A GENERATION’S LESSONS UNLEARNED: CLINTON’S BOSNIA POLICY LOOKS MORE LIKE MUNICH 1938 THAN D-DAY 1944

(Washington, D.C.): Tomorrow,
President Bill Clinton will cap a
seemingly endless series of speeches
about the need for his generation to
learn from the painful experience of its
predecessor. In the fiftieth anniversary
commemoration of the D-Day invasion, he
would have Americans and Europeans alike
find lessons for today — lessons of
courage, of commitment and of sacrifice.

Ironically, the real
lesson of D-Day seems to be going
completely unlearned by Mr. Clinton and
his counterparts in key Western European
capitals: The invasion of
Normandy — and the ultimate destruction
of Nazi Germany, had tragically been made
possible at an enormous cost in lives —
the result of a lack of courage,
commitment and willingness to sacrifice
nearly six years before.

In September 1938, the Western powers
led by Britain’s Neville Chamberlain
decided to accommodate, rather than resist,
Adolf Hitler in his claims to
“ethnic German” territory in
neighboring Czechoslovakia which he had
seized by force of arms. Any
competent appreciation of the true
historical significance of the events
that marked the beginning of the end of
World War II must start with the lessons
to be learned from the events that
represented what Winston Churchill once
called the “end of the
beginning” of that conflict.⁽¹⁾

Munich Today?

Ironically, the foreign ministers of
the United States, Russia, Britain,
France and Germany, among others, are
expected to meet in Talloires, France
amidst the invasion-marking fly-overs,
multi-gun salutes and wreath-laying
photo-ops. Their purpose will be to try
once again to develop a diplomatic
solution to the first major conflict on
the continent of Europe since V-E day.

Like the umpteen negotiating sessions
concerning the Bosnian crisis that have
preceded it, the present meeting is
doomed to fail. The reason for such a
grim prognosis? The United States
and its European allies continue to
pursue towards Serbia the odious policies
of Neville Chamberlain — dangerous
policies of appeasement that rewarded an
aggressor in 1938, not the courageous
policies which defended and ultimately
liberated the victims of aggression in
1944 that are properly being extolled
today.

Indeed, the foreign ministers’ meeting
of the so-called “Contact
Group” is supposed to try to conjure
up what amounts to the lineal descendant
to the Munich agreement. Pursuant to its
terms, the Bosnian government would be
obliged to halt further efforts to undo
the territorial conquest achieved by Serb
forces through brutal “ethnic
cleansing” over the past few years.

Certified War Criminals

Fresh documentation of the Hitlerian
barbarity of this organized, deliberate
effort to secure Serbian liebensraum
through wholesale crimes against humanity
has just been supplied by the United
Nations Commission on War Crimes. In a
sixty-page report released last week,
Serbia was charged with
“genocide” as well as a
“systematic rape policy” in
regions throughout Bosnia and
Hercegovina.

The report was commissioned a year ago
by a U.N. Security Council tribunal
established in The Hague to indict those
accused of war crimes. Drawing upon over
65,000 pages of documents and 300 hours
of videotape, the Commission found that
Serb practices — which included the rape
of some 20,000 women — were undertaken
“with extreme brutality and savagery
in a manner designed to instill terror in
the civilian population.” Just what
will be done with this damning evidence
is very unclear, however, since the
Security Council has cynically failed to
appoint a prosecutor to evaluate it,
prepare indictments or prosecute those
accused.

Unprosecutable Be
the ‘Peacemakers’

Even more of an obstacle to such a
prosecution, though, is the fact that the
United States and its allies persist in
negotiating with those responsible for
this campaign of aggression. As a
consequence, individuals formally
labelled “war criminals” by
then-Secretary of State Lawrence
Eagleburger are the very people with whom
the Bosnian government is being compelled
to treat — and to whom concessions are
supposed to be made.

To be sure, the current round of
negotiations is also concerned with
securing territorial concessions from the
Serbian side. While the Contact Group
plan would oblige the Serbs to give up
some of the estimated 72 percent of
Bosnia-Hercegovina it controls today, the
aggressors would nonetheless be allowed
to retain virtually half of the country.
This is, however, a more favorable
outcome than the Serbs have reason to
expect if Bosnian government forces
continue to achieve military victories on
the ground thanks to recent infusions of
arms and other assistance from overseas.

What Arms Embargo?

A report in the 2 June 1994 Washington
Times revealed that the Muslim-led
government of Bosnia-Hercegovina is now
receiving both arms and significant
numbers of fighters from the radical
Islamic regime in Tehran. According to
the Times, Iran has, since early
May, dispatched “up to 400
Revolutionary Guards…along with
shipments of arms and explosives.”⁽²⁾

The emerging strategic relationship
between the Bosnian government and Iran
is an ominous — albeit entirely
predictable — result of the
international arms embargo imposed on the
former Yugoslavia by the United Nations.
Denied access to weaponry (let alone
meaningful support) from other
democracies in the West, the Bosnian
Muslims were left no choice but to be
drawn into the orbit of a nation that
would provide both.

