The peace map that mediators Cyrus Vance and Lord Owen have drawn labels the northwest corner of Bosnia and Herzegovina "Province No. 1." The cold, hungry people who live there call it the Bihac Pocket. Surrounded by Serb- ( controlled territory, the 300,000 inhabitants -- mostly Muslims -- have survived seven months of isolation and almost nightly bombardment from Serb guns. Homes have no electricity, schools are closed, and jobless workers peddle smuggled cigarettes. Thousands in the region would have starved by now except for the sporadic arrival of humanitarian-aid shipments.
Though people are under daily threat of death from shelling, the residents here would rather fight on than accept the dismemberment of Bosnia into 10 ethnic enclaves put forward by the Vance-Owen plan. It is a measure of their desperation that some Bihac dwellers still believe President Clinton's decision last week to join the peace process might yet rescue them from that plan. Irfan Ljubijankic, head of the local leadership committee, denounces Vance-Owen as a potential "win for Serbia," and clings to the hope that Clinton's new policy "is more radical than it appeared." He is convinced that the U.N.-ordered arms embargo will eventually be lifted, so that Bosnian fighters can be re-equipped. "Fighting is not our will," he says. "It is an imperative to survive."
Even with the arms embargo, the Bosnian army's Fifth Corps in Bihac is holding its own against the Serbs. Its commanders loudly reject the Vance-Owen proposal. "If they try to impose that plan," says Captain Ramiz Drekovic, "we will continue our war until we liberate Bosnia and Herzegovina. It could take a year, five years, 10 or a hundred."
He has only to look at the plight of the Muslims of Banja Luka, deep in the belly of the Serbian stronghold in Bosnia. The disenfranchised Muslims there already know what is in store for them if their homeland is officially deemed a Serbian statelet. For 10 months, they have seen their kinfolk murdered and driven from their homes by the hundreds of thousands. They experience terror nightly as drunken thugs prowl Banja Luka's icy streets. They have lost their jobs and most legal status: they need special papers just to walk freely under the open sky.
Most of the non-Serbs who have remained in Banja Luka will go if the Vance- Owen plan is implemented. Radoslav Brdjanin, a government "minister" in the self-proclaimed Serbian Republic relishes the prospect and laughs at the demand that Serbs return to the Muslims any land taken. "Wherever there stands a Serbian army boot, that is our territory," he says. "Bosnia does not exist anymore. Our task is simply to clarify the divisions."
That, the Clinton Administration made clear last week, is pretty much what the U.S. intends to do. On the stump and during the presidential transition, Clinton said he would consider tougher action against Serbian aggression and criticized Vance-Owen for in effect rewarding the Serbs for their "ethnic cleansing." He said in recent weeks he wanted to give Bosnia's Muslims a better deal and make the Serbs give up more of the territory they have seized.