says a U.N. representative in Croatia, is, "You cannot have peacekeeping without peacemaking." Little can be done without the threat of force. But the U.S. and the U.N. have ruled that out in favor of renewed negotiation. "We will march down this trail as strongly as we can," says a senior U.S. official. "If it's not successful, we will have to see what else is available." The answer next time may be the same: not much.

With reporting by James L. Graff/Bihac and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington