another factor. She’s an extremist Zionist, and the fact that the
Muslims are involved already makes them guilty.
Some say that, just as the Allies should have bombed the rail lines to
Auschw itz to prevent the deaths of many people in concentration
camps, so w e should now bomb the Serbian gun positions
surrounding Sarajevo that have kept that city under siege. Would
you advocate the use of force?
First of all, there’s a good deal of debate about how much effect
bombing the rail lines to Auschw itz w ould have had. Putting that
aside, it seems to me that a judicious threat and use of force, not by
the Western pow ers but by some international or multinational
group, might, at an earlier stage, have suppressed a good deal of the
violence and maybe blocked it. I don’t know if it w ould help now.
If it w ere possible to stop the bombardment of Sarajevo by
threatening to bomb some emplacements (and perhaps even
carrying the threat out), I think you could give an argument for it.
But that’s a very big if. It’s not only a moral issue—you have to ask
about the consequences, and they could be quite complex.
W hat if a Balkan w ar w ere set off? One consequence is that
conservative military forces w ithin R ussia could move in. T hey’re
already there, in fact, to support their Slavic brothers in Serbia.
T hey might move in en masse. (T hat’s traditional, incidentally. Go
back to Tolstoy’s novels and read about how R ussians w ere going to
the south to save their Slavic brothers from attacks. It’s now being
reenacted.)
At that point you’re getting fingers on nuclear w eapons involved.
It’s also entirely possible that an attack on the Serbs, w ho feel that
they’re the aggrieved party, could inspire them to move more
aggressively in Kosovo, the Albanian area. T hat could set off a large-
scale w ar, w ith Greece and T urkey involved. So it’s not so simple.
Or w hat if the Bosnian Serbs, w ith the backing of both the
Serbian and maybe even other Slavic regions, started a guerrilla
w ar? Western military “experts” have suggested it could take a
hundred thousand troops just to more or less hold the area. Maybe
so.
So one has to ask a lot of questions about consequences.
Bombing Serbian gun emplacements sounds simple, but you have to
ask how many people are going to end up being killed. T hat’s not so
simple.
Zeljko R aznjatovic, know n as Arkan, a fugitive w anted for bank
ann
(Ann)
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