The Western world's reaction to the destruction of Bosnia has been a
triumph of diplomacy. A triumph, that is, of diplomacy over foreign
policy. The sky has been dark with airplanes shuttling statesmen and
their entourages between London, Paris, Washington and Geneva.
Meetings have been held, deferred and reconvened; pieces of paper
have been signed, and declarations made to the television cameras.
And yet, in spite of all this--or rather, to a large extent, because
of all this--the killing and destruction in Bosnia have continued
unabated.

A crude but adequate account of the difference between diplomacy and
foreign policy might go as follows. The sign of successful diplomacy
is that all parties can come out of a meeting feeling that their
interests have been respected. The sign of successful foreign policy
is that one party can come out of the meeting knowing that its own
interests have been advanced. Diplomacy seeks to assuage, to
conciliate, to reassure: the end-state at which it aims is a
psychological one. Foreign policy, on the other hand, has concrete
aims: to make things happen which are in a country's own interest, or
stop things happening which are frustrating it.

On Bosnia, Western governments were from the outset unsure about what
their own policy interests were. Insofar as they had some general
guiding principles (the need for "stability" in south-eastern Europe,
the wish to avoid setting precedents for other parts of the former
communist world, the desire to maintain good relations with Russia),
they failed to apply them correctly. Indeed, they managed (as will be
discussed below) to achieve almost systematically the opposite of
those aims. But their primary activity was always diplomacy,
negotiation and conciliation. To give just one crucial example: in
the summer of 1992, after the first reports and pictures had emerged
of Serb-run concentration camps in northern Bosnia, a wave of public
concern gave many of the Western governments the feeling that
"something must be done." At this point, the obvious thing to do was
to convene a special meeting of American, EC, and NATO governments
(with perhaps one or two pro-Western Muslim powers as well), hammer
out a joint policy, and agree on ways of implementing it. Instead of
this, a conference was held in London during August 1992 to which a
huge range of countries was invited, including all the Balkan states
and all the parties to the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. They
were politely asked to settle their differences, which of course they
failed to do. All that the West had achieved was to advertise its own
lack of clear policy objectives--and, by the same token, to show that
it had no preferences of its own when it came to judging between the
competing claims of the attackers and defenders in Bosnia's war.

A Failure to Understand

At this point, the two basic failures of the West on the Bosnian
issue become so closely entwined as to be almost inseparable. One is
a failure (largely, an absence) of policy. The other is a failure of
understanding. At no point during the entire Bosnian war have the
pronouncements of Western statesmen shown any clear understanding of
who made this war happen and why. Although commentators and analysts
had been accurately charting the political strategy of the Serbian
communist leader, Slobodan Milosevic, since 1988--the take-over of
the political machinery in Montenegro and the Vojvodina, the illegal
suppression of local government in Kosovo in 1989, the mobilization
of nationalist feeling in Serbian public opinion, the slow-moving
constitutional coup against the federal presidency, the Serbian
economic blockade against Croatia and Slovenia in late 1990, the
theft by Serbia that year of billions of dinars from the federal
budget, thereby destroying the federal economic reform program, and
the incitement and arming of Serb minorities in Croatia and Bosnia
during 1990 and 1991--it was as if the Western governments could see
no pattern in these events whatsoever. When Croatia and Slovenia,
losing patience with Milosevic's attempts to manipulate the federal
Yugoslav system, voted for independence, the West reacted with
incomprehension. Until the last moment, in June 1991, politicians
from both the EC and the United States were trying hard to persuade
the Yugoslav republics to stay together. Then, not long after the
Yugoslav Federation had broken apart, they began to comfort
themselves instead with the thought that the break-up had been
inevitable--something caused not by the particular policies of a man
sitting at his desk in Belgrade, but by long-term, impersonal forces
of history.

Two theories of historical inevitability were touted, one external,
and one internal. The external theory said that the break-up of
Yugoslavia had been caused by the collapse of communism in the Soviet
Union. Quite how or why events in Moscow should have such dramatic
effects on Yugoslavia, which since 1948 had been more free of Russian
control than any other country in Eastern Europe, was not explained.
Nor did the proponents of this theory ever say why it was that
Yugoslavia had been plunged into war, while Czechoslovakia, a country
so much more directly influenced by the fate of communism in Russia,
managed to split itself with all the bloodlessness of a self-dividing
amoeba. The main reason for holding this implausible theory about
Yugoslavia was not that it rested on historical analysis, but that it
carried the comforting (and diplomatically useful) implication that
nobody in particular inside the former Yugoslavia was ultimately
responsible for the war. And insofar as anyone there was responsible,
everyone was equally responsible: they were all merely fulfilling the
roles allotted to them by history.

