By Jennifer Thompson
"There were real massacres. We knew that this could happen. The Serbs have done this many times. That which is going on is genocide." These words, by Dutch economic development minister Pronk, were reported by Frankfurther Allgemeine Zeitung on July 20, following his return from the Bosnian government-held city of Tuzla.
Pronk refuted other Western representatives in Bosnia saying "we should not allow ourselves to be treated as fools by people who say that nothing [about atrocities by Serbs in Srebrenica] has been confirmed". Other Dutch politicians immediately criticised Pronk for violating the "policy of restraint" lest the Serbs take revenge on Dutch UN troops.
The seizure of Srebrenica on July 12 by the Bosnian Serb army with the massacres, rapes and expulsion — ethnic cleansing — of Bosnians from the UN-declared ""safe area"" is the most recent in a long list of atrocities which have come about as a result of the West's accommodation to the Greater Serbia plan of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.
The Bosnian government is well aware of the West's manoeuvres. Mohamed Sacirbey, the new foreign minister, said, "I don't think the international community gets it. They think we are begging UNProFor [UN Protection Force] to stay. [We] no longer consent to their presence."
The Serb plan to take the remaining "safe areas", including Sarajevo in eastern Bosnia, wiping Muslims and Croats from the territory they control between Serbia and Montenegro in the east to Bosnia's west, has become clear. The July 25 Newsweek said that US intelligence acknowledged this, and quoted an unnamed Pentagon official as saying "Sarajevo is the prize".
The Greater Serbia plan aims for no non-Serb presence in Bosnia, not even in the 30% held by the Bosnian government before the latest offensive. The Serbs want to unite all the areas in Bosnia, Hercegovina and Croatia where Serbs live, and expel the Muslims and Croats.
The relentless war drive by Serbia is partly explained by the demographics of pre-war Bosnia and Hercegovina. An April 1991 census revealed that 43.8% were "ethnic Muslims", 31.5% were Serbs and 17.3% were Croats. The largest concentrations of Serbs were in western Bosnia, far from Serbia; most Muslims lived in eastern Bosnia by the border with Serbia. In only 32 of Bosnia's 109 districts did one of the three major ethnic groups constitute 70% or more of the population.
UNProFor is now assisting the Bosnian Serbs in clearing away the "safe areas" by offering to evacuate the Bosnians from the remaining besieged centres while obstructing Bosnian attempts to defend themselves.
This is the case in Zepa where the UNProFor is considering moving the local population, and where the attempt to fend off the Serb army has been led by 150 Bosnian army troops in the town. Despite this, the Ukrainian UN forces there said that Zepa had not fallen as General Ratko Mladic claimed on July 19. The resistance the Bosnian army was able to mount was due in part to the arms they took from the UN personnel.
While the squabbling between Western heads of state reflects their different interests in Bosnia — Britain and France want a stable Serb-dominated region, while the US is primarily interested in containing the conflict with minimum direct involvement — the one policy they agree on is to prevent the Bosnian government its right to self defence.
The UN ""safe area'"' idea came from a meeting in Washington in May 1993. This policy followed the UN Security Council-imposed arms embargo on all five former Yugoslav states, and a number of plans to divide the multi-ethnic state of Bosnia and Hercegovina along ethnic lines.
In August 1992, after 50,000 people, mainly civilians, had been killed and more than 2 million made homeless by the Yugoslav Federal Army (JNA) and Serb militia conquests in Bosnia and Croatia, a European Community-convened London conference decided to recognise the territorial integrity of Bosnia and Hercegovina and identified Serbia and Montenegro as aggressors. The conference asked the UN to maintain a cease-fire when Bosnian Serb armies already controlled 60-70% of the country.
The series of plans to divide Bosnia between the Bosnian government, Serbia and Croatia, proposed first by the EC's Lord Owen and UN's Cyrus Vance in September 1992, recognised the Serb and Croat militias as equal negotiating partners to the democratically elected, multi-ethnic Bosnian government. This intervention was opposed by both the Bosnian government, which argued for a unified Bosnian state, and the Belgrade government and local Serb militias which insisted that any area inhabited by Serbs should be joined to Serbia.
In May 1993, the self-proclaimed Bosnian Serb Assembly rejected the plan to divide Bosnia into 10 ethnic cantons. The UN then came up with the idea for six "safe areas", a plan described by Croatian commentators as "the final capitulation" of the West before Serbian aggression.
