From: trh@jack.sns.com (Al Trh)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.turkish
Subject: Serbs' Strategy
Date: 23 Jan 1993 08:59:22 -0600
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
Reply-To: Turkish Cultural Program List <TRKNWS-L%USCVM.BitNet@pucc.PRINCETON.EDU>
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Subject: Serbs Stage New Peace Performance




A New Serb Role in the Bosnian Tragedy? Serbs Stage New Peace
Performance

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service

BELGRADE, Jan. 17 - After nine months of waging brutal war in
Bosnia and defying Western warnings, Serb nationalist leaders are
making an elaborate public-relations production out of peace.

The first act was staged early last week in Geneva, where Serbian
President Slobodan Milosevic made a dramatic cameo appearance as
a born-again apostle of peace. Milosevic - who is accused by the
Westof instigating the conflict in Bosnia - made sure the world
press was watching as he appeared to crush his Bosnian Serb
clients' objections to a peace conference proposal that would
give them less legitimacy and land than they had been loudly
demanding.  This won Milosevic, who is accused by the United
States of responsibility for war crimes in Bosnia, the public
gratitude of conference co-chairman Cyrus Vance, who thanked
Milosevic for working hard and "contributing much" to the peace
process.

The Serb second act is to be staged Tuesday at the Bosnian moun-
tain resort of Pale, headquarters of the self-proclaimed Bosnian
Serb government. There, less than 20 miles from shattered, Serb-
besieged Sarajevo, an unelected parliament of Serb warlords,
old-line communist functionaries and ultranationalist zealots is
expected to approve the Geneva peace plan and thereby effectively
abolish their Bosnian Serb "sovereign republic."

The motivation behind the Serb theatrics was made clear late this
week in a remarkably candid statement by a senior Bosnian Serb
leader. "Now it is most important that the war stop and that we
gain time to eliminate the anti-Serb hysteria in the West and
leave the proponents of military intervention without a valid
case to attack the Bosnian Serbs," said Momcilo Krajisnik,
president of the Bosnian Serb parliament, in a newspaper inter-
view here.

Krajisnik went on to declare that there are means other than
violence that can win Serb nationalists their goal of a "Greater
Serbia" carved from the ruins of Bosnia and other states of the
old Yugoslav federation. "I think that our people have to trust
this government and accept that a war cannot be won by military
force only. War can only be won by prudent policies," said Kra-
jisnik.

The shift in Serb strategy from a military terror campaign that
has given them control of 70 percent of Bosnia - while leaving
tens of thousands dead or missing and more than 1.6 million home-
less - appears to have been made here in Belgrade a week ago dur-
ing a closed strategy session of nationalist leaders.

In attendance at the newly formed "Council for the Harmonization
of State Positions" were senior politicians from Serbia and pol-
itical and military leaders from Serb-controlled regions in
Bosnia and areas of neighboring Croatia seized by insurgents dur-
ing the Serb-Croat war there last year. In command of the meet-
ing, Western diplomats say, was Milosevic.

"When Milosevic left the meeting after 6 p.m. last Saturday, they
had worked out their joint position on the Geneva talks," a
senior Western diplomat said here.

There is abundant evidence - from the almost instantaneous
response to the shift by state-run media here, to the seemingly
spontaneous moderation of Bosnian Serb demands - that the drama
of Serb diplomacy in Geneva was carefully orchestrated. On Tues-
day, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, a Milosevic protege,
flatly rejected the conference peace proposal because it denied
recognition of a sovereign Serb state in Bosnia. Because of
Karadzic, it appeared that the conference would collapse.

But just at that moment, Milosevic seemed to come to the rescue,
letting it be known that he was leaning on Karadzic. By early
Tuesday evening, although not a word had changed in the language
of the peace plan, Karadzic announced a change of heart. The
peace talks were revived, and Milosevic presented himself to
television cameras to take credit for what he called "a very big
success."

Back in Belgrade that evening, state-run television was astound-
ingly quick to praise a plan that its commentators had been damn-
ing for weeks as a treacherous sellout. Just as curiously that
evening, ultranationalist Serbs in the Bosnian city of Banja Luka
were explaining in Belgrade newspapers how they had been convert-
ed to the virtues of the peace plan. Militant politician Radislav
Vukic, a socialist who has championed the cause of "ethnic
cleansing" in the Banja Luka region and who had condemned the
Geneva plan as a betrayal, told reporters that night that the
peace talks were finally moving in the right direction.

Most Bosnian Serb leaders now predict that their "parliament" -
which just two weeks ago rejected the Geneva peace plan as anti-
Serb - will see the error of its ways. Again, parliament
president Krajisnik has been extraordinarily frank in his fore-
cast of the peace-mongering that will go on display in Pale Tues-
day. "There will be no rift in the assembly," he said, "because
there is democratic centralism in it." Democratic centralism is
communist-era jargon that translates: Everyone will do as he is
told.

What all this high-visibility peacemaking has to do with stopping
the bloodshed in Bosnia and relieving the misery of besieged
civilians in Sarajevo is not at all clear. Fighting this week
picked up across the republic as all the warring parties - Serbs,
Croats and the Slavic Muslim-led Bosnian government - tried to
improve their positions on the ground.

The next stage of Geneva peace talks deals with a proposed map
that dissects Bosnia-Herzegovina into 10 largely autonomous pro-
vinces, many of them bizarrely shaped by communal, economic and
geographic necessity and all connected by what are called "Blue
Routes" - highways that are to be policed by U.N. peace-keepers.

As currently drawn, the province boundaries are strongly opposed
by both the Bosnian government and the Serbs. Diplomats say it
could take weeks or months before map questions are resolved, ad-
ding that the Bosnian government may pull out of the peace talks
rather than surrender two-thirds of the republic to Serb and
Croat control.

This appears to suit the Bosnian Serbs, who say they will then be
seen as champions of a U.N.-brokered settlement that has been
flouted by Muslim radicals. In any case, Bosnian Serb leader
Karadzic said this week that his forces will not silence their
heavy artillery - guns that enforce the seige of Sarajevo and
other Muslim-held cities - until all arguments over the peace
plan are resolved to the satisfaction of the Serb side.