MEDDLING IN THE BALKANS: THE BURDEN OF CENTURIES
kd
By CRAIG R. WHITNEY
c.1993 N.Y. Times News Service

BONN, Germany With all the growing outrage over atrocities by Serbian forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the insistent calls for military intervention to stop them, one factor making it so difficult for the West to decide what to do is that through the centuries, outside interference in the Balkans has usually just made things worse.

The easiest decision is to do nothing, but Bosnian Muslims plaintively insist that that too is a kind of outside intervention, one that favors the Serbs.

The history of all the southern Slavs in the Balkans is a tangled tragedy of mass rape and barbaric slaughter, the product of the kind of ethnic hatred that perhaps only people who are closely related to each other could nurture so well for so long.

Outsiders enter such feuds at their peril, as the Clinton administration has begun acknowledging lately. Though Bill Clinton during the election campaign criticized the Bush administration for inaction as Yugoslavia disintegrated and descended into violence, last week he conceded that the Balkan war was ``the most difficult and most frustrating problem in the world today.''

With extreme reluctance, the NATO allies last week edged toward military intervention, deciding with the authorization of the U.N. Security Council to send scores of fighter planes over Bosnia to enforce a ban on (largely nonexistent) Serb military flights there, starting tomorrow.

Germany was particularly skittish about letting its forces participate in air control operations, having been burned by its past mistakes. Most recently, it has begun to admit that it made a mistake in rushing its European allies into recognition of the former Yugoslav republics of Croatia and Slovenia at the beginning of 1992, on the ground that this diplomatic step would help curb Serbian aggression.

Instead, the German campaign to recognize Croatia may have given Serb nationalists an additional pretext to attack in the weeks before recognition was actually extended. The pretext was there because the last time Croatia was given its independence by Nazi Germany in World War II Croats set up concentration camps and butchered tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies.

Bosnian Muslims joined in some of the bloodletting then, and the clumsy German meddling half a century later may have been another reason why Serbs in Bosnia went on the rampage after Bosnian independence was recognized last year.

Perhaps, too, it was only a pretext. But those like former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain who argue that a few surgical air strikes against Serbian artillery may be all that is needed to stop the butchery tend to play down the dangers of Western intervention. The first bomb that misses its intended target and kills an innocent child in Bosnia could quickly turn U.N. peacekeepers into everybody's enemies.

The hatred Serbs, Croats and Muslims in the Balkans have for each other has been nurtured by myths and grievances handed down through generations. The Serbs have seen themselves as martyrs ever since the Ottoman Turks defeated them in the legendary battle of Kosovo in 1389. They lived under Turkish rule for four centuries before regaining a separate existence, under the rarely effective protection of Russia.

Russia has been more willing to pressure the Serbs in recent years, but last week in the Security Council it said it would not support the stiffer sanctions that President Clinton hoped would finally get the Serbs to stop the bloodletting.

Serbian leaders in Belgrade say they cannot understand why the supposedly Christian West does not support a fight that they claim is aimed against Muslim nationalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina. And they bitterly criticize Pope John Paul II for supporting Croatian independence in 1992. Had he forgotten that, under the Nazi-supported Croat regime, the Roman Catholic authorities forcibly baptized thousands of Orthodox Serbs who lived there?

It was earlier outside intervention, by the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, that sowed the seeds of such antagonisms. Slovenes and Croats converted to Catholicism under the Austrians; Serbs and Croats converted to Islam under the Ottoman Turks. Ethnically, all of them are southern Slavs.

But by the late 19th century, all felt themselves distinct, and all had begun to chafe under foreign domination. The Serbs did not acquire full independence from the Turks until 1878, when it was ratified under Bismarck's chairmanship at the Congress of Berlin. But at the same gathering, the great European powers awarded Bosnia and Herzegovina to Austria-Hungary, sowing the seeds of resentful Serbian nationalism. Kosovo and Macedonia, which the Serbs regarded as their territory, remained part of the Ottoman Empire.

Ten years later, after imperial Russia intervened and added the yeast of pan-Slavism to this devil's brew, Bismarck said in the Reichstag that the whole Balkan problem was ``not worth the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.''

But by then the European powers had made the problem worse particularly the Austrians, who centuries earlier had resettled Serb farmers in border areas of Croatia, so the Serbs, reputed to be fierce fighters, could act as a bulwark against the Turks.

The relocations mixed populations along the Croatian-Bosnian border that gradually grew more hostile to each other. (The butchery in these territories was particularly fierce in 1991, and Serbs there proclaimed a self-styled Republic of Krajina.)

European involvement backfired in 1914 with the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by a Bosnian youth of Serb origin in Sarajevo, on the anniversary of the battle of Kosovo.

The first independent Yugoslavia emerged from the wreckage of World War I in the Treaty of Versailles, which established it as an independent kingdom. But outside powers could not establish a national political consensus on how such a multi-ethnic country should be organized.

There was chaos for 10 years, until King Alexander proclaimed what amounted to a dictatorship. He was assassinated in 1934, and in 1941, his successor was overthrown in a putsch of Serbian generals just before Hitler's troops marched in and partitioned the country.

It is the memories of what the murderous Croatian fascist state, and at times Muslim forces in Bosnia, did to Serbs during World War II that are driving their aggression today. After a bloody partisan civil war, Marshal Josip Broz Tito reestablished the multi-ethnic state, but in the interests of preserving Communist rule, he largely suppressed smoldering resentments.

With a constitutional revision in 1974, he made concessions to Hungarian and Albanian ethnic nationalism by making the provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo in Serbia ``constituent parts'' of the Yugoslav federation, on the same footing with Serbia. This added to Serbian resentment, which, after Tito's death in 1980, eventually led to the emergence of Slobodan Milosevic and his particularly virulent brand of nationalism.

Now, with the Balkans again in ruins, it is not heartlessness that makes Europeans reluctant to become more deeply involved in trying to stop conflicts that have been brewing for centuries. The Yugoslav mess is homemade, and Europe's past record not just in this war but all along does not encourage the belief that the West would leave it much better even if it did intervene militarily.

Only the alternative, the complicity of standing by and watching the slaughter go on, would be worse.