Theater of the Absurd

By Bruce W. Nelan

Serb forces lined up their heavy guns last week and blasted their way toward Bihac, the last of the lands in the northwest held by the Bosnian government. Then Yugoslav-made jets from a Serb airbase in Croatia joined in the attack. NATO fighter-bombers roared across the Adriatic from Italy to bomb the base, punching a few craters into the concrete runways, but carefully avoiding Serbian planes or soldiers. Two days later, when the Serbs failed to get the message, NATO planes hit two of their antiaircraft installations in Bosnia with missiles.

That did not stop the Serbs either. So U.N. military and civilian officials pleaded in rapid succession with Serb and Muslim leaders in Bosnia and with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade. NATO officials in Brussels interrupted Thanksgiving Day to discuss a new U.S. proposal to defend Bihac, while U.N. officials claimed -- then unclaimed -- that they had mediated a cease-fire. When the Serbian artillery continued to pound Bihac on Friday in defiance of more U.N. warnings, NATO jets flew again, but darkness fell and the planes did not drop their bombs.

If all that activity sounds confusing and largely futile, it is.

None of those frenzied maneuvers did anything to stop the war. The Serbs hardly broke stride on their march to Bihac, and the battle went very much according to their plan. They hit Sarajevo with artillery and sniper fire and confined more than 275 blue helmets to their barracks around Sarajevo, turning them into virtual hostages. Determined to crush the Fifth Corps of the Muslim- led Bosnian army based at Bihac, the Serbs bombarded the town for days, driving most of its army defenders and 70,000 civilians into basements and shelters. Ground troops then pressed into the zone the U.N. had declared a "safe area." "It's quite clear that we have failed to deter an attack on the safe area," said U.N. spokesman Colum Murphy in Sarajevo. "We were suppposed to deter attack on civilians and to protect the civilian population." Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic coolly announced: "Bihac will become a safe zone when the Serbs enter it."

The Clinton Administration last week sent three ships with 2,000 U.S. Marines to the Adriatic Sea off the Balkan coast to provide support for NATO. The Pentagon was quick to point out that the action was a precaution and did not signify U.S. involvement in the conflict, much less the commitment of American ground troops. Karadzic declared that the U.S. risks another Vietnam by sending Marines to the region.

Last week's actions were a particularly galling demonstration of the failure by outsiders to resolve the 31-month-old war in the former Yugoslavia. At cross-purposes among themselves, the Western allies have been unable to muster measures capable of making a difference. They remain unwilling to use sufficient force to challenge Serb domination, and the Serbs and the Bosnians still refuse to agree on any settlement negotiated by mediators. The Serb reaction last week to U.N. scolding and NATO's minor bombing was almost contemptuous. In a telephone call to U.N. commander Lieut. General Sir Michael Rose's headquarters, Jovan Zametica, a senior Serb official, warned, "Don't mess with us."

Such sneering is a bit unfair. General Rose and his 24,000-member force are in Bosnia on a narrowly defined mission: to protect aid shipments to civilians across the war-torn country, not to make or enforce peace. Their mission is based on the illogical premise that it is possible to deliver relief supplies through a war zone without clashing with the army that rules the battlefield. It is as if 50 years ago relief workers had tried to truck supplies to Paris through Wehrmacht lines.

If Rose and his troops want to get the trucks into Bosnian-government areas, they must deal with the triumphant Serbs. Since the blue helmets are not strong enough to fight their way past roadblocks, they end up cajoling the Serbs, obeying their rules and allowing them to search through -- and pilfer from -- the aid shipments. Rose insists, however, that his role is neutral, not to "intervene on one side." If NATO or anyone else chooses to go to war with the Serbs, his lightly armed U.N. troops will leave immediately.

Seen from Washington, the Bosnian war is one of Serb aggressors and Bosnian Muslim victims. Each time the Serbs advance, some in Congress clamor for an aggressive U.S. response. However, to the British and French governments providing the bulk of the U.N. forces, all factions in the country are responsible for the vicious civil war. A senior U.N. observer in Sarajevo says Rose is not exactly pro-Serb but may be anti-Bosnian. "Rose's interest is in keeping everything quiet, in preserving the status quo," he says.

Some European officials believe the recurrent spasms of U.S. sympathy encourage the Bosnian Muslims to keep fighting in hopes America will come to the rescue. They point out that the Serbian drive on Bihac began as a counteroffensive against the Bosnian Fifth Corps, which had attacked the Serbs from Bihac in October and scored major gains. To some Europeans, the Bosnian Muslims are only getting what they deserve for upsetting the status quo. An Administration official in Washington snaps back at the Europeans, "The boat is sinking, but they don't want to rock it."

The British and French soldiers in Bosnia tie the hands of their governments. Last week, when the U.S. wanted to bash the Serbs from the air hard enough to force them to reconsider an international partition plan that grants them 49% of Bosnia rather than the 70% they occupy, Paris and London said no. Reason: their blue helmets are spread thinly around the country and can be attacked or held captive by Serbs. "The U.N. troops," says Dominique Moisi of the French Institute of International Relations, "have become the Serbs' hostages while their governments have become hostage to the entire situation."

At a NATO meeting in Brussels, the U.S. proposed creating a weapons- exclusion zone around Bihac from which all artillery and tanks would have to be withdrawn, like the one around Sarajevo. For the French and British, it was typical American naivete. Exclusion zones need ground troops to monitor the terrain, take weaponry into holding areas and report violations. The U.S. suggested policing the proposed zone with aircraft. The allies again said no. The task "requires more than rhetoric," said British Defense Secretary Malcolm Rifkind, and "if I may say, more than air power." Bosnia, says a worried NATO official, "has done more to undermine NATO than the Soviets ever did."

In the meantime, Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev charged last week that the Bosnian government launched its October offensive "with the clear intention of involving NATO." Moscow still has a proprietary interest in its Orthodox Serb kinfolk. It has never believed in bombing them into an enforced compromise.

With so many policies and motivations in conflict, the result has been a malevolent kind of stasis. Bosnians are unable to find peace or end the war themselves, and the outsiders have no common ground from which to bring decisive pressure to bear. Moisi argues that Europe has failed an important test. So, of course, have NATO, the U.S. and the U.N.

With reporting by James L. Graff/Sarajevo and Alexandra Stiglmayer/Zagreb, with other bureaus