NEWS ANALYSIS : Biggest Risk in Bosnia May Be Inaction

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia —  While the risks of military intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina have compelled Western leaders to rethink their threatened use of force, some analysts warn that inaction may be the most dangerous choice of all.

Consider some of what might happen, according to these observers’ nightmare scenario:

* A “Greater Serbia” emerges from the sprawling mass of Serb-conquered territory. In some views, it will be an ethnically pure monument to nationalist brutality and may inspire tyrants around the world.

* A tamping down of war in Bosnia gives Serbs pause to assess the staggering price of their victory. Slobodan Milosevic, the leader of a Greater Serbia, then distracts his hostile, impoverished people by provoking a new conflict with the Albanians of Serbia’s Kosovo province. Albanians throughout the Balkans rush to defend their brothers, igniting a regionwide war.

* As fighting consumes half a dozen countries, Europe’s unraveling military and political alliances are paralyzed by indecision and recriminations over what might have been done in Bosnia to check the disaster’s spread.

* The United States is exposed as a superpower willing to rattle its saber but not use it. Washington’s role as world leader is damaged, as well as its argument that the post-Cold War order is secure enough to allow nuclear nations like Ukraine to disarm.

* Islamic countries accuse the West of sacrificing Bosnian Muslims to sidestep involvement, poisoning a relationship that showed promise after their partnership in the Persian Gulf War.

Political leaders have mostly heeded those warning against taking a side in the Balkan battles. But some have recently concluded that a failure to intervene now will only raise the stakes in a conflict likely to flare and demand quelling later.

Continuing to hesitate, they say, could haunt Western foreign policy for decades by sending the message that the international community cannot enforce its own standards for security and justice.

Dangerous Precedent

Many who argue that force is needed to halt Serbian aggression cite the risk of encouraging zealots elsewhere if the atrocities committed against Bosnian Muslims are accepted as a regrettable but irreversible fact.

Beyond the Balkans, a European Community official said, the Serbs’ success in Bosnia would not be lost on other ethnic groups living outside their own country.

A staggering array of ethnic conflicts already seethe, barely noticed, in the shadow of the Yugoslav crisis. For example:

* At least 25 million Russians live in other former Soviet republics and fear for their future as a minority.

* Four million Hungarians living outside their historic homeland are increasingly restive amid repression by Romanian, Slovak and Serbian nationalist rulers.

* Clashes in Central Asian and Caucasus republics have already claimed nearly 30,000 lives.

Paul A. Goble, a senior associate at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has been warning for more than a year that Serbian aggression is sending a dangerous mixed message. “What Bosnia is about is changing borders,” he said. “If the West acquiesces to a new map achieved by force in Yugoslavia, why shouldn’t 4.5 million Russians in northern Kazakhstan change that border by violence and join Russia?”

By failing to halt aggression in Bosnia, “what we in the West are saying is, ‘We don’t care.’ That’s a dangerous answer in a part of the world where political borders don’t correspond to ethnic borders,” he said.

“The day after the Serbs take Sarajevo,” Goble added, “any Russian leader who stands up and says we have to create a ‘Greater Russia’ will be listened to.”

Recent Croatian attacks on Muslim civilians in central Bosnia are interpreted by some to be the first evidence that the West’s failure to decisively censure Serbian aggression has encouraged nationalists elsewhere to embrace the odious but successful policy of “ethnic cleansing.”

Military strikes are called for to send a message to all aggressors that the West will not tolerate brutality against civilians, said Bernard Kouchner, founder of the international aid society Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) and until last month France’s activist minister for health and humanitarian action.

Western forces “must shoot at some very symbolic places, and not just on the Serbian side,” Kouchner said. “They must find places to shoot at the Croatian side to let the Serbs know we are not partisan, to let them know that the international community will not accept ethnic purification on either side.”

Otherwise, nationalist zealots will take the world’s paralysis as a green light for settling minority questions with violence and “ethnic purification will be the slogan of a lot of places,” Kouchner warned.

Spreading War?

Karsten Voigt, in charge of foreign policy for Germany’s opposition Social Democratic Party, shares the fear of many observers that Western inaction in Bosnia will lead to a broadening of the Yugoslav conflict.

Deeming Serbian attacks on Muslims a case of genocide, Voigt predicted that the Belgrade leadership will next apply the deadly tactics of ethnic cleansing--the ouster of non-Serbs from Serb-controlled areas--against Serbia’s Hungarian, Muslim and Albanian populations, which together make up almost 30% of the 10 million people of the former Yugoslav federation.

“We will watch the ethnic cleansing of (the Serbian province) Vojvodina, which is already under way, then we will watch the ethnic cleansing of Sandjzak (a Muslim-populated region of Serbia) and then we will watch the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo,” Voigt said. “Conflict in Kosovo raises the likelihood of an international war, dragging in Albania, which has security arrangements with Turkey, while the destabilization of Macedonia could easily bring in Greece and Bulgaria.”

