THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (146 page)
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Authors: Philip Bobbitt
78
. “Seton-Watson,… an eloquent advocate of the Slav claims… [had] helped me draw up a boundary line between the two nationalities which was much nearer the truth… In this way [House and I] tossed about free cities and played ducks and drakes with not a few islands, and we certainly whittled down the territory which both countries claimed… I made a ‘graph' and a map showing what we had accomplished. There was the city of Fiume and the port of Susak and a little of the adjacent territory. All the rest was assigned. ‘But this area, Colonel,’ I explained, ‘we shall call Disputanta, and we shall place it under the administration of the League of Nations for the period of fifteen years. Then we shall end up with a free and fair election, a plebiscite…’ The Colonel was enchanted with what he called a magical solution of all our troubles.’” Stephen Bonsai,
Suitors and Suppliants: The Little Nations at Versailles
(Prentice-Hall, 1946).
79
. Quoted in Kissinger,
Diplomacy
, 235.
80
. Which we know was dictated each day and was not subsequently “corrected”; see Yale Papers memorandum.
81
.
The Intimate Papers of Colonel House
, vol. 4, 390.
82
.
The Intimate Papers of Colonel House
, vol. 4, 488 – 489.
83
. David H. Miller,
The Drafting of the Covenant
, vol. 1 (Putnam, 1928), 49.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE KITTY GENOVESE INCIDENT AND THE WAR IN BOSNIA84
. Philip Bobbitt, “War Powers: An Essay on John Hart Ely's War and Responsibility: Constitutional Lessons of Vietnam and Its Aftermath,”
Michigan Law Review
92 (May 1994): 1364.
1
. This account is largely taken from A. M. Rosenthal's excellent study of the Kitty Genovese murder,
Thirty-Eight Witnesses
(McGraw-Hill, 1964). Rosenthal's account draws upon contemporaneous interviews made in the aftermath of the murder.
2
. “Calling for Help on the T,”
Boston Globe
, February 3, 2000, A20.
3
. Dave Lieber, “Biggest Mystery Is Why No One Called the Police,”
Fort Worth Star Telegram
, October 13, 2001, 1.
4
.
International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights Annual Report 1996
; see also U.S. Department of State,
Bosnia & Herzegovina Country Report on Human Rights Practices for 1996
, January 30, 1997; also Dan Smith, et al.,
The State of War and Peace Atlas
(Penguin, 1997).
5
. Janusz Bugajski, “Balkan Tragedy,”
Orbis
40 (1996): 638; see also Laura Silber and Alan Little,
Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation
(TV Books: Distributed by Penguin USA, 1996).
6
. Ibid.
7
. Warren Zimmermann,
Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and Its Destroyers—America's Last Ambassador Tells What Happened and Why
(Times Books, 1996), 157.
8
. Brigitte Hipfl, Klaus Hipfl, and Jan Jagodzinski, “Documentary Films and the Bosnia-Herzegovina Conflict: From Production to Reception,”
Bosnia by Television,
ed. James Gow, Richard Paterson, and Alison Preston (British Films Institute, 1996), 34, 35, 45.
9
. James Gow,
Triumph of Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War
(Hurst, 1997), 304.
10
. The Bosnian minister to the U.N. later stated that members of the incoming Clinton administration had suggested that it would be more helpful to Bosnia once in office than had been the Bush administration.
11
. Cf. Tyler Marshall, “Nato Issues Ultimatum to Serbs Ringing Enclave: Bosnia; Alliance Threatens Air Strikes Unless Rebels Withdraw 2 Miles from Gorazde's Center by 3 P.M. Today,”
Los Angeles Times
, April 23, 1994, A1.
12
. Gwen Ifill, “Clinton Defends Foreign Policy Record,”
New York Times
, May 4, 1994, A12.
13
. Patrick Glynn, “See No Evil: Clinton-Bush and the Truth about Bosnia,”
The New Republic
, October 25, 1993, 23.
14
. Ibid.
15
. There was preparation on the Western side for a response to such eventualities, so especially the 2/94–9/95 ones were played up.
16
. “The Sacking of Croatia,”
New York Times
, September 22, 1991, E16.
17
. “Erasing Bosnia's Memory,”
Washington Post
, October 16, 1992, A24.
18
. But see the Final Report of the Commission of Experts, published in May 1994.
19
. “Crisis in Yugoslavia” (House of Representatives, June 25, 1991),
Congressional Record
, 1991, H5043.
20
. “Spare Bosnia the Postmortems,”
Washington Post
, October 13, 1993, C6.
21
. Henry Kissinger, “Bosnia Has Never Been a Nation and Has No Specific Cultural Identity. Why Are We Intent on Preserving This Balkan No-Man's Land?”
Los Angeles Times
, May 16, 1993, M2.
22
. Noel Malcolm argues that the U.S./E.C. position emboldened Milosevic to attempt to crush the Slovenia and Croatian secession movements with military force. Noel Malcolm,
Bosnia: A Short History
(New York University Press, 1994).
23
. European expectations seem to have been significantly different from American ones—much more pessimistic and more willing to assume that violence is the natural state of the Balkans.
