The war in Bosnia has baffled many. It would be hard to find a greater divergence between the ideals of any decent, civilized human being and what has gone on in the former Yugoslavia. To the liberals, it follows that this war is a problem for which there will be a solution--even though their record of counter-productive results from previous problem-solving ventures, at home and abroad, leaves them undaunted. Those who look first at the inherent constraints of a situation will find in Bosnia some of the most intractable constraints imaginable. One of these is the past--a history of bitter and lethal intergroup hatreds going back for centuries.
To many, the media images of the bloodbath in Bosnia have also obscured one basic fact: that the Bosnian war is not a civil war in its own right, but an extension of the Serbian-Croatian war, a continuation by other means of the Serbian and the Croatian demand for territory. In addition, the bitter ethnic and religious differences within Bosnia have a repeated history of drawing in outside powers with ties to one or the other local factions. For example, more than a hundred years ago, Russia and Turkey fought a war that began with an uprising in Bosnia.
The geography of the region--a wooded and mountainous region--is another constraint. It is difficult to conduct military operations, whether from the air or on the ground. Geography not only makes the Balkans a difficult place for military operations, it has itself contributed to the fragmenting of the peoples who inhabit this region.
Unlike northwestern Europe, with its broad and fertile coastal plains and its many navigable rivers knitting people together economically and culturally over large territories, the mountains of the Adriatic coast are close to the sea, cutting off the narrow coastal plains from the hinterlands and isolating the peoples who have struggled for survival in the rugged uplands for centuries.
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