Macedonia, though poor and landlocked, is the tripwire of a wider conflict because its large Albanian minority is openly committed to helping defend Kosovo brothers against any Serbian attack. Greece and Bulgaria covet the strategic regional crossroads, and Turkey has entered into a defense pact with Albania that could draw it into the conflict.

The worst-case scenario could pit NATO members Greece and Turkey against each other, further complicating any intervention role to be played by the Western alliance.

Security, Arms Crises

George Kenney, the State Department’s former Yugoslav desk officer, quit his government job last August largely in protest of what he considered immoral indifference to the Bosnian horrors. But he argues that cold, hard security concerns are also at issue.

“In terms of the example it sets, smaller countries in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union will believe, rightly, that the international community cannot rescue them if one of their neighbors attacks them,” said Kenney, now an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment, a Washington think tank.

He predicted a proliferation of conventional weapons among vulnerable ethnic minorities, as well as difficulty in getting nuclear powers to give up their armed advantage amid such uncertainty. “You can’t say Yugoslavia is the reason Ukraine is holding on to its nuclear arms, but it may be a part of it,” Kenney said.

Disarmament views expressed by Gen. Yuri Prokofiev of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry appear to validate those fears.

“Yugoslavia shows that the less effective peacemaking forces are, the more aggressive imperial forces become,” Prokofiev said, adding that the lesson for Ukraine is to push ahead with building its own army.

Riven Alliances

Sharp divisions between European Community states have been visible for more than two years in their policy toward the former Yugoslav republics. Failure to resolve those differences is one of the greatest strains on the 12-nation alliance.

The Balkan crisis has been no less trying for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, where one senior official described Yugoslavia as “the test case from hell.”

“We’ve learned how hard it is for the EC to formulate a common foreign policy on such a delicate issue as this,” he said, noting Greek intransigence on recognition of Macedonia and Germany’s rapid-fire recognition of Croatia without testing its pledge to protect minority rights.

NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner warned at a press gathering in Venice last week that the international community cannot afford to fail this first major challenge in the post-Cold War era. “We have the tools to do the job. So if we were to fail, we would have no excuse,” Woerner told the International Press Institute. “So let us hope to find the courage to assume our responsibilities.”

Kenney also predicted that Western military and political alliances, like NATO and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, will be seen as “hollow institutions” if the world’s leading democracies turn a blind eye to Serbian aggression.

Islamic Alienation

A senior Turkish official fears that Western inaction in Bosnia could strengthen the hand of fundamentalists over secular or moderate leaders in the Islamic world.

“What is happening (in Bosnia) alienates Muslims throughout the Islamic world in such a way that inevitably will be exploited by the radicals, saying they were right, that accommodation with the West was wrong,” the official said, alluding to the Gulf War alliance in which some Muslim countries supported the U.S.-led Desert Storm against Iraq.

Failure to protect Bosnian Muslims also endangers the West’s fragile bond with former Soviet republics with sizable Muslim populations.

“There are Muslims across the territory of the former Soviet Union who are pro-Western and identify strongly with Europe,” said John Colarusso, an anthropologist and Caucasus specialist at McMaster University in Canada. “But if they see that Europe doesn’t give a damn about Muslims, they will turn to Iran and Saudi Arabia as natural allies.”

The 51-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference has repeatedly assailed Western Europe’s reluctance to quash the violence on its southern doorstep, suggesting it would be otherwise if the victims were Christians instead of Muslims.

While security concerns weigh heavily into the equation in calculating the logic of applying force, most proponents of intervention seem most disturbed by the moral implications of tolerating evil.

Failure to invoke Western mediators’ promises of “peace with justice” in Bosnia runs the risk of eroding moral authority and the basic humanitarian values on which Western democracies are based, some say.

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has spoken most strongly against Western hesitancy to intervene, accusing European leaders of being “accomplices” to massacre.

A young Polish journalist, Konstanty Gebbert, took his concerns that genocide was under way in Bosnia directly to Vice President Al Gore during last month’s commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of World War II. Noting the West’s inability to halt the flow of innocents’ blood in Bosnia, Gebbert said to Gore: “You are the vice president of the world’s biggest superpower. If you can’t stop (atrocities), what hope is there?”

Times staff writers Tyler Marshall in Berlin, William Tuohy in London, Joel Havemann in Brussels and Richard Boudreaux in Moscow contributed to this report, as did special correspondents Matt Bivens in St. Petersburg, Russia; Mary Mycio in Kiev, Ukraine; Ian McWilliams in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and Hugh Pope in Istanbul.