A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  With the November 1992 election approaching, Powell did not have to win many converts within the administration. Bush was unwilling to risk American lives in Bosnia in any capacity. Senior U.S. officials in the Administration said they viewed Bosnia as a “tar baby” on which nobody wanted their fingerprints.81

  One way the administration deflected attention away from Bosnia was to focus on another humanitarian crisis, in Somalia. President Bush learned of the famine not from international media coverage, which was initially belated and thin, but from the personal appeals of U.S. ambassador Smith Hempstone in Kenya and those of Senators Paul Simon (D.–Ill.) and Nancy Kassebaum (R.– Kans.).82 The Joint Chiefs instinctively opposed sending U.S. troops to Somalia. But on August 14, 1992, Bush abruptly altered course, ordering a very limited intervention. U.S. C-130 cargo planes, not ground troops, were deployed to aid in the relief effort. Bush also pledged to help transport 500 Pakistani peacekeepers to the embattled country. According to senior officials involved in the planning, the White House saw an opportunity to demonstrate it had a heart, to respond to domestic criticisms on the eve of the Republican Party’s national convention, and to do it relatively cheaply. The nightly news coverage of Bosnia from the middle to the end of August dropped to one-third of what it had been earlier in the month.83 Even though U.S. troops would not deploy to Africa for several months, the Somalia famine had already begun drawing attention away from the Balkans.

  Within the bureaucracy the State Department’s cold exterior continued to be hotly contested. On August 25, 1992, George Kenney, the acting Yugoslav desk officer, stunned the Beltway by resigning from the State Department. News of Kenney’s departure made the front page of the Washington Post. “I can no longer in clear conscience support the Administration’s ineffective, indeed counterproductive, handling of the Yugoslav crisis,” the foreign service officer wrote in his letter of resignation, which the newspaper quoted. “I am therefore resigning in order to help develop a stronger public consensus that the U.S. must act immediately to stop the genocide.”84 Kenney, like so many, favored lifting the arms embargo and bombing the Bosnian Serbs. In London for the UN-EU peace conference, Eagleburger asked, “Who knows Kenney?” He then publicly dismissed the act of the junior official, saying, “To my mind that young man has never set foot in the former Yugoslavia.”85 But Kenney’s exit gave the public its first taste of the battle raging inside the department. And U.S. officials who remained disgruntled by the U.S. policy were introduced to a new option. “When you’re in the foreign service,” Kenney’s counterpart on Bosnia, Marshall Harris, notes, “every part of the institution and the culture frowns on leaving. It just isn’t seen as an option. The fact that George had done it awakened us to thinking of resignation as a real possibility.”

  With the November 1992 election nearing, foreign policy had been demoted. James Baker and a few of his top foreign policy advisers had been transferred to the White House, where they managed the president’s reelection campaign. Eagleburger had been promoted to acting secretary of state. Many U.S. officials thought Eagleburger had long been making the Bosnia policy; now his title reflected his influence.

  Hooper requested a meeting with the new secretary and surprised his colleagues by being granted one. At a half-hour session in mid-September, Eagleburger appeared willing to listen. At the end of the meeting, he asked Hooper to prepare a memo that explicitly spelled out his recommendations for a new policy. Hooper and his colleague Richard Johnson, another career foreign service officer, prepared a twenty-seven-page memo and employed the dissent channel to be sure it reached Eagleburger’s desk. The State Department had introduced the channel at the end of the Vietnam War so that those who disagreed with policy could make their views known to senior officials without having to clear them with their immediate bosses. “This was the one thing we could do that didn’t have to be cleared,” recalls Hooper. “Nobody could stop you from sending it—not your boss, not the secretary of state, not anybody.” Eagleburger did not respond until after the election, but on Veteran’s Day, November 11, 1992, he summoned Hooper and Johnson to his office. After a two-and-a-half-hour session in which Eagleburger peppered the men with questions, he escorted them out of his office and commended them for their critique. “Thanks for telling me my policy is full of horseshit,” a grinning Eagleburger said. The normally lugubrious Hooper was speechless. Johnson said wearily, “I see you were listening.”

