Yugoslavia: The Case for Confederation

By Jill Smolowe

The grandstanding and rhetoric of June gave way to the tanks and guns of July. As Yugoslavia heads into August, the fighting is spurring ever more urgent attempts to devise at least piecemeal solutions. The European Community last week dispatched three foreign ministers to Zagreb and Belgrade to secure a cease-fire in the increasingly volatile republic of Croatia. The trio arrived bearing words of peace, but without any assurance that they could engineer a truce, let alone an enduring solution. In Belgrade, sessions convened by Yugoslavia's crippled eight-member federal presidency produced door slamming and name calling -- but no cease-fire.

While Belgrade fiddled, Croatia burned. Yugoslav army tanks fired from Serbia across the Danube at the Croatian town of Dalj and two nearby villages 50 miles northwest of Belgrade, killing at least 80 people. The campaign brought nearly one-third of Croatia's territory under Serbian control. The shaken Croatian leadership responded with a series of unconvincing proposals. To buttress the republic's 70,000 security forces, President Franjo Tudjman called up 30,000 reserves, then admitted that he lacked the weapons to arm them. He also revamped his Cabinet, firing his hard-line Defense and Interior ministers and seating an ethnic Serb. In a move that might have meant something a month ago but last week looked like what it was -- sheer panic -- government officials even floated the idea of offering cultural autonomy to Croatia's Serb-dominated regions.

With the country in such deep disarray, the contours of one ghastly solution are already emerging on the battlefield: a redrawing of internal borders along ethnic lines, accompanied by population exchanges. In a sense, it is already happening. Some 40,000 ethnic Serbs have fled across Croatia's borders, mostly into the Serbian province of Vojvodina and the republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Croatian retreat from embattled zones where Serbian militias have triumphed over Croatian defense forces has dislodged tens of thousands of villagers. But a formal remapping of Yugoslavia, with its six republics and two autonomous provinces, could deepen the crisis. Historically, population exchanges have produced bloodshed and pillaging. Moreover, if Serbia wrests territorial concessions from Croatia, what is to stand in the way of a Croatian-Serbian scheme to carve up Bosnia, where ethnic Serbs, Croatians and Muslims mingle? Or a newly hatched Serbian attempt to incite Bosnia's majority Muslims against the republic's Croatians?

How then to stop the lunacy before Yugoslavia erupts in wholesale civil war? The Yugoslavs have signaled that an enduring peace must be brokered internally, not imposed by external forces. The E.C. would like to oblige, but fears are growing that a European military intervention might be necessary. "The moment may not be too far away when we have to take a step forward," Jacques Poos, the Foreign Minister of Luxembourg, warned last week. The E.C.'s proposal for a three-month moratorium on independence offers the same face- saving opportunity that quieted hostilities in the breakaway republic of Slovenia. The republics' leaders could use the cooling-off period to consider how the region might be stitched together again.

For starters, Yugoslavs would have to give up hope of putting the federation back together. The linchpin of the federation cobbled together after World War II by Tito -- a strong central government -- is a shambles; members of the collective presidency can barely remain in the same room at the same time. Moreover, the precondition for a viable federation -- the voluntary surrender of individual sovereignty by the member units -- is no longer (arguably, never was) possible to achieve.

Confederation, by contrast, suggests an alliance. This word might not seem anathema to the hostile republics if their leaders would stop portraying such an arrangement as a shotgun wedding and instead looked at it as a marriage of convenience whose purpose is to promote not love but mutual interests. Of those, economic considerations rank highest. The economies of Yugoslavia's republics and provinces are inextricably linked. If Yugoslavia hopes to improve the living conditions of its people, and thus quiet the ethnic resentments that are fueled by unequal economic opportunities, the republics must act in concert. The dream nurtured by some republics that the E.C. will come to the rescue by granting them membership is folly. Other countries are ahead in line, and the E.C. will not admit any country that lacks a stable, democratic government.

Under a loose confederation, a central, democratically elected parliament and presidency would preside over truly mutual interests: foreign affairs, a pared military and a national budget, shrunk to serve national interests rather than to prop up inefficient Serbian firms. To ensure that no republic would trample on the rights of resident minorities, a federal judiciary would define and enforce human rights. In the interests of self-preservation, each republic would respect current borders.

In exchange for economic collaboration, each republic would have political autonomy, run its own defense forces, control its own borders and ignore the other republics as it pleases. Cultural, religious and social issues would also be decided locally. Ethnic hatreds -- and certainly this would be the most difficult challenge of all -- would be held in check by the perverse threat of renewed violence. If all the republics signed on to such an arrangement and exercised some restraint, each could enjoy the fruits of autonomy -- while laying to rest the terrors of war.

With reporting by James L. Graff/Belgrade and William Mader/London