SKUNK AT THE PICNIC: IRANIAN PRESENCE IN BOSNIA LOOMS OVER SENATE DELIBERATIONS ON LIFTING THE ARMS EMBARGO

(Washington, D.C.): In the next two
days, the Senate Armed Services Committee
is expected to take testimony from
foreigners committed to preserving the
morally reprehensible and manifestly
inequitable embargo on arms transfers to
the government of Bosnia-Hercegovina. Unrepresented,
but nonetheless a presence at these
proceedings will be the one nation —
apart from the Serbian aggressors — that
has the most to gain from perpetuating
this arrangement: radical Islamic
Iran.

With the active assistance of the
Clinton Administration, hearings have
been hastily arranged with British
Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd and the
defense ministers of several NATO nations
that have peacekeeping forces in Bosnia
or other vested interests in the
conflict. The clear purpose of these
hearings is to derail the growing support
for legislation requiring an end to the
arms embargo.

‘Big Mo’ Behind Lifting the
Embargo

On 12 May 1994, the Senate approved S.
2042, a schizophrenic piece of
legislation that simultaneously called on
the President to engage in efforts to
achieve a multilateral lifting of the
arms embargo while directing him, at the
initiative of Sens. Robert Dole (R-KA)
and Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), to do so on
a unilateral basis. What the two
elements had in common was a recognition
that the effect of U.N.-mandated limits
on arms transfers was to deny weapons
only the victims of Serbian aggression as
Serbian forces continue to receive large
quantities of arms from Russia and
elsewhere.

Then, on 9 June, the House of
Representatives upped the ante, adopting
at the initiative of Reps. Frank
McCloskey (D-IN) and Ben Gilman (R-NY)
and by a stunning 242-178 vote a
statutory requirement for the immediate
and unilateral termination of the arms
embargo, upon the request of Bosnia’s
government. And now, the Senate is
expected shortly to consider an amendment
to the FY1995 Defense authorization bill
that would have the same effect.

Should the new Dole-Lieberman
initiative be adopted by the Senate, Sen.
Sam Nunn (D-GA) — the Armed Services
Committee chairman who opposes lifting
the embargo unilaterally — would be
effectively precluded from dropping it in
the upcoming House-Senate conference.
More importantly, President Clinton would
be confronted with a choice between
conforming to its requirements, or
vetoing the defense bill.

Fresh Ammo for Proponents
of the Embargo

Clearly, Sen. Nunn and others
committed to preserving this odious
embargo unless and until the U.N. says it
can be lifted feel the need to shore up
their case.

Impassioned statements from allied
representatives opposing its unilateral
termination, coupled with renewed threats
to remove British and French peacekeeping
forces from Bosnia are, accordingly, to
be expected.

Interestingly, as of this writing,
Chairman Nunn refuses to afford the
Bosnian government an opportunity to make
its case for lifting the embargo at once.
It has fallen to the Ranking Minority
Member, Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-SC), to
invite senior representatives of the
government in Sarajevo — Vice President
Ejup Ganic and U.N. Ambassador Mohammed
Sacirbey — to participate in an unofficial
session at 11:30 a.m. on Thursday. Others
advocating an immediate and unilateral
ending of the embargo may be given
similar short shrift.

In sum, it is predictable that — all
other things being equal — the
compelling arguments likely to emanate
from the Thurmond and any subsequent
sessions featuring opponents of continued
adherence to the Bosnian arms embargo
will receive far less attention than the
self-serving pronouncements featured in
the earlier hearings with Foreign
Minister Hurd and his counterparts from
allied defense ministries.

What About the Iranians?

As noted in a 5 June 1994 Center for
Security Policy Decision Brief⁽¹⁾,
in the face of the sustained denial of
access to weaponry (let alone meaningful
support) from other democracies in the
West, the Bosnian government has been
left no choice but to be drawn into the
orbit of a nation prepared to provide
both — Iran. The Muslim-led government
in Sarajevo is now receiving arms and
non-trivial numbers of fighters from the
radical Islamic regime in Tehran.
According to a report in the 2 June 1994
edition of the Washington Times,
Iran has, since early May, dispatched
“up to 400 Revolutionary
Guards…along with shipments of arms and
explosives.”

The Senate Armed Services
Committee would be well-advised to
contemplate the deleterious consequences
likely to flow from the emerging
strategic relationship between the
Bosnian government and Iran. For
example, in the words of one U.S.
official quoted by the Times,
Iran is thus 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.”⁽²⁾

Unless the Bosnian government is
afforded some alternative to its emerging
dependency on Tehran, it is predictable
that, as the American official put it,
Iran will use its new European 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 Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy
continues to believe that an
immediate end to the arms embargo is an
essential precondition to achieving a
just and durable peace on the ground in
Bosnia-Hercegovina. Even if one
posits that the so-called “Contact
Group’s” newest peace plan for
Bosnia — reportedly about to be unveiled
— will prove acceptable and workable,
the victims of Serbian aggression are
clearly going to need the means to defend
themselves and deter future attacks.

But if, on the other hand, this
proposal like countless others before
it proves to be chimerical, there is
all the more reason why the Bosnian
government forces should be equipped with
the arms needed to liberate territory
“ethnically cleansed” and
seized by the Serbs. And it is
clearly in the West’s interest that
Bosnia be permitted to obtain those arms
from — and forge strategic relationships
with — Western nations, rather than a
fanatic Iranian regime bent on their
destruction.

– 30 –

1. See A
Generation’s Lessons Unlearned: Clinton’s
Bosnia Policy Looks More Like Munich 1938
than D-Day 1944, ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-D_56″>No. 94-D 56, 5
June 1994).

2. 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.”