24
. One report described the tarmac lot at Omarska as “a killing yard, the bodies loaded onto trucks by bulldozers. Omarska was a place where cruelty and mass murder had become a form of recreation. The guards were often drunk and singing while they tortured. A prisoner named Fikret Harambasic was castrated by one of his fellow inmates before being beaten to death. One inmate was made to bark like a dog and lap at a puddle of motor oil while a guard… jumped up and down on his back until he was dead. The guards would make, videos of this butchery for their home entertainment.” Dusan Tadic, the Bosnian Serb primarily responsible for this, was convicted of crimes against humanity by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague and sentenced to twenty years in concurrent sentences for the killing and torture of Muslim prisoners. Gillian Sharpe and Bob Edwards, “Bosnian Serb Sentenced. Gillian Sharpe reports from The Hague on the International War Crimes Tribunal's first sentencing of a Bosnian Serb war criminal. Dusan Tadic was sentenced to twenty years in concurrent sentences for the killing and torture of Muslims in prison camps,”
NPR Morning Edition
, July 14, 1997.
25
. Members of the American Jewish community repeatedly spoke out to call attention to the systematic violence against the Muslims in Bosnia. Notable among them for his tenacity and eloquence was Elie Wiesel.
26
. Ed Vulliamy, “Middle Managers of Genocide,”
The Nation
, June 10, 1996, 11.
27
. See Final Report of the Commission of Experts.
28
. “A Mission of Mercy for Tavnik,”
New York Times
, December 6, 1992, E18.
29
. Final periodic report on the situation of human rights in the territory of the former Yugoslavia submitted by Mr. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, special rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights, pursuant to paragraph 42 of the Commission Resolution 1995/89.
30
. “A Defeat for Civilization,”
Wall Street Journal
, July 17, 1995, A10.
31
. Dimitri Simes, “There's No Oil in Bosnia,”
New York Times
, March 10, 1993, A1.
32
. See U.N. Report S/26765.
33
. Tigalrth-Pileser III (745
B.C.
-727
B.C.
) was the first Assyrian ruler to make forced resettlement a policy; under his reign half the population of a conquered land would be carried off, to be replaced by settlers from other areas.
34
. Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, “A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing,”
Foreign Affairs
72 (1993): 110.
35
. Cf. William Safire, “On Language,”
Houston Chronicle
, March 14, 1993 (syndicated column).
36
. Christopher Hitchens reports that Jose-Maria Mendiluce, the UNHCR envoy, believes he first coined the term. Christopher Hitchens, “Appointment in Sarajevo,”
The Nation
, 1992, 236.
37
. Norman Cigar,
Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of Ethnic Cleansing
(Texas A&M University Press, 1995), 18 – 19.
38
. Cited in Rabia Ali and Lawrence Lifschultz, “Why Bosnia?,”
Monthly Review
45 (March 1994): 1; also in V. P. Gagnon, “Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict: The Case of Serbia,”
International Security
19 (1994): 130; and in Wohlstetter, see n. 41 below.
39
. See Ali and Lifschultz.
40
. Classified State Department report, cited in Ali and Lifschultz; “A Last Chance,”
New Yorker
, July 27, 1993, 4 (saying U.S. had one “last chance” not to become implicated in an E.C.-U.N. scheme of apartheid).
41
. Albert Wohlstetter, “Creating a Greater Serbia,”
The New Republic
, August 1, 1994, 22.
42
. A similar account describes the first stage of operations, before systematic shelling:
A 62-year-old Bosnian Muslim witnessed the willful killing by ethnic Serb paramilitary forces of at least 53 men, women, and children in the village of Prhovo, Bosnia. At about 3 pm on May 30, 1992, a large force of ethnic Serb paramilitary soldiers and three armored personnel carriers entered Prhovo, a village located about 7 kilometers northeast of Kjuc. The village, which contained 45 houses grouped along a main road and several small streets, had more than 150 inhabitants. The soldiers, who wore stocking masks over their faces, went from house to house searching for weapons. After finding some weapons, the soldiers proceeded to ransack the homes, break windows and doors, and pull the residents out into the streets. These men, women, and children were ofdered to fold their hands behind their heads and were herded through the village to a point on the road where they were stopped and lined up. Meanwhile, the soldiers attempted to coax back into the village those residents who had run into the woods when the soldiers arrived. The soldiers announced through megaphones that the residents would not be harmed if they returned. When these people returned, the soldiers beat them severely; about 10 were beaten into unconsciousness. The assembled villagers were then told that they were free, that they need not worry anymore, and that they must place white flags on their homes to indicate the village had surrendered. During the nights of May 30 – 31, some people fled to the woods, while others slept in their cellars. At about 6 pm on June 1, the soldiers returned and again used megaphones to call people in from the forest. They also went from house to house, pulling people out into the streets. The male residents were beaten severely. At about 7 pm, the soldiers began murdering the residents with automatic weapons. They fired single shots, then long bursts of automatic gunfire. After the shooting stopped and the soldiers had departed, the witness, who had fled to the woods when the shooting
started, returned to the village. The murdered men, women, and children lay in the streets. Houses were burning, and their roofs were collapsing. Some women and children who had hidden in basements began coming into the street crying and looking for their loved ones.
