Baker’s Whistlestop Campaign For Freedom’s Foes: Next Stop Belgrade?

(Washington, D.C.): With his present
trip to Beijing, Secretary of State James
Baker seems determined to leave no stone
unturned in a personal campaign to
improve U.S. ties with odious tyrants and
other enemies of freedom, wherever they
may be. After all, communists in China,
Vietnam, Cambodia and North Korea,
Syria’s Hafez el Assad, the Soviet
central authorities and the Palestine
Liberation Organization have all been the
direct beneficiaries of the
Secretary’s diplomatic ministrations in
recent months.

One despot engaged in a frontal
assault on democracy is curiously absent
from this list, however — the rapacious
Serbian communist Slobodan Milosevic. In
fact, it has been nearly six months
since Secretary Baker last visited
Belgrade; on that occasion, moreover, he
delivered a speech widely interpreted as
a repudiation of Croatian and other
former Yugoslav republics’ aspirations
for independence and an endorsement of
“territorial integrity” and
central control.

The federal authorities wasted no time
acting upon Baker’s implicit invitation
to violence. With the failure of an
abortive campaign to intimidate Slovenia
into withdrawing its declaration of
independence, forces loyal to Milosevic
turned their full terror on Croatia. As href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=91-P_112at”>the
attached column by Patrick Buchanan
published in yesterday’s Washington
Times makes painfully clear, the
upshot has been the systematic
destruction of Croatian museums,
churches, cultural sites and historic
cities as well as the slaughter of
thousands of the republic’s innocent
civilians.

The Bush Administration’s response to
this violence has been characteristically
half-hearted and tardy. While
periodically condemning the bloodshed in
Croatia, Washington has generally adhered
to the shameful fiction that the Serbians
and Croatians are somehow equally to
blame for it. Until last week, the
United States paid lip service to the
need to end of the Yugoslav strife while
relying on the European Community’s
utterly ineffectual efforts to bring it
about.

Finally, on 9 November 1991, President
Bush actually announced that the United
States would take some concrete
action to punish Serbian aggression. In
doing so, however, he was still
following the EC’s lead — mirroring the
Community’s shockingly belated decision
to impose economic sanctions on the
would-be “Greater Serbia” (hopefully
excluding Croatia and Slovenia).
Unfortunately, it would be par for the
Bush Administration’s course if, having
now reluctantly delivered this
long-overdue slap on the wrist, the
Secretary of State were to be dispatched
to Belgrade to smooth ruffled Serbian
feathers.

The Center for Security Policy
continues to believe that U.S. and allied
interests would be far better served —
both in the context of former Yugoslavia
and as a precedent for other dissolving
empires (notably that of the former
Soviet Union) — were the West to align
itself squarely with those seeking
democracy and free market economic
opportunity. Accordingly, the Center
calls once again on the United States to
offer real leadership in this
crisis. The place to start would be to send
Secretary Baker forthwith to Zagreb
and Ljubljana to announce
U.S. recognition and support for Croatian
and Slovenian independence.