MISSOURI COMMENTARY: ETHNIC PARTITION IN PLACE IN BOSNIA

When he campaigned for president in 1992, Bill Clinton advocated a more aggressive military policy on Bosnia, including NATO bombing of key Serb positions. The British and French, with peacekeeping troops on the ground, wouldn't buy it.

Three things have led to a change in the British and French intransigence: (1) Their peacekeepers are now out of Bosnian Serb territory and, thus, no longer in danger. (2) The instant Serb collapse in the Krajina region of Croatia. (3) The butchering at Srebrenica.

The spark that instituted the bombing raids was the Serb shelling and killing of 37 people in Sarajevo. The objective of the heavy bombing and pressure from Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was to bring the Bosnian Serbs to the peace table. Nothing is risk-free in Bosnia. Peace is by no means at hand, but there may be a flickering light at the end of the tunnel.

Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke is attempting to sell the American peace plan in Belgrade and Zagreb. In fact if not in law, Bosnia already has been ethically partitioned. What romantics used to fancy as a harmonious mixed society -- the pre-war Bosnia of Orthodox Serbs, Roman Catholic Croatians and the Moslems -- has been stratified along distinct ethnic lines. At the price of enormous bloodshed, hundreds of thousands of people have shifted from the ruins of a mixed society into ethnically homogeneous areas.

Until recently, most of the agony of dislocation was felt by the Moslems as they were uprooted by the Serbs. Now that 150,000 Serbian refugees have been expelled from Krajina, there is a touch of moral equivalency tot he Bosnian tragedy. The goals of ethnic cleansing have been, more or less, fulfilled. Although the Sarajevo bombing illustrates the depths of hatred that impede a final resolution, peace negotiations may be easier now that the three dominant ethnic groups are less intermingled.

The word "partition" is a nasty word in diplomacy. Czechoslovakia was partitioned at Munich. Germany was partitioned after World War II. No American or European diplomat wants to have his name on a partition document. Therefore, Assistant Secretary Holbrooke will talk in terms of "confederation," "federation," "association." Call it anything you want. Bosnia is partitioned and will remain so if and when the military conflict ever ends.

This isn't the first time that territories and peoples have been juggled around by peacemakers. In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson sailed to Europe to bestow his and God's blessing on the peace deliberations. Wilson had ordained his Fourteen Points, one of which was that each ethnic group should be free to pursue its own destiny. The Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Moslems, Slovaks, Czechs, Poles and Magyars were all free to be free. Lovely notion.

One of Wilson's great friends was Tomas Masaryk, the architect of the newly invented Czechoslovakia. Wilson asked his staff for a report on what ethnic groups would be in this new nation and how he could consult with such groups. He was told that Czechoslovakia would consist of Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia. His staffers told him, "Mr. President, there are 3 million Germans in Bohemia who will be part of the new Czechoslovakia." Wilson answered, "My friend President Masaryk never told me that."

Hundreds of thousands of Germans were also left in the newly created Poland. Both of these decisions, antagonistic to Wilson's notion of self-determination, were to become the grist for Hitler's bloody mill.

In early 1945, before the German collapse, the Allies agreed that they couldn't repeat what they had done after the previous war with respect to Germans living outside the boundaries of the new Germany. These Germans weren't to be ethnically cleansed. The phrase was "orderly transfer." Germans left in Czechoslovakia after World War II were accordingly "transferred" by the Allies to the new Germany.

The new Poland also had to be cleansed of Germans in Danzig (new Gdansk), Pomerania, Silesia and East Prussia -- all historic German lands. Three and a half million Germans were expelled from their homes and taken by boxcar to the new Germanys.

No one brags about the niceties of the "orderly transfers" after World War II. But they served a purpose. Most certainly no one will today be prepared to sanctify "ethnic cleansing." The fact still remains that the shifts in population -- call them what you will -- were probably necessary conditions for eventual peace in Bosnia.

~Tom Eagleton of St. Louis is a former U.S. senator from Missouri.