(2 of 4)
Yugoslavia today is not the Balkans of 1914: no great powers are struggling for advantage in the peninsula. If powerful Serbia were allowed to walk over Croatia, however, it might encourage aggression elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The Yugoslav army insisted that it wanted only to relieve its posts under siege in Croatia, but the firepower it deployed -- and its marches into Bosnia -- looked more like Serbian expansion. While Bosnia was frantically mustering a defense force of its own, two frontline Croatian towns, Vukovar and Vinkovci, came under heavy fire as tanks advanced on Zagreb.
The extraordinary nature of Yugoslavia's crisis became clear when Stipe Mesic, the country's nominal President and a Croatian, urged federal soldiers to desert and "join the people." According to Belgrade news reports, moreover, federal Prime Minister Ante Markovic tried and failed to force the resignation of Defense Minister Veljko Kadijevic on grounds that the Yugoslav People's Army, in waging open war on Croatia, had proved to be "neither Yugoslav nor of the people."
Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia's crypto-communist president, has steadily usurped federal authority in championing the resistance of Serbs in Croatia. As Croatians see it, his goal is to swallow up Serb-inhabited territory in the separatist republic. Milosevic might have met his match, though, in Franjo Tudjman, Croatia's fervently nationalist president. After the assault began, Tudjman offered to restore food and utilities to surrounded federal barracks in Croatia, but Kadijevic rejected the offer as inadequate and "cynical." Dressed in combat fatigues, Tudjman vowed to "fight and defend our homeland," and added angrily, "I think it is time for Europe to wake up."
Was Europe sleepwalking? In many ways, yes, according to a number of critics. Western Europe did not want to ignore lessons of the past. If it cannot help restore order in Yugoslavia, it fears that reawakened ethnic rivalries may catch fire throughout the decommunized East. But in this, the first security challenge it has ventured to handle alone, the Community had to wonder finally if it was equal to the task. And strains over how to act in the East were sharpening old jealousies in the West, threatening the E.C.'s cohesion.
While Germany has argued for a more decisive approach -- despite its own purported constitutional ban on deploying troops beyond NATO's boundaries -- Britain and the Netherlands viewed Bonn's rhetoric as grandstanding, a ploy to extend German influence in Eastern Europe. The French, meanwhile, seemed "torn between their desires and what makes sense," as a senior Italian diplomat put it. Francois Mitterrand dearly wants a distinct West European "defense identity," but the French President has a Bismarckian distaste for the Balkans. "These countries," he fairly snorted two weeks ago, "have been at the origin of several great wars into which we were then dragged."