Serbian neo-Stalinists on the offensive in Bosnia-Herzegovina

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As we go to press, the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina seems very similar to the one in Croatia. Another in a series of fleeting truces has evaporated. The Yugo-Serbian army is using its heavy arms to terrorize civilian populations and cover local Serbian chauvinist irregulars engaged in a war of slaughter and pillage against the other nationalities in the republic.

The Bosnian leadership, like the Croatian one, has been slow to mobilize to meet the threat posed by the neo-Stalinist Serbian chief, Slobodan Milosevic. It made the mistake of thinking that this danger could be staved off by political maneuvers and still worse by relying on the "peacemaking" of the Western big powers and their instrument, the United Nations.

Only one of the oppressed peoples of ex-Yugoslavia was prepared for Milosevic's aggression and dealt him a decisive defeat. It was the Slovenians. They refused to let the Yugoslav army reabsorb the local militias that were set up to defend the country against Soviet intervention, and instead used them as a basis for building up an independent armed forces.

The Slovenian leaders understood the threat that the Serbian neo-Stalinist regime represented, and that it could only be countered with a decisive use of armed force.

Of course, the Slovenians had two advantages. They had the experience of the Serbians trying to organize a military coup to establish a neo-Stalinist regime in Slovenia. In addition, there are no national divisions in the republic that Milosevic could exploit. But Slovenia is also the smallest of the republics, and it could not have routed the Serbians without a correct policy.

In its Sept. 10, 1991, issue, the Croatian magazine Danas asked Anton Bebler, one of the Slovenian government's principal military advisers, for the secret of the Slovenes' success. He said: "Apparently, the Croatian leadership lived under the illusion that war could be avoided, that the Yugosläv army would never used armed force, that sovereignty could be achieved peacefully." Croatian family in bomb-damaged house Bebler also said that it was a big mistake to expect any real help from the Western powers. In fact, although the West was involved in arranging a ceasefire that finally has held, this came about only after the desperate and heroic Croatian forces began giving a good account of themselves on the battlefields. Up until then, all the ceasefires negotiated by Western mediators only served to delude the Croatians.

On the other hand, the Croatians now have the right to complain that the other oppressed peoples of Yugoslavia have not come to their aid, but either played a waiting gamelike the Kosovo Albanians or sought a separate solution for themselves through political maneuver-like the Bosnians and Macedonians.

Milosevic's ruthless rampage in Bosniain Dubrovnik.

Herzegovina seems to have driven the lesson home of the need for a united war against the neo-Stalinist chauvinists. New York Times correspondent Chuck Sudetic quoted a woman of the Bosniak Muslim community in a besieged apartment building in Sarajevo as saying: "When they attacked Slovenia, we remained quiet. And when they made war in Croatia, we told ourselves it would never happen here. Now it has arrived, and we now know how wrong we were.

The naked aggression of the Serbian neoStalinists and the local Serbian chauvinists against the peoples of Bosnia-Herzegovina, after the outrages of the Croatian war, has made it necessary for the Wester powers to "tut-tut" them more vigorously. But the State Department's attitude has remained Romano Cagnoni the same. It is oriented toward an eventual deal with Greater Serbia, and so it is trying to spread the blame for the conflict over all the parties.

Thus, at the start of the latest fighting, State Department spokesperson Margaret D. Tutwiler said, "No party is blameless for the current situation. This includes Croatia and Croatian irregular forces in Bosnia. Moreover, Muslim-the third nationality as defined by Yugoslay law— irregular forces also are now involved in actions contrary to peaceful resolution of the crisis."

In any war, outrages are committed on all sides, but the responsibility for the conflict in Yugoslavia is absolutely clear. It comes from the policies of the Serbian neo-Stalinist regime that has driven the oppressed peoples to secede in order to defend themselves and has continually deepened the national conflict by its chauvinist assaults.

While some argue that the Tudjman regime in Croatia played into Milosovic's hands by its insensitivity toward the Serbian minority, there seems no basis for any such accusations against the Bosniak leadership. The Muslim Bosniaks are only a relative majority in Bosnia-Herzegovina. They are historically one of the most oppressed of the Yugoslav peoples.

Both the Yugoslav monarchy and, to a certain extent, the Stalinist regime tried to pressure Muslims to emigrate to Turkey. In the latest period, any attempt at selfexpression of the Slavic Muslim people has been met by the Serbian media with hysteria about the "Islamic fundamentalist threat." (The Albanians are mostly Muslims, but they are defined more by the their language than their religion. The Bosniaks speak Serbo-Croat.)

Although the Bosniaks have only a relative majority, it is their weight and historical role that gives the region its distinct character. It has been clear for some time that a Bosniak nationalist movement was going to arise. At the same time, the press reports indicate that the local Croats and most of the Serbian population do not support the assault on the Bosniaks.