This Time We Mean It

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

What made the mortar shell that burst in Sarajevo's central market that Saturday morning different from the innumerable other rounds that have slammed into the Bosnian capital over the previous 22 months? "Strategically it meant nothing," says a senior U.S. diplomat. But the grisly footage broadcast round the globe showing 68 people blown to bits while peacefully shopping made for peculiarly revolting television. The timing of the attack, seemingly planned to kill the greatest possible number of innocent civilians, dramatized the brutality of the war all over again to a world populace that had grown benumbed to reports of concentration camps, ethnic cleansing, mass rape and daily casualties.

The market images prompted a Western outcry that this time the Serbs had gone too far, that U.S. credibility was at stake, and that the NATO alliance was in jeopardy. Something had to be done. The answer last week was an ultimatum to the Serbs to stop shelling Sarajevo or face allied bombs. But haven't we heard all that before?

Americans and Europeans remember a long series of empty Western threats to intervene to stop the slaughter. Only a month ago, a disgusted State Department official had summed up President Clinton's strategy: "The object of U.S. policy is to keep Bosnia out of the headlines. Every day it's not in the news is another day of success." The 120-mm shell that hit the market made that policy a thundering failure and raised embarrassing questions: If even this could not move Clinton and the leaders of Western Europe to act, would anything do so? If not, how could anyone believe anything they said ever again?

The 16-nation NATO alliance responded with yet another warning, only this one was not so vague. It took the form of a flat ultimatum to the Serbs: Stop shelling Sarajevo. Pull back all big guns, heavy mortars and tanks 12.4 miles $ from the Bosnian capital or put them under U.N. control. And do it in 10 days, by 1 a.m. Feb. 21, Sarajevo time. After that, NATO warplanes will bomb or strafe any heavy weapons still in the exclusion zone, or any artillery pieces still firing into Sarajevo from beyond it.

Strong language, and carrying something of the conviction born of despair. A long series of earlier warnings -- most recently a NATO resolution last August authorizing air strikes to prevent the "strangulation" of Sarajevo -- had sputtered to nothing. For that very reason, argued a NATO official, if the Serbs defy the new ultimatum "we have to attack. If we didn't, NATO's credibility would suffer a fatal blow."

But will air strikes or Serb compliance with the ultimatum actually do much to end the war and stop the killing? The Pentagon is dubious that NATO planes can do much damage. In the face of past threats, the Serbs have proved adept at backing down just enough to keep things quiet for a while, then stepping up the fighting again. There is also a fear that the ultimatum and air strikes are a mere facade behind which the U.S. will help pressure Bosnia's beleaguered Muslims into settling the war on terms amounting to a surrender to Serb aggression. One U.S. diplomat cynically believes some air strikes will in fact be conducted "because that will help us press the Bosnians to sign on to the dismemberment of their country."

Clinton denies any intention of twisting the Bosnians' arms until they sign a peace they find intolerable. But his language hardly sounded reassuring to the Muslims' sympathizers. Early last week he drew little distinction between aggressors and their victims, remarking that "until those folks get tired of killing each other over there, bad things will continue to happen." And in the course of announcing the ultimatum, he asserted that "there is an awful lot of fighting and an awful lot of dying going on now over relatively small patches of land and issues like a path to the sea for the Muslims" -- showing little recognition that such small patches of land could constitute the difference between a barely viable Muslim state and one that could never sustain itself.

Even so, Clinton has moved some distance toward the strong U.S. involvement that all sides believe is the key to any settlement of the war. He has not so much led as let himself be led -- by French pressure and his own more hawkish advisers. Given his months of pledges and backdowns, he has hardly prepared the country to invest in Bosnia. But a President whose discomfort with security issues is physically visible and whose foreign policy had seemed to be dominated by a fear of body bags has now placed himself and the country in a position of risk.

The perils are very real. NATO flyers bombing and strafing Serb gun positions could be shot down and killed, or captured and paraded on TV as hostages, a la Iran or Somalia. The air strikes could be ineffective: finding and destroying well-hidden artillery pieces, especially mortars that can be moved quickly, is no cinch. The Serbs could step up their offensives far from Sarajevo, intensifying the killing in other vulnerable towns like Srebrenica and Tuzla. The Serbs could take prisoner or even kill civilian aid workers who distribute food and other humanitarian assistance. Result: whipsawing pressures on Clinton either to cut and run, wrecking U.S. credibility for good, or to apply more force drip by drip, escalating into a Vietnam-style quagmire.

As recently as January, Secretary of State Warren Christopher fought with French diplomats pressing for a more bellicose stand in Bosnia. According to an eyewitness, Christopher, chatting with British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd before the NATO summit in Brussels about the long-promised American commitment to help police a peace agreement, asked him, "How do we get out of that?"

But senior officials claim that even then, while trying to keep Bosnia out of the news, they were beginning to realize they could not do so much longer. Geneva peace negotiations were going nowhere; both Serbs and Muslims were thought to be gearing up new offensives; France and Britain were grumbling about pulling out of a U.N. peacekeeping force that only seemed to be exposing their troops to danger. The Europeans, says a senior official at the State Department, "were calling, even pleading, for U.S. leadership."

That prodded Christopher into asking his aides to review the options again. By the time they arrived home from the summit, they had drafted a plan to invigorate the Geneva talks backed by a threat of military action against the Serbs. But the emphasis was on diplomacy -- until the mortar shell struck the market. Then, says one official, "the use of force became a first priority."