  Both dissenters were surprised that their message had not been delivered by other sources. Bill Montgomery, Eagleburger’s office director, told Hooper, “You’re the only ones. Nobody else in the bureaucracy is telling him this.” The department’s officials who cared about America’s Bosnia policy could be divided into three groups—the dissenters who favored U.S. intervention (mainly in the form of air strikes), the senior policymakers who actively opposed it, and most numerous, the officials who supported bombing but assumed it would not happen so did nothing.

  President Bush himself never paid much attention to the conflict in Bosnia. National Security Adviser Scowcroft remembers that about once a week Bush would turn to him and say, “Now tell me again what this is all about?” This was at a time when some 70,000 Bosnians had been killed in seven months.

  Scowcroft speaks very candidly about the formulation of the Bush administration’s response, expressing no regret. If he had to formulate policy all over again, the calculus would yield the same outcome. The atrocities were awful, but they occurred in a country whose welfare was simply not in the U.S. national interest:

  We could never satisfy ourselves that the amount of involvement we thought it would take was justified in terms of the U.S. interests involved. . . . We were heavily national interest oriented, and Bosnia was of national interest concern only if the war broke out into Kosovo, risking the involvement of our allies in a wider war. If it stayed contained in Bosnia, it might have been horrible, but it did not affect us.

  War that spread was deemed threatening to the United States. Regardless of how many civilians died, one that remained internal was not.

  Genocide?

  Although the Holocaust analogy was employed frequently in this period, the question of whether events constituted genocide or not was controversial as always. The killings, the rapes, the torture, the camps, the cleansing together convinced lawyers at Helsinki Watch to use the term. The Serbs had set out to destroy the Bosnian Muslim population, and even if they were not exterminating every person, they were ravaging the Muslim community and doing all they could to ensure it would never recover.

  The Bush administration assiduously avoided using the word. “Genocide” was shunned because a genocide finding would create a moral imperative. The day after the ITN footage of Keraterm aired, Bush told a news conference: “We know there is horror in these detention camps. But in all honesty, I can’t confirm to you some of the claims that there is indeed a genocidal process going on there.”86 Policymakers preferred the phrase “ethnic cleansing.”

  Scowcroft believes genocide would have demanded a U.S. response, but ethnic cleansing, which is the label he uses for what occurred in Bosnia, did not:

  In Bosnia, I think, we all got ethnic cleansing mixed up with genocide. To me they are different terms. The horror of them is similar, but the purpose is not. Ethnic cleansing is not ‘I want to destroy an ethnic group, wipe it out.’ It’s ‘They’re not going to live with us. They can live where they like, but not with us.’. . . There is a proscription on genocide, but there is not a proscription on killing people. . . .Therefore there is something of a national interest in preventing genocide because the United States needs to appear to be upholding international law.

  During the reign of the Khmer Rouge, a small-scale debate over applying the word genocide had been played out mainly on America’s editorial pages. It did not occur in the U.S. government, where such a finding was considered moot in the face of a determined U.S. policy of nonengagement. When Iraq targeted the rural Kurds, Galb
raith’s claim of genocide was rejected by the Reagan administration on the grounds Hussein was not exterminating all Kurds but was suppressing rebellion. The Bosnia debate over “genocide” was notable because it was the most wide-ranging, most vocal, and most divisive debate ever held on whether Lemkin’s term should apply.

  Some U.S. officials who debated the “is it” or “isn’t it” saw it simply as a question of truth. The Serbs were systematically killing and expelling Muslim and Croat civilians from territory they controlled. The talk of “ancient hatreds” implied a degree of inevitability and spontaneity belied by the carefully coordinated, top-down nature of the killing, which was better signaled by the term “genocide.” These officials wanted to gather and publish evidence of atrocities in order to set the record straight and show that a group of individuals had decided to target non-Serbs for destruction. Others hoped to see Serb attacks labeled “genocide” so as to trigger the genocide convention, which the United States had ratified and which they read to legally oblige a U.S. military response. They knew as well from polls and instinct that the term “genocide” moved Americans. A later poll showed that while 54 percent of Americans favored military intervention in Bosnia, that figure rose to 80 percent when those surveyed were told that an independent commission had found genocide under way.87 This was a key point: Whatever America’s legal obligations, U.S. officials hoped a finding of genocide might at least frighten politicians into thinking they would pay some political price for inaction. Both reasons for pursuing application of the word “genocide”—to clarify the nature of the violence and to generate or tap public outrage—were motivated by a desire to make the higher-ups act. They believed that a dominant majority in the United States would support intervention to stop a murderous minority in the Balkans if they only knew what it was they were stopping.

  Richard Johnson, the foreign service officer who had accompanied Hooper to meet with Eagleburger, set out to investigate why the “g-word” controversy persisted when the separating of the men from the women and children; the beatings, rapes, and murders; and the specific targeting of the educated and political elites satisfied the convention’s requirements. He cornered sixteen State Department and NSC officials for formal interviews. He found that any confusion over the Serbs’ genocidal intent stemmed from the State Department’s reluctance to stir moral outrage and its failure to devote the human or material resources needed to collect evidence of a systematic attempt to destroy a substantial part of the Bosnian Muslim group. The White House never issued a directive calling for research and analysis to determine whether a genocide case could be made against Serbian president Milosevic or against rump Yugoslavia (composed of Serbia and Montenegro).

  In the waning days of the Bush administration, the focus of State Department dissenters shifted from rescue to punishment. Jon Western, for one, intensified his effort to collect proof of atrocities. He hoped to turn the heaps of evidence that had been gathered since April into “courtroom-ready” intelligence. Although no international criminal court existed, the frustration with international impotence, the relentlessness of some spirited advocates of prosecution (such as Neier at Helsinki Watch), and probably also the resonance of the crimes in Bosnia with those of World War II caused European and U.S. policymakers to begin considering setting up a tribunal. By December 1992 Western and others had set out to answer two questions: Was there sufficient evidence of war crimes to think about prosecuting perpetrators, and did these crimes constitute a legal genocide? Western took a plodding approach to tackling the issue, which was unpopular with some of his colleagues. “I felt we weren’t going to get a smoking gun,” recalls Western. “Milosevic was never going to call up his henchmen and say, ‘Go commit genocide.’ We had to develop the case by showing the systematic nature of the campaign. Only by working backwards could we show intent.”

  Western had company. In October 1992, upon the recommendation of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the UN Human Rights Commission’s special rapporteur for ex-Yugoslavia, the allies had created an impartial commission of experts to assess the atrocity reports.88 The five-member War Crimes Commission convened for the first time in December 1992 in Geneva. Coincidentally, this inaugural session was held in the same building as one of the many cease-fire negotiations sponsored by the Vance-Owen, UNEU “International Conference for the Former Yugoslavia.” By this time the defeated Bush administration was concerning itself with its legacy, which, when it came to Yugoslavia, needed quick repair. At that meeting Eagleburger urged several new steps, including enforcement of a no-fly zone, possibly lifting the arms embargo against the Muslim-led Bosnian government, and accountability for suspected war criminals. Eagleburger declared:

  We have, on the one hand, a moral and historical obligation not to stand back a second time in this century while a people faces obliteration. But we have also, I believe, a political obligation to the people of Serbia to signal clearly the risk they currently run of sharing the inevitable fate of those who practice ethnic cleansing in their names. . . . They need, especially, to understand that a second Nuremberg awaits the practitioners of ethnic cleansing, and that the judgment and opprobrium of history awaits the people in whose name their crimes were committed.89

  What made Eagleburger’s December 1992 remarks significant was that the top U.S. diplomat “named names.” An unlikely midwife to the justice movement, Eagleburger said that the United States had identified ten war crimes suspects that should be brought to trial. His list included the prominent Serb warlords Zelko “Arkan” Raznjatovic and Vojislav Seselj, as well as the Serb political and military leaders Milosevic, Karadzic, and Ratko Mladic.90 Eagleburger also described specific crimes—such as the Serb siege of Sarajevo, the Yugoslav army’s destruction of the Croatian city of Vukovar in 1991, and the Serb murder of 2,000–3,000 Muslims near Brcko.

