With humanitarian relief operations progressing well enough, the United Nations sent negotiators to Somalia to join Ambassador Robert Oakley, the U.S. special representative to UNOSOM, in persuading the warlords to disband their private armies, to stop stealing UN relief supplies, and to form a government. The Somali warlords did not care that the UN International Emergency Children’s Fund was the leading relief agency or that children and the elderly made up most of the 400,000 Somali dead. They took from the poor and gave to themselves or sold to others for guns and drugs. UNITAF had done some modest gun collecting (mostly junk), while the Somalis had brought in AK-47s, light machine guns, heavy machine guns mounted on light trucks, and RPG light missiles, many of the weapons Soviet-surplus from Afghanistan and Ethiopia. Nevertheless, Boutros-Ghali, prodded by the United States, decided to declare victory in May 1993 and to enter a nation-building phase with UNITAF protection, labeled UNOSOM II and UN directed. Many of the humanitarian relief agencies joined the victory parade and turned over their operations to UN agencies, undermanned and unprotected. When General Johnson returned to Washington, Clinton joined the chorus of success, bought at the cost of eighteen dead (ten in accidents) and twenty-four wounded.
In less than a year (June 1993–March 1994), the Somali warlords commanded by Mohamed Farrah Aideed fought the Battle of Mogadishu and drove UNOSOM II out of Somalia. In a sense, it was Beirut all over again. The new UNOSOM II force shrank as its mission expanded to include breaking up the warlord militias. A retired American admiral, Jonathan T. Howe, became the UN political official in Somalia, and a U.S. Army general became the deputy UNITAF commander. The American force, however, shrank to a battalion task force from the 10th Mountain Division and a Special Forces group, which would be the quick reaction force for the polyglot army of light infantry battalions from twenty countries, the largest force 4,000 Pakistanis. Aideed concluded that UNOSOM II might support his enemies and confiscate his weapons caches if he did not turn his restless Mogadishu bands loose in an urban guerrilla campaign against the UN forces. In early June, Aideed’s forces (“the Somali National Army” or SNA) attacked two Pakistani companies and other scattered units, killing twenty-four and wounding fifty-six. On June 6 the UN Security Council declared war on the SNA. With a heavy emphasis on using armed helicopters and AC-130 aircraft gunships, UNOSOM II forces could inflict casualties, but they could not convert deaths to victory. Much of Mogadishu rallied to Aideed to fight the foreigners. Instead of reinforcing UNOSOM II with U.S. Army tanks and Bradley mechanized fighting vehicles, Secretary Aspin persuaded Clinton to send a separate Quick Reaction Force (QRF), Task Force Ranger, to Mogadishu outside of UNITAF control. This elite force included a Ranger battalion, the operators of Delta Force, and helicopters from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (“Nightstalkers”). TF Ranger brought with it the most advanced night operations and target acquisition technology the Army had.
Using intelligence information collected by the UNOSOM II forces, including Somali agents, TF Ranger targeted Aideed and his senior commanders, who had already survived one major Quick Reaction Force (QRF) raid in September. The SNA fired RPGs at U.S. helicopters and led Somali mobs into the fray against the UN infantry. On October 3–4, 1993, TF Ranger and a Delta detachment raided a meeting of SNA leaders and completed the captures as planned. Before the raiding force and its rescuers escaped the SNA part of Mogadishu, however, TF Ranger had lost two UH-60 Blackhawks, three of six pilots and crew, two senior Delta sergeants, and eleven Rangers dead and fifty-seven wounded.17 The raiders killed 300–500 Somalis. Covered in bloody detail by foreign TV crews, the battle felt like a defeat and ended the Aideed hunt as the Clinton administration lost heart for Somali nation-building. In part for their role in the operation, Aspin resigned and Admiral Howe came home. A Marine task force covered the UNOSOM II withdrawal, justified by a temporary ceasefire. Watching the action on TV, Osama bin Laden marveled at American timidity.
The Haitian intervention (1994–1995), or Operation RESTORE DEMOCRACY, put an expeditionary force in that impoverished, chaotic African-Caribbean country, a model failed state. Legitimized by the Organization of American States and the UN, the United States chose to place Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the Haitian presidency, an office to which he had been elected under outside supervision. A junta of kleptomaniac army officers and street gangs pretending to be police had kept Aristide from office and attacked the demonstrations by his faithful. The gutters of Port-au-Prince ran with blood. Human rights and civil rights leaders in the United States demanded intervention. Ships of Atlantic Command had been blockading Haiti since October 1993, but without political effect. Almost a year later, after former president Jimmy Carter had convinced the Haitian generals that the U.S. Army would crush them, Clinton committed 20,000 American troops (about half Army, half Marine) to a UN multinational force dedicated to putting and keeping the Aristide government in place. The intervention started on a sour note. A Haitian mob chanting “Somalia! Somalia!” prevented one U.S. Navy ship from landing a military relief and security team. After six months of policing, the UN forces departed. Between September 1995 and March 1996, 2,800 American troops returned to support the UN mission in Haiti that conducted civic aid programs and supervised elections. All the help did not prevent Father Aristide from being a tyrant, but it improved Clinton’s image.
