His compatriots disagreed. To the astonishment of most everyone-including the parliament’s last remaining friends, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Greek Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakisthe self-styled Bosnian Serb assembly rejected the peace proposal by a vote of 51-2, and called for a referendum to ratify their decision. It was the second occasion in a month, and the third time since January, that the parliament had repudiated a deal that would have allowed it to control nearly half of Bosnia-much of it won through “ethnic cleansing”-with impunity. Lord Owen had stretched his own plan to be accommodating, offering a demilitarized corridor linking nonadjoining Serb-dominated areas and U.N. protection in regions where Serbian forces withdrew. This was their last chance to duck the punch of U.S.-led foreign intervention. So why did the Bosnian Serbs choose defiance?
One answer lies in the eastern Bosnian town of Nova Kasaba. In March, Serbian forces sacked the place and drove out thousands of Muslims who’d lived there for centuries. Today, the town is under control of Serb militiamen. They see their assault on Nova Kasaba not as an appalling case of ethnic cleansing, but as a narrow escape from an Islamic fundamentalist takeover. “Would you want your wife to have to wear a veil?” demands a guard at a checkpoint. No matter that the veil is about as common a sight in Bosnia as a tank top in Teheran. Under the Vance-Owen plan, the town would have reverted to Muslim control-a prospect that enrages and terrifies local Serbs. Another guard, who only gives his name as Ljubo, says, “Here, yesterday, someone killed our people, and today we have to live with them? Impossible.”
The Bosnian Serb scenario from hell is retribution by those against whom they’ve committed such grievous crimes-and that fear seemingly underlies the Bosnian Serbs’ portrayal of themselves as victims. “If we sign [Vance-Owen], we have no legitimate right to fight for Zvornik,” says Dragan Spasojevic, president of the local government in the eastern Bosnian town, where Serbian forces murdered and brutally expelled Muslim civilians last year. “If we don’t sign, we have the moral right, as long as there is a single soldier here.”
The Serbs’ sense of victimization also emboldens them. Right before it rejected the peace plan, the Pale assembly proposed a series of impossible “conditions.” Sanctions against Belgrade, legislators argued, would have to be lifted immediately. Half of all future U.N. peacekeepers on Serbian lands had to be from Eastern Orthodox countries. Serbs in Muslim- and Croatdominated regions would have the right to join nearby Serbian areas. “Regardless of what we decide,” said Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb commander, “the West will continue its hellish plan.” That sort of fatalism has engulfed many Bosnian Serbs. It is rooted in the conviction that the vote was moot because the West is hellbent on bombing them anyway. “I suppose I should be getting away from roofs like that,” Mladic half-joked as he left the smoke-filled meeting hall at the Heavenly Valley Hotel where the parliament had convened. “They might attract American missiles. But what the hell. Let them come.”
Dr. Frankenstein: Milosevic, fearing the threat of Western missiles, didn’t appreciate the bravado. After imploring the assembly to pass Vance-Owen, he turned on it in rage. “Instead of preserving what you’ve gained, you’re like a drunken poker player putting everything on one card,” he fumed. It was an extraordinary renunciation-Frankenstein disowning his own monster. It was Milosevic, after all, who built his career as the protector of all Serbs, who stoked his Bosnian brothers with the paranoia that they faced extinction and who gave them the means to launch the most brutal war in Europe since the Nazi era.
Now he found himself in the role of “peacemaker”-making political hay out of the No vote. Within hours, Belgrade announced it was cutting off all supplies, except food and medicine, to Bosnia. If enforced, such sanctions could devastate Serb-held territory, which is already impoverished after a year of war and completely dependent on oil supplies from Serbia. Has Milosevic really changed his spots? While U.S. officials are deeply skeptical, a few diplomats are willing to suspend disbelief. “I believe he now thinks it’s in the best interests of the Bosnian Serbs to sign the peace agreement,” Lord Owen told NEWSWEEK. “That conversion took place in Belgrade-I can time it-on Sunday April 25 at 3 o’clock in the afternoon … He stretched his hands behind his back and said, ‘Ah, I feel relaxed’.”
That can scarcely bring much comfort to Bosnian Serbs–or to the Muslims, whom they continue to attack. The bombing of two 16th-century mosques in the northern Bosnian town of Banja Luka was a harmless show of audacity compared with the besieging of Zepa, one of the last Muslim holdouts along the Drina River. A week of heavy bombardment there, according to unconfirmed local radio reports by Bosnian Muslims, left more than 200 civilians dead. The U.N. Security Council declared Zepa and five other Muslim enclaves “safe areas.” But even as General Mladic signed a cease-fire agreement with the Bosnian government on Saturday, his forces stepped up their bombardment of Sarajevo. Bent on a course that even their own allies in Belgrade consider suicidal, the Bosnian Serbs still seemed determined to take along everyone they could with them.
