That might come as a surprise to the U.N. brass. After all, Lt. Gen. Sir Michael Rose, U.N. commander in Bosnia, and political aide Victor Andreyev first floated the proposal in late February, as NATO’s clock began ticking; they’ve been clamoring ever since for more troops along siege lines throughout Bosnia. In any event, the Bosnian Serbs have achieved nearly everything they set out to gain on the battlefield-excluding, perhaps, Maglaj, the Muslim enclave in north-central Bosnia which they flattened last week.
But something more than mere belligerence has kept the Serbs away from the peace process: call it an attitude problem. While U.S. envoy Charles Redman advanced a Washington-brokered agreement between Croats and Muslims to share territory and combine their military forces, the Bosnian Serbs scoffed at the deal and kept their distance. Their view of the war a curious picture tinged with rage, self-righteousness and audacity-will make them tough negotiators, if they can be persuaded to come to the table at all.
For now, they seem intent on legitimizing their conquests. They have been victimized, they claim, by two years of lies by the media, by diplomats and by human-rights groups. “This war of public opinion began before the shooting war-it was the Muslims and Western journalists who started blaming us,” complains Alexander Petrovic, a battalion commander in Grbavica, a Serb-held suburb of Sarajevo. “So who is responsible for the killing? The journalists, more than anyone.” Never mind that Serbian nationalists have prosecuted a war that has left an estimated 200,000 dead, most of them civilians, and displaced nearly 3 million people. “Our message is simple,” says Zametica, who attended the London School of Economics. “We Serbs wish to live together as Serbs in one state. under one roof. We don’t want to be forcibly incorporated as national minorities in hostile states.”
What about the Croats and Muslims who remain in ethnically cleansed areas? “The rights of minorities are completely respected in Bosnian Serb territory,” says Zametica. “In Bijeljina, 20,000 Muslims continue to live there as equal citizens.” In fact, only a few thousand still reside in the northeastern Bosnian town; many of them are subject to regular harassment and expulsion. Local Serbian officials have caught on to the spin game, too. The mayor of Foca recently informed journalists that his town, which once had a Muslim majority, had never contained a single mosque. (Not true: the Serbs dynamited 13 mosques after sacking the place in 1992.) To demonstrate tolerance, he trotted out the city’s last Muslim, a watchmaker, who seemed too terrified to speak. “The Aatchmaker is married to a Serb,” said a guide. “She’s barren, so there won’t be any more Muslims in Foca.”
Bosnian Serbs still can’t believe the world has branded them as latter-day Huns. That bafflement only compounds their stubborn self-justification. Their aim from the beginning, says Zametica, was simply “national self-determination.” When Yugoslavia began to crumble in 1991, he argues, the West didn’t hesitate to recognize the rights of Slovenians, Croats, Macedonians and Muslims, who’d been granted a special status by Marshal Tito-so why not the Serbs? The 1992 Bosnian referendum to break away from the Yugoslav federation, says Srdjan Trifkovic, the Bosnian Serb representative to Britain, was a casus belli. “It was the intention of the Muslims to disregard Serbian aspirations, reducing them to the status of an irrelevant and despised minority,” he says. ‘Armed resistance was the only way."
And force may be the only way to impress the Bosnian Serbs to come to the bargaining table. NATO’s recent toughness-particularly the destruction of four Serbian jets-has made an impression. “The psychological impact of the downed planes has been tremendous,” says Milos Vasic, a journalist at Vreme, the Belgrade independent magazine. But the Bosnian Serbs, still in denial, can probably be twisted only so far. Even as they rained shells on Maglaj, they paradoxically portrayed themselves as peacemakers who have already made too many concessions, from agreeing to give Muslims one third of the territory (which was landlocked and surrounded on all sides by their enemies) to giving free access to aid convoys (which hasn’t yet happened). “All the demands made by the international community the Serbian side met,” Zametica says. “Now, all of a sudden, there’s a wholly new game in town.”
He means the Croat-Muslim alliance. “It sounds like peace made on the graves of Serbs,” says Trifkovic. “That only makes our determination to tough it out so much more pronounced.” When it comes to promises of cease-fires, Bosnian Serbs can’t always be taken at their word. Their intransigence, though, has proven all too reliable.