The major interventionist challenge, however, for the Clinton administration became the dissolution of Yugoslavia. A tarpit of communal rivalries since the Turkish expansion into the Balkans in the fifteenth century, modern Yugoslavia had been a patchwork kingdom created after World War I, built on the wreckage of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. It remained unified as a dreary Communist state after World War II, ruled by Marshal Tito, who was born Josef Broz. When one stripped away the glue of the Tito government and the Yugoslavian Communist Party, united in their hatred of Russia, Yugoslavia was an artificial state. Ethnicity was not an issue, since the Balkan peoples were predominantly southern Slavs. Most of them spoke Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language. Culture, religion, and history had divided them into warring communities, exacerbated by the civil war that went on during the Italian-German occupation, 1940–1945. In the north, Slovenia and Croatia preserved their Catholic faith and European orientation from their roots in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Serbia had been a hotbed of anti-Austrian separatism for centuries. Serbs regarded the Muslims and Croats as equal enemies. The Serbs saw themselves as the champions of Slavic culture and the Serbian Orthodox Church, as well as the only true patriots who had fought the Turks and the Germans. The capital of Yugoslavia was Serbian Belgrade, and Serbs dominated the Yugoslavian Communist Party and national armed forces. The dominant political figure after Tito’s death was the Serbian-Yugoslavian president, Slobodan Milosevic, a bitter rival of Franjo Tudjman, the Croatian political boss and former general.
Source: U.S. Army Center of Military History, Bosnia-Herzegovina: The U.S. Army’s Role in Peace Enforcement Operations, 1995–2004
The dark and bloody ground of Yugoslavia was and remained Bosnia-Herzegovina (capital, Sarajevo), where Serbs, Croats, and Muslims had lived in uneasy peace. Bosnia had been an economic gate to Italy and the Muslim world. It had been a patron of the Serbian province of Kosovo, which borders on Muslim Albania. The majority of Kosovars are Albanian Muslims and keenly aware of the history of war and massacre that poisoned their relations with the Serbs. The southeastern corner of Yugoslavia was the Macedonian province (now a republic) and a Greek Orthodox region tied to the Macedonian people of northern Greece and unfriendly to Muslims and Serbs alike. All of the provinces of Yugoslavia had or could find enough weapons to wage war for decades. The Yugoslav national army had inherited German weapons from World War II and Soviet weapons from its brief alliance with the U.S.S.R. The dissolution of the Warsaw Pact armies and open borders meant Croatia and Serbia could draw weapons from all of Eastern Europe and Russia. The Muslims could import arms (with Arab money
) from the sea and through Albania. Fifty years of conscription provided thousands of officers and men for a bloody civil war.
The Yugoslavian civil war did not start with Slovenia’s secession (1991). Quick recognition of Slovenia’s independence by its European neighbors, however, prompted Tudjman to announce that Croatia would no longer take orders or pay taxes to Belgrade. The Croatian army began to drive the Serbs, 20 percent of Croatia’s population, from their towns and to extend Croatia’s frontiers to the Adriatic. The Croats also resurrected the symbols of the pro-Nazi Croatian militias, known for massacring Serbs in World War II. Although the Croats had no love for Muslims, they had been and would be their allies in a war against Serbia. The earliest campaigns put the Croatian forces on territory claimed by the neighboring semi-autonomous province of Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Tudjman’s forces armed Croats and Muslims alike. The Croats claimed they were only waging a preventive war against the Serbs since Milosevic had already in 1989 opened a campaign of repression against the Muslim-Albanian majority in Serbia’s rebellious province of Kosovo. Claiming to be victims of Croatian aggression, the Yugoslavian-Serbian army struck back at the Croats and Muslims and forced Tudjman to agree to a ceasefire in January 1992. The Muslim Bosnians, convinced of Croatia’s support, declared Bosnia-Herzegovina an independent nation, which immediately set off a Serbian invasion that occupied 70 percent of Bosnia by year’s end. The Croats proved reluctant allies, guarding their conquests outside of Bosnia. With Milosevic’s full support, the Bosnian Serbs declared themselves a new republic (under President Radovan Karadzic) with its own army, commanded by Ratko Mladic, a career officer-warlord of murderous instincts. By the end of 1992, the center of “the former Yugoslavia” had been plunged into cycles of conventional battles between Bosnian and Serbian armies, which the Serbs won; warfare between sectarian militias spawned urban sieges and massacres of Bosnian male “POWs.” The Serbs raped women and abused children and the elderly. The basic Serbian goal was “ethnic cleansing,” which meant driving Croats and Bosnians from territory that would become Greater Serbia. The Serbs drove 750,000 Bosnians from their homes and into the inept hands of the Bosnian government, led by a Muslim, Alija Izetbegovic. The war in Bosnia became the central front of Yugoslavian state suicide and provided plenty of gruesome coverage for CNN, the BBC, and other international media networks.
