THE FADED SERB MYTH

By KARSTEN PRAGER

The odds may still not be even on the battlefield in Bosnia, but they certainly have changed. For the first time in three years, the Bosnian Serb military machine has been forced into reverse, yielding large pieces of territory to a Croatian-Bosnian government offensive in the northwest of the country and easing the siege of Sarajevo under the pressure of a 14-day NATO bombing campaign. Whether the war in the former Yugoslavia is in its endgame or not, the dramatic shifts in the military and territorial balance should have a salutary effect on peace negotiations. The myth of invincibility, which the Bosnian Serbs wrapped around themselves--and which much of the outside world readily accepted--has faded, if not evaporated.

Pushed back along a broad front, the Bosnian Serbs now hold about half of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 20% less than before their retreat--and the approximate share set aside for them in a proposed settlement. Why the sudden reverse after three years in which they called virtually all the shots in the war, ignored pleas for restraint and thumbed their noses at the world? What happened to the soldiers described by Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in a recent Time interview as "no doubt the better fighters"? Was the Bosnian Serb army ever as good as it was assumed to be? Probably not.

"Maybe everyone overestimated them in the beginning," says Lewis MacKenzie, the now retired Canadian major general who commanded U.N. peacekeepers in the Sarajevo sector in 1992. Weaknesses there certainly were: lack of infantry and a reluctance to use it, overextended supply and communications lines, and poorly trained troops pressed into service. The shortcomings didn't seem to matter so long as the Bosnian Serbs' heavy weapons kept the thoroughly outgunned Bosnian government forces boxed in on the defensive.

Almost unnoticed, however, the deficiencies began to tell when Milosevic, looking for a negotiated solution, withheld his political and material support from the Bosnian Serbs. Military stalemate, debilitating for any army, took a toll as well: in recent months reports of war weariness, low morale and lax discipline cropped up with increasing frequency. Inept officers were drinking when they should have been training their troops, a Serb militia leader told a New York Times reporter last week; the soldiers, he said, were "too stupid to stop an attack by Boy Scouts." Stupid or shrewd, many also saw little point in fighting for territory that the negotiators might soon take from them anyway.

On top of this came NATO's air campaign against Bosnian Serb air defense installations and ammunition storage facilities. The full impact is yet to be assessed, but the targets were "severely reduced," in the U.S. Defense Department's curt reading after the bombing halt was extended indefinitely last week. Apparently crucial was a Sept. 10 strike on command-control and communications facilities around the Bosnian Serbs' stronghold of Banja Luka; several cruise missiles crippled the installations just as the Croatian-Bosnian offensive began in the northwest.

That attack further smudged the Serb superman image. The main punch in the offensive was provided by units of the Croatian army, a highly motivated and well-equipped force that, as Michael Williams of London's International Institute for Strategic Studies describes it, "is as underrated now as the Bosnian Serb army was overrated then." Warning that the Croats will soon dominate the Muslims, a source close to Milosevic calls the Zagreb-Sarajevo coalition "a marriage made in hell." That's the kind of language that could get a new myth started.