Making War to Keep Peace (25 page)

The Western organizations did not deal well with this conflict. Neither the EC nor the UN nor the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) roused itself quickly to oppose the violence, which had forced 2.2 million Bosnians to flee their homes by mid-July 1992, and reintroduced into Europe the barbaric notion of “ethnic purification” that was thought to have died with Adolf Hitler. The international failure to counter this Serbian aggression could be traced to a diverse set of motives. Some governments were inhibited by their historic ties to Serbia. Some argued that the conflict was a hopelessly complicated ethnic struggle in which outsiders should not become involved, or that blame was so evenly divided among the parties that there were no meaningful moral issues. Some governments (notably France) opposed NATO's involvement, anxious to avoid setting a precedent for a post–cold war U.S. role in Europe. Everyone equivocated.

Reminding the world that leaders make a difference, recently retired heads of state Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan signed public appeals deploring the Serb violence and demanding that Milošević cease military action against Bosnia and the flow of weapons to Serb forces in Bosnia, turn over heavy weapons to an international body, and permit Bosnian civilians to return to their homes under international protection—or else expect NATO airpower to target and destroy Serb military assets.
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In the summer of 1992, François Mitterrand, the oldest of the Western presidents, flew into Sarajevo in a French helicopter, donned a flak jacket, and spent seven hours under continuous mortar and sniper fire. “The people of Sarajevo are truly prisoners, condemned to murderous blows, and I feel an overpowering sense of solidarity with them,” he declared.
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But his trip had few consequences, perhaps because, in spite of his expression of solidarity, he took no formal action.

The shelling eventually became so heavy that General MacKenzie suspended the ongoing airlift of food and medicine, which had barely sustained the city. By this point Sarajevo had little electricity or water.
Many civilians were killed and wounded by mortars and bombs, and the city's hospitals were severely damaged. On August 13, acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the Security Council passed Resolution 770, authorizing states to use “all measures necessary” to deliver food and medicine and fuel to Bosnians trapped in cities under siege, and imposing a ban on military flights over all of Bosnia-Herzegovina, except for flights in support of UN missions.
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A month later, a follow-up Resolution (786) was passed providing for monitoring (but not enforcing) the no-fly zone.

In an oblique threat, Baker said that the United States would not accept the blockage of the airport and humanitarian relief. He warned Karadzic that the United States might use air and naval units in Europe to attack Serbian artillery around Sarajevo. Baker held intensive consultations with the other members of the Security Council on how to get food and medicine to Sarajevo, which by now had been surrounded by Serb forces for months. In the United States, impatience grew. Democrats in the Senate—including Claiborne Pell (RI), Paul Simon (IL), and Joe Biden (DE)—demanded U.S. participation in delivering food and medicine.

General MacKenzie was scheduled to leave the Balkans in the first week of July 1992, and the Canadian battalion, 850 strong, would be leaving with him. It was rumored that he was being removed at the request of the UN because of the Bosnian government's strong feeling that he favored the Serbs. (A few years later, the secretary-general would request the recall of French generals Philippe Morillon and Jean Cot because the Serbs felt they favored the Bosnians.)

Throughout MacKenzie's last day, urgent appeals for help flooded in from amateur radio operators in the Muslim town of Gorazde, which had suffered months of siege and repeated ethnic cleansing. Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovíc appealed again to President Bush for American air attacks on Serb artillery positions to break the sieges of Gorazde and Sarajevo and to clear the way for new shipments of food and water. Bosnian foreign minister Haris Silajdzic appealed for more decisive action from the Security Council or the United States. But the world stood by—the NATO forces idle—while heavily armed Serbs slaughtered civilians in the heart of Europe.

Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali's response was unfathomable. Despite urgent appeals, he refused to provide UN peacekeepers for Bosnia when he deployed UNPROFOR troops in Croatia. This elegant francophone Egyptian Copt, who often called himself an African, was preoccupied with Somalia, not Bosnia, which he described as a “war of the rich.” It was his stated view that the Bosnian Serbs and the Yugoslav government should not be blamed for the violence in Bosnia.
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Again and again, he found excuses for those who attacked Bosnian Muslims. Eventually, the evidence overwhelmed his prejudice—but not until two million Croatians and Bosnians had been “relocated” under conditions that resembled the Nazi relocation of Jews: stuffed for days in stifling boxcars without food or water; crowded into prisons and army barracks, where women were raped, men beaten to death, and people “disappeared.”

“We have reached the end,” Bosnian president Izetbegovíc told Bernard-Henri Levy early in July 1992. “We have no food, no arms, no hope. We are the Warsaw ghetto. Will the world once more leave the people of the Warsaw ghetto to perish?”
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On July 14, an amateur radio operator in Sarajevo transmitted a similar message: “We are awaiting death together. Please tell the world that we beg them to do something to stop these attacks as quickly as possible.”

“Everywhere,” Roy Gutman wrote, “Serb ethnic cleansing, the euphemism for murder, rape, and torture, was continuing against Muslims and Roman Catholic Croats. The Serb onslaught had displaced two million civilians and left ten thousand dead. It was the most vicious conflict seen in Europe or nearly anywhere else since World War II. But the steam had run out of Bush's presidency.”
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According to Gutman, at the G-7 meeting early in July 1992, when violence was already widespread in Yugoslavia, Bush had said, “I don't think anybody suggests that if there is a hiccup here or there or a conflict here or there that the United States is going to send troops.”
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Bush's reaction was no different from that of other Western leaders, all of whom were essentially passive in the face of near genocide in Bosnia. Despite reports of cruelty worse than anything seen in Europe since World War II, the Western leaders equivocated, procrastinated, and offered only the most measured and detached responses. Though conditions in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina worsened throughout 1991 and
1992, the Western leaders responded to Serbian aggression mainly by assuring one another that there was little they could do.