In return, Iran, in the words of one
U.S. official quoted by the Washington
Times, is being given a base
“to get at the soft underbelly of
Europe.” From it, the Iranian
mullahs evidently hope to create
terrorist groups that will enable them
not only to “conduct operations
against Serbs” but also to “be used
as a means of subversion in other parts
of Europe.”⁽³⁾
They can also use this base to “set
up networks of pro-Iranian groups in
Bosnia and other parts of the former
Yugoslavia that will assist Tehran in
breaking what the Iranian government
views as a U.S.-imposed embargo of
Iran.” Such networks can
only be expected to proliferate as
militant Islamic forces develop into
radical enclaves among the displaced
populations of their coreligionists from
Northern Africa, Kurdish regions and
elsewhere now living in Europe in
increasing numbers.

The Macedonian Flashpoint

Matters are likely to be made worse
shortly as political instability in
Macedonia creates new opportunities for a
regional widening of the conflict in
Bosnia. The VRMO, an extremist opposition
group noted for its provocative claims on
Greek territory, may actually win
elections to be held in November.
Albanian nationalist sentiments in
Macedonia — as well as Muslim
radicalization — are also pushing the
present leadership in Skopje toward
closer ties with Belgrade, ties that
already translate into indifference to
the flagrant violation via Macedonia of
international sanctions against Serbia.

With the Clinton Administration’s
decision first to deploy and, more
recently, to augment the 600-800 U.S.
“peacekeeping” troops in
Macedonia, the coming explosion of this
Balkan tinderbox could well result in
American casualties, another humiliating
retreat or both. This is particularly so,
as these troops have been moved from
their relatively safe deployment at the
airport in Skopje to more exposed
positions.

Russian Arms Supplies to
Serbia

The self-defeating nature of Western
passivity is further evidenced by another
reported Western intelligence finding:
According to news items aired by CNN on
29 May 1994 and carried in the Washington
Times the next day, the evidence is
mounting that Russia is
intensifying its violations of the
international sanctions against Serbia
and the arms embargo on the former
Yugoslavia by stepping up munitions
shipments to its allies in Serbia.
As the Times put it:

“Publicly, Russia
remains supportive of the Geneva
agreement. But some intelligence and
diplomatic sources believe it is
playing a double game, with Russian
military leaders privately assuring
the Bosnian Serbs they will continue
to receive Russian arms and support.
Western European intelligence sources
say the Russian military continues to
ship ammunition, oil and other
essential supplies up the Danube from
Black Sea ports, despite U.S. efforts
to stop it.”

The Bottom Line

In other words, by its fecklessness in
the face of Serbian aggression, the West
may once again be unleashing on the
continent of Europe forces of fanaticism
and mayhem that will take years, enormous
resources and great loss of life to root
out. The ultimate costs may or may not
eventually come to approximate those that
flowed from appeasement in Munich. On the
other hand, the ultimate victory over the
enemies of democracy and freedom may
prove far less clear-cut than that
ensured by the triumphant landing at
D-Day.

As former British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher, in a typically
eloquent commentary in the 4 May 1994
editions of the New York Times
put:

“The new joint effort by
Russia and the West to persuade the
Serbs to settle for 49 percent of
Bosnian territory (down from the 72
percent they have now occupied)
is…rife with dangers. The Serbs
will almost certainly not withdraw,
and once the guns are quiet the
Russians may not wish them to do so
— nor may the West be prepared to
revive the threat of bombing to force
them. Even if they were to
withdraw, their 49 percent of Bosnia
would still represent a reward for
aggression.”

The Center for Security Policy
believes that it is imperative that the
United States swiftly lift the arms
embargo against the Bosnian government
and establish that Serbian aggression
neither be rewarded there nor tolerated
in Macedonia or elsewhere.

– 30 –

1. The Center for
Security Policy has long argued that the
lessons to be usefully learned from the
last titanic European conflict actually
begin with the Spanish civil war. See in
this connection, entitled “For
Whom the Bell Tolls: The Serbian
Dressrehearsal for the coming crisis in
Europe “, ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=91-D_77″>No. 91-D 77,
13 August 1991).

2. While the
Iranian connection may be the most
worrisome, it is not the only one the
Bosnian government has been forced to
forge. The Washington Times report
also claims that “U.S. intelligence
agencies have detected small numbers of
fighters from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and
Syria in Bosnia” and that “the
Saudi government has supplied several
hundred million dollars worth of arms to
the Bosnian Muslims.”

3. According to
Kenneth Katzman, a specialist on Middle
East matters at the Congressional
Research Service quoted by the Times,
“The [Revolutionary] Guards are like
a virus — they get into a country and
replicate themselves, leaving a militia
behind.”