Leading Article: Owen, as he will be judged (CORRECTED)

CORRECTION (PUBLISHED 13 AUGUST 1993) APPENDED TO THIS ARTICLE

There are two sharply different views of Lord Owen's long-running endeavours to mediate a peaceful settlement of the conflict in Bosnia. One sees him struggling gamely, conscientiously, even nobly to bring the bloodshed and 'ethnic cleansing' to the earliest possible end, making the most of the appallingly weak hand left to him by divisions and lack of will within the Western camp.

The contrasting view is that he has, wittingly or unwittingly, become a tool of the Serbs and Croats, lending legitimacy to their ruthless carve-up of a state whose independence the European Community actually encouraged: in essence, doing dishonourable deals with war criminals, at the expense of the weakest party, the relatively innocent Bosnian Muslims.

The American assessment has fluctuated between these two poles, but appears to be becoming increasingly negative. This week Lord Owen has come under attack from at least three separate US sources. One was an official who has resigned as the State Department's senior Bosnia expert, Marshall Freeman Harris. After spending three days in Geneva observing the current peace-making negotiations, he said yesterday in London: 'I think Owen should be removed, in part because he seems only to want to reach a quick political settlement rather than a politically viable one.'

Earlier this week the Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland called on Lord Owen to resign 'rather than help dig the grave deeper for the victims of the Bosnian war'. Mr Hoagland attacked Lord Owen's reported effort to persuade the Bosnian government to give the Serbs control of part of Sarajevo, and was subsequently supported by the State Department spokesman, Mike McCurry.

It is easy to forget precisely what Lord Owen and his UN partner (first the American Cyrus Vance and now the Swede Thorvald Stoltenberg) have been trying to do. With no UN or Western military commitment to back them up, they have been seeking to negotiate a conclusion to the hostilities, of necessity on the basis of the cantonisation or some other form of division of the multi-ethnic state. They are obliged to negotiate on the basis of what has been happening on the ground, and against a background of deep-seated suspicions and a history of bloodshed.

Their weakness as mediators reflects the divisions not just between the West Europeans and the Americans, but within each interested country. It was clear from the start that Nato countries, above all the United States, were not prepared to have their own troops involved in a ground war. That strengthened the Serbs' hand enormously. So did the allies' subsequent response to the revealed horrors of 'ethnic cleansing': the dispatch of troops solely as protectors of humanitarian aid convoys. Fear of what might happen to these troops, and to aid workers, helped to paralyse any decision to take punitive action against Bosnian Serb forces. It continues to do so.

Earlier this year, hard though it may now be to credit, Lord Owen was being canvassed as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. That was when the original Vance-Owen plan calling for Bosnia's division into 10 cantons appeared to have been accepted by all three parties. They would never have got that far without David Owen, remarked the respected US ambassador to this country, Raymond Seitz, at the time.

It was American reluctance to provide the troops to implement it that did most to scupper a deal which would in effect have made Bosnia a UN protectorate. The deal now under negotiation in Geneva is a much cruder three-way carve-up. For his own reputation, Lord Owen might have done better to resign when the earlier version was killed off in Washington. His wisdom in persevering may be doubted, but it is hard not to admire his sense of duty, and his courage.

CORRECTION

Our apologies to Lord Owen's co-negotiator, Thorvald Stoltenberg: he is Norwegian, not, as stated yesterday, Swedish.