The wave of optimism that swept Europe after Radovan
Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, signed the Vance-Owen plan for a settlement
in Bosnia could all too easily turn out to be premature.
The first real test of last weekend's agreement is not so
much whether or not the Bosnian Serb "parliament", meeting as Tribune went to press, endorses Mr
Karadzic's move but whether or not the Serb armed forces in Bosnia stop
fighting and then withdraw from their positions in accordance with the
timetable in the Vance-Owen plan.
It is essential to recognise that, as things stand, the
likelihood of this happening is remote indeed. Fighting is still going on and
shows no sign of ending. More important, nothing that we know about the Serbs’
previous behaviour or their war aims suggests that they will easily give up the
territories that they have seized in the past year.
The Serbs have occupied much land, "ethnically
cleansed" the countryside and besieged the towns in pursuit of a Greater
Serbia stretching from Vojvodina in the north to the Adriatic coast, including
large parts of Croatia and Bosnia.
The Vance-Owen plan has many faults, the most important of
which is that its goal of a Bosnia cantonised on ethnic lines, which has
already encouraged the Serbs and Croats in their seizures of land, is dangerously
close to partition. Nevertheless, by resisting partition, preserving the territorial
integrity of an ethnically diverse Bosnia and refusing to recognise the military
gains of the past year's war, the plan is an obstacle to the Serbs’ dream – and
as such is unacceptable to the Serb forces on the ground in Bosnia.
In the end, it is their attitude that counts, not what Mr
Karadzic might say when his arm is being twisted by the Serbian government,
desperate to have the sanctions against it lifted or at least eased.
Put bluntly, this means that the international community is
very soon likely to be faced with a choice between capitulating in the face of
Serb intransigence and somehow making the Serbs stop fighting and withdraw.
In such circumstances, as Jack running, ham, the shadow
Foreign Secretary, has said, it would be idiotic to send in United Nations
forces in a "peace-keeping" role: there would be no peace to keep and
they would simply be sitting targets. A very different sort of military
intervention would be needed to force the Serbs to comply with the Vance-Owen
provisions (or indeed some other plan for a post-war settlement in Bosnia, such
as a United Nations protectorate, if Vance-Owen falls apart).
So what sort of military intervention would do the trick?
Essentially, we are back to the arguments that were raging before the outbreak
of optimism in the wake of the Athens conference.
As Tribune argued
a fortnight ago, air strikes on Bosnian Serb supply lines, suggested as a last
resort by the Labour front bench, would not be enough: the indications are
that the Bosnian Serb forces have plentiful arms and ammunition. Intervention
by ground forces, backed by helicopter-borne forces and with air support,
would be essential if they were to be made to accept a ceasefire and retreat.
Contrary to the arguments of opponents of such a course of
action, this would not take a massive army, nor would it be irresponsibly
risky. The Bosnian Serb forces are less than formidable. Their soldiers, some
60,000 in number, are ill-disciplined, ill-equipped and inexperienced, their artillery
immobile and their 300 tanks mainly ancient Soviet T-55s. They have advanced as
far as they have only because the Bosnian government, with 90,000 troops under
arms, has had no adequate means of stopping the tanks. (This, incidentally,
gives the lie to claims that the wooded mountainous terrain makes intervention
by ground troops too difficult: tanks cannot operate in wooded mountains.) It
is hard to believe that, confronted by well-equipped, professional
intervention forces, the Bosnian Serb forces would have much stomach for a
fight.
The upshot is that a relatively small NATO force of around
50,000 to 75,000 troops – the same size as the peacekeeping force envisaged in
the Vance-Owen plan – could, if necessary, force the Serb forces to lay down
their arms and withdraw. Once it had done this job, it could be turned into a
peace-keeping force. Alternatively, a separate UN blue-helmet force could be
introduced to oversee implementation of the political settlement.
The hope that it will not come to this, that the Bosnian
Serbs will meekly act as the rest of the world wants them to and that a UN
peace-keeping force will be all that is required from the international
community, must not be allowed to eclipse hard-headed realism. West European governments
are looking for any excuse to revert to hand-wringing if anything goes wrong
with implementation of Vance-Owen: it is up to the left to keep the pressure
on them so that they prepare for the worst.
Policy forum offers
little hope of creative thinking
The idea behind Labour's National Policy Forum, which meets
for the first time this weekend, is not a bad one. For several years now, the
party's annual conference has been a wholly inadequate forum for
policy-making: trade union block votes have guaranteed that just about anything
dreamed up by the small group of politicians in the Shadow Cabinet and the National Executive
Committee has gone through on the nod. Labour needs some
sort of body in which a wider group of people, including ordinary individual
members, can have a real influence on party policy.
Unfortunately, there is little hope that the National Policy
Forum as currently constituted will fulfil any such role. Because of Labour's
financial crisis, it has – been slimmed down to just 100 members and will meet
only annually instead of quarterly.
This weekend's meeting will have only four hours of open
debate – which works out at two-and-a-half minutes per member. That would be a
great formula for a radio quiz game, but it is hardly the way for a serious
political party to behave.
It will be a miracle if the forum is the source of creative
thinking and constructive debate that the party's spin-doctors claim it will
be.
