NEWS ANALYSIS : Outraged West Preparing to Act--at Last--in Balkans

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia —  Whipped by the gathering winds of nationalism, the Yugoslav conflagration that destroyed Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992 now threatens to engulf southeastern Europe and draw American forces into the Balkans war.

As acts of premeditated savagery against Bosnia’s Muslim Slavs have steadily mounted to provide testimony to genocide, military intervention has become the rallying cry of frustrated Western nations whose earlier preference for diplomacy abjectly failed to contain the crisis.

As litle as a few months ago, intervention was categorically rejected as an option. Now, however, the reopened debate is no longer over whether Western forces should move in, but how they can be effective now that the bloodletting is out of control.

Images of wounded children, burning villages and ravaged women have outraged democratic nations, forcing elected leaders to abandon a policy of inaction, based on the assumption that the conflict will eventually burn itself out.

But the West’s long contemplation over how deeply to get involved has complicated its mission, as missteps and half-measures employed over the last year allowed the attacking Serbian forces to accomplish most of their expansionist aims.

One-third of Croatia and 70% of Bosnia is in the hands of Serbian gunmen, who have expelled those of other nationalities to ensure unchallenged rule over their spoils. The death toll from fighting that ensued after Serb vigilantes took up guns against non-Serbs in Bosnia in March is officially put at 17,000, but most of the 100,000 missing Muslim civilians are also presumed dead.

More devastating than the casualties has been the uprooting of whole populations. A deadly exercise Serbs call “ethnic cleansing” has created pure Serbian enclaves by forcing nearly 2 million people from their homes at gunpoint.

A tragic archipelago of shabby refugee camps has sprung up in Croatia, Slovenia and along Bosnia’s border, where the displaced are warehoused and fed charity rations to prevent their becoming a burden on Western Europe.

To undo the damage of ethnic cleansing, observers despondently concede, will prove a far larger undertaking than preventing it would have been.

“Western powers are going to come in and bring the killed Muslims back to life? They are going to rebuild the burned houses and make everyone live happily together again?” asked a skeptical Milos Vasic, a prominent military analyst long critical of Western indifference toward the systematic aggression of his fellow Serbs. “I don’t think so. Ethnic cleansing has gone too far.

“The Serbs are laughing at intervention,” said Vasic. “The West has too long held to the view that those in an aggressive, totalitarian regime will be made happy, if we feed them with the Bosnian Muslims to make them quiet.”

But failure to act on humanitarian grounds has angered Muslims around the world, straining relations between Islamic and Christian powers that could ignite or aggravate conflicts in other regions.

American officials a year ago shelved the Yugoslav crisis, saying it was Europe’s problem and leaving it to the fractious 12-nation European Community to seek a solution. The United Nations agreed to deploy peacekeeping troops to Croatia, where 10,000 were killed in the first year of the war. But it declined to protect Bosnia from a long-threatened Serb rebellion, despite repeated appeals by the Sarajevo leadership for early intervention to keep the peace.

Four months after Serbs began their armed rebellion against Bosnian independence, the United Nations launched a program in July to deliver food to civilian victims. Attacks by combatants on humanitarian relief workers fostered a gradual escalation of U.N. involvement, which now includes nearly 7,500 troops, whose mandate remains limited to escorting aid.

The ineffectiveness of the peacekeeping mission and foreign mediators’ failure to broker a serious cease-fire have served to encourage Serb forces to believe they cannot be beaten. “Serbia bows to no one,” was the successful campaign slogan of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, who defeated moderate federal Prime Minister Milan Panic in a flawed but accepted ballot for the Serbian presidency on Dec. 20.

Tolerance of Serbian expansionism in the Balkans has also created rifts among European allies and brought accusations that extreme elements in Russia are being encouraged by the West’s inaction.

The foreign ministers of Austria, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia last week appealed to President Bush for American leadership in the crisis. Upheaval in the former Yugoslavia is “mainly a European problem,” the leaders said in a statement. But they noted that the last 18 months of failed diplomacy “have clearly shown . . . that Europe is not yet ready to come to terms with a problem of such dimensions.”

