Anyone Remember U.N. Article 51? : The Bosnian war may only be beginning

On Wednesday NATO gave its staff two days to produce a plan for the withdrawal of all 24,000 U.N. peacekeepers from Bosnia. On Thursday President Clinton offered U.S. ground troops to assist in the withdrawal. (The United States is expected to contribute about half of a combined NATO force of up to 45,000.) The causes of the U.N. collapse in Bosnia aside, we applaud the President’s alacrity in offering American assistance in this grim evacuation.

BLOOD BATH FEARED: Once the peacekeepers are gone, Serb victory may follow and thereafter an “ethnic cleansing” blood bath to which no outsider will be witness. In addition, the war may well widen before it ends. Croats are again fighting Serbs both in Bosnia and Croatia. Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has threatened to carry the war to Zagreb, the Croatian capital. And the war may not be waged by local combatants alone. On Wednesday Turkish Foreign Minister Murat Karayalcin said that Muslim countries are ready to provide troops and equipment for Bosnia when UNPROFOR leaves. A day earlier Bosnia’s president met in Geneva behind closed doors with a new Islamic “Contact Group”--Pakistan, Senegal, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Malaysia, Turkey and Egypt. Some Muslim UNPROFOR contingents may decline to be evacuated, among them Jordan’s (3,367) and Pakistan’s (3,017), the two only slightly smaller than France’s (4,489) and Britain’s (3,405).

Once the United Nations has left Bosnia, the U.N. Security Council may seek to lift the arms embargo that has prevented Bosnia from effectively defending itself. Russia may use its veto to keep the embargo in place. But as respect for the United Nations drops to a new low, the veto may be ignored. The Islamic Contact Group may publicly reject it, and pressure could mount in the U.S. Congress to do the same. Under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, any nation has the right to defend itself. Watch for Article 51 to be widely invoked.

European antipathy to an enlarged Muslim force in Bosnia, particularly if it enjoyed any U.S. support, could be intense. Because of it, Russia could receive unexpected support for its suggestion that the Western European Union replace NATO (and that, by unmistakable implication, Russia replace the United States in European collective security). According to sources cited in the Guardian newspaper of London, “the (British) Government is for the first time giving serious consideration to alternatives to NATO.”

TIME OF DESPERATION: The outcome of these developments is unpredictable, and just that makes them ominous. Because the Serb aggression aims not at domination but at expulsion and extermination, surrender may not be an option for the Muslims and Croats. But a battle to the death does not proceed like a forest fire burning itself out. Real people, whose fate will be known worldwide, are involved. No one knows what they or others reacting to their plight may do. Our only, hesitant advice to the Clinton Administration must be: Do not conduct American diplomacy as if this war were over. It may be only now beginning.