  According to Eagleburger, though he had supported the idea of a court for several months, it had been Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel who convinced him to speak out. Wiesel had visited the region in November, making stops in Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Banja Luka, including the Manjaca concentration camp. When Wiesel returned home, he had what he called a “long talk” with Eagleburger in which he convinced him that speaking out was a moral obligation. But Eagleburger made it clear he was not calling for the forcible seizure of the men he named. Karadzic, one of those just branded, freely wandered the halls outside the main conference hall in Geneva.91 He would remain a valued negotiating partner for two and a half more years. In addition, the United States did not follow up on Eagleburger’s statement by assigning officials within the State Department or U.S. intelligence community to build legal cases against these leaders. According to Johnson, when the State Department finally began submitting evidence to the UN War Crimes Commission, it assigned the task to a foreign service officer in the Human Rights Bureau with no knowledge of Balkan affairs and to a short-term State Department intern just out of college.92

  The closest the Bush administration came to acknowledging genocide was on December 18, 1992, when the United States joined a long UN General Assembly resolution that held Serbian and Montenegrin forces responsible for aggression and for “the abhorrent policy of ‘ethnic cleansing,’ which is a form of genocide.”93 The American voice was one of many. It was probably not heard and certainly not heeded.

  Around the same time, Hooper and Johnson entered a second memo into the State Department dissent channel arguing for a legal finding of genocide. The memo was circulated on December 20, 1992. It quickly garnered signatures from the assistant secretaries of state for INR, legal affairs, European affairs, and International Organizations. With those signatures in place, however, the department practically shut down for the holidays until January 3, 1993. A memo that found that the Serbs were committing genocide sat unexamined for two weeks while State Department officials celebrated Christmas and the New Year. When Secretary Eagleburger returned, he said at last that he agreed. But he also said that it would be unfair for th
e Bush administration to issue a finding of genocide just as the next administration was taking over. As Western put it: “The last act of the Bush administration was not going to be, ‘Oh, by the way, this is genocide. We haven’t been doing anything about it. Oops. It’s all yours!’” On January 19, 1993, the last day of the Bush administration, Patricia Diaz Dennis, the assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs equivocated unintelligibly:

  In Bosnia, our report describes widespread systematic atrocities, including the rapes and killings of civilian victims to the extent that it probably borders on genocide. We haven’t yet decided whether or not it’s a legal matter. The conduct in Bosnia is genocide, but clearly the abuses that have occurred there over the last year are such that they, as I said, border on that particular legal term.94

  Before leaving office, President Bush did something that woud have grave bearing on the Clinton administration’s foreign policy: he sent 28,000 U.S. troops to feed starving civilians in Somalia. Although President Bush viewed the Somalia mission as purely humanitarian, National Security Advisor Scowcroft saw two national interests present that were “intimately connected with our decision not to intervene in Yugoslavia.” He argued at the time, first, that the United States had to demonstrate that “it was not that we were afraid to intervene abroad; it was just that the circumstances weren’t right in Bosnia.” Second, Scowcroft believed that the United States had to show Muslim nations that the U.S. decision to stay out of Bosnia was not rooted in the victims’ Muslim faith. “For me, Somalia gave us the ability to show they were wrong,” he says. “It was a Southern Hemisphere state; it was black; it was non-Christian; it was everything that epitomized the Third World.” When asked why the Third World mattered at all to U.S. vital interests, Scowcroft says, “The opinions of leaders in the Third World matter because to be a ‘world leader,’ you have to convince people it is in their interest to follow. If everyone hates you, it is hard to be a world leader.”