by Tony Judt
In Bosnia, where Serbs were present in far larger numbers, the prospect of an independent Bosnia with a Croat-Muslim majority aroused similar anxieties. Whether Bosnian independence was unavoidable remains unclear: this was the most integrated of the pre-war republics, with the most to lose from any move to separate by force its constituent communities who were spread like a patchwork all across its territory, and before the rise of Milošević none of its ethnic or religious minorities had shown any sustained desire for institutional separation. But once its northern neighbors had seceded, the issue was moot.
After 1991 the Croats and Muslims of Bosnia were bound to prefer sovereign independence to minority status in what remained of Milošević’s Yugoslavia, and they voted accordingly in a referendum at the end of February 1992. However the Serbs of Bosnia, now exposed for some months to talk from Belgrade not merely of Ustashe massacres but of a coming Muslim jihad, were no less understandably disposed to prefer union with Serbia, or at least their own autonomous region, to minority status in a Muslim-Croat state ruled from Sarajevo. Once Bosnia (or rather its Muslim and Croat leaders—the Serbs boycotted both the referendum and the parliamentary vote) declared itself independent in March 1992 its fate was sealed. The following month Bosnian Serb leaders declared the Republika Srpska and the Yugoslav army marched in to help them secure territory and ‘cleanse’ it.
The Serb-Croat and Serb-Bosnian wars wrought a terrible toll on their peoples. Although there was initially some open warfare between more or less regular armies, particularly in and around strategic cities like Sarajevo or Vukovar, much of the fighting was conducted by irregulars, notably Serb irregulars. These were little more than organized bands of thugs and criminals, armed by Belgrade and led either by professional felons like ‘Arkan’ (Zeljko Raznatovic), whose ‘Serb Volunteer Guard’ (the ‘Tigers’) massacred hundreds in eastern districts of Croatia and Bosnia; or else by former Yugoslav Army officers like Lt. Colonel Ratko Mladić (described by American diplomat Richard Holbrooke as ‘a charismatic murderer’), who placed himself in charge of the Bosnian Serb forces from 1992 and helped organize the first attacks on Croat villagers living in majority-Serb communities in the Krajina.
The primary strategic objective was not so much the defeat of opposing forces as the expulsion of non-Serb citizens from their homes, land and businesses in the territories claimed for Serbs.329 This ‘ethnic cleansing’—a new term for a very old practice—was engaged in by all sides, but Serb forces were far and away the worst offenders. In addition to those who were killed (an estimated 300,000 by the end of the Bosnian war), millions were forced into exile. Applications to the European Community for asylum more than tripled between 1988 and 1992: in 1991 Germany alone faced requests for asylum from 256,000 refugees. In the first year of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia there were 3 million people from Yugoslavia (one in eight of the pre-war population) seeking refuge abroad.
The international community was thus hardly unaware of the Yugoslav tragedy—which in any case was unfolding in real time on the television screens of the world, with harrowing pictures of starving Muslims in Serb prison camps and worse. The Europeans were the first to try and intervene, sending an EC ministerial team to Yugoslavia in June 1991—it was on this occasion that the unfortunate Jacques Poos, foreign minister of Luxembourg, unburdened himself of the deathless claim that ‘the hour of Europe’ had dawned. But despite establishing high-level commissions to enquire and arbitrate and propose, the European Community and its various agencies proved quite helpless—not least because its members were divided between those, like Germany and Austria, who favored the seceding republics and others, led by France, who wanted to retain existing borders and states and who for this reason among others were not altogether unsympathetic to Serbia.
Since the US (and therefore NATO) remained resolutely above the fray, that left only the United Nations. But beyond imposing sanctions on Belgrade, there appeared little the UN could do. Historically, soldiers under UN command were introduced into war-torn regions and countries to secure and keep a peace: but in Yugoslavia there was as yet no peace to keep, and there existed neither the will nor the means to bring it about on the ground. As in the comparable case of the Spanish Civil War, an ostensibly neutral international stance in practice favoured the aggressor in a civil conflict: the international arms embargo imposed on former Yugoslavia did nothing to restrain the Serbs, who could call on the substantial arms industry of the old Yugoslav federation, but it severely hampered the Bosnian Muslims in their struggles and goes a long way to account for their substantial military losses between 1992 and 1995.
