But the gods have apparently decided otherwise. America has made it clear that it is willing to parachute relief supplies into beleaguered eastern Bosnia, but not ground troops or bombs. Instead, the United States counsels accepting bitter defeat and soon. That’s why Vice President Al Gore advised Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic to return to the peace talks, led by Cyrus Vance and Lord David Owen, and try to get the best deal. Signing the Vance-Owen map, which partitions the republic into 10 ethnically based provinces, will be a setback for democracy and any hopes of reversing “ethnic cleansing.” But it could also isolate Serbia and leave its president, Slobodan Milosevic, as odd man out.
Without international pressure, the Serbs have no reason to negotiate. By attacking Muslim enclaves like Cerska, Konjevic Polje and Srebrenica, they have sought to cleanse areas abutting Serbia’s western border. It is only a matter of time before their vastly superior forces succeed. “The soldiers defending Srebrenica are down to one meal a day,” says Phillip von Recklinghausen, a German journalist speaking from the besieged city by amateur radio. “Their morale declined in the last two to three weeks, when they saw that no military aid was coming.” Bosnia’s military problems are not only a question of food and weapons. Leadership trouble has hampered the cause as well: two ranking commanders were recently arrested for refusing to fight in a crucial engagement at Azici, a Sarajevo suburb now in Serb hands.
Morale might improve in Srebrenica now that U.S. airdrops-the one part of Bill Clinton’s policy welcomed by everyone in Bosnia-have begun to hit their marks. But the airlift has little impact in Sarajevo. People in the capital once spoke of resisting the Serb onslaught to the end. But, as outside military help has not materialized, more and more Sarajevans have begun to think of peace at any price. “For 10 months we’ve eaten nothing but spaghetti and rice, spaghetti and rice,” says a 23-year-old Bosnian soldier who has been fighting in the trenches in the suburb of Stup. “Ninety percent of the soldiers are sick of the war. Anything Izetbegovic signs is OK, just to finish the war.”
Izetbegovic himself seems increasingly resigned. He met last week with his fractious cabinet and army, trying to disabuse them of any expectation of foreign military intervention. That didn’t go down easily with some government hard-liners, who argued that the Serbs would respond to nothing but the real threat of force. Finally, Izetbegovic declared his intention to sign the Vance-Owen map, but only if the U.N. Security Council guaranteed that Bosnia’s borders would be under the central government’s control, and that U.N. or NATO forces would seize the Serbs’ heavy artillery. Not a bad compromise for someone so close to the edge of annihilation: the Bosnians came out looking like advocates of peace, insisting on reasonable terms the Serbs are likely to reject. Says one Sarajevo official, “It will be clear who the aggressor is, and the world will do what it has to do.”
That kind of thinking has sustained the Bosnian cause since the Serbs began shelling the capital nearly a year ago. Now, Sarajevo must hew to a last-resort strategy that relies on diplomats to fight their battles for them. But Vance and Owen’s latest plot to isolate Belgrade was to invite Milosevic to Paris for a sumptuous meal with President Francois Mitterrand. If Milosevic wanted to avoid more painful economic sanctions, they argued, he must persuade Serb nationalists to sign their map. Mitterrand took a surprisingly soft approach, offering to press the Security Council to lift sanctions against the rump Yugoslav state if Milosevic agreed to a peace plan. The Serbian president demurred, claiming he had no influence over the forces he unleashed against Bosnia. His intransigence could help the Sarajevo government at the talks when they resume in New York this week. Next, U.N. negotiators must be willing to stand down a new player at the peace table-Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military commander and chief executioner of ethnic cleansing.