A similar conclusion was drawn from the theory of internal
inevitability. This was the theory which said that the driving forces
of Yugoslav history were "ancient ethnic hatreds." Lazy politicians
who dipped into their history books were able to pick out a few
examples of wars and massacres, which they flourished at their
audiences with the words: "It was ever thus." In fact, the examples
they offered were from the twentieth century, or at most the late
nineteenth; they arose mainly from the most untypical episodes in
Balkan history, conflicts introduced or exacerbated by forces (such
as the Axis invasion) from outside Yugoslavia itself. For most of the
rest of the history of those lands, there are no records of Croats
killing Serbs because they were Serbs, or vice versa. And even though
it was of course true that the killing had been severe during the
Second World War, it was not obvious why, nearly fifty years later, a
population the majority of which had no personal memories of that war
should spontaneously rise up to re-enact its horrors.

But the myth of all-consuming "ancient ethnic hatreds" was too
convenient for the politicians to ignore. Within days of the Croatian
and Slovene declarations of independence in 1991, British Foreign
Secretary Douglas Hurd declared, "Yugoslavia was invented in 1919 to
solve a problem of different peoples living in the same part of the
Balkans with a long history of peoples fighting each other." One
British diplomat, Sir Crispin Tickell, breezily announced that there
was a history of hatred between the Yugoslav peoples running back
"thousands of years"--a remarkable statement, in view of the fact
that the Slav peoples are known to have arrived in the Balkans only
in the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. Prime Minister John Major,
meanwhile, managed to combine both the external and the internal
theory, when he assured the House of Commons, more than one year
after the outbreak of the Bosnian war:

"The biggest single element behind what has happened in Bosnia is the
collapse of the Soviet Union and of the discipline that that exerted
over the ancient hatreds in the old Yugoslavia. Once that discipline
had disappeared, those ancient hatreds reappeared, and we began to
see their consequences when the fighting occurred."

American politicians were not immune to the temptations offered by
such catch-all theories. According to theaccount of the Clinton White
House recently published by Elizabeth Drew, at the very time when
Warren Christopher was touring Europe (in May 1993) trying to get
support for a more active policy on Bosnia, President Clinton became
convinced that nothing could be done about the war because it was
just an upsurge of "ancient ethnic hatreds." What had convinced him
(and Hillary Rodham Clinton, and General Colin Powell) was the book
by Robert Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts, which, while it says almost nothing
about the history of Bosnia, fancifully portrays all the inhabitants
of the Balkans as zombie-like creatures out of Bram Stoker, naturally
programmed to hate and kill one another. We can only speculate as to
what the course of history might have been if, instead of reading
Kaplan's book, President Clinton had read the long and critical
review of it published in the Summer 1993 issue of The National
Interest.

The Doctrine of Equivalence

This particular failure of understanding, shared by statesmen in both
Europe and America, was crucial to Western policy (or rather, to the
lack of it). It was the perfect counterpart to the West's reliance on
mere diplomacy: each reinforced the other. The original sin of
diplomacy is its doctrine of equivalence--its assumption that all
parties to a conflict must be treated equally, with prima facie equal
rights and claims. The theory of "ancient ethnic hatreds,"
conveniently, rendered all parties to the conflict equivalent: the
Serbs were expressing ancient Serb hatred, the Muslims ancient Muslim
hatred, et cetera, and one bundle of hatred can be no better and no
worse than another. At a stroke, attacker and defender were reduced
to the same status. The fact that the defender in this war was not
just an ethnic group but a democratically-elected government,
containing Muslims, Croats, and Serbs, was an unfortunate detail
which most Western policymakers tended to elide. (To this day,
situation maps issued by the UN Protection Force [Unprofor] in
Sarajevo mark Bosnian army positions not as the Bosnian army but as
"the Muslims." One wonders whether these maps are ever glimpsed by
that battalion of the Bosnian army's Second Corps in Tuzla, which is
composed entirely of Serbs.) Indeed, the reduction of the Bosnian war
to an upwelling of "ancient ethnic hatreds" did not only lower the
status of the elected government of that country. It also raised the
status of the rebel Serb leadership, who now tended to be regarded
not as a gang of ambitious local politicians egged on from Belgrade,
but as representative figures, through whom the deep, historic forces
of ancient Serb hatred found their natural outlet.

