How the West Can Bring Peace To Yugoslavia

By Richard Nixon
The Wall Street Journal, 17 December 1991

As the post-Cold War era in Europe begins, the crisis in
Yugoslavia has set a profoundly dangerous precedent: While
communism has collapsed around the world, the West has
mounted a comically tepid response to attempts by Serbian
hard-line communists to dismember or even to destroy the
democratic government of Croatia. As Germany and some other
European states understand, the West must recognize Slovenia
and Croatia in order to stop the war, to prevent the reversal
of peaceful democratic change through military force, and to
facilitate a settlement based on the principle of democratic
self-determination.

Some argue that, to paraphrase Neville Chamberlain,
Croatia is a small, far away nation about which we know
little and should care less. But great stakes are involved
that create the potential to transform today’s small issue
into tomorrow’s big issue. A neutral Western position
appeases the aggressors in Serbia and the Serbian-dominated
federal army. It will give a green light to aggressors
world-wide and send a discouraging signal to the world’s
struggling democrats, not only in the former Soviet Union but
even in China.

We should not mourn the passing of artificial
multinational states, such as the Soviet Union and
Yugoslavia, that were held together by force under a
totalitarian system. In Yugoslavia, civil war resulted from
the actions of communist leaders in Belgrade who sought to
perpetuate old-style centralized rule and not from those of
democratic forces in the republics who sought to decentralize
power. The Soviet Union will likely avoid a similar fate
because the democrats in the republics, led by Boris Yeltsin,
have prevailed politically over the unionists at the center,
led by Mikhail Gorbachev.

The Yugoslav crisis is not the stereotypical Balkan
struggle between equally guilty parties in which benign
neutrality is the best policy. In launching the offensive
against Croatia, the communist hardliners executed a de facto
coup, seizing state power and defying the constitutional
orders of Yugoslavia’s president, prime minister and four of
the country’s six republics. Serbian militias and the federal
armed forces have committed shocking atrocities against
civilians, bombed the offices of the Croatian president,
shelled cultural landmarks such as the medieval city of
Dubrovnik, razed the major city of Vukovar, and are now
poised to level the cities of Osijek and Vinkovci.

The West has accepted this communist “fait accompli”. The
idealistic mediation efforts of the European Community and
the United Nations have lacked the hardheaded realism needed
to stop communist aggression. Even worse, the West engaged
for months in a tragic kind of moral equivalency by imposing
an arms embargo and economic sanctions that treated the
perpetrators and victims of aggression alike. Only recently
have some European states waived economic sanctions against
republics, like Croatia, that have complied with the mediated
cease-fires.

In the coming weeks, events in Yugoslavia will follow two
possible scenarios. Europe and the U.S. can end the war by
recognizing the independence of Slovenia and Croatia and
adopting policies to create a balance of power on the ground.
Or the West can stand by idly until communist forces commit
further outrages on the battlefield that compel our
intervention after thousands more have died.

While we should not call Gen. Schwarzkopf out of
retirement or send in the Marines, we should do the
following:

• First, we must grant full recognition to the
  governments of Slovenia and Croatia. In declaring
  independence, the democratic governments of both republics
  were exercising the right to secede set forth in the first
  sentence of the Yugoslav constitution. Croatia has expressed
  a willingness to accept the European Community peace plan,
  but Serbia and the federal army have stonewalled every
  proposed compromise. Diplomatic recognition would create a
  powerful deterrent to further aggression and a legal
  foundation for later actions.
• Second, we must introduce international peacekeeping
  forces even if a perfect cease-fire has not been established.
  The present policy of premising such a deployment on a total
  halt to hostilities gives the communist forces a veto over
  international action. As they have done after the 14
  cease-fires negotiated so far, they need only to restart the
  shooting, and international efforts go back to square one.
  Instead, well-armed U.N.- or European-sponsored peacekeeping
  forces should be deployed both at the current positions of
  the federal army and at Croatia’s prewar borders, with
  subsequent negotiations focusing on the withdrawal of
  Belgrade’s forces from occupied Croatian territory.
• Third, we should provide Slovenia and Croatia with
  defensive weapons. The U.N.-imposed arms embargo on
  Yugoslavia has had the perverse effect of aiding the
  communist forces. The Serbia-dominated army has large
  military stockpiles, and Yugoslavia’s munitions factories,
  all of which are in Serbia, are working overtime. Some
  Yugoslav generals have boasted publicly that the embargo
  primarily hurts the poorly armed Croatian militia and have
  implied that if Croatia acquires sufficient defensive weapons
  their army would be forced to make peace. It is time for the
  West to supply Croatia with the mines, anti-tank weapons, and
  anti-aircraft missiles needed to compel the communists to
  compromise at the negotiating table.

As Germany and other European states move toward
recognizing Slovenia and Croatia, the U.S. should not ride in
the caboose of the recognition train. In 1776, the Croatian
city-state of Dubrovnik became the first country to establish
diplomatic ties with the U.S. The Croatians had the courage
of their convictions then. We should demonstrate the courage
of our convictions now.

Mr. Nixon is the author of “Seize the Moment: America’s
Challenge in a One-Superpower World,” due out next month from
Simon & Schuster.