Activists Of the Last Hour

Washington - The change occurred over a period of 24 hours, from Tuesday to Wednesday: The United States moved from more or less balanced condemnation of the Serbian and Croatian incursions in Bosnia-Herzegovina to condemnation solely of the Serbian leadership and the Yugoslav People's Army.

On Tuesday the State Department assailed "the use of force, intimidation and provocation to nationalist violence by militant nationalist Serbian and, to a lesser extent, Croatian leaders in Bosnia". On Wednesday, the State Department's blame fell alone on Serbia, with phrases like "barbaric", "wrong", "completely outside the bounds of civilized behavior".

All of a sudden , the United States was acting like the "leader of the free world" in the Yugoslav crisis, after months and months of hugging the sidelines and leaving crisis management to the European Community and the United Nations.

Here was the United States as activist pressing the members of the Conference of Security and Cooperation in Europe to consider excluding "Serbia" from its place in the Helsinki conference still registered in the name of "Yugoslavia".

Here was the United States mobilizing European foreign ministers toward a concerted action against Serbia. Here was the United States dispatching a deputy assistant secretary of state to beleaguered Sarajevo to sign documents officially recognizing Bosnia-Herzegovina's sovereignty and independence - "planting the American flag" as one department official said, "pitting down a marker against Serbia", as another said.

Here was the United States beginning an airlift of emergency relief supplies for Sarajevo.

Here was the United States contemplating action in the United Nations to expel Serbia from Yugoslavia's seat in the world body, of which it was a founding member.

Here was the United States sending its third tough demarche to the government (or should one say "governments"?) of Slobodan Milosevic in a matter of days.

Here was the United States Government suddenly striking "Yugoslavia" from its vocabulary and speaking only of "Serbia" when addressing matters concerning the Belgrade authorities.

All this in the 110th year after the United States commenced diplomatic relations with (the Kingdom of) Serbia.

What had happened to electrify Secretary of State James A. Baker 3rd, to entangle him so thoroughly in the Yugoslav mess?

By all accounts it was a passionate appeal by Haris Silajdzic addressed Tuesday to Baker. The foreign minister from Sarajevo spoke of the "mass massacre" of his people and pleaded for help. Of course, there were other factors, including the Secretary of State's long-standing disgust with almost all things Yugoslav, starting with Slovenia and Croatia.

A few days earlier - after United States and European Community recognition of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the heightened Serbian offensive along the Drina - an Administration official experienced in Yugoslav affairs confided to a friend: "It leaves us looking very embarrassed and looking very stupid".

Thus the dominant factor was Baker's realization, made more vivid by the eloquence of the Bosnian visitor, that armed Serbs were invading a virtually helpless neighboring republic that had been recognized as sovereign and independent by President Bush only one week earlier. That is, Baker took the Serbian actions as a flagrant insult to the United States.

To be sure, Baker's spokeswoman, Margaret Tutwiler, insisted that the United States would continue to defer to the European Community in formulating policy in the Yugoslav crisis. But the actions spoke louder than such words.

European diplomats say that they welcome the increased attention to the conflict by the Americans, but one said that at the beginning of the week, neither European governments nor the United States had "contingency plans or specific ideas" for clamping down on the Serbian leadership.

The European diplomat said the lack of plans was evident in a meeting Tuesday of Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger with the foreign ministry political directors of Britain, The Netherlands and Portugal who currently have principal responsibility for policy on Yugoslavia in the European Community. "Everybody wanted to do something, but nobody had an answer", he said. "It looks very bleak."

Serbia has been under a trade embargo by the European Community since last year and under various United States sanctions including commercial benefits since December. "The embargoes have not been effective in the practical sense of turning the population around", the diplomat observed.

Administration officials and the diplomats said the only real leverage the international community might possess in the conflict involved President Milosevic's oft-repeated desire that Serbia be accepted as the heir to the remains of the old Yugoslavia.

To deny this claim to legitimacy in international councils might have some effect, they reason. Margaret Tutwiler alluded to this two days running in her press briefings, saying: "Some countries care about legitimacy".