I hate the corpses of empires. They stink

as nothing else.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon

NARRATOR: At the edge of Europe, between East and West, lie the Balkans. The term is Turkish for mountains.

Since 1991, a bloody war has raged in the Western Balkans in a country which used to be called Yugoslavia. The carnage is shocking. The human suffering great. Not since World War II has Europe seen a shooting war within its borders or heard the chilling term "ethnic cleansing." The new world order may be upon us, but what does it mean for the tragic "Breakup in the Balkans."

["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" program introduction.]

Admiral EUGENE CARROLL: Welcome once again to "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR."

Almost every night on TV we see the latest scenes of horror from Bosnia. But these scenes and sound bites don't give us much insight into the causes of the tragedy that's going on there. Today we've invited some individuals with firsthand knowledge of the situation in Bosnia and the reasons for this tragedy and they will share their information with you.

NARRATOR: Three groups of Slavic peoples make up the majority of the former Republic of Yugoslavia: Croats, Serbs, and Muslims. Its diversity originates from its history.

ROBERT KAPLAN: The Balkans is on a major migration route between the Middle East and Europe and it's where the histories of the Middle East and Europe all thread together.

NARRATOR: Robert Kaplan is a well-traveled journalist and author of "Balkan Ghosts."

Mr. KAPLAN: It was always dominated by a major outside imperial power, be it Austro-Hungary, Ottoman Turkey, czarist Russia or the Soviet Union.

NARRATOR: Balkan Slavs also fought against these empires with their own independence. Sometimes the rest of the world ignored these struggles. Sometimes it was drawn into them.

In 1914, Gavrillo Princep assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire in Sarajevo. It was a shot fired for Serbian independence, but it rang around the world. The world went to war.

After World War I, Yugoslavia appeared on the map for the first time.

Mr. KAPLAN: It was made into a unified state as a quick, easy solution to satisfy the victors of World War I. The upshot of World War I was that two empires collapsed. So, with two empires gone, states had to come about. And it seemed logical at the time to put all the Slavic peoples in the Western half of the Balkans into one state, because they weren't Hungarian; they weren't Romanian, who are Latin; they weren't Greeks to the south; nor were they Albanians.

NARRATOR: Germany quickly defeated Yugoslavia in World

War II and established a puppet government under the Ustashe, a nationalist Croatian group. The country disintegrated.

JANUSZ BUGAJSKI: The Germans were unable to hold the area.

NARRATOR: Janusz Bugajski is the associate director of Eastern European Affairs at the Center for Strategic and Interna-tional Studies.

Mr. BUGAJSKI: You basically had three different sides. There was a Yugoslav civil war between the Croatian fascists, the Serb nationalists, and the multi-ethnic communist forces of Marshal Tito.

NARRATOR: Over 1.5 million Yugoslavs died in World War II, the majority at the hands of other Yugoslavs.

In 1945, Yugoslavia was reunited under the leadership of Marshal Joseph Tito. Despite deep divisions left over from the war, Tito managed to hold the country together for the next 35 years. He did so by dividing Yugoslavia into six republics and two provinces. The republics' boundaries were drawn to dilute Serbian political power, not along population lines.

Tito, a communist, also broke with Stalin in 1948. This independence led to Western economic and military aid. In fact, Yugoslavia was the only communist country ever to receive US military aid during the cold war.

At the time of Tito's death in 1980, Yugoslavia was one of the wealthiest and most open communist countries. Ten years after Tito's death, however, Yugoslavia disintegrated once again.

It is or was a gay peninsula, filled with

sprightly people who...drank strong liquors,

wore flamboyant clothes...and had a splendid

talent for starting wars...Karl Marx called

them "ethnic trash." I, as a footloose

youngster in my twenties, adored them.

C.L. Sulzberger, former New York Times Chief

Foreign Correspondent

Some analysts see the current war as a continuation of the historic regional turmoil.

Mr. KAPLAN: What we're seeing now is the effect of histori-cal process. The war ended, communism came, everything went into a freeze-frame state. Then communism collapsed. And after 45 years, we are now in part two of that same civil war, where the Serbs have come in for their revenge. It's almost as if the 45 years of Titoist communist are like halftime at a football match.

NARRATOR: Others point to the so-called "ethnic" or religious differences among the Orthodox Christian Serbs, the Roman Catholic Croats, and the Slavic Muslims. Janusz Bugajski believes, however, that the hatreds which fuel the ferocity of the current war were deliberately manufactured.

Mr. BUGAJSKI: It didn't start up spontaneously because of age old hatreds. That sort of assumes there was some inevitabi-lity in the conflict. It's shrewd politicians, it's media outlets that have manipulated public fears at this very unstable transi-tion period after the fall of communism, in order to generate what has become an ethnic war.

NARRATOR: Daniel Plesch is the executive director of the British-American Security Information Council.

DANIEL PLESCH: There's an old saying from my history books, which goes, "I defy you to turn a fat man into an agitator." Which goes to say that if people are well-fed and prosperous, it's much more difficult to get social conflict going than if people are in very poor social circumstances.

NARRATOR: During the 1980s, Yugoslavia's economy faltered. It was hurt further by the rise of the Iron Curtain and the breakup of the Soviet Union, which redirected Western attention and aid dollars elsewhere in Europe.

Despite a sophisticated industrial base in Slovenia and booming tourist industry along the Croatian Adriatic coast, inflation soared out of control.

Mr. BUGAJSKI: There were resentments, particularly in Slovenia and Croatia, which were the two richer republics in the federation, of paying money into the federal budget, into the federal coffers for the support of the army, as well as the development of the southern republics and the southern provinces.

JOHN LAMPE: And I think the hyper-inflation and the deteriorating economic conditions in post-Tito Yugoslavia during the 1980s started to create an atmosphere of irrational anxiety.

NARRATOR: John Lampe is the director of European Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center, in Washington, D.C.

INTERVIEWER: How bad was inflation?

Mr. LAMPE: Well, it was some thousands of percent a year, so that by '89, I think it came close to 3000 percent.

Mr. KAPLAN: The combination of Tito's death and the down-turn of the economy, which turned out to be a permanent downturn, led to a kind of warfare, an economic warfare between the various republics, which set the tone for the actual physical warfare which was to take place later. In a nutshell, every year in the 1980s, Yugoslavia got poorer, and meaner, and more hate-filled by the year.

NARRATOR: After years of being courted by both East and West as a non-aligned country, Yugoslavia was left out of the new world order.

Mr. PLESCH: They found that there wasn't any aid coming, that they had 20 years of examination papers before they were going to be allowed into the European Economic Community, and that NATO wasn't interested in having them in either.

NARRATOR: Yugoslavia eventually began to respond to the changes sweeping post-cold war Europe. The government instituted a market reform program. Ironically, however, other reforms got in the way.

Mr. BUGAJSKI: The nationalist issue came to the forefront just as the new Yugoslav government was about to launch a market reform program. So, it was never really given a chance.

NARRATOR: In January 1990, the Yugoslav communist party voted to allow multi-party elections. These elections took place in the republics later that year.

Mr. KAPLAN: The 1990 election in Yugoslavia seemed very positive from the outside world.

NARRATOR: As Robert Kaplan explains, however, looks were deceiving.

Mr. KAPLAN: Democrats were elected who were extreme nationalists, which only made a war even more possible.

NARRATOR: In a calculated effort to stay in power, former communist officials-turned-political candidates deliberately stirred up nationalist passions and found scapegoats for the worsening economic conditions. Every side had a different

scapegoat.

Mr. PLESCH: Both the Serbian leader, Milosevic, and Croat leader, Tudjman, took control of their television stations as almost their first political acts on gaining power and started to tell people things such as that the other side eats babies, literally.

NARRATOR: This propaganda further polarized the republics and added fuel to the separatist movements.

In June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia. In October, Bosnia also declared its independence.

In January 1992, Croatia and Slovenia were recognized by the European Economic Community. Europe had officially recog-nized the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history

meant in flesh and blood.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

NARRATOR: The war has had three distinct phases so far. The first phase was the Serbian-Slovenian war. The Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, sent the federal army to defeat the Slovene government and bring them back under Yugoslav and Serbian rule. The war lasted ten days. The Serbian army was routed and the Slovenes won their independence.

