Charles Kreuthammer

Washington Post, Editorial, August 15, 95.

This week in four days of blitzkrieg by the Croatian army, 150 000 Serbs living in the Krajina region of Croatia were ethnically cleansed, sent running for their lives to Bosnia and Serbia.

In the face what U.N. observers in Croatia call the largest instance of ethnic cleansing in the entire Balkan wars, where were the moralist who for years have been so loudly decrying the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims. Where were the cries for block the demand for arms, the call to action on behalf of today a pitiful victims. There were the columnists, the senators, the other posturors who excoriate the West for standing by when Bosnian Muslims are victimised and are silent when the victim of the day is Serb?

On vacation I suppose. The plight of the Krajina Serbs will be addressed just as soon as they return from the Hamptons. Meanwhille 160 000 people are expelled from their homes. Why no anguish over the fall of Krajina, a region the Serbs have inhabited for 500 years longer than we have inhabited North America? The reason for the deathly silence is the unspoken feeling that, well the Serbs had it coming: Look at what the Serbs have done to the Muslims in Bosnia. What goes around comes around.

The Serbs? Which Serbs? Most Krajina Serbs had nothing to do with the war in Bosnia, let alone with the atrocities commited there by other Serbs. How in particular are the women and children and old people of Krajina - now terrorized, displaced and universally unlamented - responsible for the suffering of Sarajevo?

And what was the great crime of the menfolk for which expulsion is now tacitly considered fit punishment? Yes they did form a breakway state within Croatia. Yes, when Croatia itself broke away from Yugoslavia in 1991 they did preciptate a war of independence within Croatia.

But they went to war for good reason. They did not want to live under a people that had massacred their parents. The Croatian state they rebelled against had, from its inception in 1991 adopted many of the symbols - the coat of arms, the kuna (the Croatian currency) and much of the authoritariasm of the first Croatian state, the notorious Nazi pupet state of World War 2, a genocidal state with Nuremberg Laws, concentration camps and a monstrous record of the ethnic exterminatio that included the murder of hundreds of thousands of Serbs. (Presentday Bosnia, by the way, was part of that Nazi pupet state, which helps explain Bosnia's Serbs have demanded independance too).

The Serbs of Krajina had every reason to fear falling under Croatian sovereignity again. And this week of course, their fear were borne out. The Croats shelled Serb villages and towns before advancing their armies, thereby terrorizing the poulation to flight. And once they fled, report U.N. observers in Croatia, refugees indiscriminately shot at.

Where are the protests? Not only are there no protests, but the government of the United States (and Germany, Croatian's onetime patron) has quietly applauded the Croatian blitzkrieg.

The reason is a simple. Realpolitik. This crime is a suitable one. It fits the map. It solves Croatia's Serb problem. It neatly cleanses the Croatian state. It removes an ethnic pocket trapped by history and Tito's maliciously drawn (now internationaly recognized) Yugoslav borders. This ethnic cleansing, President Clinton and his aides have indicated quite candidly might make a Balkan settlement more possible.

Well then, it seems we have a new moral calculus for former Yugoslavia. Ethnic cleasing will be tolerated if it might help end the war. This is the logic: 1) The paramount moral, imperative in former Yugoslavia is to end the fighting. 2) Given the history of these three peoples - Serb, Croat and Muslim - the only way to end it is by grouping ethnic populations within contigous lines. 3) We don't care which lines so long as they separate the groups within reasonably defensibile territory. And 4) if people - 150 000 Krajina Serbs, for example - need to be ethnically cleaned, so be it.

The Bosnian moralists - those who denounce our refusal to help Bosnia's Muslims - have long objected to such cold and cynical logic. Given their hypocrisy regarding the Krajina Serbs, however, it is hard to see how they can maintain their objection. There is either one moral standard regarding ethnic cleansing or none. There cannot be two.

Perhaps shame over the fate of the Krajina Serbs will now inject a note of realism into the overheated American debate about Bosnia. Perhaps it will put an end to the moral preening of those, who, in order to encourage American intervention, have played on Muslim victimhood exclusively, grotesquely invoking the Holocaust to create a morality play in which the Serbs are the Nazis and the Muslims are the Jews.

There are many sides to the conflict in former Yugoslavia, and both past and present, more than one victim.