Bosnia's agony.

• Position: Editorial

War rages in the lands that used to be Yugoslavia. as neighbors kill neighbors for reasons based on conflicts that should have been forgotten centuries ago, as men rape women for reasons based on politics, as shells drop on sleeping families for reasons based on nothing--nothing but hate--and as children not yet old enough to hate suffer and die, the world wrings its hands.

There must be something we can do. But can we?

It has been obvious since war broke out nearly two years ago that military intervention is not a good idea and will not work. Even the military geniuses who can usually be depended on to get the world community into a fray want to stay well clear of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, and Macedonia.

Less intrusive measures don't work either. The airdrops of food and medical supplies begun by the United States on the last day of February are the most recent example. Designed as relatively simple humanitarian gestures, the airdrops began on a Sunday. By Tuesday, Defense Secretary Les Aspin had declared them to be a great success," because they demonstrated to Serbian forces that it was futile to block ground convoys and would persuade them to lift their sieges of Muslim enclaves. By Wednesday, it was clear that what are "futile" are the airdrops. Serbian gunners turned their weapons on Muslim civilians who came out to collect supplies, and the people of eastern Bosnian villages that had held out for months abandoned them to the Serbs.

And by Thursday, having used the airdrops as backdrop to these victories, the Serbian military commanders made a magnanimous offer: SERBS REPORTED WILLING TO ALLOW MUSLIMS TO LEAVE OVERRUN AREA, read the front-page headline in The New York Times the next morning. The story quoted the reaction of a U.N. official in the area: "Things have started moving in the right direction," he said. The right direction for Bosnian Serbs, perhaps. Not for anyone else.

What does a Bosnian settlement look like after such ethnic cleansing"? Jose Maria Mendiluce, representative in the former Yugoslavia of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, toured the shell-shattered remains of Derventa in late February. "Once an ethnically mixed town of 56,000 (21,000 Croats and 22,000 Serbs)," The Washington Post reported, it is "now down to 10,000--all Serbs except for forty-five Croat and Muslim families. Colonel Slavko Lisica, who led the Serbian delegation, said Serbs and non-Serbs were |all living together happily'...