Making War to Keep Peace (33 page)

Perry's proposals resembled those of other members of the Clinton team, including Morton Halperin (then at the National Security Council) who recommended that U.S. armed forces be drastically reduced and the unilateral use of force renounced. Like Perry, he looked to multinational forces to meet the occasional challenges created by outlaw states.
Halperin emphasized that the United States should act in the world through the UN, and he expected that national defense would become the defense of world peace. Peace, he anticipated, would be protected mainly by the moral force of a united world community. “The threat of military force should be sufficient to obviate the need to use it if the right military and political conditions are met,” Perry wrote.
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The vision of investing less in national defense and more in international peacekeeping was emphasized in the pronouncements of various Clinton officials. In a June 15, 1995, speech before the Philadelphia Bar Association, Madeleine Albright emphasized (and, I think, exaggerated) the diverse tasks that could be performed by a UN peacekeeping operation, which, she said, could “separate adversaries, maintain cease-fires; facilitate the delivery of humanitarian relief; enable refugees and displaced persons to find homes; demobilize combatants and create conditions under which political reconciliation may occur and free elections may be held. It can help to nurture new democracies; lower the global tide of refugees; reduce the likelihood of unwelcome interventions by regional powers; prevent small wars from growing into larger conflict.”
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Spurred on by this vision, American participation in peacekeeping had spread rapidly into all the areas where the Clinton administration found cause to use force to achieve a goal.

In the meantime, the costs of these missions were mounting. On March 8, 1995, the General Accounting Office (GAO) reported to the House of Representatives that United States had deployed the following troops:

• 26,000 troops to the peacekeeping mission in Somalia
  
• 14,000 troops to monitor repression of the population in southern Iraq
  
• 11,700 troops to enforce the arms embargo in former Yugoslavia
  
• 20,000 troops on what the Clinton team called “returning Haiti to democracy”
  
• 2,000 troops to enforce the no-fly zone in Bosnia-Herzegovina
  
• 1,000 troops to help provide humanitarian assistance in Bosnia
  
• 1,500 troops for the security of safe havens for the population in northern Iraq
  

“[A]s the number, size, and scope of peace operations have increased dramatically in the past several years,” the GAO report observed, “the nature and extent of U.S. participation have changed markedly. Recently, the United States has used much larger numbers of combat and support forces to respond to events in a number of locations.” The title of the report: “PEACE OPERATIONS: Heavy Use of Key Capabilities May Affect Response to Regional Conflicts.”
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More Busy Nonresponse

For all the expenditures the U.S. government was making around the world, however, the international response to Bosnia was still anemic compared to the challenges it faced. It takes a strong stomach to watch a town encircled; its population—swollen with refugees—bombed, strafed, and picked off by snipers; its crowded hospitals targeted; its water and electricity cut; and its inhabitants denied the food and medicine waiting for them just beyond the big guns. Yet, time and again, this is exactly what the UN and NATO forces managed to do: stand by and wait while the Serbs surrounded Bosnian towns.

As embodied in 1993's PDD-13, the Clinton administration's policy committed the United States to broader participation in global peacekeeping. The discussions regarding this participation raised many questions, because in Bosnia, for example, peacekeepers had repeatedly inhibited efforts to protect Bosnians rather than inhibiting Serbian attackers.

Only determined action could have stopped the spread of violence in the former Yugoslavia and restored credibility to the UN. It was clear that continuation of the feckless policies applied thus far in Bosnia would negate the idea of collective security for another generation. But NATO's belated decision to resist Serb violations of UN-declared “safe areas,” including Sarajevo, provoked a violent Serb reaction.

For months, the UN forces had tolerated Serbs blocking the delivery of food and medicine and reclaiming their heavy weapons from UN custody. But eventually the situation of UN peacekeepers and the civilian Bosnian population had deteriorated so badly that action was required. On May 25–26, 1995, NATO planes dropped bombs on Serb ammunition dumps near Pale. Although the targets had no military importance, the bombing enraged Bosnian Serb leaders, who responded with rocket attacks on downtown Tuzla that killed seventy civilians. Serb shelling of Sarajevo was stepped up, and serious hostage taking began.

In June 1995, a group of Bosnian Serbs—dressed in stolen French uniforms and the blue berets of UN peacekeepers—infiltrated UN lines, seized a bridge in Sarajevo, and stole a half dozen UN tanks, two dozen armored personnel carriers, and assorted other vehicles and supplies. By week's end, the Serbs held four hundred hostages, mainly British and French UN peacekeepers. Many of the hostages were chained in exposed positions as human shields to prevent another NATO raid.
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The foreign ministers of France, Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and Russia, who happened to be meeting, called this an “outrageous act.” The French proposed an international rapid reaction force to reinforce the peacekeepers. The British dispatched another fifteen hundred troops and put additional troops on alert. Clinton spoke of sending American ground forces to help evacuate or reposition UN troops. Defense Secretary Perry said that U.S. ground forces might be sent only as “part of a NATO operation in order to extract UN forces that are in danger.” Such an operation, he said, would have to be under NATO command and authorized by Congress.

A few days earlier, on May 26, NATO secretary-general Willy Claes had made clear that air strikes would come only at the request of the UN and for the purpose of helping peacekeepers. “NATO has no intention to take sides in the conflict,” he said, “but will continue to act within the framework of the UN Security Council resolutions and the ongoing efforts of the international community to achieve a negotiated solution.” It was another ludicrous invocation of “NATO neutrality.” Claes also said that NATO's actions were precipitated by “persistent and flagrant violations of the safe areas by the Bosnian Serbs…and represent a threat to
the viability of the UN mission and a challenge to the will and the credibility of the international community.”

