WASHINGTON -- With the first volley of cruise missiles yesterday, the United States and its allies finally targeted what is widely seen as the main source of eight years of Balkan brutality: the Yugoslav regime of Slobodan Milosevic.

U.S. officials and experts who have watched the decade unfold say that had similar military force been used earlier, many atrocities in the former Yugoslavia might have been prevented.

"In 1992, it would not have taken forces of any great dimension," said David Acheson, president of the Atlantic Council, a think tank that closely follows European security affairs.

"If we had had a NATO decision to move with force, we could have stopped it cold."

When such problems "are easy to fix and small," he said, "nobody cares. People start caring when they're almost impossible to reverse."

Out of fear of a military quagmire in a corner of Europe with a history of ethnic bloodshed, neither the United States nor its European allies challenged Milosevic early enough to have averted hundreds of thousands of casualties in the breakaway Yugoslav republics and close to 1 million refugees.

President Clinton himself acknowledged that the United States and its allies were too slow in responding to the carnage in Bosnia, with dreadful results. "This was genocide in the heart of Europe," he said in a televised address last night.

But now, confronted with the possibility of a region-wide war if the Kosovo crisis spins further out of control, the administration has decided it could wait no longer.

Announcing the launch of airstrikes yesterday afternoon, President Clinton referred to Milosevic with the kind of bellicose language previously reserved for Saddam Hussein of Iraq:

"President Milosevic, who over the past decade started the terrible wars against Croatia and Bosnia, has again chosen aggression over peace," Clinton said.

Though more evidence would emerge over time, the ethnically aggressive character of Milosevic's leadership began revealing itself in 1987, when he fanned the flames of Serbian nationalism on visits to Kosovo in a foretaste of the drive for a greater Serbia.

Together with barbarous acts by Yugoslavia's Croats and Muslims, the region has racked up an appalling record of war crimes. Warren Zimmerman, who became U.S. ambassador to Belgrade in 1989, wrote four years ago that Milosevic had made "a Faustian pact with nationalism as a way to gain and hold power."

The Yugoslav leader's extraordinary "coldness," Zimmerman said, "made it possible for Milosevic to condone, encourage and even organize the unspeakable atrocities committed by Serbian citizens in the Bosnian war."

Failed diplomacy

A succession of diplomatic efforts, starting with a peace bid by former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Britain's Lord Carrington, failed to halt the Serbs' drive.

"Milosevic-style nationalism has proven singularly resistant to economic inducements, penalties or any other pressures short of force," Zimmerman writes. "Unfortunately, neither the Bush nor the Clinton administration was willing to step up to the challenge of using force in Bosnia, despite significant American interests in the Balkans."

After then-Secretary of State James A. Baker III tried and failed to prevent the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, a frustrated fatigue with the Balkans set in. Zimmerman recalls being told by a U.S. colleague that Yugoslavia "had become a tar baby in Washington. Nobody wanted to touch it. With the American presidential election just a year away, it was seen as a loser."

The Bush administration tried to hand the problem off to Washington's European allies. But Europe proved unable to meet such a security challenge without U.S. help. Providing the bulk of troops for an ineffective peacekeeping force in Bosnia, France and Britain resisted a more muscular military stance.

During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton criticized Bush's hands-off posture, accusing the Republican administration of giving "short shrift to the yearnings of those seeking freedom in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia" and of having "ignored the warning signs that Milosevic was emerging as one of Europe's bloodiest tyrants."

Under a Clinton administration, the candidate vowed then, the United States would be "a catalyst for a collective stand against aggression."

John Fox, an expert on Eastern Europe at the Baker State Department who served briefly under Clinton, said yesterday: "The U.S. government should have done [in Yugoslavia] what it did in nearly every transition country: Support the democratic forces against the authoritarians. This was specifically not done because of the hands-off policy at the time regarding Yugoslavia."

Recounting a list of earlier chances to halt Milosevic, Fox said the West should have applied pressure in 1990, when his government stripped Kosovo of its autonomy and used force when Serbia began "test-marketing ethnic cleansing" in Croatia in 1991.

"With much lower-cost preventive force, we could have deterred or at least limited the war in Croatia and Bosnia much earlier," Fox said. "This could have avoided ever-larger security crises in southeastern Europe which have fundamentally challenged the Western alliance."

Christmas warning

One deterrent that worked for six years was the "Christmas warning" of 1992, in which Bush threatened to use force against Serbia if it violently repressed the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

This threat was reaffirmed by Clinton. But when Milosevic tested it early last year, the Clinton administration failed to act, and a violent crackdown continued.

"The nonviolent political leadership of Kosovo never got any real support," Fox said. "It wasn't until there were a lot of refugees and dead bodies on the ground that we finally faced up to the challenge."

Long after it became clear that Yugoslav forces would not abide by their cease-fire agreement in October, the United States held off on military action, Acheson says, to prove to European allies that further diplomacy was hopeless.

Had the West adopted an early tough stance against Milosevic, a logical extension might have been to accuse him of war crimes.

"He was the guy behind the political attractiveness of ethnic cleansing," Acheson says. "He ought to be brought to The Hague," the site of the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. "But unless NATO goes in there with ground forces, they're not going to get him."

Pub Date: 3/25/99