At the end of 1992, Robert Gates, Bush's CIA director, reviewed the war's human costs: “At least nineteen thousand persons have been killed…and perhaps another hundred thousand have died as a result of the hardships created by the war. At least three million Bosnians have lost their homes, and more than five hundred thousand have fled to neighboring nations…Most of the victims have been Slavic Muslims, who formed 44 percent of the republic's population before the war, while Serbs made up about 31 percent.”
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The harsh, dehumanizing policies imposed by Serbs in conquered Bosnian territory bore a stark resemblance to those imposed by Nazi occupiers a half century earlier. In September 1992, the Associated Press published an abbreviated version of the declaration issued in the Bosnian town of Celmac.
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Among the many restrictions, non-Serb citizens were not allowed to move around the town from 4:00 PM to 6:00 AM; to swim in the rivers, fish, or hunt; drive motor vehicles; to gather in groups of more than three; to use telephones except in post offices; or to wear uniforms of any kind. They were expected to do any tasks and work assigned to them.

The behavior of Bosnia's neighbors and the international organizations in ignoring Serbian brutality demonstrated the inadequacy of the elaborate arrangements that had been constructed to deal with international crises. It also called to mind a July 1938 conference in Evian, France, assembled to consider how to deal with Adolf Hitler. In that infamous meeting, a
New York Times
correspondent wrote, “[L]eaders of the three great democracies—the United States, the United Kingdom and France—engaged in a nontruthful poker game…in which each of the players refused even to contemplate raising the stakes.”
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The UN response to Serbia was distorted by a persistent attitude of neutrality toward victim and victimizer, and by the mistaken expectation that an arms embargo would diminish the violence, when it actually empowered the Serbs while denying Croats and Muslims the weapons they needed to defend themselves. U.S. and NATO officials repeatedly told one another that “no one was innocent” in the Balkans, implying that no one was to blame. But in fact Serbia was clearly the aggressor, and Bosnia and Croatia unmistakably victims. The passivity and impotence of the UN,
the United States, the EC, the Western European Union (WEU), and NATO in facing this horror sapped the political and moral foundations of collective action.

The Bush administration, which had taken the lead in Kuwait, offered several explanations for its failure to act, notably the “unsolvable nature” of the tragedy of interethnic violence and the “European” character of these Yugoslav wars. Assistant Secretary of State Ralph Johnson offered this limp excuse: “The bottom line is that the world community cannot stop Yugoslavs from killing one another so long as they are determined to do so…. Only the people of Yugoslavia and their leaders can do that.”
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That excuse was a convenient way of blaming the victim and excusing the observer.

Secretary of State James Baker, having concluded that it was in the interest of the United States to prevent this humanitarian nightmare from continuing, emphasized the importance of multilateral pressure to enforce an ending to the conflict.
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He took a series of diplomatic measures, withdrawing recognition from Belgrade's ambassador to the United States, closing the Yugoslav consulate in Chicago, stepping up consultations with allies on relief operations in Sarajevo. Baker seemed astonished at the Serbians' behavior: “It's hard to believe,” he testified later, “that armed forces will fire artillery and mortars indiscriminately into the heart of a city, flushing defenseless men, women and children out into the streets and then shooting them.”
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But his disbelief never moved him to address the crisis effectively.

The Bush administration was not only unwilling to take unilateral action, it was reluctant to take any action at all. The Senate majority leader, Robert Dole (R-KS), called repeatedly for lifting the arms embargo to permit Bosnia and Croatia to secure the means to defend themselves. Senator Don Nickles (R-OK) observed that fifty countries had recognized Bosnia-Herzegovina while the United States had not, nor had it recognized Croatia and Slovenia. In the late summer of 1992, California Democrat Tom Lantos accused Bush of being too preoccupied with campaigning to make Bosnia a priority:

Through the summer and fall of 1992, conditions in Bosnia grew steadily worse, demands for action by the United States grew more urgent, and protests against the Bush administration grew stronger. Bosnia became a major issue in the American press and within the State Department, where several young Foreign Service officers resigned to protest U.S. policy.
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But the policy remained the same, and Bush's time was running out.

One might have thought that the EC, which had eagerly claimed jurisdiction over the Yugoslav conflict at its outset, would have requested emergency meetings of the Security Council, or that the Islamic Conference would have acted in solidarity with Bosnia's Muslim population. But the EC limited its efforts to low-key diplomatic démarches throughout 1991 and 1992, and the Islamic Conference was occupied at the UN with its usual vendettas against Israel.

If the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, China, and four or five of their colleagues in the Security Council had decided to stop the slaughter in Bosnia or Croatia, they could have done so. Had the WEU or the NATO countries decided to act, they too could have done so, even though some of the Bush team recognized that there would likely be long-term consequences to such action. “The entire future of our efforts to build our common security based on common values is at risk in the Balkans,” warned Lawrence Eagleburger, who became acting secretary of state on August 23, 1992, when Baker left to run Bush's campaign.