Carter's trip to Bosnia
President Clinton takes a great gamble by signing on to Jimmy Carter's first talks with the Bosnian Serbs. He risks creating momentum and a public for a pro-Serb diplomacy that will undercut the plan that the "contact group" of the United States, Russia, France, Britain and Germany has already put on the table. Mr. Carter's view that the list of "concessions" he had got from the Bosnian Serbs was consequential suggests a one-sided approach that could provide a nice fig leaf for American, U.N. and NATO disengagement, but nothing for the bleeding, brutalized people of Bosnia -- the ethnically cleansed -- that this country and its allies and the United Nations once undertook, at least in some measure, to protect.
The Bosnian Serbs control 70 percent of Bosnia, by conquest and "ethnic cleansing," but are internationally isolated. Jimmy Carter offers them a start on international acceptance, this merely for stopping things -- especially, harassment of U.N. peacekeepers -- that were and remain unpunished outrages that they should not be paid a nickel for stopping. He opens the further possibility of becoming not just an interlocutor but a validator of Bosnian Serb settlement terms.
It is clear enough why the Bosnian Serbs would be eager to recruit a prestigious former American president, one who promises to be "impartial" as between victimized Muslims and victimizing Serbs, to help them consolidate their war gains and resume a normal life. Right off it is a way to deflate contact-group pressures to remove U.N. peacekeepers, who have become the Bosnian Serbs' hostages and in fact should be withdrawn. One also understands the generosity and fatigue that lead many to believe that ending the war now on whatever terms is better than adding to its human and political toll.
But the inconvenient fact is that the victims are still struggling. The Muslim-led government means to fight on at least to regain the share of its country offered in the contact group's peace plan. Whether this goal can be accomplished is disputable. But certainly the Bosnian government has a claim on those countries, including the United States, that wrote the plan. It is unthinkable that the contact group, having declined to provide military aid or direct military support, would then lend itself even tacitly to a plan written by the aggressors.
The Clinton administration insists it is not going to let the diplomatic ball be taken away from it. If former president Carter can get the Serbs to take small steps that reduce tensions, fine, it says, but it's not abandoning the contact group plan. This is the key position the administration must now enforce.
-- The Washington Post