The immediate consequence of this doctrine of equivalence was that
Western diplomats and military men conducted their activities in
Bosnia on the principle that everyone was more or less equally
guilty. "Everybody is to blame for what is happening in Bosnia and
Hercegovina," declared Lord Carrington, the EC negotiator, three
weeks after the initial Serb attack there, "and as soon as we get the
cease-fire, there will be no need to blame anybody." (Time has
brought no further illumination to Lord Carrington's thinking on this
matter. In an interview at the end of December 1994, he declared, "I
don't think any of them are particularly in the wrong. They are all
in the wrong. And all have some right on their side.") The military
commanders who were sent into Bosnia quickly adopted the same
attitude. It was easy for them to do so, because, apparently on
principle, they had never been briefed about the origins and
underlying political purpose of the war. All they could observe was
people fighting, and people breaking cease-fires; and since this
happened on both sides of the front line, they declared (like
schoolmasters awarding points for good or bad behavior) that both
sides were guilty. As the first Unprofor commander in Sarajevo,
Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, put it in a phrase which was to be
widely repeated in official circles, "There is more than enough blame
to go around for all sides, with some left over."

Two other damaging consequences of this doctrine of equivalence need
to be emphasized. The first is the distorted view it created of the
nature of the Bosnian war, and of how to stop it. In the eyes of
Western policymakers, this war was not a project engaged in by a set
of people with political aims; it was an outbreak of an
undifferentiated thing called "violence," which had just sprung up,
as a symptom of Bosnia's general malaise, here, there and everywhere.
Clausewitz was out; Freud and Jung, as theorists of the death wish
and the collective unconscious, were perhaps thought more
appropriate. Lacking a political understanding of the origins and
nature of the war, the West responded to it not with politics but
with therapy. The main aim of our policy, it was frequently said,
should be to "reduce the quantity of fighting." The way to do this,
it was claimed, was to reduce the quantity of weapons entering the
war zone. Nowhere was the failure of understanding more graphically
expressed than when politicians such as Britain's Douglas Hurd said
that to allow arms into Bosnia would be like putting petrol on the
flames. A fire is a single, undifferentiated thing; a war is a
conflict between two parties with opposed sets of intentions, in
which disparity in arms between them may be just as much (or more) of
a stimulus to greater killing than parity.

Only by removing almost all trace of political understanding from
their view of the Bosnian war could Western politicians continue to
argue about it in this way. And yet that excision was performed, and
performed thoroughly. It is hard, for example, to think of a single
speech by any British, American, or European politician which has
discussed Serbian war aims at any length, or even used the term "war
aims" at all. In the absence of such analysis, it is not clear what
Western politicians can really mean when they claim that their
policies have at least "contained" the conflict within the former
Yugoslavia. This is another one of those phrases which relate to
images of brush fires or epidemics; but unless the people who use it
believe that Milosevic's war aims included the conquest of, say,
Hungarian or Austrian territory, they cannot claim that it is their
own policies which have "contained" the war within the former
Yugoslav border.

The Single Most Damaging Instrument

The arms embargo, which flowed as a natural consequence from these
misunderstandings and misrepresentations, was the single most
damaging instrument of the Western world's policy on Bosnia.
Politicians who like to describe their policy as "non-intervention"
have, by the means of this embargo, intervened decisively,
entrenching the massive military superiority of the force which
launched the original attack on Bosnia in April 1992. The application
of this embargo to Bosnia was itself a classic illustration of the
shortcomings of any doctrine of equivalence. UN diplomats liked using
the phrase "even-handed" to describe this embargo, which was indeed
applied to Serbia as well. But since Serbia, and its proxy forces in
Bosnia, had the stockpiles of the fourth largest army in Europe,
while the Bosnian government, on the first day of the war, had no
army at all, the effects of this even-handedness were far from
equivalent.

