A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  Congressman Frank McCloskey, a Democrat from Indiana, also dates his awakening to a weeklong trip he took to the Balkans during the war in Croatia in December 1991. The congressman had four experiences on the trip that, in hindsight, ably illustrate the nature of the entire Yugoslav mess and prepared him for Milosevic’s double-dealings in Bosnia. They also altered the course of his political career and life. First, he was shelled by Serb forces while visiting the Croatian city of Osijek, a university town that reminded him of his own Bloomington. Second, he came upon the remains of a massacre that had been committed around the Croatian town of Vocin, some seventy miles southeast of the capital of Zagreb. Forty Croatian victims, most over the age of sixty, had been dismembered with chain saws, and McCloskey, who was one of the first to arrive on the scene, was revolted by the piles of mutilated body parts. Third, when he personally traveled to Belgrade to confront the Serbian authorities, President Milosevic told McCloskey solemnly that no matter what he had seen or thought he had seen, Osijek had not been shelled and no massacre had been committed in Vocin. “He was very smooth and polished, and described himself as a peace-loving man,” McCloskey remembers. Milosevic told him that the corpses were “part of a show” put on by the Croatian government. And fourth, a U.S. embassy official in Belgrade had warned him that although the ongoing war in Croatia was bad, the conflict in Bosnia would produce a “real slaughter.” The war would rarely deviate from this text: shelling, massacre, straight-faced lies, and plenty of early warning of worse to come.

  Wishful Thinking

  American policymakers have often fallen prey to wishful thinking in the face of what they later recognized to be genocide. But history has shown that this phenomenon is more human than American. Before the war began in Bosnia, many of its citizens, too, dismissed omnipresent omens. They were convinced that bloodshed could not happen there, that it could not happen then, or that it could not happen to them. In order to maintain this faith amid mounting evidence of horror, Bosnians found ways to link the widespread tales of terror to circumstances that did not apply to them. When Serb forces began targeting Croatian civilians in 1991, many Muslims in Bosnia told themselves that it was Croatian president Franjo Tudjman who was the nationalist and the obstructionist making it impossible to resolve the conflict peacefully. Bosnia’s leaders would be more sensible and moderate. Besides, even if the Serb response to Croatia’s declaration of independence was unduly violent, their beloved Yugoslavia would never turn on Bosnia, an ethnically jumbled microcosm of Yugoslav leader Marshal Tito’s larger dream. Even once it was clear that war was consuming Bosnia and the radio brimmed with gruesome reports of summary executions and rapes, Muslims continued to console themselves that the war could never infect their neighborhoods. “That’s a long way off,” they would say. “We have been living together for years.”

  In retrospect, when Serb radio began broadcasting reports that Bosnian towns had been attacked by “Muslim extremists,” non-Serbs might have checked their history books. The extremists tended to be those who made such announcements, justifying preemptive assaults. But Bosnians were not prepared for either the crackle of evening gunfire or the suddenly stern, familiar radio voice telling them, “Citizens are requested to remain in their homes and apartments for the sake of their own security.”

  Most Bosnians did as they were told. Under Tito’s forty-five-year Communist rule, they had grown accustomed to listening to strongmen. In many the muscle that twitches in defiance, or at least in apprehension, of state authority had atrophied for lack of use. Some might have questioned the source, but few dared to challenge it. The instructions made sense: danger outside; safety inside. Unfortunately, they made sense to those who issued them as well. Because the Muslims stayed indoors, they could be found playing cards, folding linen, or simply sleeping when the Serb police or militia arrived.

  Bosnians were not especially naive or gullible. They erected what Primo Levi likened to a cordon sanitaire to shield them from murderous events they felt powerless to stop or avoid. They were confronted with a choice that for most was too awful to contemplate: fight or flight. Bosnia’s Muslims were militarily unprepared to make war, but, like the Kurds who remained in Saddam Hussein’s prohibited zones, they stared out at the fields they had tilled or the hills they had roamed for generations and could not bring themselves to take leave. In the primarily rural country, many clung to the cold walls that they or their ancestors had assembled brick by brick. They claimed even the patch of sky overhead. Every Bosnian seemed to have a river of his or her own—the Sava, the Una, the Sana, the Miljacka, the Drina—in which they had bathed as children, by which they had nestled romantically for the first time as teenagers. There was, they said, “a special bond between heart and grass.”

  Because the national story in Tito’s era was one of “brotherhood and unity” in which ethnic identity was discounted and even disparaged, and because the communities had lived intermingled or in neighboring villages for so many years, many found it even harder to take seriously the threat from their neighbors. They maintained a faith in the power of familiarity, charm, and reason. They believed that individual destiny and personality would count for something.

