Plan Will Help Wipe Bosnia Off Map

The Clinton administration’s bid to end the war in Bosnia - now backed up by heavy allied bombing and shelling against the Bosnian Serbs - may ultimately succeed, but that won’t be the end of the conflict.

As has often happened in recent history, a patched-together peace settlement may only plant the seeds of something worse later.

The specifics of the U.S.-authored proposal are still under wraps. About all that has been officially revealed is that the plan offers the Bosnian Serbs roughly half of Bosnia’s territory. In other words, the carve-up would be about the same as was offered to them by early peace schemes that they rejected out of hand.

But officials of their “government” in Pale, the ski resort that serves as their makeshift capital, have said they are ready to consider the American plan. At least, that was their position before NATO aircraft, most of them American, started blasting Bosnian Serb targets this week in retaliation for the latest murderous mortar attack on civilians in Sarajevo.

In diplomacy, timing can be all-important.

One theory is that Washington’s political intervention has proved more promising than previous attempts to reach a settlement because the military balance has recently turned against the Bosnian Serbs and because their godfather, President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia proper, has decided that the 41-month-long war is no longer worth what it has cost him both politically and economically.

One thing sure is that Milosevic, pictured by U.S. officials in the past as practically the devil incarnate, has been very cozy with the American diplomats sent to Belgrade to enlist his support for their plan.

There’s something fishy about all this.

One of Milosevic’s spokesmen may have provided the real clue to the Serbs’ newfound conversion to compromise when he explained to a western journalist this week that, though the U.S. plan doesn’t cede more territory to the Bosnian Serbs than was previously put on the table, it awards them better territory.

What is offered this time, he said, was “more economically valuable territory … much more of those worthwhile areas containing Bosnian industry and rich agricultural land” than United Nations and European Union negotiators had earlier proposed should be theirs.

If this is so, the reasons for the Serbs’ sudden reasonableness becomes clearer.

Such a peace settlement would leave the Sarajevo government’s half of Bosnia a vulnerable rump with little prospect of long-term survival. Even the earlier peace plans raised substantial doubts about the future of the internationally recognized Bosnian state.

The American proposal - assuming the Serbian official is even partially correct - would increase the likelihood of Serbia and Croatia, Bosnia’s northern neighbor and current ally, eventually partitioning what’s left of Bosnia between them.

There’s no doubt this is their ultimate goal. Neither the Serbs nor Croats regard the Bosnians as a people worthy of possessing their own nation.

Both will tell you that never before in history has Bosnia-Herzegovina been an independent nation (which is true), unlike their own countries. Therefore, they claim, Bosnia isn’t entitled to the same consideration as “authentic” national states. What they mean is, it isn’t worthy of existence.

The suspicion must be that the American peace plan, if successful, may bring closer the day when the Serbs and Croats will be able to impose their implacable views and wipe Bosnia off the map.