Bosnia: the problem for peace activists.

What has happened in Bosnia is a shame. There is no other word for it. It is a failure and a humiliation. We should be deeply ashamed about the atrocities we have witnessed in Srebrenica and Zepa, the utter inability of the international community to keep its promises, and the unwillingness of our politicians to admit their guilt. How can they continue to insist that the U.N. operation is something to be proud of? If, for once, one of the politicians would say "sorry" to the people of Srebrenica, that could be a starting point for a different approach. How can the moral myopia of the key actors in the so-called international community be cured?

The clumsy compromise at the London Summit on July 20 is a victory for the Bosnian Serbs. The so-called international community has given the green light to the Pale Serbs to occupy all the safe havens except Gorazde and Sarajevo. The decision to defend Sarajevo and Gorazde, which should, of course, have been taken three years ago, is a welcome relief. But that does not mean that the U.N. should tolerate the terrorization of other safe havens--Zepa, Bihac, and perhaps Tuzla as well.

The attempt to achieve a political solution through talks with the warring sides has failed. Their demands are irreconcilable. The latest plan, the contact-group plan, which was at least supposed to hold Bosnia together, is finished. We can expect a new plan, which all sides will never agree to, for dividing Bosnia. Gorazde will be traded for a Berlin situation in Sarajevo and the safe havens will be abandoned.

Under this scenario, Tuzla, the town that has managed to preserve a non-nationalist politics throughout the war, will become vulnerable because it lies between the two halves of Serb-occupied territories and the Bosnian Serbs will want to improve their position on the ground.

The embargo will be lifted by the Islamic countries and perhaps also the United States, and we can expect a long war with a lot of casualties and the growth of Muslim nationalism on the Bosnian side.

The federation between the Croats and Muslims is unlikely to hold together. Once a divided Bosnia is back on the negotiating table, the Croats in Bosnia will want to join Croatia. And the war is likely to spread because of the way that the international community has condoned ethnic nationalism.

The position of the Republicans and many people on the American left is, in fact, much on the same line. While it is undoubtedly true that the Bosnians need heavy weapons, if this means withdrawal of U.N. forces and, probably also, Russian supplies to the Bosnian Serbs, the net outcome will be a long war and a victory for the more extreme nationalists on all sides who depend on a permanent war mentality.

The fundamental problem is the unwillingness to commit sufficient ground troops and to risk casualties. Although the American and Russian positions appear to be sharply polarized, in fact, they both end up hand-in-glove with the Bosnian Serbs.

The Russians are totally against any kind of fighting in Bosnia. They insist that all sides are equally guilty and that only a political solution negotiated between the parties can end the war--a position that sits rather oddly with their role in Chechnya. The Americans are wedded to the concept of deterrence. "We are here to deter not to protect," says Yasushi Akashi, the representative of the U.N. Secretary General in Zagreb. But how can you deter effectively without protection?

Generals always fight the last war, in this case, the Cold War. Because there was no war in Europe, NATO members believe deterrence works. They drove around in tanks in Germany and threatened "deep strikes" into Warsaw Pact territory. Luckily, the Russians never invaded. Now, NATO members think it is sufficient for Europeans to drive around in tanks in central Bosnia and to threaten air strikes. The Americans are unwilling to lend the British and French helicopters to send reinforcements to Gorazde for fear the pilots will get killed. But they are willing to threaten massive air strikes even if many people get killed on the ground and the British and French soldiers are taken hostage.

The very scale of the proposed air strikes transforms the image of the Bosnian Serbs, turning them into an apparently formidable opponent. Does the so-called civilized world really require 150 sophisticated combat aircraft with an array of expensive infrastructure to deal with a group of primitive bandits? It simply expresses what Czech President Vaclav Havel has called the "crisis of cowardice."

The war in Bosnia is not simply a local Bosnian occurrence. It is archetypal of our age. While it draws on local and particular histories, it is characteristic of spreading patterns of violence to be found in large parts of Africa, South Asia, and the former Soviet Union, and it has echoes on the streets of Western Europe and the United States. The war rages on in the name of exclusivist labels--nations, peoples, clans, gangs, tribes. It involves the disintegration of state structures, the privatization of violence, the manipulation of opinion through the electronic media, and widespread violations of international humanitarian law including civilian massacres, mass rape, systematic starvation, hostage-taking, and the destruction of historic and cultural sites. The actors are global as well as local transnational criminal networks, especially arms dealers; diaspora nationalists; foreign mercenaries set loose by post-Cold War defense cuts; not to mention journalists and humanitarian agencies.

There has to be an international response to these wars. It is simply not possible to insulate a country, or even a continent, from the increased criminal activity, the refugees, the xenophobic ideologies generated by these new wars. Precisely because the war in Bosnia is archetypal, this is a moment that could determine the ability of international institutions to manage this form of transnational disintegrative violence in the future.

What we need is a new approach to peacekeeping that matches the new nature of these wars, an approach that breaks with the national mindset about the nature of war. Governments must view peacekeeping as a form of international policing. Its purpose is to create the conditions in which international principles based on human values can survive. The international community has to represent a new kind of politics, which is totally and clearly opposed to exclusivism of any kind, and which acts in ways that can be widely regarded as legitimate.

