We enter Bosnia at our peril

THIS WEEK'S news from central Bosnia should do something to slow down the drift towards Western and/or United Nations military intervention in former Yugoslavia. It should now be clear that ethnic cleansing is not just a Serbian idea. It is a fancy recent label for standard practice in a Balkan civil war. Croats and Muslims were hard at it this week, and not for the first time (though never before with such publicity).

If UN forces were to intervene, they would not be able to end the civil war. They would complicate it. They would be drawn into it in various ways. They would be seen inevitably, in any given theatre, as siding with one local faction or another, and attract the murderous hatred of the faction that saw itself as betrayed. In a short time the forces would be seen as foreign occupiers, and would meet with guerrilla resistance from every ethnic group. The bodybags would start coming home, and many of those who have been demanding intervention would be calling for withdrawal. The troops would be withdrawn, leaving behind an even worse situation than that which they had been sent to clean up.

It is true that relatively few influential people are as yet calling directly for the deployment of ground troops. The demand recently has been mainly for escalation from 'no-fly zones', seen as ineffective, to air strikes against Serbian supply lines. Air strikes sound safe, in terms of Western casualties, but this is a mistake. The well-informed among those who press for air strikes see them only as a stage in an escalation towards the deployment of ground troops. Even the resolute interveners, those who would not stop short of ground warfare, are reluctant to tell us just what the troops are to do after they go in, or how long they are expected to stay.

An influential American lobby headed by a retired Air Force general and former chief of staff, Michael J Dugan, calls not only for the expulsion of Serbian troops from all of Bosnia, but also for the occupation of Serbia itself. Under this scheme, the ground troops are to be supplied by Britain, France and Italy; America's contribution is to be confined to the air. Support for such ideas has been growing in America and is expected to grow further with the rising influence of an air force lobby.

As a candidate, and now as President, Mr Clinton explicitly committed himself to refrain from sending American ground troops to former Yugoslavia. If there are US air strikes and these fail to produce political and social results on the ground that are satisfactory to the US television audience, there will be pressure to commit European ground troops to a doomed enterprise.

It is important, therefore, at the present stage, for European governments to make clear that they do not support the idea of air strikes, and that if the Americans unilaterally resort to them, they must not implement this decision until the Europeans have withdrawn the forces already deployed for humanitarian purposes, as these would then appear in a combat role for which they are not prepared. From the prudent statements this week by Douglas Hurd and Malcolm Rifkind, it would appear that the British government is indeed sending messages of this kind to Mr Clinton. I hope that this week's news from central Bosnia will give these messages more weight with the White House.

If the troops do go in, how long are they expected to stay? American and other Western interventionists cannot tell us, for they have no idea. But a statement issued this week on behalf of the Bosnian government called for an EC/UN military presence throughout Bosnia for the next 25 years. Interventionists on the outside are hoping for some kind of quick military fix. But their friends on the inside know only too well that this is not on.

Pressed to intervene, but shrinking from the cost, Mr Clinton is now reported as leaning in the direction of arming the Muslims. This is a certain way of making the civil war worse. The Muslims would then step up their own contribution to ethnic cleansing, from its present relatively modest proportions in central Bosnia. The Germans would then see that the Croats received an increase in arms also, the Russians would do the same for the Serbs, and the civil war would become worse. The British and French governments are right to resist this wild proposal.

Unspeakable cruelties have been, and are being, perpetrated, and not by one side only. It is right to try to help. But the most that outsiders can do is to mitigate the suffering. What can be done in that line is being done through the international programme of humanitarian aid. That programme would work better if the threat of a UN-imposed military solution were removed. Aggressive military intervention from the air or on the ground would not end or reduce the suffering. It would only intensify it, widen it and bring it to bear on different sections of the civilian population. And after the interveners had withdrawn, the civil war would continue until it burnt itself out.

We are told, of course, that it is not a civil war at all, but an international conflict. It was a civil war until it was artificially internationalised, and thereby intensified, through the folly of the EC, under German pressure, in recognising Croatia and Bosnia as independent states. German opinion was, and is, partial to Croatia. If Serbia's seizure of parts of Bosnia constitutes international aggression, as we are told it does, then so does Croatia's seizure of parts of Bosnia. But the Croats have got away with it so far. Their conquests in Bosnia to date were allocated to them in full, under the Vance-Owen plan, because the Germans wanted it that way, and therefore so did the EC.

The ethical contours of these conflicts are not quite so simple as the public has been given to believe. We are being told, ad nauseam, that Slobodan Milosevic is Hitler redivivus. Milosevic is a Balkan warlord and, to that extent, has some points in common with Hitler. But he is not the only Balkan warlord who practises ethnic cleansing. The Croats, under their equally nasty Balkan warlord, Franco Tudjman, do the same sort of things, but nobody compares Tudjman to Hitler, even though he goes on in a similar vein about the Jews. The Croats get a better press than the Serbs, not because they deserve it, but because they have a powerful patron inside the Community and the Serbs do not.

Comparisons with Hitler are intoxicating, and should be avoided. It was by seeing Nasser as Hitler that Anthony Eden got Britain into Suez. John Major is in no danger of repeating that error. But John Smith has been displaying some of the symptoms. All concerned should now digest the lessons of the events in central Bosnia and draw back from a fatal Balkan brink.

(Photograph omitted)