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Jacques Delors, the E.C. commission President, lamented that "the E.C. is a little like a child confronted with an adult crisis." At the same time, Lord Carrington, chairman of the E.C.-sponsored Yugoslav peace conference, voiced the widespread conviction that little more than jawboning could work. After last week's cease-fire began to unravel, the former British Foreign Secretary noted wearily, "In the end, the only thing that stops violence is when the people involved want to stop it."
Serbs and Croatians plainly were not in the mood to stop it. At the meeting Carrington conducted in Igalo, a seaside resort in the small Yugoslav republic of Montenegro, Milosevic and Tudjman glared at each other fiercely and refused to exchange a word. The agreement they signed never had a chance. When he returned to Zagreb, Tudjman fired his defense minister, Luka Bebic, for carrying out the cease-fire's terms prematurely -- and the belligerents leaped at each other again.
Along with Slovenia, its sister western Yugoslav republic, Croatia on June 25 declared independence from the polyglot state cobbled together by wartime communist resistance leader Josip Broz Tito. Ancient enemies, Croatians and Serbs had dangerous scores to settle. One-eighth of Croatia's 4.75 million people are Serbs, and super-Serb Milosevic offered them a cause. Serbian guerrillas have seized perhaps one-third of Croatia -- mostly in the lowland east neighboring Serbia and in the boomerang-shaped republic's coastal south. The heavily Serb-officered federal military has aided and probably armed them right along, but it avoided large-scale attacks until last week.
The turning point came when Croatian militia units laid siege to Yugoslav army garrisons in the republic and cut off power, water and food supplies. Federal soldiers inside responded with artillery, shelling civilian neighborhoods around their bases at random. Yugoslav MiG-21 fighter-bombers streaked over Croatia, and gunboats threw up a blockade of the republic's long coastline, pressing in with bombardments of major Adriatic ports, from the medieval stoneworks of old Dubrovnik north to Split, Sibenik and Rijeka.
Western officials did not exempt Tudjman from fault. Said a U.S. diplomat: "The Croatian government is far from blameless or democratic, and it has severely discriminated against Serbs living in Croatia." But Milosevic's aims are expansionist, and success on his part threatens to undo everything the E.C. stands for.
Mitterrand, on an official visit to Germany, argued that Yugoslavia must not be allowed to "poison European cohesion." But beyond whatever precedent it was setting for the fragmenting Soviet Union and other parts of Eastern Europe, the crisis was already seeping venom into the West. The main rubs: How could the E.C. enforce a peace, and what kind of peace did it want? With French support, German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher undertook to jump-start a rusting security mechanism, the Western European Union. Consisting of nine of the 12 E.C. members -- Denmark, Ireland and Greece do not belong -- the WEU was garaged soon after it was created 43 years ago, when U.S.-led NATO assumed its functions. But France sees it as a vehicle for an autonomous West European security role, and Genscher had hoped it would sponsor a peacekeeping force.