Mr. BUGAJSKI: Slovenia got out of Yugoslavia relatively unscathed. They had a minor war, a minor skirmish, if you like, with Yugoslav forces, but they were lucky in the sense that they didn't have large minorities, either Croat or Serb, which could act as a magnet for Serbian and Croatian claims to Slovenian territory.

NARRATOR: The second phase of the war involved Croatia and Serbia. After Croatian independence, the 600,000 Serbian minority living in Croatia began to fear that they were in danger.

Mr. KAPLAN: The chants, the flags, the slogans of the fascist Ustashe regime of the 1940s came back and the minority Serbs in Croatia had every logical reason to think that they were going to be exterminated. This provided Milosevic with a strong psychological tool. He could say to these Serbs in Croatia, "If you don't support me, you're going to be killed."

NARRATOR: Using this as his excuse, Milosevic sent federal troops into Croatia with devastating results.

Bosnia had the largest number of Slavic Muslims in the former Yugoslavia. It also had a sizable Croatian and Serbian minority population. Representatives from all three ethnic groups made up its coalition government. The Bosnians prided themselves on being a multi-cultural republic, but Bosnia did not exist in a vacuum.

Q. Why was there no fighting in Bosnia?

A. Because Bosnia has advanced directly

to the finals.

Serbo-Croatian joke

Mr. KAPLAN: If you look closely you will see that this has and still is a Serbo-Croat war between two conflicting terri- torial ambitions, Greater Croatia and Greater Serbia. In such a war, Bosnia is the strategic prize, because Bosnia is where most of the Yugoslavs' arms industry and weapons stores are located.

The first few weeks of the war in Bosnia was only fighting between Serbs and Croats. The Muslims entered at a later stage, as the sort of community that could not be absorbed by the other two.

NARRATOR: The propaganda between the hostile Croatian and Serbian republics did not stop at Bosnia's borders. Daniel Plesch explains its effect in Bosnia.

Mr. PLESCH: It's also, I think, a conflict pretty much between, you might say, the hillbillies and the urban sophisti-cates. Sarajevo, in particular, is as integrated or even more integrated than any of your urban areas. But up in the hills, things have changed much more slowly over the years. People are much more isolated and that these people were left with enormous stocks of weapons. And all they were watching was one channel, "hate television," for four or five years that told them that the Muslims, or the Serbs, or the Croats were eating babies.

NARRATOR: Bosnia became a microcosm of the previous wars. Bosnian Serbs fought Bosnian Croats. Both fought Bosnian Muslims. Everyone fought everyone else. Neighbor against neighbor, families divided.

As the ancients say, wisely,...Look before

you leap; for as you sow, ye are like to reap.

Samuel Butler, 1664

NARRATOR: More than 280,000 Bosnians -- Serb, Croat, and Muslim -- have been killed or wounded since the war began in 1992. At least 2.5 million refugees have fled the Bosnian war. American audiences are bombarded with graphic images of the war's effects on the civilian population. The seige of Sarajevo has prompted outpourings of emotion from around the world. Yet no one has come up with a workable solution to end the agony.

UN peacekeepers have been in the former Yugoslavia since February 1992. Twenty-four thousand peacekeepers are now in the region, 10,000 in Bosnia alone. While the Serbo-Croat war ended in a UN-sponsored accord, the UN has been less successful in Bosnia. The Bosnian peace talks have broken down repeatedly. The UN no-fly zone has not stopped ground-based artillery from pounding Sarajevo. The six UN safe areas created to shelter Bosnian Muslims are repeatedly attacked and the UN cannot guarantee the safe evacuation of refugees.

Some have suggested lifting the arms embargo that the UN imposed on the former Yugoslavia in 1991. It's not clear, however, that ending the embargo would do anything but intensify the killing on all sides.

Some analysts believe that military intervention by NATO could have ended the conflict. But this assessment is not universally accepted.

ROBERT MAYNES: There are certain things that people want international organizations to do that they do reasonably well, but they could do better. And there are other things that people want international organizations to do that I think it is really unrealistic to expect them to do.

International organizations can investigate. They can monitor. They can mediate. And, although it's never been tested, we can assume -- in the case of NATO, we can assume that some of them can repel aggression.

NARRATOR: William Maynes is the editor of the influential journal, Foreign Policy Magazine. He believes that both the UN and NATO are ill-suited to the tasks that they have been asked to perform in Bosnia.

Mr. MAYNES: In the old days, a country that went in and was determined to impose law and order on an area, regardless of the cost, didn't worry about press attention, didn't worry about human rights considerations. It simply used the military fist to bring law and order. I think to ask an international organization to do that is a very, very daunting request.

Yugoslav soldiers, irregular or regular,

are the meanest mothers in the valley of

death, and the last tigers the United States

ever wants to try to tame.

Colonel David Hackworth (USA, Ret.)

NARRATOR: As the fighting continues and the body count grows higher, there has been increased pressure for American military intervention, either unilaterally or under the auspices of the UN or NATO.

American troops are already on the ground in the former Yugoslavia. American forces oversaw both the NATO enforcement of the UN no-fly zone and the UN humanitarian air drops into Sara-jevo and other United Nations safe areas.

An American medical M.A.S.H. unit currently operates in Zagreb, Croatia. And in June 1993, 330 American troops were flown into Macedonia as part of a United Nations peacekeeping contingent.

The United States may become even more involved in

the conflict. Since his inauguration, President Clinton has repeatedly threatened to bomb the Bosnian Serb forces. In August 1993, NATO finally sanctioned the use of air strikes, subject to a UN veto. There are still widespread doubts about the effective-ness of this action.

Mr. BUGAJSKI: A lot of the bombing is done by mobile artil-lery pieces, some of them located in population areas, so there's a danger you're going to hit civilians, which is bad publicity. Secondly, you're not going to destroy all the artillery pieces and the Serbs can fire back and claim, look, we've defeated the United States and NATO, they've been unable to destroy our forces.

NARRATOR: Bombing alone does not win wars, from the Battle of Britain in 1940 to Baghdad in 1991. As in Iraq, effective military intervention could only be achieved by placing troops on the ground.

According to a Pentagon Joint Chiefs of Staff estimate, it would take an entire field army -- 400,000 troops -- or four-fifths of the total US force serving in Vietnam at the height of that war to intervene effectively in Bosnia.

A Congressional Research Service report on American military options in the former Yugoslavia compared a potential war in the Balkans to the war in Iraq. The study found that conditions would be worse. Fewer allies would share the burden of combat. And the enemy they would face? In the words of the study, the enemy would be "uncertain."

The art of arranging how men are to live is

more complex even than the art of massacring

them.

Georges Clemenceau, French Prime Minister, 1918

NARRATOR: Military intervention has also been suggested as a way to prevent the war from spreading outside of Bosnia.

Mr. BUGAJSKI: I would say there are two potential scenarios. One is the restart of the Serb-Croat war. The second danger, which is even more dangerous I would say for Western interests, is the potential of a spillover southward. A conflict in Macedonia could very easily embroil six neighboring countries, including two NATO allies, Greece and Turkey, and that is poten-tially very dangerous.

NARRATOR: The expansion of the war into Macedonia and Kosovo is not at all certain, primarily because of the doubtful quality and morale of the Serbian military.

Mr. LAMPE: I don't think that the war will spread at this time. I think that, first of all, the Milosevic regime, its army in Serbia -- which is I think of doubtful quality, and morale, and training of many unwilling draftees that have been rounded up, an army that didn't perform well elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia -- that, in any kind of concerted military action, I think would not be useful. And why this force would be risked in Kosovo, when the place is under Serbian martial law as it stands and when the existing border with Macedonia is open to the one supply I think that the Milosevic military really needs and the one item they pass on to the Bosnian Serbs, and that is petroleum supplies.

NARRATOR: Military force has also be advocated as a way to bring all three sides in the Bosnian war to a peace settlement. Some analysts suggest using troops to enforce the sanctions imposed on Serbia by the United Nations. While the sanctions have been in place since 1991, Serbian borders are notoriously permeable. Others suggest the creation and protection of permanent Muslim enclaves, or mini-states, within the former Republic of Bosnia, protected by the UN.

Mr. KAPLAN: In 1945, the threat was ideological, so we made Berlin a showcase of free markets where we drew the line. Now that the threat is one of ethnic anarchy, we should draw the line at these Bosnian enclaves and make them a showcase of multi-ethnic tolerance and economic survivability.

INTERVIEWER: How do you do that?

Mr. KAPLAN: Well, you do that with a NATO force of -- according to what I've heard, of 80- to 100,000 troops.

NARRATOR: Tougher enforcement of sanctions and the estab-lishment of ethnic enclaves would require large numbers of troops either from the United Nations or NATO to enforce them. Once troops are committed, in whatever capacity, from whatever source, they would be committed indefinitely. And what organization or country would be willing -- or able -- to assume that responsibility?

Mr. MAYNES: Many people when discussing Bosnia area talking about another function that the UN should play. And that basically is to create what I would call a "peace protectorate." In other words, to stop people from killing one another.

INTERVIEWER: Who don't want to stop.

Mr. MAYNES: Who don't want to stop. Now is the UN capable of doing that? Is NATO capable of doing that?

Mr. KAPLAN: What I think will happen is that we will see the creation of two perfectly bad ideas -- Greater Croatia and Greater Serbia -- and eventually the annihilation and total collapse of the Muslim community near to the heart of Europe.

Mr. BUGAJSKI: Without major military force, we're not going to reverse the gains of either the Serbs or the Croats. I think what we have to do is to press for some kind of a confederal arrangement, whereby all three sides are satisfied with the territories that they have.

NARRATOR: There is little question of the outcome of this tragic war. The question remains, however, what will happen next.

It is clear that the methods of dealing with armed conflicts during the cold war, never really effective to begin with, do not work now. What the international community must do is search for other long term solutions.

Some have suggested a program of economic investment and reconstruction of the Muslim areas once partition takes place.

Mr. BUGAJSKI: It's going to be a long process of recon-struction for all three areas. If the Muslims do get the terri-tory that they have now, they will actually have about 50 percent of the industry of Bosnia. The question is do we then -- and I think this would be important -- launch some kind of reconstruc-tion program or an aid program, particularly for the Bosnian state, the Muslim state that emerges in the middle of the former Bosnia.

NARRATOR: Others recommend continuing the sanctions against the aggressor nations who started the conflict in the first place as a message to others who might emulate them.

Mr. MAYNES: I think that right now the Serbs have achieved a victory. It's a victory, however, the outside world should not accept. And I think that, as I indicated before, we should look on the Serb gains in Croatia and Bosnia the way we did the Soviet gains in the Baltic states and declare that we will not recognize them and that we will not recognize any geographical change in the area unless it is accepted by the Muslims.

NARRATOR: Others see the need for political and social solutions to put the former republics of Yugoslavia on the firm road to democracy.

Mr. PLESCH: So many people from the region talk about the way in which this war was created by television -- not from the 13th Century or the Roman Empire, but whipped up by racist television programs -- that what we would propose, and many journalists in Yugoslavia would propose, is a "Peace TV." I mean, it's something like someone like Ted Turner could do from the satellites. It's something that could be done from the mountain- tops of Italy and Albania. And actually to send in an intelligent mix, if you like, of PBS-style reporting from intelligent, indigenous, antiwar journalists mixed up with, if you like, mud wrestling and European soccer and basketball.

NARRATOR: What is clear is that the international community must learn to adapt to a real new world order, one in which military means are not the first option in solving national and international disputes.

Other wars rage around the globe. As in Bosnia, the world often fails to do anything and, more often, chooses to ignore these wars entirely. Perhaps the international community will depart from business-as-usual in the aftermath of the cold war. The global spotlight on Bosnia just might encourage new thinking and action. And maybe, just maybe, we can use what we learn in Bosnia to resolve other conflicts around the world.

Admiral CARROLL: As horrifying as the situation is in the former Yugoslavia, I hope that you have a deeper insight into the causes for the breakup in the Balkans. There are no easy solu-tions to the problems there, but if we understand the reasons, we can get a better start on finding some solutions.

Until the next time, for "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I'm Eugene Carroll.