  As remarkable as the existence of this faith is its durability. In Cambodia even those subjected daily to the rigors and horrors of Khmer Rouge rule persisted in hoping that those who were hauled away were only being reeducated. In Bosnia, even two years into the war, when more than 100,000 of their neighbors had been killed and the bloodiest of displacements had taken place, thousands of Muslims and Croats refused to leave Serb-held territory. Some had no money, and by then the Serbs had begun charging an “exit tax” of nearly $1,000. But most who remained found the fear of death preferable to the reality of abandoning their homes. Foreign visitors would plead with them, remind them of the lunacy (patently obvious to our transient, cosmopolitan eyes) of their perseverance. Those who tested the neighborhood thugs inevitably lost their homes and many, eventually, their lives. One month foreign visitors would meet an elderly family that would dip into its emergency stock of bread, cheese, and Turkish coffee and produce photos of missing family members. Several months later the visitors could return to find the quaint cul-de-sac reduced to blackened rubble. Or they might discover the Muslims’ bungalow intact but occupied by Serbs who hung a Serb flag from the window, as protective lamb’s blood had once been splashed above doorways. The Muslim occupants had vanished.

  Human rights groups were quicker than they had ever been to document atrocities. Helsinki Watch, the European arm of what would become known as Human Rights Watch, had begun dispatching field missions to the Balkans in 1991. When the war in Bosnia broke out in 1992, the organization was thus able to call quickly on a team of experienced lawyers. In the early months of the war, Helsinki Watch sent two teams to the Balkans, the first from March 19 to April 28, 1992, the second from May 29 to June 19. Investigators interviewed refugees, government officials, combatants, Western diplomats, relief officials, and journalists. Aryeh Neier, executive director of Helsinki Watch, edited the impressive 359-page report, which contained gruesome details of a systematic slaughter. Neier found himself presiding over an organization-wide debate over whether the Serb atrocities amounted to genocide.

  Neier had moved to the United States from Germany at age eleven as a refugee after World War II. As president of the history club at Stuyvesant High School in New York City, he had heard about the exploits of a fellow refugee, Raphael Lemkin, who had coined a new word. In 1952, forty years before the Bosnian war, Neier, a presumptuous sixteen-year-old, rode the subway to the new UN headquarters and tracked down Lemkin in one of its unused offices. Neier asked the crusader if he would come to speak to the Stuyvesant history club some afternoon. Never one to turn down a speaking engagement, Lemkin agreed, giving the future founder of Helsinki Watch his first introduction to the concept of genocide.

  In the Helsinki Watch report, published just four months into the war in Augus
t 1992, the organization found that the systematic executions, expulsions, and indiscriminate shelling attacks at the very least offered “prima facie evidence that genocide is taking place.” Neier had learned Lemkin’s lessons well. The report said: “Genocide is the most unspeakable crime in the lexicon. . . . The authorization that the Convention provides to the United Nations to prevent and suppress this crime carries with it an obligation to act. The only guidance the Convention provides as to the manner of action is that it should be ‘appropriate.’ We interpret this as meaning it should be effective.”10

  Helsinki Watch had a mandate different from that of Amnesty International. It criticized both the perpetrator state and the Western powers that were doing so little to curb the killing. But for all of their outrage, many individuals within the organization were uncomfortable appealing to the United States to use armed force. “We were in a real bind,” Neier remembers. “The organization had never called for military intervention, and we couldn’t bring ourselves to do so. Yet we could also see that the atrocities would not be stopped by any other means. What we ended up with was a kind of tortured compromise.” In the report Helsinki Watch described U.S. policy as “inert, inconsistent and misguided.”11 It became the first organization to call upon the United Nations to set up an international war crimes tribunal to prosecute those responsible for these crimes. But when it came to the question of military intervention, it punted:

  It is beyond the competence of Helsinki Watch to determine all the steps that may be required to prevent and suppress the crime of genocide. It may be necessary for the United Nations to employ military force to that end. It is not the province of Helsinki Watch to determine whether such force is required. Helsinki Watch believes that it is the responsibility of the Security Council to address this question.12

  The Security Council was made up of countries, including the United States, steadfastly opposed to using armed force.

  A U.S. Policy of Disapproval

  When Yugoslavia had disintegrated in June 1991, European leaders claimed they had the authority, the strength, and the will to manage the country’s collapse. Europeans had high hopes for the era of the Maastricht Treaty and the creation of a borderless continent that might eventually challenge U.S. economic and diplomatic supremacy. Jacques Poos, Luxembourg’s foreign minister, proclaimed “If anyone can do anthing here, it is the EC. It is not the U.S. or the USSR or anyone else.”13 The United States happily stepped aside. “It was time to make the Europeans step up to the plate and show that they could act as a unified power,” Secretary of State James Baker wrote later. “Yugoslavia was as good a first test as any.”14 Whatever the long-term promise of the European Union (EU), it was not long into the Balkan wars before European weaknesses were exposed. By the time of the Bosnian conflict in April 1992, most American decisionmakers had come to recognize that there was no “European” diplomacy to speak of. They were left asking, as Henry Kissinger had done, “What’s Europe’s phone number?” Yet anxious to avoid involvement themselves, they persisted in deferring to European leadership that was nonexistent.

  Ron Haviv-VII

  Serb Paramilitaries in Bijeljina, Bosnia, Spring 1992.

