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When he was appointed commander of the Croatian Serb forces in mid-May, Mrksic declared that he wanted to create a highly professional army. Since then he has set up mobile brigades equipped with tanks and artillery, and is said to have initiated the rounding up of Croatian Serb refugees of draft age in Serbia. Though Milosevic denies it, since mid-June police in Serbia have been sweeping up military-age Serbs born in Bosnia and Croatia -- at least 3,000 by some estimates-and shipping them back for instant induction into Serb armies.
last week Yugoslavia won a 75-day extension of the suspension of some sanctions, allowing international air travel as well as cultural and sports exchanges. The U.N. certified that according to its frontier monitors Belgrade has been living up to the commitment to keep all but food, clothing and medical supplies from crossing into Serb-held Bosnia; whatever leakage the U.N. detected it considered "not significant." Says a Western diplomat in Belgrade: "Milosevic closes his eyes to certain things on the border, but then it's impossible to totally close a border in the Balkans."
The sanctions left in place are painful enough. Out of a labor force of 2.3 million, 1 million people are jobless and about 700,000 have been temporarily laid off. Gross national product dropped from $2,330 per capita in 1991 to $1,225 in 1993, the latest figure available. An estimated 2 million of Serbia's 10 million people live below the poverty line. The embargo also limits the country's ability to make an industrial recovery. Sanctions-busting on a grand scale -- mainly through Romania and Bulgaria and, to a lesser extent, Macedonia -- keeps stores filled with all manner of goods, but few people can afford them at whatever price.
Still, Milosevic says he sees the sanctions discussion in far more than just economic terms. His argument is that the embargo constitutes the single most important obstacle to a comprehensive regional peace. "Serbia is a major factor for peace in the Balkans," he says, "but we are under sanctions; we are in prison. The international community is making a mistake in expecting us to run in our struggle for peace but do so with the chains of sanctions on our legs." Once the embargo is lifted and a comprehensive peace is in place, he says, economic and other links will bring the former constituent republics of the old Yugoslavia together in a new kind of alignment driven by economic and cultural interests of long standing-part of a larger integration of Balkan countries that would validate an approach to the European Union. To outsiders at least, such a scenario seems unlikely -- given the bloody passions of the past.