Stirred by the international humanitarian outcry about Balkan atrocities, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, led by Great Britain and France, edged toward intervention in 1992. At their annual meeting in June, the NATO foreign ministers called upon the alliance to plan for peacekeeping operations by a UN Protective Force (UNPROFOR). The Bush administration declared the United States a nonplayer in a European problem. Candidate Clinton criticized Bush’s insensitivity to Bosnia’s victims. Bush responded by authorizing relief supplies to be flown into Bosnia. In July 1992, under UN Security Council authority, NATO declared a total arms embargo and economic sanctions on Serbia. The enforcement of the naval blockade tightened, and NATO declared Bosnian air space a “no-fly zone” for all belligerent aircraft. Despite peace plans and limited negotiations, the war went on. In December the NATO foreign ministers agreed that NATO should, under UN authority, place coalition forces on the ground in Bosnia to interpose themselves between the warring armies while UN negotiators tried to make local ceasefires and set up safe refugee camps for the more than 350,000 homeless Bosnians still in the battle zone. In effect, NATO entered the war as allies of the Croats and Bosnian Muslims. In fact, Austria and West Germany had done little to curb the flow of weapons and money from their citizens (and churches) to the Croats, the supporters of the Bosnians from afar.
As the Bosnian Serbs showed no willingness to stop their march of ethnic cleansing, the UN committed a ground UNPROFOR to Bosnia’s beleaguered cities and refugee centers in April 1992, but did so under rules of engagement that posed little threat to Mladic’s army. This peace enforcement operation expanded the UN-NATO observer-support presence in Sarajevo and included infantry battalions from NATO and other European nations. The most demanding mission was protecting relief convoys and refugee camps—and moving Bosnians away from Serbian artillery and thus aiding the ethnic cleansers. UNPROFOR had limited troops (around 10,000 of the required 34,000) and UN-determined rules of engagement that made even self-defense problematic. The Serbs rejected a UN plan for Bosnian partition and a ceasefire because Karadzic and Milosevic smelled victory. The tepid UN-NATO response, affected in part by America’s limited involvement, told them they had time on their side.
The Clinton administration inherited a limited air and naval commitment to UNPROFOR it did not want to expand. American reluctance was linked to an unrealistic desire for Yugoslavia to remain whole and doubts about the political restraints on the ground UNPROFOR. Clinton, however, conceded the State Department’s argument that the U.S. needed more military-based leverage on Balkan peacemaking, so the president ordered the use of USAF transports to fly relief supplies to the Bosnians (February 1993). He then agreed to join the NATO air forces to enforce the no-fly zone more aggressively. As the Bosnian Serbs pressed northward, the Bosnians rallied with reinforcements from the Muslim world, many of them veterans of the war against the Russians in Afghanistan and the civil wars going on between the Russians and Muslim ethnic minorities. Evidence of Bosnian Serb massacres mounted, and NATO authorized air strikes on Serb armor and artillery positions. On April 12, 1994, USAF aircraft launched their first strikes on Serb ground targets. Still the Bosnian Serbs marched north, emptying villages along the way. Frustrated, Clinton actually withdrew American aircraft from UNPROFOR at the end of 1994. The most he would do was send a U.S. Army mechanized infantry battalion to the Republic of Macedonia, a symbolic gesture at best. The UNPROFOR troops at risk came from France, Great Britain, Canada, Turkey, Russia, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia.