In Paris, as well: the day after the blast, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe and Defense Minister Francois Leotard were already calling for an / ultimatum, and Washington swiftly agreed. Transatlantic telephone conferences between Presidents Clinton and Francois Mitterrand helped iron out some minor differences. By the time NATO ministers met in Brussels Wednesday, there was a joint Franco-American proposal on the table, possibly the first in the 30-odd years since Charles de Gaulle began fulminating against "les Anglo-Saxons."

By then, some of the doubters had been brought into line. Britain reluctantly acquiesced on the condition that military action be severely limited. Clinton persuaded Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien to go along despite worries about the safety of 2,000 Canadian peacekeepers. Even Greece, the most pro-Serb of the NATO nations, decided not to vote for the ultimatum, but cast no veto either.

When the council finally approved the resolution after 14 hours of debate, NATO Secretary-General Manfred Worner, who left a sickbed against his doctors' orders to preside, enthused that its vote marked "a decisive moment in the history of our alliance." So it was, though a somewhat ironic one. NATO was formed 45 years ago to resist any Soviet Bloc invasion of Western Europe, but its first shots fired in anger, if any are, will be a pre-emptive, not a defensive, act against antagonists having nothing to do with a Soviet empire that no longer exists. A NATO diplomat says the ministers in Brussels never even discussed what Moscow might think.

They didn't have to; they well knew. Air strikes against the Serbs could severely strain relations between the NATO powers and Russia, many of whose citizens empathize with the Serbs as fellow Slavs and Orthodox Christians. If the ultimatum had to be voted on in the U.N. Security Council, Boris Yeltsin's government would almost certainly veto it, if only to respond to public anger fanned by nationalists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who was in full cry last week. NATO finessed that by insisting that its ultimatum is justified under previous Security Council resolutions. U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros- Ghali, who has resisted previous attempts to take military action, will have to approve launching the first air strike, but this time he is virtually certain to do so, say NATO officials. NATO officials hope Moscow will confine itself to speechmaking rather than seriously trying to block action against the Serbs.

In any case, the ultimatum is narrowly drawn. It does not authorize air strikes outside the Sarajevo region. The Serbs will not even be required to lift the city's siege. NATO hopes that will happen if the Serbs can no longer use their big guns to offset the Bosnian government's advantage in manpower. But if the Serbs withdraw their artillery while keeping up the sniper fire that has killed many Sarajevans, that would not trigger air strikes. How come? Says U.S. Ambassador to NATO Robert Hunter: "We did not want to create any illusions that this will end the war."

The Serbs have been alternating bluster with hints of cooperation to leave open -- probably up to the expiration of the ultimatum -- whether they will provoke air strikes or not. Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic makes the absurd claim that the Muslims faked the whole market carnage, using mannequins, professional actors to portray the wounded and old corpses provided by obliging Croat forces, who would have had to smuggle them into Sarajevo through Serb lines. Jovan Zametica, spokesman for the self-described Bosnian Serb government, remarks, "If NATO aircraft attack, we'll take them out." Drunken Serb soldiers on a hillside south of the capital mock the NATO threat. Bosnian troops are just down the hill, they say, and "if they get us, they're going to get them too."

But on another hill, Serb troops were uncharacteristically subdued as they awaited the next turn in the war. Their cries of defiance lacked conviction amid a newfound fatalism. "If we pull our artillery out," said Goran Bogic, "the Muslims will overrun us in 10 minutes." In Sarajevo, Serb forces not only held to a cease-fire but also started placing some heavy weapons under U.N. control -- though U.N. troops were not even certain the meager haul of cannon had ever been emplaced around Sarajevo.

The biggest question is what kind of final settlement the new Western policy is aiming at. Clinton's aides say it is the U.S. pledge to participate vigorously in negotiations, as much as the ultimatum, that distinguishes this initiative from earlier ones. National Security Adviser Anthony Lake insists "this is not an effort to impose a settlement on the Bosnians. It is an effort to work with them to ((decide on)) realistic terms."

But what is realistic? French officials openly rejoice that the U.S. now backs the plan dividing Bosnia along ethnic lines. Fair enough: there would be no way of reconstructing a single Bosnia without helping the Muslims reconquer territory already taken by the Serbs, and that would mean a long ground war ! that nobody wants -- least of all Bill Clinton. He tempered his support of the air-strike ultimatum by repeating his promise not to put U.S. ground troops into Bosnia, except maybe, eventually, to help enforce a formal peace settlement. So the question comes down, crudely, to the terms of Bosnia's eventual partition into ethnic states, and whether the Muslims will get enough territory to have a fair chance of independent survival.

Clinton had better get the answer right. Many critics believe the ultimatum was a hasty, ill-thought-out move, "a classic example of foreign policy by CNN," as one Democratic congressional aide puts it. Be that as it may, the stakes go far beyond Bosnia: in the opinion of not a few critics, thugs around the world, from Zhirinovsky in Russia to Kim Il Sung in North Korea, are watching Bosnia for clues as to how far the U.S. can be pushed, and how it responds to the challenge.

With reporting by Jay Branegan/Brussels, James L. Graff/Sarajevo, J.F.O. McAllister/Washington and Thomas Sancton/Paris