The only practical achievement of the international community before 1995 was to install a 14,000-strong UN Protection Force in Croatia to separate Croats and Serbs after the fighting there had subsided, followed by the insertion into selected towns in Bosnia—designated as ‘Safe Areas’—of a few hundred uniformed UN peacekeepers to protect the growing numbers of (mostly Muslim) refugees herded into these areas. Later came the establishment of UN-authorized ‘no-fly zones’ in parts of Bosnia, intended to restrict Yugoslavia’s freedom to threaten civilians (or break UN-imposed sanctions).
Of greater long-term significance, perhaps, was the setting up in The Hague, in May 1993, of an International Tribunal for War Crimes. The mere existence of such a court confirmed what was by now obvious—that war crimes, and worse, were being perpetrated just a few score miles south of Vienna. But since most of the presumptive criminals, including Mladić and his fellow Bosnian Serb Radovan Karadžić (President of Republika Srpska), were actively pursuing their crimes with impunity, the Court remained as yet a ghostly and irrelevant side-show.
The situation began to change only in 1995. Until then all talk of foreign intervention had been stymied by the claim—energetically propounded by French and British officers in and out of the UN forces—that the Bosnian Serbs were strong, determined and well armed. They should not be provoked: any serious attempt to enforce a peace settlement in Bosnia against their will or their interests, it was suggested, would not only be unfair but could make matters worse . . . a line of reasoning slyly encouraged from Belgrade by Milošević, who nevertheless claimed somewhat implausibly to play little part in the decisions of his fellow Serbs in Bosnia.
Thus accorded a virtual free hand330, the Bosnian Serbs proceeded nevertheless to overplay it. Even though it was broadly agreed by the international community (including a ‘Contact Group’ of foreign diplomats tirelessly seeking an agreement) that a ‘Muslim-Croat’ Federation (formed in March 1994 in a ceremony in Washington that put an end to Croat-Muslim fighting) should receive 51 percent of a newly federal Bosnia, with the Serbs getting 49 percent, the Serb leaders based in the town of Pale took no notice and continued their attacks. In February 1994 their forces had lobbed a mortar shell from the surrounding mountains into the marketplace of Sarajevo, killing sixty-eight people and wounding hundreds more. Following this NATO—with UN backing—threatened air strikes in the event of further attacks and there was a temporary lull.
But in May of 1995, in retaliation for some Bosnian military advances and Croatia’s successful recapturing of the Krajina (putting the lie to the myth of Serbian military prowess), Serbian shelling of Sarajevo resumed. When NATO planes bombed Bosnian Serb installations in response, the Serbs seized 350 UN peacekeepers as hostages. Terrified for the fate of their soldiers, Western governments importuned the UN and NATO to desist. The international presence, far from constraining the Serbs, now offered them additional cover.
Bolstered by this evidence of Western pusillanimity, on July 11th Bosnian Serb forces under Mladić brazenly marched into one of the so-called UN ‘Safe Areas’, the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, by then overflowing with terrified Muslim refugees. Srebrenica was officially ‘protected’ not just by UN mandate but by a 400-strong peacekeeping contingent of armed Dutch soldiers. But when Mladić’s men arrived the Dutch battalion laid down its arms and offered no resi
stance whatsoever as Serbian troops combed the Muslim community, systematically separating men and boys from the rest. The next day, after Mladić had given his ‘word of honor as an officer’ that the men would not be harmed, his soldiers marched the Muslim males, including boys as young as thirteen, out into the fields around Srebrenica. In the course of the next four days nearly all of them—7,400—were killed. The Dutch soldiers returned safely home to Holland.
