Help a Sovereign Nation to Protect Itself

By Senator Russ Feingold

It is becoming a cliché that one of the most tragic and troubling conflicts of our time has been how to respond to the unspeakable horrors perpetrated by Slobodan Milosevic's Serbian armies against the people of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. There are no simple solutions to this problem, but that is no justification for the apparent paralysis of the international community regarding Bosnia.

Despite good-faith attempts of some to avert disaster, the former Yugoslavia is suffering the bloodiest violence on European soil since the Second World War. President Clinton and Secretary Christopher have actively engaged the U. S. in efforts in this arena, and rightfully so. This president deserves much credit for acknowledging the difficulty we face in Bosnia and for his efforts to help. His involvement has been more responsive than that of the previous administration.

Unfortunately, it is time to recognize that we must take additional steps which would offer profound and constructive intervention into this—the most serious—of post-Cold War wars. Extraordinary action must be taken to counter this extraordinarily grave situation.

History will reveal how Europe, Russia, the United Nations, and the United States should have responded differently over the past few years. But after months and months of wringing our hands, paralyzed by inaction because we cannot find the perfect solution, we must deal with the situation as it stands today. We must accept that there are no simple or " no-risk" solutions: as Defense Secretary Les Aspin said in April, "I have never seen a government problem with no, totally no, good options before."

Sadly enough, this complexity is used by many to conclude that we should do nothing. Nothing, but watch as Slobodon Milosevic's army seeks to wipe away an infant nation.

History also teaches us many lessons. One of the most important is that we simply cannot stand by and do nothing when we are confronted with unbridled tyranny and genocide. History has taught us that inaction is not an appropriate response to horror.

This spring we commemorated the 50th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In 1943, a powerful mechanized Nazi army using air and ground forces and blitzkrieg tactics battered the Jews who were surrounded in the Ghetto of Warsaw, Poland. For three weeks, some 700 mostly young men and women fought the Nazi army to a standstill. They improvised weapons, explosives and tactics. There was no outside help. During those 21 heroic, miraculous days, the defenders of the Ghetto fought off thousands of Nazi soldiers, tanks and airplanes until their arms and supplies were exhausted and they were overwhelmed.

Our pain in remembering the Uprising was intensified by the knowledge of "ethnic cleansing" and "forcible transfer" taking place now, in 1993, in the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina where an entire people, virtually unarmed and unprotected, are alone in defending against a rather sophisticated military arsenal.

The people who fought in the Uprising demonstrated that a small force of inspired but poorly armed defenders could challenge a powerful military machine, but only for a short while. Those fighting today to defend their homes in Bosnia-Herzegovina face similar handicaps and unfortunately similar odds.

This is why I have long advocated a lifting of the United Nations arms embargo against Bosnia-Herzegovina. This should have been our first step in helping to halt the atrocities taking place in the Balkans. A sovereign nation must have the ability to protect itself. This right is guaranteed by Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.

Fifty years ago, six million Jews and millions of other members of ethnic groups were systematically annihilated by Adolf Hitler, the Nazis and their accomplices in Europe. Earlier this year we dedicated the U., S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. That dedication was premised on the commitment that "never again" would the world have to endure the horror of genocide. The museum was built to "bear witness" to that horror so that we can better understand how to stop it from happening again.

While the industrialized menace of the gigantic Nazi death machine has not been recreated in Bosnia-Herzegovina, there are all too many disturbing similarities. The world has a chance to learn from what happened in 1943, right now, today, in 1993.

If the phrase "never again" is to mean anything, we cannot allow the Bosnian people to stand defenseless in the face of further Serbian massacres. If we fail in this, the memory of the Uprising and the moving symbolism of the Holocaust Museum will be little more than empty monuments to hypocrisy.

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.