Word: herzegovina
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Policymakers have an awesome capacity to intone that "things can't go on this way" for months or years -- while things do go on the same way. In the rapidly disappearing republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, though, the vicious fighting that has raged since February might really end soon. Not primarily because of the cease-fire announced in London last week; no one yet knows whether it will become fully effective, let alone last any longer than an eyeblink. Nor will any thanks be due to the American and European statesmen who have almost daily proclaimed that the bloodshed must stop...
Already, says a senior British diplomat, "Bosnia-Herzegovina has ceased to exist." Even if the cease-fire were to hold, Serbs control about two-thirds of the country, and Croats have proclaimed a quasi-independent republic in ! most of the rest. Sarajevo, if it should be able to hold out, looks increasingly like a Balkan West Berlin: cut off from any countryside, capital of Nowheresville. Outside city limits, only a few slivers of territory remain under the control of the Muslim Slavs who constitute 41% of Bosnia's population...
Following the lead of French President Francois Mitterrand, Bush pledged to send "whatever it takes," including U.S. fighter bombers and helicopter gunships, to protect food shipments to besieged civilians in secessionist Bosnia-Herzegovina. At a dinner of foreign ministers in Munich, Secretary of State James Baker told France's Roland Dumas that the U.S. was ready to make other major concessions to win a trade agreement if France would make deep and rapid cuts in farm subsidies. Would Paris reciprocate? "No," Dumas replied. But what, Baker asked, if France got all the concessions it wanted? Dumas repeated, coldly...
Relief shipments, welcome as they are, can be only a palliative. They do not end the siege of Sarajevo or the Serbian occupation of about two-thirds of Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Serbs make up less than a third of the population. A political settlement is still out of sight, but Britain's tireless Lord Carrington, the European Community's mediator, returned to Sarajevo last week in a futile attempt to restart the stalled peace talks...
Yugoslavia, says a U.S. State Department official, is the horrible example of "self-determination gone mad." He and others accuse Serbia of adopting a poisonous nationalism that demands ethnic purity at home, enforced by deporting "foreigners" if necessary, and conquest of any lands -- portions ) of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example -- to which one's brethren have migrated. Once that spirit takes hold, says the official, "anything becomes justifiable in the name of your kind: expulsion, devastation, murder...