New Statesman & Society leader, 2 June 1995
The UN must stay in Bosnia – but in the long term the answer
to Radovan Karadzic is to let the Bosnian government have the arms to kick him
out
The hostage crisis in Serb-occupied Bosnia has been waiting
to happen since the very start of the deployment of United Nations forces to
escort aid convoys in 1992.
From the beginning, the UN troops have been peacekeepers in
a war zone. They have had to rely on the good will of the combatants to go
about their business, and the enemies of the Bosnian government – initially both Croats and Serbs, since 1994
the Serbs – have used this to further their own interests.
Aid convoys have been held up and pillaged, UN troops have been messed around
and humiliated. It was always likely that, if Bosnian government forces
started to gain military advantage or it seemed that the international
community was planning to intervene on the government side, the Serbs would
take a desperate course of action. Which is precisely what has now happened.
In the past few months, the military tide has turned against
the Serb aggressors in Bosnia. Radovan Karadzic's brutal Bosnian Serb regime is
beginning to crumble both economically and militarily. The Bosnian Serb troops
retain the superiority in heavy weapons, which they inherited from the arsenal
of the Yugoslav army, and which allowed them to seize 70 per cent of Bosnia in
the first place. But that superiority is declining as the government finds
ways of evading the arms embargo imposed by the UN "on all sides",
which came close to crippling Bosnian resistance to Serb expansionism.
To make matters worse, the dictator of Serbia proper,
Slobodan Milosevic, decided last year that he had more to gain from the removal
of sanctions on Serbia itself than from continuing to back Karadzic's refusal
to make even the small territorial concessions demanded by the Contact Group
plan for carving up Bosnia (to dignify it with the title of "peace
plan" would be a travesty) .
Milosevic retains his dream of a Greater Serbia: contrary to
what the British Foreign Office and others would have us believe, he has not
suddenly changed into a dove and should on no account be encouraged, let alone
trusted. But from Karadzic's point of view it appears that he has joined the
ranks of the enemies of the "Republica Sprska". Since Milosevic
started trying to bully him into accepting the Contact Group plan, Karadzic has
felt that the whole world is conspiring against him.
Hence, after Nato aircraft struck last week against Serb
military targets in a belated response to continued murderous artillery
attacks by Karadzic's forces on unprotected civilians in Bosnian government
enclaves, the Bosnian Serbs upped the ante, seizing hundreds of UN troops as
hostages. In response, the Contact Group powers rushed further troops into
Bosnia. As NSS went to press, each side was waiting for the other to blink.
The dangers in this stand-off are multiple – but, contrary
to the populist chorus in the Commons on Wednesday, the greatest of them is
not what might happen to the troops being held by Karadzic's forces. Worrying
as their predicament is for them and their families, it is less so than the
prospects for Sarajevo and the Bosnian government enclaves in eastern Bosnia
if the UN troops are withdrawn. Unless Karadzic is more stupid than he has so
far appeared to be, the hostages will come to no harm. The same, however,
cannot be said of Sarajevo and the defenceless communities of eastern Bosnia,
which will be destroyed by Karadzic's thugs if the UN pulls out. It is
essential that the reinforcements sent this week are used to protect the
Bosnian enclaves, not to facilitate UN withdrawal from Serb-occupied Bosnia.
But that can only be for the short-term. Critics of the UN
deployments are right to argue that the international community cannot go on
forever running food and other essential supplies into the besieged towns.
Somehow, the sieges must be lifted and the besieged towns allowed to return to
a normal peaceful existence.
The question is how. Karadzic and his cronies have this week
shown just how naive were all those diplomats, from Lord Carrington on, who
thought that the way to secure peace in Bosnia was to divide it on ethnic
grounds, with Karadzic controlling the majority of territory. Never has it been
clearer that the answer is to give the Bosnian government the tools and let it
finish the job. Who cares if it upsets the Russians – it's way past time to
lift the arms embargo on the Bosnian government.
