BACK TO BAGHDAD?

John Simpson says that the attitude of some

Serbians reminds him of Saddam Hussein's men before the bombing of Baghdad

Pale THE DISTANCE between Sarajevo and Pale, the little town which the Bosnian Serbs have turned into the capital of their self-declared government, is about ten miles. It is also the infinitely greater dis- tance between besieged and besieger, imprisonment and freedom, hardship and plenty, and also (you would have said until this past week) fear and safety. Not any more. Nato and the United Nations have decided to redress the balance in favour of Sarajevo and the mostly Muslim govern- ment of Bosnia.

I made the journey here from Sarajevo last Friday. It can't be done in any safety without an armed vehicle, an unwieldy construction of steel or kevlar in which you travel around like a vulnerable hermit crab inside its borrowed shell. It takes a good hour and a half, and involves showing your passport and various other forms of identi- fication at half a dozen or more barricades and check points. No inhabitants of Saraje- vo can get through: the mostly Muslim defenders of the city don't want them to leave, the UN soldiers won't let them go, and the Serbs won't accept them unless they are themselves Serbs who are defect- ing to Pale.

Last Friday was the second full day of ceasefire in Sarajevo: the only one of its kind which has ever worked. That morning when I looked out of my window at the Holiday Inn hotel, I could see that some- thing had changed radically. The Berlin 1945 landscape behind the hotel, with its shattered buildings, heaps of rubble and weed-grown pavements, is permanently in the sight of at least two Serbian snipers. Across the open stretch of ground you have to run: with the gallows humour of war this is known as the 'Sarajevo shuffle'. No one was doing the Sarajevo shuffle last Friday: they were walking around as though that eerie, unpropitious field of fire was like any other street corner. No sniper's rifle cracked: no artillery echoed through the surrounding hills.

I first realised that something had changed on the Serbian side too when we reached the barracks at Lukavica, soon after leaving the city. This is the place where you have to check in and get your permission to travel up to Pale. One Ser- bian officer was familiar to me: an over- bearing little man inclined to complain about the things that western journalists said about this war. Now, though, he was smarmily pleasant, his handshake was damp, and he wanted to talk about the likelihood of a Nato air strike. I tried to rattle him further by telling him with phoney sympathy that I hoped he would get through the next week or so in safety. His passing handshake was even damper. As we drove off towards Pale I felt he reminded me obscurely of someone, but it was a little time before I remembered who: the censor in Baghdad in the days immediately before the allied onslaught on Saddam Hussein in January 1991 there was exactly the same ingratiating polite- ness, as though if he were nice enough to me I might somehow grant him protection against the bombs that would soon be falling.

Our armoured vehicle trundled up the mountainside, past the Serbian positions on the heights overlooking Sarajevo, and on into Pale, an unremarkable little ski resort with only two hotels and not much in the way of shops. The government has taken over one of the hotels, together with a factory that used to make car engines and was called, unsuitably, Koran, and turned them into its headquarters. In the

past I have always disliked Pale. So much relaxation and plenty seemed insulting after the privations of the city which the people here were helping to destroy. But the atmosphere has changed in Pale too. Nato fighters and reconnaissance planes regularly fly overhead to remind everyone that the deadline is getting closer. And though there may be a certain amount of surprise that after 22 months the outside world has finally decided to do something about the siege of Sarajevo, I haven't yet found anyone here who thinks an air strike is unlikely. No one, though, seems to know quite what to do about it. 'I suppose this place will be a target,' said a senior official vaguely as he looked out of his window at the snowy hillside. Like most ministers and top government advisers, he was quartered in an hotel outside town at the nearby ski resort of Jahorina. He spoke excellent English and had done a PhD at Corpus Christi, Cambridge. Out of a certain fellow feeling I assured him I didn't think Nato would come seeking out civilians. One cer- tainly hopes not. It wouldn't do Nato, or the West in general, any good at all if its first attempt since the Gulf war to impose a new order on things were to lead to a lot of unnecessary deaths. How would that be superior morally to what the Bosnian Serbs have done to Sarajevo?

For the moment, though, all this is pure- ly speculative. While there are no air strikes, most Bosnian Serbs continue to behave with a friendliness which is by no means intended to be ingratiating. The other day, a quiet, thoughtful officer in the Bosnian Serb army took my colleagues and me to see the front-line positions he com- mands. He was an impressive man, who didn't do much talking. He drove us through the snow to a position in the mountains where a group of 17 French marines serving with the UN had set up their camp. It was in an old ski hotel, once no doubt very pleasant, but now wrecked by fighting. There was a damaged mural in what must have been the dining-room, looking out over Sarajevo hundreds of feet below. In it, happy skiers cavorted with the spirit of the place. It was all very Titoesque. There were little piles of neatly curled excrement on the floor, but elsewhere the French marines were starting to make the place habitable.

The French marines were sent in to over- see the withdrawal of the Bosnian Serb guns from a position immediately behind and above the little hotel. The Bosnian Serb officer had invited them up here when he found they were sleeping out in the open in what had been the hotel car-park.

Now he brought them a bottle of slivoric, and shook hands with them. 'We could not have had a more welcoming reception,' the lieutenant in charge of the men said appre- ciatively. And yet, when we sat and talked in a dugout on the hillside, the Bosnian Serb officer made it absolutely clear that if there were to be air strikes he would not be able — would, indeed, not even want — to protect the 17 French marines from the anger of his men. Nor the civilian drivers of the UN High Commission for Refugees who bring supplies through the Bosnian Serb line. Nor, he added for our benefit, the western journalists.

I can certainly believe it. The Bosnian Serbs are not the kind of people who think particularly carefully about the conse- quences of what they do. They are blunt, not subtle. The difference between the Muslims in Sarajevo and the valley below them, and the Bosnian Serbs up here on the heights is the difference between Southern Irish Catholics and Ulster Protestants. Down in Sarajevo people are pleasant and subtle and full of schemes; nothing is as it appears. The Muslims are the urban middle-class, sophisticated and worldly, many of the Bosnian Serbs come from Sarajevo themselves, but as a group they tend to be from peasant stock. They are tough, open and sometimes brutal.

The Muslims have made themselves superb at the art of public relations: Eyeup Ganic, the Bosnian vice-president, is always ready to meet foreign journalists and explain the situation to them wittily but with a hint of passion. Few foreign journalists in Sarajevo question the right- ness of the Muslim cause, or the tactics the Muslims pursue. When the UN announced last summer that the Muslim government was itself preventing the reconnection of water and electricity supplies to Sarajevo, partly in order to keep the sympathy of the outside world, the news received remark- ably little attention.

By contrast, the Serbs know that such a thing as public relations exists, just as I know that nuclear physics exist; but neither of us has any idea what it means in prac- tice. Until recently the Serbs bombed Sara- jevo pitilessly every day, blamed the Muslims every time there was serious loss of life, and became angry when no one outside took their version of events seri- ously. Government offices here are plas- tered with crude, ugly posters denouncing the Croats and their German backers (`nasty kid of a nasty mother') even though they have now entered an alliance with the Croats. Like the more extreme Ulster Protestants, the Bosnian Serbs are their own worst enemy, and each time they open their mouths they make more people dis- like them.

But not, of course, their own supporters. For them, not-an-inchism is entirely admirable. They feel they have been pushed far too far, and the honest decent Serbs of the countryside are being deprived of the homeland by the feline subtleties of the Muslims. 'Our backs are against the wall' one Bosnian Serb official said to me, rather improbably for someone who is actively helping to organise the siege of the enemy capital. Nevertheless that is the self image of the people in Pale: they are fighting a defensive war, and now the outside world has come in and sided with their enemies. Their instinct is of course to come in and fight all the harder. And yet their leader, Dr Karadzic, knows that this is no solution. He appreciates that his supporters, the Serbian govern- ment in Belgrade, have reached the end of their willingness to expand Serbian territo- ry any further and he is uncomfortably aware that things will get further out of hand if Nato planes start the bombing of Serbian positions. Above all he under- stands that the siege of Sarajevo does nothing but damage to the Bosnian Serb cause, and that the outside world would pay far less attention to the continuing war if there was an end to the daily assault on a city which has always been famous for its sophistication and its fine setting.

And so faced with the stubbornness of his people on the one hand and the deter- mination of the Americans and French to put an end to the siege on the other, Dr Karadzic has decided to give way carefully. Not, he explained hotly, to the Nato ulti- matum, but as a result of the agreement reached last week with the United Nations for a ceasefire and gradual demilitarisa- tion of Sarajevo: as though Nato and the UN are in some ways different or even competing entities.

General Sir Michael Rose, who has had a stunningly impressive start to his term as UN Commander in Sarajevo, has grasped Dr Karadzic's need for a way out, and is allowing him this one. What is far from clear, as I write, is whether Dr Karadzic can make it in time, taking all his heavy weapons with him — in time for the 17 French marines perched up in their shat- tered hotel on the heights overlooking Sarajevo: for the UNHCR drivers who bring supplies through Pale into the city; and for those of us who have elected to watch the outcome of the crisis from the Serbian side. 'You know what all this reminds me of?' asked my friend, colleague and namesake, Bob Simpson, who was with me in Baghdad at the start of the allied bombing in January 1991, and reached Pale a day or so after me this week. I did, of course: but Pale isn't another Baghdad, and Dr Karadzic certainly isn't another Saddam Hussein, willing to risk his coun- try's future and his people's lives for the sake of his own weird sense of honour. The signs are that the Nato ultimatum shook Dr Karadzic badly, and that he is now try- ing to bring the crisis to an end. He claims he is willing to satisfy the demands of the United Nations, while condemning those of Nato. But none of this really matters now. Barring accidents, it looks to me as though there won't now be air strikes on the Ser- bian positions overlooking Sarajevo.

John Simpson is foreign affairs editor of the BBC.