  U.S. and European officials adopted a diplomatic approach that yielded few dividends. Cyrus Vance, secretary of state under President Carter, and David Owen, a former British Labour Party leader, were appointed chairmen of a UN-EU negotiation process aimed at convincing the “warring parties” to settle their differences. But nationalist Serbs in Bosnia and Serbia were intent on resolving difference by eliminating it. The “peace process” became a handy stalling device. Condemnations were issued. U.S. diplomats warned Milosevic that the United States regarded his military support for rebel Bosnian Serbs with the “utmost gravity.” But because warnings were not backed by meaningful threats, Milosevic either ignored them or dissembled. “For Milosevic the truth has a relative and instrumental rather than absolute value,” the U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmermann, observed. “If it serves his objectives, it is put to use; if not, it can be discarded.”15 Although Milosevic struck some as a habitual liar, most U.S. and European diplomats continued to meet his undiplomatic behavior with diplomatic house calls. Milosevic did not close off the diplomatic option as the Khmer Rouge had done. Instead, he shrewdly maintained contact with Western foreign servants, cultivating the impression from the very start of the conflict that peace was “right around the corner.”

  Most diplomats brought a gentlemen’s bias to their diplomacy, trusting Milosevic’s assurances. This was not new. Most notorious, Adolf Hitler persuaded Neville Chamberlain that he would not go to war if Britain and France would allow Germany to absorb the Sudetenland. Just after the September 1938 meeting, where the infamous Munich agreement was signed, Chamberlain wrote to his sister: “In spite of the hardness and ruthlessness, I thought I saw in his face, I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he gave his word.”16 When it came to Milosevic, Ambassador Zimmerman noted, “Many is the U.S. senator or congressman who has reeled out of his office exclaiming, ‘Why, he is not nearly as bad as I expected!’”17 Milosevic usually met U.S. protests with incredulous queries as to why the behavior of Bosnian Serbs in Bosnia had anything to do with the president of Serbia, a neighboring state. He saw that the Bush administration was prepared to isolate the Serbs and brand them pariahs but not intervene militarily. This the Serbian leader deemed an acceptable risk.

  Washington’s foreign policy specialists were divided about the U.S. role in the post–Cold War world. One camp believed in the idealistic promise of a new era. They felt that the Gulf War eventually fought against Saddam Hussein in 1991 and the subsequent creation of the safe haven for the Kurds of northern Iraq signaled a U.S. commitment to combating aggression. Where vital American interests or cherished values were imperiled and where the risks were reasonable, the United States should act. They were heartened by Bush’s claim that the Gulf War had “buried once and for all” America’s Vietnam syndrome. The United States had a new credibility. “Because of what’s happened,” President Bush had said soon after the U.S. triumph, “I think when we say something that is objectively correct—like ‘don’t take over a neighbor or you’re going to bear some responsibility’—people are going to listen.”18 Still, for all the talk of a “new world order,” Bush was in fact ambivalent. To be sure, the United States had made war against Iraq, a state that “took over a neighbor.” But the United States had always frowned upon and occasionally even reversed aggression that affected U.S. strategic interests. Although Serbia’s aggression against the internationally recognized state of Bosnia clearly made the Bosnian war an international conflict, top U.S. officials viewed it as a civil war. And it was still not clear whether the rights of individuals within states would have any higher claim to U.S. protection or promotion than they had for much of the century.

  The other camp vying to place its stamp on the new world order was firm in the belief that abuses committed inside a country were not America’s business. Most of the senior officials in the Bush administration, including Secretary of State Baker, Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, were traditional foreign policy “realists.” The United States did not have the most powerful military in the history of the world in order to undertake squishy, humanitarian “social work.” Rather, the foreign policy team should focus on promoting a narrowly defined set of U.S. economic and security interests, expanding American markets, curbing nuclear proliferation, and maintaining military readiness. Although these were the same men who had waged the Gulf War, that war was fought in order to check Hussein’s regional dominance and to maintain U.S. access to cheap oil. Similarly, when they established the safe haven for Kurds in Operation Provide Comfort, the Bush administration had been providing comfort to Turkey, a vital U.S. ally anxious to get rid of Iraqi Kurdish refugees.

  With
ethnic and civil conflict erupting left and right and sovereignty no longer the bar on U.S. intervention it had been in Morgenthau’s day, Bush’s foreign policy team saw that the United States would need to develop its own criteria for the use of military force. In 1984 President Reagan’s defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, had demanded that armed intervention (1) be used only to protect the vital interests of the United States or its allies; (2) be carried out wholeheartedly, with the clear intention of winning; (3) be in pursuit of clearly defined political and military objectives; (4) be accompanied by widespread public and congressional support; and (5) be waged only as a last resort.19 Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, now resurrected this cautious military doctrine and amended it to require a “decisive” force and a clear “exit strategy.”20 Iraq had eventually threatened U.S. oil supplies, whereas Yugoslavia’s turmoil threatened no obvious U.S. national interests. The war was “tragic,” but the stakes seemed wholly humanitarian. It met very few of the administration’s criteria for intervention.