From: U15231@uicvm.uic.edu
Newsgroups: soc.culture.bosna-herzgvna
Subject: Not a U.S. Problem? Don't Bet on That
Date: 26 Jan 93 15:56:57 GMT
Article-I.D.: uicvm.93026.095657U15231
Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago



Los Angeles Times
Sunday, January 24, 1993.

EDITORIAL:
                Not a U.S. Problem?
                Don't Bet on That

        There's a real threat the Balkan agony won't `stay home'

        Must the agony of Bosnia-Herzegovina be regarded, with whatever
regrets, as somebody else trouble? We don't think so, but the argumnets
on behalf of that view deserve answers. Among them are the following:

 **  The Balkan conflict is a civil war and unlikely to spread beyond the
borders of the former Yugoslavia.

  -  Wrong. Belgrade has missles trained on Vienna. Tito's Yugoslavia claimed
by way of Macedonia, that Greece as far south as Thesaloniki belonged
under its sovereignity. That claim may return in some form. "Civil" war
pitting non-Slavic Albanians against Serbs could spread to Albania,
Turkey, Bulagaria and Greece.

 **  The United States has no strategic interest in the Balkans.

  -  Wrong. No peace, no peace dividend. Unless the West can impose the
view that ethnic purity can no longer be the basis for national soveregnity,
then endless national wars will replace the Cold War. Fascism has
appeard in genocidal form in Bosnia. If it cannothere, it will erupt
elsewhere, and the Clinton Administration's domestic agenda will be an
early casualty.

 **  If the West intervenes on behalf of the Bosnians, the Russians will do
so on behalf of Serbs, and the Cold War will be reborn.

  -  Wrong. The Russians have more to fear from "ethnic cleansing" than
any other people on Earth. Nothhing would reassure them better than a new,
post-Cold War Western policy of massive, early response against the
persecution of national minorities, including the Russian minority found
in every post-Soviet republic. The Russian right may favor the Serbs,
but Russian self-interest lies elsewhere.

 **  This is unwinnable war. Even tha Nazis couldn't pacify the Balkans.

  -  True, but think of the Serbs as the Nazis and the Bosnians as the
resistance and that argument can be upended. Sanctions, already painful
in Belgrade, can be made to hurt worse. Western military aid to the
Bosnians will save lives in the long run by sapping Belgrade's will to
continue expansion by conquest.

 **  The Serbs also have their grievances.

  -  They do, but their way of responding to these grievances, says the
State Department's just-issued annual human rights report, "dwarfs
anything seen in Europe since Nazi times." Via the Genocide Convention,
armed intervention is legal as well as justified.

 **  The U.N. peace plan is the only alternative.

  -  Wrong. The plan is hopelessly cart-before-horse. It proposes the
reorganisation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, followed by the cease-fire. A
better first step would be a U.N. declaration that any nation or
ethnic group proceeding to statehood on the principle of ethnic
purity is an outlaw state and will be treated as such. The current U.N.
peace plan, with a map of provinces that not one party to the conflict
accepts, is really a plan for continued "ethnic cleansing."

 **  That is a Europe's problem.

  - Someday it will be, but the West is in transition. So long as NATO
is the major guarantor of peace in Europe and so long as the United
States as a NATO member, it is by definition America's problem - and
President Clinton's.
Xref: sparky soc.culture.bosna-herzgvna:1280 soc.culture.yugoslavia:10592