GIVE US A BREAK: RUSSIAN CONFERENCE ON BOSNIA, CLINTON ENDORSEMENT WILL ONLY APPEASE, EMBOLDEN SERBS

(Washington, D.C.): Just at the moment
when even Belgrade’s most assiduous
apologists (e.g., former Secretary of
State Lawrence Eagleburger) were finding
it impossible to maintain the fiction of
moral equivalence concerning Serbia’s
genocidal aggression, Russia has
introduced a new device for protecting
Serb equities: an “urgent
summit” on the Bosnia conflict. Such
a summit would involve Russia, the United
States, the European Union, the United
Nations; presumably, Serbia, its proxies
and its victims would be represented as
well.

The results of such a summit
at this juncture are absolutely
predictable: The Serbs will view it as
further insulation from the concerted
military action even Boutros
Boutros-Ghali appears to believe is
in order. At a minimum, they
will seek further concessions as the
price for: refraining from further
“ethnic cleansing” in Gorazde
and other parts of Bosnia; ending
deliberate attacks on hospitals, refugee
centers and civilian populations;
liberating United Nations and
humanitarian personnel taken hostage;
returning impounded Serb heavy weapons
removed at gunpoint from U.N. storage
sites; and other odious war crimes. At
least as likely, however, is that the
Serbs will continue such activities as
the new negotiations proceed.

Given the cynical role that the
Kremlin has been playing in Bosnia over
the past few weeks — a role designed to
restore Russia’s prestige and influence
in the international arena as well as to
bail out their Serb allies — it is
hardly surprising that Moscow would try
the “summit” gambit at this
juncture.⁽¹⁾
After all, they have done so again and
again in the past when confronting the
imminent use of Western military power
against a client (e.g., the Soviet
efforts to derail Desert Storm and
Russia’s proposal for a summit to
forestall action against a nuclearizing
North Korea).

What continues to be
astounding — and appalling —
however, is the Clinton Administration’s
continuing willingness to welcome such
Russian sabotage. Even as he
implicitly acknowledged that Boris
Yeltsin had blind-sided him with his
unilateral call for a summit, President
Clinton essentially endorsed it this
afternoon:

“[President Yeltsin] and I
have discussed [the summit proposal]
on the telephone at least once, maybe
twice, and I think it has some merit.
We both agreed the last time
we talked, before this
development in Gorazde, that we were
making progress doing what each of us
was doing and that it might
be a little premature. That
sort of thing, in effect, can only be
done once and it might be
better to save it for a time
when hopefully the negotiations
between the Serbs on the one hand and
the Croatians and the Muslims on the
other where coming down to an
endpoint.

“I presume from his
statement today that he is
sufficiently concerned about what has
happened over the last couple of days
that he thinks we ought to go ahead
and do it now. I think it
deserves serious consideration and I
want to discuss it with him and with
the other nations that would be
involved. I think in the context of
the statement President Yeltsin made
today, it has to be considered
seriously because it was a
very important, positive statement
that he made.”

The Bottom Line

The West will fully deserve
the contempt that it has earned over the
past two years if it now accepts Serb
cease- fire “breakthroughs,”
promises concerning deployments of fresh
U.N. monitors to Gorazde or other token
gestures. These are sheer cant.
As the U.N. commander in Bosnia, Lt. Gen.
Sir Michael Rose put it today — with
characteristic British understatement
laced with sarcasm:

“The difference between the
stated intentions and the actual
actions in the Bosnian Serb side is
something we will have to look at
again in the future. And I
would certainly say that I would not
believe things the way I have done in
the past.”

The United States and its allies must
similarly reject the Russians’ summit
stalling tactic and instead put
Moscow to the test. If President
Yeltsin is sincere in his condemnation of
the Serbs and his insistence, as he put
it today, that “the international
community ought to take decisive measure
to ensure a political solution to the
Bosnian crisis,” then Russia should
stop opposing NATO’s use of air strikes
against Serb targets as mandated by the
U.N. and sought by its Secretary General.

– 30 –

1. For more on the
Kremlin’s machinations on behalf of the
Serbs see the Center for Security
Policy’s Decision Brief entitled
Guernica, 1937; Gorazde, 1994,
(No. 94-D 36,
18 April 1994).