PEACE at last in Bosnia - after almost four years of bloodshed and conflict that has taken 250,000 lives and turned two million people into refugees.

But though the peace accord which the USA has brokered between the three factions - Muslim, Croat and Serb - is undoubtedly historic, the settlement is too fragile yet to warrant rejoicing.

Instead, a cautious sense of relief that the fighting has stopped is more appropriate.

There should also be a sense of shame on the part of the European nations which failed, largely out of fear of their own escalating embroilment and an attendant lack of political will at home, to achieve what the US administration has.

Perhaps the lesson of this outcome is that it was, in essence, brokered by compulsion.

The US-led air raids, under the Nato banner, against Serb offensives on UN-declared "safe areas" and moves in Congress to lift the arms embargo on the Bosnian Muslims are what broke the deadlock. In the light of the peace deal that has ensued from this firmness, the regretful question is begged of whether similar forcefulness by Europe's nations at the outset might have stayed this dreadful war rather than letting the worst conflict since the Second World War develop and endure for so long on their doorsteps.

But, now, apprehension must accompany the signing of this peace deal since, as is generally acknowledged, it is not a fully just settlement. Instead it is one constructed out of painful concessions and resigned realisation on all sides of the futility of shedding more blood in military pursuit of victory or justice.

It is not surprising then that, crafted on that basis, and with a bitter legacy of hatred, atrocity and upheaval left behind, this deal will require a Nato peacekeeping force of 60,000 troops - more than a third of them American and the rest mainly British and French - to make it stick.

And if it does not?

Therein lies the big gamble that US president Bill Clinton has taken in achieving this foreign policy coup.

If those troops have to fight to enforce the peace and begin to get killed, then Nato commitment to Bosnia's long-overdue peace may evaporate in a cloud of bewilderment amongst voters at home over their sons dying for a cause that is not theirs or their country's.

But perhaps the best hope against the dreadful prospect of a "Vietnam" developing in Bosnia lies with the people of that now strangely-constructed country - in that having lived nearly four years of hell, they impress upon their leaders the fact that they do not want a return to still more war.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.