Srebrenica was the worst mass murder in Europe since World War Two: a war crime on the scale of Oradour, Lidice or Katyn, carried out in full view of international observers. Within days the news of what appeared to have taken place at Srebrenica was broadcast worldwide. Yet the only immediate response was an official warning from NATO to the Serbs that there would be a resumption of air strikes if other ‘safe areas’ were attacked. It was not until August 28th, a full seven weeks later, that the international community finally responded—and only because the Bosnian Serbs, assuming reasonably enough that they had carte blanche to commit massacres at will, made the mistake of shelling the Sarajevo marketplace for a second time: killing another thirty-eight civilians, many of them children.
Now, at last, NATO acted. Overcoming a lingering reluctance on the part of the UN leadership, certain European leaders and even some of his own military, President Clinton authorized a serious and sustained bombing campaign designed to reduce and ultimately eliminate the Serbian capacity to cause further harm. It was late in coming, but it worked. The much-vaunted Serb fighting machine evaporated. Faced with a prolonged, open-ended assault on their positions and with no backing from Milošević (who now took great care to emphasize his distance from the men of Pale) the Bosnian Serbs folded.
With the Serbs out of the picture and the US now very much in, it proved surprisingly easy to introduce peace—or at least the absence of war—into the Balkans. On October 5th President Clinton announced a cease-fire, declaring that the parties had agreed to attend peace talks in the US. On November 1st the talks began, at a US Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio. Three weeks later they concluded with an agreement signed in Paris on December 14th 1995.331 Tudjman represented Croatia, Alija Izetbegović spoke for the Bosnian Muslims and Slobodan Milošević signed on behalf of both Yugoslavia and the Bosnian Serbs.
The objective of Dayton, from the American perspective, was to find a solution to the Yugoslav wars that did not entail a partition of Bosnia. Partition would have represented a victory for the Serbs (who would then have sought to join their share to Serbia proper and forge the Greater Serbia of nationalist dreams); and it would have put an international imprimatur on ethnic cleansing as state-making. Instead, a complicated tripartite system of governance was established, in which the Serbs, Muslims and Croats of Bosnia all had a degree of administrative and territorial autonomy but within a single Bosnian state whose external boundaries would remain unaltered.
Formally, then, Bosnia survived its civil war. But the effects of terror and expulsioncould not be undone. Most of those expelled from their homes (Muslims, above all) never returned, despite assurance and encouragement from local and international authorities. Indeed there were to be further ‘cleansings’—this time of Serbs, systematically expelled by Zagreb from the newly retaken Krajina or else pressured by their own armed militias to leave their homes in Sarajevo and elsewhere and ‘resettle’ in predominantly Serb areas. But on the whole the peace was kept and Bosnia held together—by a 60,000-strong NATO army acting as an Implementation Force (later Stabilization Force) and a civilian High Representative empowered to administer the country until it could assume responsibility for its own affairs.
Both the High Representative and the international troops are still in Bosnia and continue to oversee its affairs at the time of writing (ten years after Dayton)—an indication of the calamitous condition of the country following the war and of the continuing ill-feeling and lack of cooperation among the three communities.332 Bosnia became host to a raft of international agencies: governmental, inter-governmental and non-governmental. Indeed the Bosnian economy after 1995 depended almost entirely upon the presence and expenditures of these agencies. A World Bank estimate of January 1996 suggested that in order to recover Bosnia would need $5.1 billion over three years. This has proven wildly optimistic.
Once the Bosnian war ended, and with the various international agencies in place to help secure the peace, international interest subsided. The European Union, as usual, was transfixed by its own institutional concerns; while Clinton, taken up first with domestic election issues and then with NATO expansion and the instability of Yeltsin’s Russia, ceased to focus on the Balkan crisis. But even though Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia were now ostensibly independent states, the Yugoslav problem had not been resolved. Slobodan Milošević was still in control of what remained of his country and the issue on which he had ridden to power in the first place was about to explode.
The Albanians of Serbia had continued to suffer discrimination and repression—indeed, with international attention deflected to the crisis farther north they were more vulnerable than ever. Following Dayton, Milošević’s international fortunes had decidedly improved: although he had not succeeded in getting all sanctions removed (his chief purpose in cooperating so readily with the American peace moves in Bosnia), Yugoslavia ceased to be quite the pariah it had been. And so, with a series of defeats to his name and Serb nationalist politicians in Belgrade criticizing him for compromising with Serbia’s ‘enemies’, Milošević turned back to Kosovo.