By September 1992 it was estimated that the Bosnian government forces
had two tanks and two armored personnel carriers (APCs), while the
Serb forces had three hundred of the former and two hundred of the
latter. The most recent detailed breakdown of forces, compiled by the
Croatian General Karl Gorinsek in October 1994, gives the Bosnian
army forty-five tanks and thirty APCs, and the Serb forces four
hundred tanks and two hundred and fifty APCs. (Serb forces in the
UN-controlled areas of Croatia, who now cooperate openly in joint
campaigns with the Bosnian Serbs, also have two hundred tanks and one
hundred and fifty APCs.) The fact that, even with this imbalance in
heavy armor, the Bosnian government forces have managed to hold the
front lines almost static for more than two years, is in itself
suggestive. What it suggests is that the Bosnian government forces
possess certain other advantages--of motivation and morale--over
their Serb opponents. This in turn may suggest that if only the
Bosnian government troops had had more arms of their own (including
anti-tank weapons, and artillery-locating radar), they would have
been able not only to hold the front lines, but to inflict defeats on
their attackers. In the long term, the Bosnian arms embargo has not
so much "reduced the quantity" of fighting as extended its duration.

British and French politicians tend to talk about the embargo as if
it were out of their hands--a legal matter, locked up in a UN
Security Council resolution which cannot be unpicked. The truth is
that the application of this embargo to Bosnia is a matter of policy,
not law. The resolution introducing an arms embargo (no. 713) was
applied to the whole of Yugoslavia, at Belgrade's request, in
September 1991. At that time Bosnia was still part of the Yugoslav
state. In April 1992 Bosnia was recognized as a new state,
independent and separate from Yugoslavia, and on May 22 it was
admitted as a member-state to the United Nations. Yet still the
embargo was applied, despite the glaring prima facie conflict between
this application and Bosnia's right of self-defense under
international law. On what basis was the decision made to continue
the embargo in this way? The answer is that in late December 1991,
when the UN secretary-general was considering the implications of
recognizing Croatia, he wrote to the UN-appointed negotiator, Cyrus
Vance, asking whether it would be advisable to keep up the arms
embargo against any ex-Yugoslav republic. Vance replied that this
would be helpful for the peace process, and Boutros-Ghali embodied
this advice in a report which he submitted to the Security Council on
January 4, 1992. Cyrus Vance was not even a legal officer of the UN;
he had merely given his advice on a point of policy, relating to a
country (Croatia) where the war was in the process of ending. And yet
this opinion was treated as a matter of legal principle, and used
three months later to tie the hands of the Bosnian government when a
war was launched against it.

"Facts on the Ground"

The other consequence of the doctrine of "ancient ethnic hatreds,"
wrapped up in an attitude of policy-less diplomacy, was an acceptance
by Western diplomats of the principle of ethnic division. The
reasoning here was very simple. If violence is the natural product of
hatred, and hatred the natural mode of interaction between people who
are ethnically different, then the obvious way to stop the violence
is to separate the ethnic groups. At no point in the entire Bosnian
story was the close fit between the failure of Western understanding
and the success of Serb war aims made more apparent. One key player
in the story, the Unprofor commander General Philippe Morillon, has
made the point explicitly himself. In his own recently published book
about the war, a monument to political and historical incomprehension
grandiosely entitled Croire et oser ("To Believe and To Dare"), he
repeats the usual mantras about ancient ethnic hatreds and then adds:

"This past lends itself very well to the theory of ethnic cleansing.
Since the brothers who live on this territory never stop fighting one
another, you have to separate them. The idea is simple; it may not be
in good taste, but it catches on.... "

The suggestion here is quite plain: only the over-scrupulous "good
taste" of Western readers, who have no experience of these brutal
Balkan types, will prevent them from recognizing that the Serbs had
the best solution to the problem all along. (Somewhere in this chain
of reasoning the General has lost sight of the fact that, until the
Serbs started applying this solution by driving tens of thousands of
peaceful Muslim citizens out of their homes in April 1992, the
problem of war in Bosnia did not exist.)

