From: draskovi@usc.edu (Zoran Draskovic)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.europe
Subject: Bosnia
Date: 15 Oct 1992 23:11:04 -0700
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: aludra.usc.edu



Jewish Chronicle   August 28, 1992


			B O S N I A

		The bloodshed and the blame

by Nora Beloff


	It is one of the paradoxes of Yugoslavia's tragic civil war
that most of the leaders of the Jewish community favour the Croats and
Muslims, backed respectively by the Germans and the Islamic world,
against the Serbs, who are fighting primarily to rescue Serb enclaves
from what they see as ethnically and religiously alien rule.

	Every Jew must shudder at the words "ethnic cleansing" or
"genocide" and this agonised sensitivity has been exploited, by 
selective reporting and unconfirmed atrocities, to make the Serbs appear 
as Hitlerite aggressors. Most Serbs see themselves, on the contrary,
as protectors of the Serb minorities who are living inside the 
internationally recognised but multi-ethnic provinces of what had been 
Yugoslavia, as well as acquiring the access routes to reach them.

	Recognizing this discrepancy in no way denies the appalling
suffering imposed by the siege of Sarajevo and other contested areas,
nor belittles the efforts to rescue Jews from this inferno.

	But what we also need to admit is the overwhelming evidence that,
although the Serbs have the heaviest and most televisable guns, they
have no monopoly of the slaughter and sadism. All three communities,
Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim, incited by vicious nationalist leaders,
are guilty of war crimes against hapless civilians who happen not to
belong to their own ethnic group.

	In this respect, President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia is no
worse than President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia or President Alija
Izetbegovic of Bosnia.

	Political and religious leaders , WHETHER JEWISH OR NOT, cannot
help being influenced by a public, enraged by daily TV news bites 
presented to them by reporters with no knowledge of the historical or
political background and who compete against each other for the most
easily accessible horrors, the bloodier the better.

	Wiser judgements might prevail if the origins of the present
conflict were examined. For there is good reason to suppose that the
dreadful civil war need never have taken place, had it not been for
German and, later, American promotion of unilateral declarations of
independence by the component parts of the Yugoslav federation --
despite both the mixed ethnic composition of the populations and
repeated warnings from France and Britain.

	The Tito brand of Communism was already in an advanced state of
decomposition and, in any case, had never been run for the benefit of
the Serbs. New forms of self-government within appropriate boundaries
might, with the help of international mediators, have been negotiated,
with limited acrimony and skirmishes. For when the fighting stops, the
contenders, at least those who survive, will have to go on living within
the same geographically narrow confines, though the present violence may
have indefinitely delayed the ultimately necessary reconciliation.

	The simplistic Western view is that the troubles started when
Milosevic reimposed Serb rule on the Albanian-inhabited Serb province
of Kosovo. Like other Communist bosses, he had recognised that he could
retain power only by playing up the nationalist issue.

	What the media ignore is that, in the late 1960's, Tito had
transferred power from the Serbs to his Albanian cronies and, as I saw
during my own visits, they built up local support by harassing and
driving out the hated and vunerable Serbs.

	The Serb response was, of course, excessive but so was the 
reaction of the Slovene and Croat nationalists who used the Kosovo
issue to fuel hatred and fear of the Serbs and to incite war hysteria.

	Even so, violence might have been averted had the Austrians and
Germans not encouraged the rupture and fostered the belief that the
struggle for independence would have international support.

	German intervention was itself provocative. Jews should be the
first to remember that, in 1941, after Belgrade had rebelled against
allowing Yugoslavia to be incorporated into the Axis, an enraged Hitler
had condemned the Serbs to rank with the Jews and gypsies as a people
to be destroyed. He left the genocidal job to his Croat nominee, the
extremist Ante Pavelic -- whose daughter had now been readmitted to
Tudjman's Croatia, where she has registered a party aiming to
rehabilitate her father.

	Pavelic's followers, the Ustashas, fled after the last war,
but they or their descendants are now either returning to carry on the
fight or staying behind to finance the best public relations firms
instructed to demonise the Serbs.

	In the cause of European unity, the Germans induced the British
and French to recognise Croatia and Slovenia, after which, quite
predictably, the rest of Yugoslavia fell apart. It was not only an
example of violence paying -- and UDI is, by nature, violent -- but
also showed that what was left of Yugoslavia, deprived of its main
Catholic components, would have been unacceptably dominated by Serbs.

	The U.S. initially opposed the break-up of Yugoslavia but
President Bush, driven by public outrage over TV horror pictures and,
more rationally, by the need to stay in line with a German-dominated
European Community, suddenly changed sides. The last straw may have
been when the Muslims, the biggest of the three minorities of which
Bosnia is composed, gave an Islamic twist to the diplomatic fray.

	Bush needed his Middle Eastern friends and could not appear
indifferent to the very real sufferings of the Muslims. Ignoring the
fact that one-third of the Bosnian population is Serbian, he blamed
the civil war on Serbian aggression and U N sanctions were duly imposed.

	It doesn't require the perceptiveness of General Lewis MacKenzie,
former commander of the U N peace-keepers, to recognise the fact that
the Muslim leadership is desperate to keep the war going until it provokes
international involvement, the only hope it has of beating the Serbs.

	President Izetbegovic's record as a peace-wrecker speaks for
itself. In the summer of 1991, he not only repudiated an initiative for
power-sharing between the Serbs and Muslims in the mixed areas --
which he had himself helped to negotiate -- but later denounced his
fellow negotiators for "selling out" to the Serbs. In early 1992, he
demolished the Carrington peace initiative, also after having seemed to
support it, and flatly rejected a "cantonisation" plan, on the Swiss
model, allowing each community to run its own affairs. Recently, he
refused to enter negotiations until after the Serbs had surrendered.

	The Serbs will hardly be reassured by promises of good behaviour
coming from Zagreb or Sarajevo. There is barely a family among the Serb
minorities that does not remember or know of wartime deportations,
forcible conversions and massacres -- in which the Muslim extremists
were just as active as the Croats.

	It is surely not for Jews to lecture Serbs on genocide; they
have experienced it, too. And, like the Israelis, they prefer to fight
than to accept incorporation into wider communities, where they would
be in perpetual minority.

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	Nora Beloff is a former chief political correspondent of
The Observer, and the author of several books, including 
" Tito's Flawed Legacy ".
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