The immediate results of the "safe area" policy were: an end to the fighting between Croat and Serb forces in Bosnia and Hercegovina; the targeting of Bosnian Croat fire on Bosnian government forces; and a meeting between the Croatian president Franjo Tudjman and Milosevic to formulate a plan to partition Bosnia.
Owen and Thorvald Stoltenberg, who replaced Vance as the UN's mediator, accepted this new alliance and presented another partition plan, in August 1993, that was to award 52% of Bosnia and Hercegovina to the Serbs, 30% to the Bosnian government and 18% to Croatia. Before the plan was finally dumped the Bosnian Serbs had strengthened their siege of Sarajevo.
The Croatian-Serb coalition to conquer Bosnia was only abandoned in February 1994, when the Bosnian government agreed to establish a joint federation which included allowing "Herceg-Bosna", a Croatian mini state in Bosnia, to be incorporated into Croatia.
The Contact Group plan to divide Bosnia was rejected by the Bosnian Serbs who wanted to keep all the conquered territory. Negotiations have been interspersed with Serb attacks on Goradze and Bihac in 1994 and the prevention of humanitarian aid reaching the crowded, hungry cities.
The latest Western manoeuvres involve defending the "safe area" of Gorazde in order to trade it off later to the Bosnian Serbs in return for not attacking Sarajevo. The UN's refusal to lift the one-sided arms embargo on Bosnia, combined with their concern for UN troops — whose presence prevents the Bosnians from defending themselves — make this plan as dubious as the others.
Those against lifting the arms embargo on the Bosnian government and withdrawing the UN forces — as the Bosnian government is demanding — argue that such action will only escalate the conflict as the Bosnian Serb army will attack the UN troops who have to defend the Bosnians.
Fears that a UN withdrawal will provoke a new alliance between Croatia and the Bosnia Serbs to crush the remains of the Bosnian state are well founded. However, the lifting of the arms embargo which would allow the Bosnians to defend themselves is the best insurance against this.
Time magazine reports indicate that the Bosnian Serb army of 80,000 is stretched thin and outnumbered by 150,000 Bosnian government soldiers. A US military analyst said that the combination of many poorly armed Bosnians and the well-armed but fewer Serbs makes "a recipe for an indecisive, bloody, volatile stalemate". This is the reality while the embargo remains.
The Bosnian Serbs are being armed and supplied by Serbia, despite the much-vaunted Western "strategy" of driving a wedge between Karadzic and Milosevic with the imposition of economic sanctions on Serbia.
According to the July 24 issue of Time, diplomats in Belgrade believe Milosevic is backing the offensive. They reported seeing dozens of trucks and buses the Bosnian Serbs used to expel Srebrenica's civilians crossing from Serbia to Bosnia on July 10. The Drina Corps, which took Srebrenica, were newly supplied with fuel and munitions that must have come from Serbia.
Russia has supplied Bosnian and Croatian Serbs with T-55 tanks and anti-aircraft missiles according to British defence analysts. A Russian trade ministry official acknowledged in a report in the November 1994 Current History that Russian missiles and other weaponry were sold to the Bosnian Serbs.
The view that a UN pullout and end to the arms embargo is impractical and inconvenient for Western politicians, and that arming the Muslims would require putting American advisers on the ground for months, if not years, ignores the strength of the existing Bosnian army and the reality that time is running out for the Bosnians.
It also ignores a possibility — one not canvassed by US Republican Bob Dole, a leading proponent of the UN pullout — that the UN forces leave their extensive armaments, including their heavy artillery, behind when they leave.
The chief block to a UN withdrawal appears to be the US government's reluctance to meet its commitment of 25,000 troops, $1 billion and military hardware as part of a 60,000 extra troop plan for the withdrawal. Clinton fears that US casualties in such an operation could torpedo his re-election bid in 1996.
Hassan Muratovic, the Bosnian government's UN liaison officer, scorned the plan. "They don't need a NATO force to help them leave. 60,000 to help 25,000? What are they going to do, carry them on their backs? Who is going to block them? People hate them now."
The concern that a UN withdrawal would mean an end to humanitarian aid rings rather hollow. The UN airlift into Sarajevo, now in its third year of siege, has been suspended for three months after Serbs threatened to attack incoming aircraft. The UN has refused to defend aid convoys entering Sarajevo by road — in spite of their mandate to use force to deliver aid. The July 9 Guardian Weekly cited cases where people are starving in other "safe areas".
If the war is to end, Bosnia must have the right to defend itself. To do this the UN must leave and the arms embargo be lifted. Any other course, as Bosnians have learned over the last three and a half years, will hasten the complete destruction of Bosnia and Hercegovina.