Yugoslavia The Flash of War

By JAMES WALSH

Not long ago, the reputation of the Balkans as the tinderbox of Europe seemed , to have faded. Now the region is once again in flames, igniting fears of a broader conflagration. For years, Yugoslavia was the acceptable face of communism: estranged from Moscow, a pioneer of peaceful coexistence with the West, a country whose rugged Adriatic coastline attracted tens of thousands of vacationers. But last week that idyllic image was irreparably shattered. After three months of ethnic skirmishing, hapless Yugoslavia erupted in the first full-scale war in Europe since 1945. The fighting between federal forces and breakaway Croatia gave Europe and the world beyond a stark reminder of the region's capacity for violence.

The Serb-dominated Yugoslav military threw itself into the conflict with a will. Federal gunboats boomed off the Croatian coast as warplanes and artillery opened fire on targets across the secessionist republic. A massive column of federal battle tanks, armored personnel carriers and 155-mm howitzers set out from Belgrade to assault Croatia's eastern wing, which borders on Serbia. In another action, two columns of federal reservists marched into Bosnia-Herzegovina, shattering the tense calm of that buffer state with its explosive mixture of Serbs, Croatians and Slavic Muslims. When an oil refinery blew up under attack in Osijek, Croatia's key city in the east, it became clear that a region long dormant had loosed a volcano of passions.

For the first time, the conflict was brought home to Zagreb, Croatia's capital, which howled with air-raid sirens and rattled with sniper fire. For the first time, too, the emergency came truly home to Western Europe. After the fourth attempt by the 12-nation European Community to arrange a cease-fire fell apart almost instantly, the U.N. Security Council considered an attempt at peacekeeping. There may be little time to waste. An old infection -- Europe's original sin of tribalism -- is once again raging out of control in the Balkans. Since the Continent's nationalist frenzies had drawn the U.S. into two world wars during this century, Washington sat up and took sharp notice as well.

In Yugoslavia's strife, the E.C. has been haunted by a feeling of deja vu. More than a century ago, Otto von Bismarck gazed on another Balkan crisis -- the collapse of the empire of Ottoman Turkey -- and shrank from getting militarily involved. In the Iron Chancellor's view, Germany had no interests there that "would be worth the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian musketeer." Though Serbian nationalism went on to ignite the First World War, the E.C. last week seemed to feel much as Bismarck had. At an emergency session in the Hague, the Community's foreign ministers rejected the idea of committing a "buffer" military force. The rejection prompted three other countries -- Canada, Austria and Australia -- to call on the U.N. to step in. When France and Germany joined the appeal, it seemed Europe was about to shirk a responsibility -- one that, in the end, might devolve on American leadership.

Yugoslavia today is not the Balkans of 1914: no great powers are struggling for advantage in the peninsula. If powerful Serbia were allowed to walk over Croatia, however, it might encourage aggression elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The Yugoslav army insisted that it wanted only to relieve its posts under siege in Croatia, but the firepower it deployed -- and its marches into Bosnia -- looked more like Serbian expansion. While Bosnia was frantically mustering a defense force of its own, two frontline Croatian towns, Vukovar and Vinkovci, came under heavy fire as tanks advanced on Zagreb.

The extraordinary nature of Yugoslavia's crisis became clear when Stipe Mesic, the country's nominal President and a Croatian, urged federal soldiers to desert and "join the people." According to Belgrade news reports, moreover, federal Prime Minister Ante Markovic tried and failed to force the resignation of Defense Minister Veljko Kadijevic on grounds that the Yugoslav People's Army, in waging open war on Croatia, had proved to be "neither Yugoslav nor of the people."

Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia's crypto-communist president, has steadily usurped federal authority in championing the resistance of Serbs in Croatia. As Croatians see it, his goal is to swallow up Serb-inhabited territory in the separatist republic. Milosevic might have met his match, though, in Franjo Tudjman, Croatia's fervently nationalist president. After the assault began, Tudjman offered to restore food and utilities to surrounded federal barracks in Croatia, but Kadijevic rejected the offer as inadequate and "cynical." Dressed in combat fatigues, Tudjman vowed to "fight and defend our homeland," and added angrily, "I think it is time for Europe to wake up."

Was Europe sleepwalking? In many ways, yes, according to a number of critics. Western Europe did not want to ignore lessons of the past. If it cannot help restore order in Yugoslavia, it fears that reawakened ethnic rivalries may catch fire throughout the decommunized East. But in this, the first security challenge it has ventured to handle alone, the Community had to wonder finally if it was equal to the task. And strains over how to act in the East were sharpening old jealousies in the West, threatening the E.C.'s cohesion.

While Germany has argued for a more decisive approach -- despite its own purported constitutional ban on deploying troops beyond NATO's boundaries -- Britain and the Netherlands viewed Bonn's rhetoric as grandstanding, a ploy to extend German influence in Eastern Europe. The French, meanwhile, seemed "torn between their desires and what makes sense," as a senior Italian diplomat put it. Francois Mitterrand dearly wants a distinct West European "defense identity," but the French President has a Bismarckian distaste for the Balkans. "These countries," he fairly snorted two weeks ago, "have been at the origin of several great wars into which we were then dragged."

