Abstract

Shotgun Wedding in the Balkans

The article focuses on the political events in the Balkans. Since the Spring of 1994, when U.S. pressure forced the abrupt end to the Croat-Bosnian miniwar, Washington has effectively abandoned the substance of an integral, multinational Bosnia. Instead it has toyed with ways of keeping the Bosnian Muslims afloat within a phantom Bosnia, whose borders would exist in better atlases but not in reality. To accomplish this, Washington forced the Bosnian government into a shotgun marriage with Croatia and its Bosnian (actually Herzegovinian) proxies. But the vaunted Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina was never meant to include the Bosnian Serbs, who not surprisingly were assigned to their real sponsor-President Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia.