2 Secessions a Rebuff to Bush’s ‘World Order’

Croatia and Slovenia, by declaring their independence from Yugoslavia in the face of nearly unanimous international opposition, presented the United States and the rest of the world Tuesday with an agonizing choice of strangling the new nations at birth or acquiescing in the possible disintegration of the system of nation-states.

For President Bush’s post-Cold War “new world order,” the action in the Balkans is a painful rebuff. Croatia and Slovenia asserted their sovereignty less than a week after Secretary of State James A. Baker III visited Yugoslavia to warn them against taking the step.

Last week, the 35-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe--representing the United States, Canada and every nation in Europe--advised Yugoslavia that international economic and political assistance is dependent on preservation of its unity. By inference, the group was warning that independent Slovenia and Croatia would be isolated politically and ostracized economically.

If the CSCE nations carry out that threat, they could turn the two republics into clones of Albania, Europe’s poorest country after four decades of self-imposed isolation. The Croats and Slovenes are gambling that the world will not have the stomach for the human suffering that such a policy would produce.

The way the United States and most European nations see it, if the two tiny Balkan republics successfully secede from the 73-year-old Yugoslav federation, the move will inflame ethnic independence movements from Czechoslovakia to Ethiopia to Iraq to the Soviet Union. That, in turn, would undermine the world political system that has endured since the end of World War I.

“Everybody is trying to stave this off, because states are very reluctant to see other states break up into their component parts,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former State Department and National Security Council expert on Europe. “It is not something that you lightly dismiss.”

Ethnic tensions, similar to those that drove Slovenia and Croatia to withdraw from Yugoslavia, are fueling secession movements in many of the Soviet Union’s 15 republics, the Eritrea province of Ethiopia and the Kurdish regions of Iraq, as well as in Czechoslovakia, Turkey, Iran and Syria.

By and large, the world community opposes the breakup of states as a matter of principle, regardless of the merits of individual cases. For this reason, the Bush Administration has objected strongly to the secession movements in Slovenia and Croatia, even though voting majorities in both republics clearly expressed their desire for independence in referendums--in December in Slovenia and earlier this year in Croatia.

Also, Washington’s opposition to independence has not been tempered by the fact that Croatia and Slovenia are the most Western and most democratic of Yugoslavia’s six republics.

From Washington’s point of view, the one exception to the general rule against endorsing secession movements is the three Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The United States never recognized the forceful incorporation of the republics into the Soviet Union in 1940, so the Administration supports their renewed independence.

“The United States has stood, and will continue to stand, in solidarity with the Baltic peoples in their striving for freedom and self-determination,” Bush said Tuesday in a report to Congress unrelated to the situation in Yugoslavia.

Nevertheless, the Administration is concerned that the Slovenian and Croatian secession moves will touch off violence in Yugoslavia that might spill across its borders.

“The trouble is in that part of the world, when blood gets spilled, blood calls for revenge,” said George Carver, former deputy director of the CIA. “It is bound to get messy, and it may be impossible to keep the messiness inside Yugoslavia’s borders.”

A senior Administration official said that Baker made it clear to Yugoslavia’s federal government last week that Washington would oppose the use of the national army to stop the secession drives. In addition, there has been a proliferation of weapons in private hands.

“In some republics, civilians are being armed,” the official said. “It is different civilians and different minority groups in different republics, and in some places party people are being armed as party people. Now don’t tell me that’s not a powder keg.”

Baker said last week that “instability and breakup of Yugoslavia could have some very tragic consequences, not only here, but more broadly in (the rest of) Europe, as well.” He warned that the United States would not recognize the independence of either Slovenia or Croatia, a threat that was reiterated by the State Department on Tuesday.

There is no doubt that the United States, the 12-nation European Community and other nations can turn Slovenia and Croatia into economic disaster areas if they choose to do so. Such action, however, would be certain to produce a new flow of refugees. It also could touch off additional violence.

In any case, the breakaway republics seem to be headed for difficult economic times, regardless of what the rest of the world decides to do.

“I don’t see the sources of capital (for Croatia and Slovenia), particularly if investors are not sure where the politics will settle,” said Robert Hunter, director of European Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “You don’t have to threaten sanctions. This is a self-generated sanction.”