Talk of U.S.-led intervention has prompted dire warnings of retaliation by Serb warlords. Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has demanded the withdrawal of U.N. troops from North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries currently in Bosnia, implicitly warning they will otherwise come to harm.

France has about 4,000 troops in Bosnia, and Britain has 2,700. A team of 45 Canadian peacekeepers quietly withdrew from Serb-held Banja Luka last week, ostensibly to wait out a dispute over deployment but also as an apparent precaution against becoming targets for retaliation. Many of the thousands of Belgians, Danes, Canadians and other Westerners deployed in Serb-held regions of Croatia might also be vulnerable to hostage-taking or punitive attacks.

Despite the warnings, including a vow by the Yugoslav army chief of staff to defend Serbs everywhere, pressure for intervention has strengthened. Western military strategists fear a wider conflict would draw in neighboring countries, including NATO members Greece and Turkey, likely on opposing sides.

Throughout the remains of Yugoslavia, moderates warn that the war is poised to spread.

“Milosevic is a devil and he knows very well that if he wants to stay in power he must produce all kinds of wars,” said Dragan Veselinov, leader of the opposition Farmers Party in the Serbian province of Vojvodina.

Western diplomats, confused by the sudden change in signals from their home offices, attribute the switch in favor of intervention to the stunning support for Milosevic demonstrated by the recent election. Far from the victory of moderates like Panic--which Washington and Brussels had hoped for--ultranationalist radicals gained ground on a wave of Serbian defiance of Western sanctions imposed to discourage support for the Balkan war.

“There’s no chance for change without bloodshed. Serbia is completely polarized now,” said one Belgrade-based envoy. “Washington has seen there is no chance for reversal of the Milosevic policy.”

While the directives from Western governments have changed, the approach of U.N. and European Community mediators has not. U.N. special envoy Cyrus R. Vance and EC negotiator Lord Owen continue to cling to fading hopes that a solution can be found at the stalled peace talks they oversee in Geneva.

Vance’s original plan for resolving the Yugoslav crisis stirred guarded optimism at the start of 1992, as a New Year’s Day cease-fire agreement included endorsement of a peacekeeping mission. But expectations that deployment of 14,000 U.N. troops to Serb-held areas of Croatia would foster lasting peace soon were shattered. The foreign troops, in the view of most observers, did little other than preserve rebel Serbs’ control of the occupied territory and of free roving guerrillas for what has proved to be an even deadlier campaign against the Bosnian Muslims.

As the flames of war now lick at the foundation of multi-ethnic societies in Kosovo and Macedonia, mediators have taken some lessons from the past year’s failures and moved to prevent the crisis from spreading uncontrollably south. More than 700 U.N. troops have been assigned to guard volatile Macedonia, a former Yugoslav republic of 2 million people left in a diplomatic lurch by the West’s refusal to recognize it over objections from Greece.

Ethnic Albanians who make up 90% of the 2 million residents of Serbia’s Kosovo province fear they will be the next victims of ethnic cleansing. But Belgrade’s refusal to allow foreign troops on Serbian territory presents the West with the choice of watching the emergence of another Bosnian-style slaughter or intervening in what is essentially a domestic dispute.

Bush has warned Milosevic that America stands ready to deter any Serbian aggression against Kosovo Albanians. Yet from Washington to Moscow, caution remains the watchword, and the international community still lacks a consensus on how to deal with the crisis, the most deadly and destabilizing in Europe since World War II.

“We have reacted very cautiously on Bosnia, but I think we also have to realize what is happening there,” British Prime Minister John Major commented after talks with Bush last week. “Many of the actions we have seen in Bosnia are quite unspeakable, quite intolerable and I think we have to reflect (that) in our policy.”

The dispute over when and how to intervene militarily now boils down to conflicting objectives of Western countries that want to stop the suffering of millions and those of U.N. commanders responsible for the peacekeeping troops now vulnerable to Serbian attack.