Western European governments are facing increasing public criticism of their muted response to Serbian aggression in the Balkans and the millions of refugees made homeless by the Serbs` policy of ”ethnic cleansing.”
But officials in key European capitals are showing little inclination to take a more active role.
Most European governments have so far confined themselves to symbolic gestures, such as naval monitoring-but not enforcement-of the UN economic sanctions against Serbia.
But recent news reports that Serbian nationalists have been driving Croatian and Muslim men, women and children from their homelands in sealed freight cars and cattle trucks to modern-day concentration camps have stirred public outrage.
British Prime Minister John Major has called a broad peace conference of foreign ministers and international organizations to discuss the crisis in the Balkans on Aug. 26-28, but some British politicians are beginning to say that this is not enough.
Following a string of vivid press reports about atrocities, a former British foreign secretary, Lord Owen, said Thursday that he had written to Major demanding immediate military action to stop them.
”When faced with concentration camps and sealed trains, we have done nothing,” Owen said in an interview. ”We made that mistake with the Jews in the Second World War.”
He added that if the Western allies and the United Nations could mobilize to force President Saddam Hussein to stop attacks on the Kurds in Iraq after the war in the Persian Gulf, they should be able to force Serbs to stop attacks against their neighbors in the Balkans as well.
”It is perfectly within the power of NATO” to enforce an immediate cease-fire, he wrote to Major. ”Satellite and air reconnaissance could pinpoint any unauthorized military activity and retaliatory air strikes could be mounted from NATO airfields that ring Yugoslavia or by planes flying from aircraft carriers.
”This could be implemented within hours, not even days, once the requisite authority had been got from the UN Security Council.”
Officials at 10 Downing Street said Major had received the letter and would reply in due course.
Earlier, President Francois Mitterrand of France flew into Sarajevo under fire, and has assigned French troops to the airlift of food and medicine into the city, but only after making clear that France, too, had no intention of asking the troops to try to enforce peace.
Two influential national newspapers, Liberation and Le Monde, wrung their hands this week about the collective European failure to stop the fighting, but stopped short of proposing to send soldiers in to do anything about it.
German officials have been sounding increasingly urgent alarms about the inadequacy of existing measures.
”I grant that we have so far been unsuccessful in stopping this terrible murdering and killing,” Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel said in an interview with the Sueddeutsche Zeitung on Wednesday. ”I have always said that in the end military intervention should not and cannot be excluded.”
Some European politicians have drawn parallels between the Serbian actions and what the Nazis did to the Jews and the Slavs in World War II, when Western democracies also stood by until it was too late for millions of Nazi victims.
”Ethnic cleansing” of Muslim and Croatian areas in Bosnia and Herzegovina and elsewhere by Serbian militias has been going on for months, and 2 1/2 million refugees are homeless in the Balkans, the largest number since World War II.
The prime minister of the truncated Yugoslav state, the Yugoslav-born American businessman Milan Panic, has acknowledged that these actions invite comparisons to the Nazi barbarity, and he said in London on Thursday that he would go to Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, to try to stop the fighting.
Paddy Ashdown, the leader of the opposition Liberal Democrats in Britain, said Friday that he was also going to Croatia and Bosnia ”to draw attention to the failure of Britain`s government and governments throughout Europe to rise to this appalling human tragedy.”