By the spring of 1997 Elisabeth Rehn, the UN special rapporteur for human rights, was already warning of impending disaster in the Kosovo province, as Belgradepressed down upon the Albanian majority there, rejecting all demands for local autonomy and depriving the local population of even the minimum of institutional representation. Bypassing the helpless and humiliated moderate leadership of Ibrahim Rugova, a younger generation of Albanians—armed and encouraged from Albania itself—abandoned non-violent resistance and turned increasingly to the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army).
Originating in Macedonia in 1992, the KLA was committed to armed struggle for Kosovo’s independence (and perhaps union with Albania). Its tactics—consisting mostly of guerilla attacks on isolated police stations—offered Milošević an opportunity to condemn all Albanian resistance as ‘terrorist’ and authorize a campaign of increasing violence. In March 1998, after Serb forces—armed with mortars and backed with combat helicopters—killed and wounded dozens of people in massacres at Drenica and other Albanian villages, the international community at last responded to pleas from Rugova and began to pay closer attention. But when both the US and the EU expressed themselves ‘appalled by the police violence in Kosovo’, Milošević’s belligerent response was to warn that ‘terrorism aimed at the internationalization of the issue will be most harmful to those who resorted to these means.’
By now all the Kosovo Albanian leadership—most of it in exile or in hiding—had decided that only complete separation from Serbia could save their community. Meanwhile the US and the ongoing ‘Contact Group’ countries continued to try to mediate between Miloševič and the Albanians—partly to broker a ‘just’ solution, partly to head off a broader war in the south Balkans. This was not an unreasonable fear: if Yugoslavia could not be brought to treat its Albanian citizens decently—and they opted to secede—this could have serious consequences for neighboring Macedonia, with a large and unhappy Albanian minority of its own.
Newly independent Macedonia, known at Greek insistence as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM)333, was a historically sensitive zone. Its frontiers with Bulgaria, Greece and Albania had all been disputed before and after both World Wars. It was looked upon with suspicion by all its neighbors—on whom the landlocked little state is utterly dependent for trade and access to the outside world. And its survival following the break-up of Yugoslavia was by no means a sure thing. But if Macedonia were to collapse, then Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and even Turkey mig
ht be drawn into the conflict.
Thus Milošević’s continued mistreatment—massacres—of the Albanians in Kosovo was bound to bring down upon him the disapproval and ultimate interventionof the Western powers. Curiously, he seems never fully to have grasped this, despite serial warnings through the summer of 1998 from the US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (who said she would hold Milošević ‘personally responsible’), President Jacques Chirac of France, and NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana. Like Saddam Hussein a few years later, Miloševič was isolated and insulated from Western opinion and over-confident of his own ability to manipulate foreign statesmen and maneuver between them.
This was not entirely Milošević’s fault. Flattered by frequent visits from certain American diplomats—vaingloriously over-confident of their negotiating prowess—Milošević had good reason to think that he was seen in the West not as an intransigent foe but as a privileged interlocutor.334 And the Yugoslav dictator was well aware of the international community’s overarching concern to avoid any further redrawing of international boundaries. As late as July 1998, despite clear evidence that the situation in Kosovo was now desperate, the Contact Group of foreign ministers publicly ruled out independence as a solution.
What Milošević quite failed to grasp was the transformative impact of the Bosnian catastrophe upon international opinion. Human rights—ethnic cleansing in particular—were now high on everyone’s agenda, if only out of a gnawing collective guilt at the world’s previous failure to act in time. In June 1998 the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague declared itself competent to exercise jurisdiction over crimes committed in Kosovo—Louise Arbour, the chief prosecutor, claiming that the scale and nature of the fighting in the province qualified it as an armed conflict under international law—and on July 19th the US Senate urged the Hague officials to indict Milošević with ‘war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide’.