The United Nations command in Sarajevo was right to insist yesterday that it is now in the business of peace enforcement. That means an end to bargaining with the Serbs and a determination to impose, at last, a minimum level of protection for the people of Sarajevo. Any wavering on this point would be a fatal error of political judgement.
So the focus must still be on General Mladic, regardless of the unrest in Russia and the predictable wranglings within the Nato alliance. Stripped of the encumbering United Nations bureaucracy, the allies have accomplished much in the past few weeks.
They have consolidated their troops in central Bosnia and diminished the paralysing risk of hostage-taking. They have finally defined a clear set of objectives and set out to enforce them. They must now remain coherent and keep the Russians attached to the negotiations unfolding in parallel with the bombing campaign.It would, however, be wise to take two further steps which might lead General Mladic to comply with Nato’s demand. First – without easing the military pressure on him – the allies could insist that the Bosnian government give firmer guarantees not to exploit the air offensive by launching attacks around Sarajevo. That would remove a key objection by General Mladic, who insists that to pull out his heavy weapons would put at risk more than 100,000 Serbs who live in the area.
Second, the Nato allies could arrange a ceasefire around Sarajevo to enable a verified withdrawal of weaponry to take place.If neither condition sufficed, then there would seem to be little alternative to extending Nato’s air attacks to the broader list of targets already defined by its planners. But nobody should be under any illusions about the dangers of the course which Nato has chosen. Its gunners and airmen are now, in effect, engaged against the Bosnian Serbs to the military advantage of the Muslims and Croats, who yesterday made significant gains in central Bosnia.This not a policy which the governments of Britain or France will sustain for very long – nor should they. The presence of British and French troops must remain coupled to progress in peace talks.
If the bombing forces the pace at which Bosnia’s Serbs come seriously to the negotiating table, it will have served its purpose. Bombing the Serbs, by itself, may make some people feel better about a war which still shames modern Europe. But it is not a substitute for the political negotiations in which the United States has now taken a vital and long overdue lead.. Sir Roger Bannister must have made a lot of people uncomfortable yesterday. Britain’s first four-minute miler suggested that people of African descent are born to outsprint their white contemporaries.
They seem, he said, to have innate physical advantages which explain their extraordinary success on the track. Some, a small minority, will resist his conclusion because they wish to believe in white physical superiority. But evidence has been stacking up against them for a long time. Their theory has been falling apart since the black athlete, Jesse Owens, won four golds in the 1936 Berlin Olympics and blew apart Hitler’s dogma of Aryan supremacy.
Others will have different qualms, feeling that this is a subject better not raised at all. Discussions about human performance, whether physical or intellectual, based upon racial generalisations are easier to make than they are to prove Put in the wrong way, such theses can do great damage. Once you start saying black people are genetically inclined to athleticism, what next? Is Sir Roger also inadvertently backing The Bell Curve’s case that black people are also genetically predisposed to being less intelligent than white people?His argument also touches upon the legacy of slavery. In explaining black superiority on the track, Sir Roger suggests that adaptation of muscles to hot climates may have enhanced performance, along with a relative lack of fatty tissue.