Finally, after forty-eight hours of delay, the Security Council passed a resolution, authorizing NATO to take “necessary measures” to enforce the no-fly zone, “subject to close coordination” with the secretary-general and the UN peacekeeping forces. With the UN resolution in hand, the permission of the president of Croatia, and a resolution passed by the sixteen ambassadors to NATO, Claes instructed General Bertrand I. Lapresle, the military commander of UN forces in Bosnia, to take appropriate military action. After consultation with the secretary-general's special representative, NATO authorized a limited attack on the Serb airstrip in Croatia, taking care not to destroy Serbian planes, hangars, or vehicles. This was not exactly decisive force. Admiral Leighton W. Smith, NATO commander in Southern Europe, said of the raid: “If I wanted to put that airfield out of commission, and to make sure nothing ever took off from it again, we would have taken out all the aircraft…. We would have hit their ammunition dumps and we would have taken out all the buildings anywhere around that airfield.”

The halfhearted attack only emboldened the Serbs. Concluding that NATO was incapable of acting forcefully, Serb forces resumed their attacks, bombarding Bihac and the surrounding villages again with tanks and a helicopter gunship. Surface-to-air missiles were fired at British planes, and no significant NATO response was forthcoming. Bihac was soon completely surrounded. French foreign minister Alain Juppé said the events in Bosnia raised serious doubts about whether NATO could ensure European security in the post–cold war world. “Never has NATO appeared so little capable of maintaining security on the old Continent. Never have events in Bosnia shown it in so bad a light.”

Spring and summer of 1995

By the spring of 1995, three Muslim towns that had been declared safe zones in 1993 remained outside the control of the Bosnian Serbs: Srebrenica, Zepa, and Gorazde. They had been shelled and starved and were full of refugees from the surrounding towns. Each had given up its weapons as the price for becoming a safe area under UN protection. They
were “protected” by a skeleton crew of two dozen Dutch soldiers, who were themselves surrounded by well-armed Serb troops.

The events that followed, in the spring and summer of 1995, have been investigated by the Dutch and French parliaments, various journalists, and scholars seeking to understand what led to the mass murder of some eight thousand men and boys in Srebrenica, and the rape and brutalization of many of the girls and women. The details of the massacre of Srebrenica are so horrific that in 2002, after reviewing a report on the incident, the entire Dutch cabinet resigned in shame.
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“Someone must take responsibility” for the thousands killed in the massacre, one official said, “and no one else was willing to do so.”

On July 6, 1995, the Serbs moved on Srebrenica, mounting a fierce attack with tanks and artillery. The Dutchbat commander made a series of requests for close air support, first in Sarajevo, then in Srebrenica. Supposedly, the commander was told by the UN that NATO planes would soon arrive to conduct air strikes. But NATO planes were never called in. Later investigations indicated that Akashi, who reported directly to Boutros-Ghali, did not inform him or other top UN officials of the requests.

On the afternoon of July 6, approximately twenty thousand persons—mainly women, children, and old people—converged on the Dutchbat headquarters in Srebenica, demanding air strikes. But there were no calls and no air strikes. The commander cut a hole in the fence, and four to five thousand people came through, under the illusion that it was safer inside the compound than outside it. Another fourteen to fifteen thousand refugees remained outside the compound. Thousands more unarmed refugees sought to make their way to Tuzla. On July 8, the Dutch peacekeepers abandoned three posts under direct fire and again requested air strikes. On July 10, close air support was finally requested.

On July 11, the Serbs took control of Srebenica. Mladic insisted that Muslim boys and men between the ages of seventeen and sixty must be disarmed and then questioned one by one. He said they would be well treated. In fact, virtually all of them were slaughtered. On August 8, the massacres were described in a
Newsday
article. On August 10, Ambassador Madeleine Albright showed her UN colleagues aerial photographs
of Bosnian Serbs killing hundreds of men and boys held captive in a soccer stadium.

Akashi later insisted that he had no advance intelligence of the planned attack, but he had many warnings. The Bosnian government had urgently and repeatedly provided him with accurate information about what was happening, including the forced departure of thousands of Bosnian males from their homes and villages. Later investigations confirmed that UN and U.S. intelligence had detected signs of an upcoming Serb offensive, but not of Serb intentions to annihilate thousands of Bosnian males. The Bosnian government, better informed, had intercepted Serb radio communications describing plans for mass murder, but no one else was taking these reports seriously. (That the killings were planned in advance has since been confirmed by the testimony of Bosnian Serb officers at The Hague.
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UN officials said they did not regard Bosnian government intelligence as reliable, although they later acknowledged that Bosnian officials had accurately reported the systematic slaughter of Bosnian men and boys. UN and U.S. government officials later acknowledged that they had too little confidence in information from the Bosnian government.
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A year later,
Newsday
's Roy Gutman compiled the following timeline of events:

The Dutch UNPROFOR contingent that was supposed to be protecting the refugees was very lightly armed. The Serbian forces, on the other hand, were ready for war—with tanks, armored vehicles, heavy artillery, communications, and intelligence. For months, the Bosnian Serbs had blocked all deliveries of food, fuel, and spare parts to the Dutch troops. These conditions led the Dutchbat force commander to conclude, “My battalion is no longer willing, able, or in the position to consider itself impartial due to the policy of the Bosnian Serb government and the BSA [Bosnian Serb Army].” The commander spoke repeatedly with General Mladic, appealing for help. Meanwhile, progressively more desperate refugees were gathering in Srebrenica: Four thousand were already there, and their numbers were swelling rapidly. In a letter, Boris Yeltsin placed blame firmly on the aggressors: