A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  Several senior U.S. officials may have also been influenced by personal idiosyncrasies in their handling of the Bosnian war. Secretary Baker relied heavily on his deputy, Eagleburger, whose diagnosis may have stemmed, in the words of Zimmerman, from “understanding too much.” Knowing that Croatian president Tudjman was a fanatical nationalist and frustrated that the lovely Yugoslavia was being torn apart, Eagleburger seemed to adopt a kind of “pox on all their houses” attitude, which, according to several of his State Department colleagues, he fed Baker. This was not uncommon. Journalists and diplomats who had served time in Belgrade tended to bring a Yugo-nostalgia for “brotherhood and unity” to their analysis, which made them more sympathetic to the alleged effort of Yugoslav forces to preserve the federation than toward the nationalistic, breakaway republics that seemed uncompromising. They were right that the leaders of Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia were inflexible, and Tudjman was in fact a fanatic. But however blighted, the leaders of the secessionist states clued into Milosevic’s ruthlessness faster than anyone in the West. The repressive policies of the Serbian president left no place in Yugoslavia for non-Serbs.

  An “action memorandum” sent to Deputy Secretary of State Eagleburger two weeks into the Bosnian war in April 1992 proposed a variety of detailed economic and diplomatic measures designed to isolate the Belgrade regime. Eagleburger’s signature appears at the bottom of the document—beside the word “disapprove.”21 Critics of the Bush administration’s response branded it a “policy of appeasement,” but it might better be dubbed a “policy of disapproval,” a phrase that testifies more accurately to the abundance of “soft” and “hard” intervention proposals that were raised and rejected.

  U.S. policymakers had a number of options. Most made their way onto the editorial pages of the nation’s major dailies. The United States might have demanded that the arms embargo be lifted against the Bosnian Muslims, making a persuasive case at the UN Security Council. “I completely agree with Mr. Bush’s statement that American boys should not die for Bosnia,” Bosnia’s Muslim president Alija Izetbegovic said in early August 1992. “We have hundreds and thousands of able and willing men ready to fight, but unfortunately they have the disadvantage of being unarmed. We need weapons.” The United States might have helped arm and train the Muslims, using its leverage to try to ensure the arms were used in conventional conflict and not against Serb or, later, Croat civilians. But President Bush was opposed to lifting the UN embargo. “There are enough arms there already,” he said. “We’ve got to stop the killing some way, and I don’t think it’s enhanced by more and more [weapons].”22

  If the Bush administration had been serious about stopping the killing of unarmed Bosnians, U.S. troops alone or in coalition (à la the Gulf War or Operation Provide Comfort) might have seized Sarajevo and enough surrounding territory to protect the airport against artillery attack. They might have fanned out from the capital to create a ground corridor to the port city of Split, Croatia, where aid could be delivered. U.S. fighter planes acting alone or with their NATO allies could have bombed the hills around Sarajevo to stop Serb mortar and artillery fire on the capital or to protect humanitarian relief flights. They might have bombed Serb military and industrial targets in Bosnian Serb territory or even in Serbia proper with the aim of deterring Serb aggression. Or most radical, they might have waged all-out war, reversing Serb land gains and allowing Bosnia’s 2 million displaced persons to return home.

  Instead, the Bush administration took a number of tamer steps aimed mainly at signaling its displeasure. In addition to withdrawing Ambassador Zimmerman from Belgrade, the United States closed its two consulates in Serbia, expelled the Yugoslav ambassador from the United States, and moved military forces to the Adriatic to begin enforcing the arms embargo and UN economic sanctions. But the Bush White House did nothing that caused the Serbs to flinch. Diplomatic and economic jabs were worth enduring if the reward for that endurance was an independent, ethnically pure Serb “statelet” in Bosnia.

  Recognition

  What Did the United States Know?

  No other atrocity campaign in the twentieth century was better monitored and understood by the U.S. government. U.S. analysts fed their higher-ups detailed and devastating reports on Serbian war aims and tactics. One classified April 14 information memorandum, for instance, described the Serbs’

  clear pattern of use of force, intimidation, and provocation to violence aimed at forcibly partitioning [Bosnia] and effecting large forced transfers of population. . . . The clear intent of Serbian use of force is to displace non-Serbs from mixed areas (including areas where Serbs are a minority) to consolidate Bosnian Serb claims to some 60% of Bosnian territory . . . in a manner which would create a “Serbian Bosnia.”23

  Balkan watchers also knew Milosevic well enough to alert their superiors to his favorite stalling tactics. In the same memo the analyst wrote, “Belgrade practiced the strategy of the hyena in Croatia, curbing its most aggressive actions during peak moments of international scrutiny and condemnation but resuming them as soon as possible.”24 This was written just a week into the war.

  Jon Western, an analyst in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, was one of many U.S. officials charged with processing Serb brutality on a daily basis. Western was on the fast track in the department. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, and nothing if not earnest, Western had joined the government in 1988. His first day’s journal entry from INR, dated July 15, 1990, read: “This is the job I’ve always dreamed of.” Western had grown up in North Dakota and never in his life seen a dead body. Yet suddenly in 1992 he found himself confronted by reports and photos that depicted human beings who “looked like they had been through meat grinders.” From the beginning of the war, he was tasked with sifting through some 1,000 documents on Bosnia a day—open source reports from foreign and American journalists and international human rights groups, local press translations, classified cables from the field, satellite intelligence, refugee testimony, and telephone and radio intercepts. He used the data to prepare Secretary of State Baker’s morning intelligence summary.

  In his training for the post of intelligence analyst, Western had been taught to greet reports with skepticism. And the stories emerging from Bosnia certainly seemed to warrant disbelief. One cable described a nine-year-old Muslim girl who had been raped by Serb militiamen and left lying in a pool of blood for two days while her parents watched, from behind a fence, as she died. He did not believe it. “You’re taught to be objective,” he remembered. “You’re trained not to believe everything you hear.”25 Following in the footsteps of Morgenthau in Constantinople and Twining on the Cambodia-Thai border, Western confronted images he could not process. But the refugees kept talking, making themselves heard. The very same report about the Muslim girl crossed his desk a second time when a separate group of witnesses confirmed it independently to U.S. investigators.26

  Some of the images were superficially mild. For instance, Western saw satellite photos that looked like they depicted the night sky—hundreds of luminous little stars dotted a black canvas. But the young analyst knew that the stars were not stars at all but the glowing embers of small fires that proud Europeans expelled from their homes built in their makeshift encampments in the woods. In June 1992 he found himself assigned to conduct a frame-by-frame analysis of television footage of the Sarajevo “breadline massacre,” in which a Serb shell blew twenty-two shoppers apart. His was a taxing visual odyssey. Marshall Harris, Western’s colleague in the State Department, remembers, “Jon had it the worst. He had to read everything that came in, no matter how horrific. The rest of us got a summarized version of the brutality, but he had to process every minute detail.”

  However gruesome his tasks, Western had a job to do. Beginning in late May, he set out to see if there might be a pattern in the refugee accounts and in the Serb military advance. He was leery of leaping to conclusions because the Bosnian Muslims had already gained a reputation for ma
nipulating international sympathy. Western demanded corroboration. Could the refugees provide more descriptive detail about the weather on a particular day? Did they recall the color of the buildings in the so-called concentration camps? Could they describe the clothes of their supposed assailants?

  Over the July 4 weekend in 1992, Western and a CIA colleague worked around the clock for three days, poring over mounds of classified and unclassified material. Gathering military intelligence and refugee reports from all across Bosnia, they acquired the most clear-cut evidence yet of a vast network of concentration camps. The Serb tactics in Brcko in northern Bosnia resembled those in Zvornik in eastern Bosnia and Prijedor in western Bosnia. This suggested that the ethnic cleansing and the military attacks had been planned and coordinated. Bosnian Serb artillery would begin by unleashing a barrage on a given village; Serb paramilitaries would launch infantry assaults, killing armed men, rounding up unarmed men, and sending trembling women and children into flight. When most Serb forces moved to the next village, a cadre of paramilitaries and regulars stayed behind to “mop up.” Within hours, they had looted valuables, shot livestock, and blown roofs off houses. Non-Serb life in Serb territory was banned. Some 10,000 Bosnians were fleeing their homes each day.27

  The Serbs’ next moves were spookily easy to predict. As Western remembers:

  We could see the attacks coming by watching our computer terminal screens, by scanning the satellite imagery, or often just by watching television. We knew exactly what the Bosnian Serbs were going to do next, and there was nothing we could do. Imagine you could say, “In two days this village is going to die,” and there was nothing you could do about it. You just sat there, waited for it to happen and dutifully reported it up the chain.

  But the chain was missing some links. The question about what could be done, which was burning inside junior and midlevel officials, had already been answered by senior officials within the administration. Powell, Baker, Scowcroft, Cheney, Eagleburger, and Bush had decided the United States would not intervene militarily. That case was closed. John Fox of the State Department’s Policy Planning Office recalls a climate that eschewed mention of the possibility of U.S. intervention. “For most of 1992, we couldn’t send memos that called for the use of American force,” Fox remembers. “The best we could do was to write arresting things that led inexorably to the conclusion that force would have to be used.”

  An ever-expanding posse of like-minded State Department officials piped cable upon cable up the State Department food chain in the hopes that one senior official would bite. There were no takers. The young hawks recognized that they had several forces working against them. First, their higher-ups had narrowly circumscribed what everybody within the building understood to be “possible.” There would be no U.S. military intervention in Bosnia. This was a fact, not a forecast. This shaped the thinking of those who sat before their computers or bumped into one another in the department’s drab cafeteria and decided whether and how to appeal. Second, they were dealing with bureaucrats like themselves who were protective of turf and career and not at all in the habit of rocking the boat. Third, they knew that their strongest argument for intervention was a moral argument, which was necessarily suspect in a department steeped in the realist tradition. Fox remembers diversifying his written appeals, offering “something for everyone”:

  I used history, arguing that we had allowed fascism to triumph before in this building, and that it had proven not to be such a good idea. I argued that we should intervene because it was “the right thing to do.” This is an argument you almost never make in government if you know what you are doing. It virtually guarantees that you don’t get invited to the next meeting and that you gain a reputation for moralism. I warned them that if we let these killings happen this time around, they would be the ones stuck holding the smoking gun. Of the three types of argument—the historical, the moral, and the “cover your ass” kind—the latter was of course the most compelling.

  U.S. foreign service officers knew that Secretary of State Baker believed that the United States did not “have a dog in this fight.” But undaunted by their superiors’ indifference, they kept the analysis coming. One of the most memorable overviews of the situation came from the pen of Ambassador Zimmerman, who, one month into the war, submitted a confidential cable to the secretary of state entitled “Who Killed Yugoslavia?” The cable was divided into five sections, each headed by a verse from “Who Killed Cock Robin?” Zimmerman had been recalled to Washington on May 16, 1992, and writing it was his last official act as ambassador. He argued that nationalism had “put an arrow in the heart of Yugoslavia” and placed the blame squarely on Balkan leaders like Croatia’s “narrow-minded, crypto-racist regime” and the Milosevic dictatorship in Belgrade:

  Innocent bystanders . . . never had a chance against Milosevic’s combination of aggressiveness and intransigence. Historians can argue about the role of the individual in history. I have no doubt that if Milosevic’s parents had committed suicide before his birth rather than after, I would not be writing a cable about the death of Yugoslavia. Milosevic, more than anyone else, is its gravedigger.

