Word: serbia
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...most to blame for the horrors. Serbs remember vividly what happened on a late spring day 603 years ago, June 15, 1389, when Prince Lazar tried to stop the advancing army of the Ottoman sultan Murad I, 150 miles south of Belgrade. Lazar's army was crushed, and Serbia fell under Ottoman rule. That epic defeat has roughly the same significance for Serbs that the destruction of King Solomon's Temple has for Jews...
Every one of the European Community ambassadors, along with American envoy Warren Zimmermann, left Belgrade to protest Serbia's continued attacks on neighboring Bosnia. But no amount of home-capital "consultations" is likely to wind down the latest act in Europe's fiercest bloodletting since World War II. Though the West's opprobrium has landed squarely on Serbia's fiercely nationalistic president, Slobodan Milosevic, he continues to proclaim that all he wants is peace...
...newly independent neighbors in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia may feel differently. Bosnia's Serbs, who wish to remain part of a greater, Serbian- dominated Yugoslavia, have taken over two-thirds of the republic's territory with the indispensable aid of the federal army and free-lance gunmen from Serbia. In the process, an estimated 1,300 people have died in Bosnia, and hundreds of thousands have left their homes...
Further muddying the waters were signs that Serbia and Croatia are hatching plans to carve up Bosnia between themselves, leaving the Muslims -- 44% and thus the core of Bosnia's population -- with next to nothing. Croatia, which counts heavily on its friends in Bonn and Vienna, might be persuaded to desist. Stronger sanctions against Serbia, however, including a total trade embargo or a freeze of foreign assets, might only encourage Milosevic to hunker down even more. Short of large-scale military intervention, a prospect no one countenances, it appears, sadly, that no force exists with sufficient power and pluck...
...Western allies' failure to concur on a policy is partly a refraction of concerns that they might only inflame or, worse, get bogged down in Yugoslavia's mess. Diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions against Serbia have not yet been pursued with any seriousness because no one knows if such hardball tactics will scare Milosevic -- or merely strengthen his territorial ambitions. At the moment, there is widespread agreement that recognition of the new Yugoslavia is undesirable until Serbia removes its army from Bosnia. It is a tactic that might have some effect: without recognition, Yugoslavia stands to lose its U.N. seat...