Dilemma For the World

Tired of waiting for the world, desperate Bosnia is in a noose: the more it tugs, the more it chokes. The death struggle was brought home to outsiders last week after besieged defenders tried to break through Serbian lines surrounding Sarajevo. The thrusts not only failed but provoked intensified Serbian fire that closed down the city’s airport, cutting off U.N. relief shipments. Bosnian soldiers who scaled Trebevic Mountain in the hope of outflanking the Serbian guns may have at least tasted a moment of gallows humor: before being driven back, they reached the bobsled run built for the 1984 Winter Olympics.

That relic symbolizes as well as anything else the gathering moral crisis over Bosnia. Eight years ago, Sarajevo attained the Olympus of international favor, playing host to the snowy elite from the rest of the world. Today bobsledding down a slippery slope is exactly what Western leaders fear most about intervening in the former Yugoslav republic. Even short of a Desert Storm-scale operation, how can the deployment of multinational firepower be justified here and now when other peoples are also in mortal peril — starving Somalis, say, or junta-persecuted Burmese? And if intrusion is justified, what force could conceivably sort out a vicious blood feud among hill folk who have helped write the book on guerrilla warfare?

The first question is easier. Why Bosnia? For one thing, because it is a victim of evident, if not altogether naked, cross-border aggression. This may sound like a mincing lawyer’s brief, but split hairs have become the tightrope that cases for intervention must tread. U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali lashed out two weeks ago at British critics for faulting his lack of deference to the Security Council’s big powers. The West’s sympathies for Yugoslavia, he suggested, had claimed priority over equally desperate crises in the Third World. Newspapers in London may have rebuked him, he cracked, “because I’m a wog.”

That rejoinder was not only frivolous but shallow. After the early ’60s, one reason why the U.N. was unable to intervene in African and Asian bloodbaths was the sanctity-of-boundaries standard that Third World members held dear. Idi Amin’s Uganda, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and other killing fields piled up bones unchecked in large part because the carnage was performed within sovereign borders. Many developing countries were disturbed by these atrocities, but they remained loath to compromise the U.N. Charter’s criterion for use of outside force; the days of “intervention” by Western colonial empires were too recent. Beyond that, some U.N. members did not bear much scrutiny when it came to internal violence. While condemning bloodshed in Soweto, for example, Syria freely bombarded insurgents in the city of Hama.

So double standards exist on both sides. The part of the world that grieves for Bosnia today is naturally exercising one. Pictures of European toddlers orphaned and brutalized in Sarajevo evoke the kind of fellow feeling among Western nations that similar tragedies elsewhere, sad to say, do not. Images of starving European inmates behind barbed wire also produce keener resonances in a civilization with Auschwitz and Treblinka only 50 years removed. And Bosnia today has a legal claim on help that Somalia, a case of literal and utter anarchy, does not: Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia has aided aggression against Bosnia’s Muslims and Croats every step of the way in the interest of carving out a Greater Serbia. The Yugoslav breakup has spawned atrocities on all sides, but over the long haul this war, like Iraq’s swallowing of Kuwait, is the fault of one big bully.

Have the media played a central role in electrifying outside opinion? Of course, they have. Where cameras go, so go the susceptibilities of people who live comfortable lives. But in a strange way — sometimes flawed but often legitimate — cameras and notebooks tend to converge on those crises that really do deserve greater attention. Yugoslavia figures as a kind of test case of what might happen throughout decommunized, unstable Central and Eastern Europe. Unrestrained ethnic rivalries in these lands threaten to turn the European Community on its ear, upsetting a prosperous balance gained only in the past couple of generations.

All these considerations would merely be speculative were it not for one final, compelling point: the outside world’s Yugoslavia policies to date have abetted strife at least as much as they have contained it. Foreign leaders failed to warn Serbia off. Concentration on humanitarian efforts plays into the hands of Serbs who want to create as many refugees as possible — and who perhaps mean to pursue the tactic to “cleanse” other Serb-minority territory closer to Hungary, Albania, Greece and Turkey. Faced with Western inaction, Turkey and Iran are watching the nearby anti-Muslim pogrom more and more anxiously.

Perhaps “the threat or use of force,” as the old formula goes, would not bring Bosnia’s Serbs to heel. But proposing military targets for air strikes in the Serbian heartland might make Milosevic think twice, give his many Serbian political opponents a more persuasive voice and ease the heat on slowly strangling Bosnia. At the least, it would send a message about where the West stands. At bottom, this may not be a universal U.N. concern, but it is a European crisis and, more to the point, a Western responsibility. As such, it is also a job that will not get done unless the U.S. takes the lead.