By Max Lane
The assembly of Serb chauvinists operating in conquered sections of Bosnia and Croatia rejected the Vance-Owens "peace" plan on May 5 because they believe they can gain even more than the increased concessions apparently agreed to at the summit meetings in Athens last week.
The Vance-Owens plan was always essentially a way of attempting to end the conflict by getting the Bosnian government to accept having parts of Bosnia, "ethnically cleansed" of non-Serbs and Muslim Serbs, delivered into the hands of Radic Karadzic.
There can be little doubt that this would eventually lead to these areas becoming separate states. After all, what the Western press has been calling the Bosnian Serb parliament is a body set up to govern an independent republic.
Karadzic originally rejected the plan because Vance and Owen would not agree to providing the chauvinist forces with land corridors linking all the territories they occupy. After coming back from Athens, where he signed the agreement, Karadzic stated it had been clear that the new internal borders of Bosnia could still be changed during negotiations. "The Serbs can win by peace, not war", said Karadzic to the media.
The chauvinist assembly's rejection ignored the support for the agreement expressed by Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. The threat of US bombing and even possible ground troop intervention, combined with severer sanctions against Serbia, made it politic for Milosevic to distance himself from the chauvinist Serbs in Bosnia.
However, Milosevic and Karadzic are not the sole power brokers among Serb chauvinists. Milosevic rules in Serbia proper only with the support of such figures as Dr Voyislav Seselj. Seselj is leader of the black-shirted quasi-fascist Radical Party, which also exhibits monarchist tendencies.
The Radical Party is said to have the loyalty of some of the chauvinist militias operating in Bosnia. Thus Milosevic and Karadzic may not be able to deliver agreement of the chauvinist forces to any UN plan — especially while their main opponents, the Bosnian armed forces, remain unarmed.
Threats of more severe US and UN actions are clearly unconvincing because the thrust of Western policy all along has been to allow a carve-up of Bosnia along ethnic lines, implying acceptance of "ethnic cleansing". There has never been a part of Bosnia that was not multi-ethnic.
According to the British magazine New Statesman and Society, Vuk Draskovic, a central figure in the opposition to Milosevic, said recently that the concept of a holy war between the Serbs and the Muslims of Bosnia was ridiculous: "Look, there are more than 200,000 mixed marriages between Muslims and Christians in Bosnia-Hercegovina. I was brought up in Hercegovina. My own brother married a Muslim woman, my sister married a Muslim man. Now I am uncle to five Serbian Muslims".
Eyewitnesses and UN workers have reported again and again that the basements crowded with people fleeing chauvinist bombing hold not just one ethnic or religious group but Serbs and Croats, Muslims and Christians.
Even if chauvinist opinion does buckle under UN pressure, the solutions offered by the UN provide no guarantee of the end of violence and "ethnic cleansing".
UN peacekeeping forces would be used only to police the new boundaries between the ethnically defined regions. Internal security and policing within the regions would be left to the forces already existing there.
Even on this issue, the Serb chauvinists want more concessions. They are demanding that, in the few areas which they might cede back to the Bosnian government, the UN should provide the policing forces — preferably with Russian troops — and that the official Bosnian forces should not be allowed to
return.