  Western leaders, he observed, were “no more than witnesses at Yugoslavia’s funeral.”28

  Zimmerman asked Jim Hooper, recently promoted to become the State Department’s director of the Office of Canadian Affairs, to join him in developing a menu of concrete policy options for Bosnia. Hooper was skeptical that Deputy Secretary Eagleburger would take his initiatives seriously. He thought Zimmerman was the one who needed to argue for air strikes, but Zimmerman insisted he would lose his access. “This was the classic bureaucratic trap,” says Hooper. “If you go to the boss with bad news, the boss won’t want to see you anymore.” Hooper’s wife urged him to accept anyway. “If you don’t take this,” she said, “you’ll wonder for the rest of your life whether you could have made a difference.” Hooper accepted the offer and spent the second half of 1992 running the Office of Canadian Affairs and, on a pro bono basis, trying to rally department support for intervention.

  U.S. diplomats who worked day to day on Bosnia became eager to see a Western military intervention. They had not become so engaged with Cambodia or Iraq in part because they had been blocked from entering either country and directly witnessing the carnage. Newspaper coverage had been sparse, as journalists, too, were denied access. Americans were also probably less prone to identify with Kurds and Cambodians than they were with Europeans. But the most significant difference was that the Cold War had ended, and there was no geopolitical rationalization for supporting Serb perpetrators. Thus, for the first time in the twentieth century, U.S. military intervention to stop genocide was within reach.

  But internal appeals alone were unlikely to make a dent in the consciousness of senior policy-makers so firmly opposed to intervening. The State Department dissenters needed help from American reporters, editorial boards, and advocacy groups. Initially, they did not really get it. Between April and early August many of the journalists who swooped into Bosnia had never visited the country before and compensated for their ignorance with an effort to be “even-handed” and “neutral.” Many recall scavenging to dig up stories about atrocities committed by “all sides.” Many did not portray the war as a top-down attempt by Milosevic to create an ethnically pure Greater Serbia.

  In early August 1992, however, the proponents of intervention within the U.S. government gained a weapon in their struggle: The Western media finally won access to Serb concentration camps. Journalists not only began challenging U.S. policy, but they supplied photographic images and refugee sagas that galvanized heretofore silent elite opinion. Crucially, the advocates of humanitarian intervention began to win the support of both liberals committed to advancing human rights as well as staunch Republican Cold Warriors, who believed the U.S. had the responsibility and the power to stop Serb aggression in Europe. The Bush administration’s chosen policy of nonintervention suddenly came to feel politically
untenable.

  Response (Bush)

  “Concentration Camps in Europe”

  In the notorious Serb-run camps in northern Bosnia, Muslim and Croat detainees were inhumanly concentrated. Onetime farmers, factory workers, and philosophers were pressed tightly into barracks. One prisoner’s nose nestled into the armpit or the sweaty feet of the eighty-five-year-old inmate beside him. The urine bucket filled, spilled, and remained in place. Parched inmates gathered their excretion in cupped hands to wet their lips.

  The camps of Bosnia were not extermination camps, though killing was a favorite tool of many of the commanders in charge. Nor could they really be called death camps, though some 10,000 prisoners perished in them. Not every Bosnian Muslim was marked for death as every Jew had been in the Holocaust. Although injury and humiliation were inevitable, death was only possible. Concentration camps is what they were. Forever linked with gas chambers, concentration camps were not a Nazi invention. The Spaniards had used them in Cuba during a local rebellion in 1896, the British in South Africa during the Boer War at the beginning of the twentieth century.29

  Thanks to its spy satellites, radio and phone communications, and agents on the ground, the United States had known of the Serb camps since May 1992. But midlevel and junior U.S. officials remember the offices above them were a “black hole.” “We would send things up and nothing would come back,” said Western. “The only time we would get a response was when the press covered a particular event.”30 U.S. analysts knew that Muslim and Croat men were being incarcerated and abused, but Bush administration officials never publicly condemned the camps or demanded their closure. It would take public outrage to force their hand.

  © Gilles Peress/Magnum

  A woman is evacuated from Sarajevo in 1993 on a special convoy arranged for Bosnia’s Jewish community.