In the past, the U.N. observed a sharp distinction between military intervention and peacekeeping. Military intervention was judged appropriate in the case of international aggression, as in the Korean War or the Persian Gulf War. In such a case the U.N. approved the use of force under Chapter VII of the Charter, and U.N. foes took sides. In contrast, peacekeeping was based on consent of the warring sides. The main purpose of peacekeeping was to police cease-fires.

There is no room in this scheme for anything between traditional peacekeeping based on neutrality and consent, and war-fighting on the Persian Gulf War model--that is, the use of massive air strikes on one side. In Somalia, the U.N. adopted the war-fighting approach, and it was a disaster. In Bosnia, equally disastrously, the U.N. has tried to keep to the traditional concept of peacekeeping. In Bosnia, as in Somalia, the aim of the intervention is humanitarian: to deliver aid and protect safe havens. The consent of the warring parties, though desirable, is very difficult in such conditions. In a war in which one side regularly resorts to blackmail, it is not possible to operate on the basis of consent of the warring sides. Rather, what is important is the consent of the victims on all sides. Any international intervention has to be able to mobilize local support. It has to rally around a local internationalist or cosmopolitan constituency. This requires, among other things, a change in our own discourse. We have to show concern for everyone and not just "our boys."

Such an approach implies a difference between "neutrality" and "impartiality." Neutrality means not taking sides. Impartiality means upholding international principles in an impartial way. Sometimes, as in Bosnia, this means being closer to one side than another simply because one side is more responsible for violations of international principles. If the international community is to retain its political legitimacy, it cannot always remain neutral, since one side is likely to be more guilty than the other, even if both sides share some responsibility for the violence.

The U.N. has to rearrange military tactics around the goals of the new peacekeeping. There has to be a political strategy linked to the idea of safe havens, or humanitarian throughways. The aim is to create spaces in which alternatives to exclusivism can flourish. Tuzla, which is the only municipality in Bosnia with a non-nationalist local government, is one such space.

Through effective protection, demilitarization, assistance to economic and civic reconstruction, these spaces can become models that radiate outwards and undermine the spead of violence from the war zones.

The international community has underestimated the political weakness of the exclusivist nationalists, especially the Bosnian Serbs and the Bosnian Croats. Their continued rule depends on domestic terror and a continued war mentality.

Up to now, in Bosnia, the political strategy has been totally at variance with the strategy of safe havens. It has been based on trying to reach an unholy compromise between the warring sides. A series of failed plans have proposed to carve up Bosnia into exclusivist nationalist chunks. They have not resulted in a cease-fire and they have stimulated fighting for territory. Meanwhile, the repeated failure of the international community to fulfill its promises to demilitarize and defend safe areas, to enforce the no-fly zone, or to keep open humanitarian throughways greatly undermines the credibility of international institutions as well as those local political constituencies for internationalist values.

It is this internationalist political commitment that has been missing from the debate about Bosnia so far. If we look at the war from this point of view, it is clear that the U.N. cannot withdraw, that all safe havens have to be defended, including the Eastern enclaves, that the siege of Sarajevo must be lifted, and that artillery positions around Tuzla must be removed.

This means a change in the rules of engagement, reinforcements, and very clear guidelines about the behavior of U.N. troops: respect for local populations, punishment for those who engage in blackmarket activities, and scrupulous adherence to the laws of war. It means that ground troops have to be used and that air power has to be used tactically, to support the ground troops, for defense rather than for deterrence. The aim is to minimize all casualitees, especially of noncombatants, and not just casualties to "our side."

At this point, probably the best way forward is for the British and French to go it alone under a U.N. mandate and to use the very substantial ground forces now in Central Bosnia for effective protection of safe havens. They have made a start in Sarajevo.

Gorazde could also be reinforced either by air using U.S. helicopters or by road if the convoy is properly protected. Artillery in the hills around Gorazde had to be removed with the assistance of tactical air power. In Srebrenica, the Dutch had antitank weapons and could have knocked out the Serbian tanks.

Had they done so, the story might have been very different. They did not do so because their commander had been instructed to avoid casualties at all costs. The forces in the safe havens must be instructed in the future to develop a strategy for effective defense. This must be done for Gorazde, Tuzla, and Sarajevo. In Bihac, air strikes should be used in order to make it possible to send reinforcements. Once the tide begins to turn, then it is possible to start considering retaking the lost safe havens and/or adopting a new negotiating strategy based on the reintegration of Bosnia-Herzegovina and on specific issues on the ground.

Above all, we must rebuild the support and trust of the people of Bosnia. The United Nations has coasted along on the legitimacy established after World War II, when the world was filled with moral fervor and optimism. That legitimacy was decisively lost in Srebrenica. It is a loss not just for Bosnia but for the future of European and international institutions. Rebuilding legitimacy has to be done from the bottom up.

Public opinion is equally culpable because it has failed to put effective pressure on governments.

If we are to put this moment of shame behind us, we can only do so by placing massive public pressure on politicians to defend safe havens effectively, by demanding that they keep their promises, and by offering all kinds of practical support for and solidarity with the victims of this war and with those who still hope for a unified, non-nationalist Bosnia-Herzegovina.