Massive International Attempts To Bring Peace To Bosnia Failing

The massive international effort to bring peace to Bosnia has ground to a halt.

Foreign envoys and many Bosnians see no way to move forward without a much tougher role for NATO and much more pressure on Muslims, Croats and Serbs from the powers that put together the 1995 Dayton peace accord.

The message from Western politicians is the opposite. Defense Secretary William Cohen told American troops he visited last week that U.S. and other NATO troops in the peacekeeping force are going home in mid-1998, when their mandate expires.

That departure date raises anxiety for some because foreign aid to build political institutions, return hundreds of thousands of refugees to their homes or breathe life into the ruined economy is beginning to wear thin.

“I’m very much concerned that time is running out, very precious time,” warned German envoy Christian Schwarz-Schilling. He blasted all the politicians in Bosnia for failing to remove local extremists and concluded: “Perhaps they don’t really want Dayton to be implemented.”

Dayton envisaged a loosely unified Bosnia, split into Serb and Muslim-Croat halves. Many joint institutions have yet to be created; those that exist barely function. Instead, the talk is increasingly of dividing Bosnia permanently, probably through another war.

In the past month, relations between Muslims and Croats, who are supposed to run half of Bosnia together, have sunk to perhaps the lowest point since Dayton was signed.

In full view of unarmed U.N. international police, Croat police in Mostar recently opened fire on Muslim civilians visiting a cemetery on a religious holiday. One Muslim was killed and 20 wounded. U.N. photographs clearly showed the deputy chief of Croat police and two colleagues firing.

Muslim families were expelled from Croat-controlled western Mostar. Muslims stoned cars of traditionally Roman Catholic Croats. Mysterious explosions damaged three Roman Catholic churches in Sarajevo just weeks before a visit by Pope John Paul II that is planned for mid-April.

Bosnian Serbs still violate the Dayton accord with impunity. In the only hamlet in all of Bosnia where Muslim refugees had rebuilt ruined homes on Serb territory, a crowd of Bosnian Serbs blew up the houses right under the eyes of Russian troops serving with the NATO-led peace force.

Spokesmen for the peace force argued that soldiers could not stop the Serbs because they have no mandate to kill or wound civilians.

However, without a willingness to do battle on such issues and risk lives, even the peace enforced by the mighty NATO-led force looks like little more than an expensive truce.

An decision last month on the contested northern town of Brcko exposed NATO’s reluctance to put soldiers’ lives at risk. A U.S. arbiter opted to keep the town in Bosnian Serb hands, on condition Muslim and Croat refugees can return.

Cohen, on his visit to Bosnia, suggested stronger policing.

The 1,700-member, unarmed U.N. force counters that the heavily armed, NATO-led peacekeepers could do the job.

Result: Stalemate.

“We would welcome new ideas,” said Colum Murphy, spokesman for the senior diplomat charged with bringing peace, Carl Bildt.