Gradually, the Western diplomats began to apply the principle of
ethnic separation. The process began with their use of the phrase
"the facts on the ground" to describe the conditions which the
outside world was powerless to alter (even though the immovability of
those "facts" was itself largely a consequence of the arms embargo
enforced by the outside world). Sometimes the impression was given
that those "facts on the ground" were purely military; but within a
few months of the outbreak of the war, most observers had understood
that the mass expulsion of non-Serb populations from Serb-conquered
areas was not just a by-product of the fighting, but belonged to its
central purpose. Although the first version of the Vance-Owen plan,
unveiled in October 1992, did contain some clauses about the safe
return of refugees to their homes, the concessions it made to local
power in the system of "cantons" it envisaged (even the police force
would be locally, not centrally, controlled) made it impossible to
imagine that ethnic cleansing would be reversed. The second version
of the plan, released in January 1993, took a further, fateful step:
it assigned "ethnic" labels (Serb, Muslim, Croat) to the various
cantons themselves. This was an open endorsement of ethnic
separation, and a major factor in the outbreak of serious fighting
one month later in central Bosnia between Muslims and Croats, who
wanted to secure "their" respective territories.

The Vance-Owen plan was rejected by the Serbs in May 1993: their
experience of Western diplomacy was that they were pushing against an
open door, and they saw no reason why it should not be opened even
wider. Accordingly, the next set of proposals, the Owen-Stoltenberg
plan of August 1993, outlined a cruder division of Bosnia into three
ethnic mini-republics, the borders of which were explicitly a
reflection (albeit a modified one) of the "front lines" of Serb
military conquest. Since Radovan Karadzic had issued instructions
that no more than 5 percent of the population in the territory he
controlled was permitted to be non-Serb, any proposal which
consolidated his conquests as a Serb mini-republic was bound to be,
in effect, an endorsement of ethnic cleansing.

Since then, the paper proposals have changed again. Thanks to the
initiative of the "Council of Bosnian-Hercegovinan Croats" in
February 1994, assisted by a more positive American policy initiative
in Sarajevo and Zagreb, the war between Muslims and Croats has ended,
and a Croat-Muslim Federation has been declared. In theory, this
Federation will be completed eventually when the Serbs join it too:
there will then be a Croat-Muslim-Serb federal Bosnian state.
However, for the purposes of negotiations to end the war, the
Federation is one entity and the Serbs are very much another. The
"Contact Group" of diplomatically involved countries (Britain,
France, Germany, the United States and Russia) has come up with a
proposal for a territorial settlement which gives 51 percent of
Bosnia to the Federation and 49 percent to the Serbs. This proposal,
put forward originally as a final, take-it-or-leave-it offer, does
contain theoretical commitments to the continuing existence of the
whole Bosnian territory as a Bosnian state; it also has pledges to
respect human rights, permit the return of refugees to their homes,
and so on. In recent months, however, it has become clear that this
"final" offer will be modified yet further to satisfy the Serb
leaders. The one thing they require, without which they will never
sign the plan, is the granting of a constitutional status to the
Serb-controlled 49 percent, of such a kind as to allow it ultimately
to secede from Bosnia. If they are granted this, the final
achievement of Western diplomacy will be the division of Bosnia, the
ratification of Serb military action and the perpetuation of ethnic
cleansing.

Western diplomats may be inclined to ask, "Never mind about ancient
ethnic hatreds. Whatever their reasons, is it not a fact that the
political will of the Serb people of Bosnia today is set against
being included in a Bosnian state? Do not the Serbs too, like the
Bosnian state itself, have a right to self-determination?" To this
there are two answers. The first is that nobody knows what the
democratic will of the whole Bosnian Serb population really is. It
is often said that "the Serbs" boycotted the referendum on Bosnian
independence in February-March 1992; in fact, people in many
predominantly Serb areas of Bosnia were prevented from voting by
Karadzic's paramilitary gangs, which erected road-blocks and stopped
the ballot-boxes from entering. Serbs in almost all the major cities
did vote, and voted in favor of independence for Bosnia. Today, there
are still 200,000 Serbs living in Bosnian government-controlled
territory. The territory controlled by Karadzic now contains
approximately 600,000 Serbs. Before the war, there were 1,369,000
Serbs in the whole of Bosnia: this means that Karadzic, despite
having conquered 70 percent of Bosnia, including all the areas with
majority Serb populations (and many without), now has less than half
the original population under him. Of the rest, some have been killed
in the fighting, but the vast majority have fled--either to Serbia
itself, or further afield. Karadzic's claims to be the democratic
representative of all the Serbs are thus numerically doubtful; they
are also historically baseless, since, on the one occasion when his
party did win a democratic election (gaining the votes of most
Bosnian Serbs in the election of 1990), their platform said nothing
whatsoever about dividing Bosnia by force.