Jacques Delors, the E.C. commission President, lamented that "the E.C. is a little like a child confronted with an adult crisis." At the same time, Lord Carrington, chairman of the E.C.-sponsored Yugoslav peace conference, voiced the widespread conviction that little more than jawboning could work. After last week's cease-fire began to unravel, the former British Foreign Secretary noted wearily, "In the end, the only thing that stops violence is when the people involved want to stop it."

Serbs and Croatians plainly were not in the mood to stop it. At the meeting Carrington conducted in Igalo, a seaside resort in the small Yugoslav republic of Montenegro, Milosevic and Tudjman glared at each other fiercely and refused to exchange a word. The agreement they signed never had a chance. When he returned to Zagreb, Tudjman fired his defense minister, Luka Bebic, for carrying out the cease-fire's terms prematurely -- and the belligerents leaped at each other again.

Along with Slovenia, its sister western Yugoslav republic, Croatia on June 25 declared independence from the polyglot state cobbled together by wartime communist resistance leader Josip Broz Tito. Ancient enemies, Croatians and Serbs had dangerous scores to settle. One-eighth of Croatia's 4.75 million people are Serbs, and super-Serb Milosevic offered them a cause. Serbian guerrillas have seized perhaps one-third of Croatia -- mostly in the lowland east neighboring Serbia and in the boomerang-shaped republic's coastal south. The heavily Serb-officered federal military has aided and probably armed them right along, but it avoided large-scale attacks until last week.

The turning point came when Croatian militia units laid siege to Yugoslav army garrisons in the republic and cut off power, water and food supplies. Federal soldiers inside responded with artillery, shelling civilian neighborhoods around their bases at random. Yugoslav MiG-21 fighter-bombers streaked over Croatia, and gunboats threw up a blockade of the republic's long coastline, pressing in with bombardments of major Adriatic ports, from the medieval stoneworks of old Dubrovnik north to Split, Sibenik and Rijeka.

Western officials did not exempt Tudjman from fault. Said a U.S. diplomat: "The Croatian government is far from blameless or democratic, and it has severely discriminated against Serbs living in Croatia." But Milosevic's aims are expansionist, and success on his part threatens to undo everything the E.C. stands for.

Mitterrand, on an official visit to Germany, argued that Yugoslavia must not be allowed to "poison European cohesion." But beyond whatever precedent it was setting for the fragmenting Soviet Union and other parts of Eastern Europe, the crisis was already seeping venom into the West. The main rubs: How could the E.C. enforce a peace, and what kind of peace did it want? With French support, German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher undertook to jump-start a rusting security mechanism, the Western European Union. Consisting of nine of the 12 E.C. members -- Denmark, Ireland and Greece do not belong -- the WEU was garaged soon after it was created 43 years ago, when U.S.-led NATO assumed its functions. But France sees it as a vehicle for an autonomous West European security role, and Genscher had hoped it would sponsor a peacekeeping force.

Policing a cease-fire, however, depended on gaining a cease-fire, chances for which were going up in smoke. Ultimately, the WEU was asked to "study" how to improve protection of the 200 unarmed E.C. civilian monitors already in Yugoslavia. The union is in a poor position to do more: it has no military command structure or troops at its disposal. Any West European force that might intervene would surely consist of British and French troops in the main, supported by NATO logistics.

Washington still insisted late last week that it was sticking by the E.C.'s leadership in exploring peace options. But Britain remained opposed to sending peacekeepers without a peace to keep. Unless all of Yugoslavia's factions invite such a force, said British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, an "open- ended commitment" is doomed. Hurd argued for economic sanctions, perhaps an oil embargo.

Would the U.N. commit troops instead, then? Though France would welcome such a move, it was not optimistic. An outside chance was that the U.N. would act by choosing to see Croatia as a discrete nation being invaded. Yet Germany's threat to recognize Croatia and Slovenia -- a threat Bonn dropped two weeks ago -- has been the biggest sticking point in Europe's handling of the crisis. Among other things, Britain fears emboldening other ethnic separatists such as restive Slovaks in Czechoslovakia and Basques in Spain.

Dutch Foreign Minister Hans van den Broek, the E.C. President, condemned the idea outright last week. In acid remarks clearly aimed at Genscher, Van den Broek said, "It is easy from behind a desk to recognize Slovenia and Croatia and leave the rest of the work aside." According to Dutch officials, moreover, their government moved to call the WEU meeting only to force gun-shy Bonn "to put up or shut up" on the proposal to commit troops. About Genscher, a British diplomat cracked, "In his pursuit of the Nobel Peace Prize, he has been grossly irresponsible." Britain and France expect that 30,000 to 40,000 troops would be required to keep Yugoslavia's combatants apart.

Yet hopes for anything short of intervention were not good. Susan Woodward, a fellow at Washington's Brookings Institution, criticized the E.C. for waiting too long. The storm has been gathering for months, she notes, but only when fighting broke out in June did the Community attempt to set up a peace conference. Mitterrand said in Germany last week he did "not see it as the end of human progress if we reconstitute the Europe of tribes." But would tribal Europe, starting in the Balkans, overtake and drown the tolerant Europe of ideas?

With reporting by James L. Graff/Zagreb, William Mader/London and Frederick Ungeheuer/Paris