Elections effectively partition Bosnia

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Six weeks ago there was a discreet breakfast meeting in Belgrade between Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and two senior officials of Britain's National Westminster Bank.

It may explain something about the continuing tragedy in Bosnia. The shooting is over, but the ethnic cleansers have won. The election in Bosnia on Sept. 14, authorized by last November's Dayton accords and supervised by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), is guaranteed to produce a vote that effectively partitions Bosnia along the cease-fire lines. And those overseeing the vote have been told not to complain about it.

"We were told basically to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative," said one OSCE official in June, back when voter registration patterns were beginning to show a consistent Serbian strategy of creating Serb majorities in the areas they had conquered and 'cleansed'. At that point the U.S.- based humanitarian group Human Rights Watch described the planned election as "a failure in the making"; now it is a done deal.

Why are the great powers who intervened in Bosnia last year to end the fighting now letting elections take place although only 50,000 out of 2 million refugees have been allowed to go home? Why have they silenced any official who protested that an election in this situation would only ratify the results of genocide?

The obvious urgent reason is the U.S. election: President Bill Clinton must get the Bosnian election over and start moving American troops out of the Balkans before he faces his own voters in November. So the operation will be declared a success even if it has betrayed the people it was meant to help, and nobody in an official position will be allowed to say differently.

But at least the American intervention in Bosnia, when it finally came a year ago, was meant to help the chief victims, the supporters of the legitimate Bosnian government who wanted to maintain a unified, non-ethnic Bosnia. And it was aimed at the right enemies: at Radovan Karadzic's breakaway 'Bosnian Serb Republic', which did most of the actual conquering, 'cleansing' and killing, and at the man who instigated the aggression and armed the killers, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

Current American policy falls shamefully short of last year's goals, but at least Clinton meant well until electoral concerns got in the way. What can one say about the real villains of the piece: the British? For three years before the United States finally pushed NATO into action last summer, Britain was the chief obstacle to any serious Western attempt to stop the Serbian aggression.

"I came to think of the British as like having the Russians around the State Department," a senior American diplomat told Guardian journalist Ed Vulliamy some months ago. "Your guys were usually so refined, but they were going crazy on this" -- 'this' being the need to keep the Serbs sweet.

The British Foreign Office has long been a believer in the 'realist' illusion that a strongman, however unsavory, is the best guarantor of order in trouble spots. (Munich 1938 positively leaps to mind.) So its policy of appeasing Slobodan Milosevic and his aspirations for 'Greater Serbia' was not exactly a break with tradition. What did seem inexplicable, at the time, was the grim determination, even enthusiasm, with which it pursued that policy.

The chief architects of the policy were the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, and the political director at the Foreign Office, Dame Pauline Neville-Jones. As Hurd explained in 1993, lifting the arms embargo so that the Bosnian government could counter the flood of heavy weapons Milosevic was giving to his Bosnian Serb proteges, though "at first sight it seems an act of justice", would actually be an error since it would just create a "level killing field".

Why did Hurd prefer uneven killing fields like Srebrenica, on which heavily armed Serbs slaughtered enough Moslems and others to achieve their partitionist goals? Because letting the Bosnians defend themselves would merely "prolong the war", and postpone the moment when Serb-dominated 'stability' reigned in the Balkans.

For three years Hurd and his right-hand woman, Neville-Jones, systematically sabotaged every attempt to bring help to those fighting for a secular Bosnian republic blind to religion and ethnicity. (Hurd regularly used the Serbian terminology that referred to the legitimate Bosnian government as 'Moslems', and defined the aggression as a 'civil war'.) And meanwhile 200,000 people, the vast majority of them Moslems, were killed.

Britain's pro-Serbian obstructionism drove Washington mad. "There was only one thing the British feared," said a U.S. diplomat: "a Franco-American alliance that left them out." And it was only by getting newly elected French President Jacques Chirac on side that Washington finally got around the British roadblock. Hurd retired as foreign secretary a couple of months before U.S. military intervention in Bosnia finally led to the Dayton peace talks, but Neville-Jones was still there as senior British representative on the so-called 'Contact Group', constantly pushing the Bosnians to accept the de facto partition of their country. It was a cynical, ugly, stupid policy, and all you could say in its defense was that its authors meant well.

Now you can't even say that. The British bank officials at that breakfast meeting in Belgrade on July 24 were none other than Douglas Hurd, who took a US$375,000-a-year job with the National Westminster Bank upon leaving the Foreign Office, and another recent NatWest recruit -- Dame Pauline Neville-Jones.

They were there to thank Slobodan Milosevic personally for a $10 million fee he had just agreed to pay NatWest Markets to prepare the Serbian post and telephone system for privatization, and to fish for other contracts when the electricity and oil sectors are privatized. If gratitude has any meaning, then Milosevic should certainly give them the business.