Why Are the Camps Still Full?

Bosnia's camp inmates are victims not only of the inevitable red tape but of Western Europe's hardening attitude toward the tide of immigrants from troubled Eastern Europe. The crisis also poses a moral dilemma: is asylum abroad for concentration-camp inmates tantamount to complicity in the Serbs' ethnic cleansing? Urged by U.S. Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, the London conference declared that "the primary objective" should be the inmates' return to their homes; Western policy is to encourage ethnically cleansed Bosnians to remain as close as possible to Bosnia, to make such a return more feasible. A State Department official compares the situation to that in northern Iraq: the West aided Kurds fleeing Saddam Hussein in next-door Turkey, then returned them to Kurdistan when it was safe.

No homes:

Noble as that sounds, in practice such reasoning exemplifies the fecklessness that has characterized Western policy toward Bosnia. In Iraq the Kurds were protected by allied military power. But in northern Bosnia, the Serb army and paramilitary squads rule unchallenged by foreign intervention. "Cleansed" Muslims have no homes to return to: thousands of houses have been looted and torched. Kozarac, Mehmet's hometown, has been emptied of its 25,000 mostly Muslim people and reduced nearly to rubble. Every day hundreds flee Serb terror. Most head for areas of central Bosnia that used to be under relatively safe Muslim-Croat control. But recent Croat attacks on Muslim forces may end that option. Patrick Gasser, chief of the ICRC office in Split, Croatia, concedes that taking the camp inmates to third countries may in some academic sense assist ethnic cleansing, but adds: "Who is ready to reverse ethnic cleansing at this point? Our question is, 'Who will save lives?'"

© 1992