The Krajina dentist and the painful truth

BELGRADE - For all the talk of blood brotherhood and all the mystical pledges of Serbian unity, Milan Babic, self-styled "Prime Minister" of the Krajina Serbs, looked a tired and lonely man as he skulked in a dingy office in Belgrade. Gone was the Luger pistol that a visitor once saw arrogantly twirled around a forefinger trained only to clasp a dentist's drill - yes, Dr Babic was a local dentist before he became a Communist, and an apparatchik before he turned rabid nationalist.

The new Dr Babic was in subdued form as he read out a rambling five-point statement to journalists late on Thursday in a forlorn hope of averting the crushing offensive that yesterday descended on the credulous inhabitants of his fiefdom far away near the Croatian littoral.

The great question in Belgrade yesterday was, would Serbia stay out of the war? Even before the Croatian offensive began the answer seemed evident to a people well attuned to the signals emanating from the top. Serbia would stay out - for the moment.

This reality seemed to inform the belated attempt by Dr Babic to stave off disaster. By reading what amounted to a recantation of his political credo, the Krajina Serb leader reluctantly accepted that he had been abandoned. Its terms virtually dictated by Peter Galbraith, the US ambassador to Zagreb, the statement incoherently articulated a set of promises that, if carried out, would have constituted a surrender.

Mr Galbraith had flown down from Zagreb to inform Dr Babic that his people faced exactly the fate that befell them yesterday morning. If Dr Babic produced the five key concessions, said Mr Galbraith, he, the American ambassador, would intercede with President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia to stay the army's hand. Quite what the former provincial dentist made of this visit by the representative of the most powerful nation on earth he did not say. Perhaps, like so many other bit-part actors in this prolonged charade, he has become over-accustomed to the attentions of the envoys of the great powers.

None the less, he drafted his statement, heavily qualifying its clauses in typical "negotiating" fashion. He claimed to have telephoned his erstwhile mentor, the Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who was out of town at his rural retreat in some Serbian arcady. And Mr Milosevic had sounded ready to help with a statement of support. Perhaps this would persuade Mr Tudjman.

It was all too little and too late. In the event, Mr Tudjman was not persuaded and Mr Milosevic did not produce his elusive statement. Indeed, there was a doubly unpleasant surprise in store. For even as the guns boomed out across Krajina at dawn, the first dozy readers in Belgrade were perusing the pages of Politika, a newspaper for whose editors the year 1989 seems never to have occurred. Yesterday morning's edition carried a scathing editorial penned by Hadzi Dragan Antic, the paper's acting editor and a mouthpiece for the Serbian leader.

The editorial ripped into the Krajina Serbs and their counterparts in Pale, the "capital" of the Bosnian Serbs, denouncing them all as adventurers who were leading the Serbs to destruction.

"The Serb people in the Bosnian Serb republic is being made to pay for their leadership's insane ambitions and greed by the lives of their best sons, who fight like heroes while the sons of those who make decisions are not at the front," it said.

As for the quality of those who led the Serbs in Krajina and Bosnia, they "were unworthy to occupy the lowest rank of authority, let alone be leaders of states".

Former dentists, it was clear, were to take note. Just in case anybody missed the point, Mr Milosevic ordered this fine piece of Serbo-Croat - sorry, Serbian - prose to be read out on state television.

The Krajina Serbs, therefore, were to be cast to their fate in the interests of Serbia itself. For the moment, Mr Milosevic puts more faith in the possibility of an international deal to lift sanctions on his all-but- bankrupt country than he does in any crusade to unite the Serbs from the old Austro-Hungarian frontier to the foothills of Macedonia.

The Serb Crusade was Milosevic, 1991 vintage. Milosevic 1995 is smoother on the palate. Yesterday he was at it again, sedating the envoys Carl Bildt and Thorvald Stoltenberg with more talk of peace and a genuine political settlement. The highest levels of the Serbian government have spent all week assuring foreign embassies that, in the words of one senior politician, "the international community has not realised the determination of Mr Milosevic not to allow Yugoslavia (that is, Serbia and Montenegro) to be dragged into this absurd war".

It was indeed a senior Serb who employed the word "absurd" but, as Dr Babic may now be reflecting, it does not take much to convert absurdity to violent tragedy. The internally divided representatives of the "international community" are busy calculating what would be needed to turn Milosevic Vintage 1995 sour again.

Many fear that a drawn-out and bloody Croatian campaign will generate the inevitable atrocity stories and send many thousands of Serbian refugees tramping across northern Bosnia and into Serbia itself, straining its society and politics to the limit. Some think Mr Milosevic could not stand by to behold the collapse of Knin. His clever use of proxies, such as "volunteers" from Serbia, could serve to prop up the various fronts. In the worst case, the fighting would proliferate along confrontation lines, eventually engaging Serbia and Croatia across the front in eastern Slavonia, north of Belgrade.

A quick Croatian campaign relieves the pressure on Serbia to respond. The prolonged suffering of the Krajina Serbs makes a response more likely. Much is in the balance this weekend and foreign observers might do well to recall the words of the writer HH Munro ("Saki"), who observed that the Balkans produce more history than can be consumed locally. The production line is in full swing.