The war in Bosnia reached its climax in 1995 and ended in negotiations (the Dayton Peace Accords) that partitioned Bosnia and allowed the Serbs and Croats to hold the territorial gains they had made against each other and the Bosnians. The United States finally played an influential role through Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke, a diplomat who could threaten almost anyone credibly. The real catalyst for peace was Bosnian Serb atrocities and the vengeful NATO response. In the summer of 1995, the Serbs had placed the “safe” cities under siege with artillery and marauding infantry. The protected cities of Gorazde, Sarajevo, and Srebrenica shuddered under sporadic bombardment. The Bosnians captured Srebrenica in July 1995, unchallenged by the resident Dutch battalion, which had thirty of its men held as hostages. In the chaos, the Serbs slaughtered 7,000 male Bosnians. As the enormity of this atrocity reached the world, NATO authorized heavy air strikes and limited ground attacks that stopped Mladic’s army at the gates of Sarajevo, Gorazde, Bihac, and Tuzla. The Bosnian Serb aggression sparked new determination to stop the war by force. The UN War Crimes Tribunal indicted Karadzic and Mladic for genocide and crimes against humanity; the North Atlantic Council basically declared war on the Bosnian Serbs; and the U.S. Congress lifted the ban on arming the Bosnians.
The NATO decision to mount a limited offensive against the Bosnian Serbs brought the United States into the war and produced war-ending results. Clinton finally conceded that Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Holbrooke, and General Clark were right in asserting that only American military power could stop the Serbs. With USAF and USN fighter-bombers in the lead, the air forces of UNPROFOR began offensive strikes in Operation DELIBERATE FORCE on August 1, 1995. The air attacks, constrained by weather and intelligence limitations, did not produce much Serbian reaction except the withdrawal and protection of Mladic’s heavy artillery. The Bosnian government, however, agreed to a ceasefire and more negotiations. DELIBERATE FORCE reached a new level of destructiveness in seventeen days (August 29–September 14, 1995) of intense operations. During the period, U.S. aircraft from all the services, including Army helicopters, provided two-
thirds of the ground attack sorties (2,470) on Serbian forces. American aircraft flew one-third of the support missions (1,065), which included refueling, comm-electronic support, target acquisition and bomb damage assessment, and search and rescue missions. The U.S. Air Force ran the campaign. By September 14, the air commander reported that DELIBERATE FORCE had destroyed 70 percent of its target list, especially the Serb’s air-defense system. UN ground troops had advanced and ensured that the Bosnian Serbs fell back from their city sieges. The air offensive alone, however, did not turn the war against the Serbs since the retrained Croatian army also launched a counteroffensive that drove the Serbs out of the Krajina region of Croatia, held by the Serbs since 1991, and advanced into Serbian lands in Bosnia. The American-led air campaign, run more efficiently than the Gulf War air offensive, certainly hurt the Bosnian Serb army, but the Croatian ground offensive was at least as important in bringing the Bosnian war to an end. The Croatian army now matched the Serbs, thanks to an American contractor who provided an advisory mission of hundreds of veterans and technical experts.
The Bosnian Serbs and their sponsors in Belgrade needed a truce and recovery time, hoping that a ceasefire would lead to NATO disarray. Economic sanctions had hurt Serbia; support from the Slavic world had plunged with the turmoil in the former U.S.S.R. President Milosevic convinced Karadzic that time was on their side and that a peace now would preserve the Serb conquests in Bosnia. After many false starts, Holbrooke, an imperious negotiator, managed to coerce Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia to sign the Dayton Peace Accords (November 1995), which pledged the signatories to stop fighting; to respect the legitimacy of an independent Bosnia-Herzegovina government that would control 51 percent of Bosnia; to disarm; to prosecute war criminals; to rescue the refugees; and to respect human rights. The UN would pass political responsibility for the settlement to NATO, which would replace the UNPROFOR with a multinational Implementation Force (IFOR) commanded by an American general. In December 1995, President Clinton announced that the U.S. would send 20,000 troops from a reinforced armored division to Bosnia-Herzegovina, 5,000 more to the Balkan war zone (primarily Croatia), and 7,000 more troops to bases in Europe that would support IFOR. The actual U.S. IFOR contribution numbered 17,000 in a 60,000-man international army, with units from all NATO members and eighteen other countries, predominantly Slavic or Arab supporters of the Serbs and Muslims. The dominant local force was now the Croatian army, which in effect made Bosnia-Herzegovina a Croatian protectorate except for the Republika Sprska, the Bosnia Serb “country” attached to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro). The peace worked—at least superficially—so that in 1996 the IFOR became a longer term Stabilization Force (SFOR) of 30,000, of whom 10,000 were Americans. In 1998 the U.S. Army still remained in Bosnia because the Balkan wars had not yet ended.
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