As for the Serbs' claims to "self-determination," it is the simple
facts of ethnic geography which render them invalid. Had the Serbs
all lived in a compact bloc of territory, with its own traditions and
political identity, it might eventually have been right for a
democratic Bosnian state to let that territory go, if that was what
the Serbs desired--just as the British government would eventually
grant Scotland independence, if the great majority of Scots so
wished. But the ethnic map of Bosnia was a crazy patchwork, not a
neat conjunction of three blocs, and the exercise of the so-called
"right" of self-determination by the Serbs has involved the wrongful
expulsion of hundreds of thousands of non-Serbs from their homes.
This is not democratic self-determination, but the invention, by
force, of a new political-territorial entity based on ethnic or
racial purity--something not seen on European soil since the 1930s.
And the invoking of the phrase "self-determination" is of course
doubly false here, given that the political plan which this move was
meant to serve, and the massive military resources which helped to
effect it, came not from the Bosnian Serbs themselves but from the
Serbian government in Belgrade.

Three Principles of Policy

Such, then, is the main achievement of Western diplomacy: an
acceptance, through ignorance, of the "inevitability" of the Bosnian
war, which led step by step towards an acceptance of the fundamental
claims of the people who made that war happen. In this sense, the
Western governments, by not having any definite policy, have had a
pro-Serb policy by default.

But it would be unfair to imply that the foreign ministries of the
leading European and NATO countries had never been able to think of
any principles of foreign policy that might have some relevance to
the Bosnian war. Three general principles have been evident in their
thinking. One was the need for "stability;" another was the desire
not to set precedents for other parts of the ex-communist world; and
the third was the wish to maintain close, cooperative relations with
Russia. On each of these principles, the European governments (led by
Britain and France) have sought to maintain what they believed to be
their long-term interests; but on each of the three, their attempts
to do so have been essentially counter-productive.

"Stability" is one of the key words in the British Foreign Office
lexicon, where it tends to be associated with the doctrine that every
region needs one strong local power to keep it in order. Although no
British spokesman has ever said on the record that Serbia ought to be
the dominant power in the Balkans, this pattern of thought was
nevertheless evident in the eagerness of British ministers to accept
the Serb conquests in Bosnia as a fait accompli--as if a new level of
entropy had been created, a more stable system, which it would be in
no one's long-term interest to reverse. The truth, however, is that
any division of Bosnia (and particularly one which enables the
Serb-held territories there to join up with Serb-held parts of
Croatia) will create long-term instability in the region. It will
lead not only to obsessive irredentism, in both Bosnia and Croatia,
but also to a political power struggle within the new Greater Serbia,
between the Belgrade regime and politicians in the outlying
territories.

The desire not to set precedents for other parts of the ex-communist
world was the main force behind the determination of Europe and
America to keep the Yugoslav federal state together in June 1991.
They feared the sudden break-up of the Soviet Union--which, two
months after they had failed to keep Yugoslavia together, suddenly
broke up anyway. Since that moment, the argument about precedent
setting has ceased to be a justification for Western policy and has
become a condemnation of it. The message sent by Western governments
to radical nationalists in the Baltic states, Central Europe, the
Caucasus, and the Russian Federation itself is that war, mass
expulsions and/or the de facto alteration of borders by force will,
in the end, be accepted by the outside world. One might go further
and say that the message to a Baltic state such as Estonia is that if
a Zhirinovsky government were one day to arrange for puppet forces to
take over half the Estonian territory, the most decisive reaction of
the Western world would be to slap an arms embargo on the Estonian
government. The point here is not that such events in the future
would not indeed present serious problems and dilemmas to
policymakers in the West; it is simply that the precedent set in
Bosnia makes such a scenario a more attractive choice for a future
radical regime in Moscow.

Relations with the present regime in Russia have been a dominan

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