I had always believed in scouring around in the peripheries and borderlands of nations and ideologies, for that is where it is frequently far easier to find the truth about the centers (it is the equivalent of never, for instance, seeking out the nature of a man in his respectable home; rather look to his mistress). And so it was not surprising to me that I was thus able to write the first columns that fall of 1988 on these stunning declarations of independence from Moscow.
Meanwhile, with the great ideological and military hold of Moscow so suddenly dissolved, unquestionably the newly freed peoples would now be forced to search elsewhere for faith, for sustenance, for reasons for living. Indeed, they had to, because mankind never chooses to live very long without purpose, real, invented, or imagined. It seemed clear to me that, with no ideological or power "center" any more, all those peoples, suddenly freed from Moscow's sway, would either fall back on their ancient religions, contorted ethnic roots, or clans and tribes -- and that, by the way, they would get plenty of "help."
For that reason, by the fall 1989, my attention shifted swiftly to Yugoslavia as the country tailor-made for yet the newest type of disintegration. In 1975, the country's powerful Marshal Tito had died, which was the impetus for a morally debilitating economic depression as well as the election to power of ambitious "Old Communist" leaders. With a cynicism remarkable even for the Marxist world, they immediately and deliberately began reawakening, re-creating, and orchestrating the centuries-old ethnic hatreds that had, however, been largely quiescent since the end of World War II.
Only two weeks before the Berlin Wall came down, I left East Berlin and went directly by Yugoslav Airlines (one had to want desperately to go somewhere to travel by Yugoslav Airlines) to Belgrade. I will always remember those gray, early winter days in the Yugoslav capital as among the most stimulating of my life. Stimulating, because I could see before my very eyes how the unscrupulous Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was already forming the Serb militias, arming and fanaticizing them, and fueling his violent propaganda for a "Greater Serbia!" They were also depressing, however, because anyone with eyes could certainly foresee the inexorable result.
For the next four years, diplomats and analysts repeated like a sacred chant that these new wars were paradigmatic "ethnic wars" - - "spontaneous" and "inevitable." In fact, these wars were being deliberately planned on behalf of the most ancient evil of all--to win and hold onto total power over men.
From the time the Serbs really started the wars in late June 1991, that handful of Western journalists who were there began to realize that we were witnessing the eeriest mismatch of power since the Children's Crusades in the thirteenth century. On the one side were the vicious "mountain Serbs" or "wild Serbs" of the Dinaric Alps, whose names had long stood for all the killing, torturing, and looting that we had vowed never again to let happen -- surely not in Europe, surely not during the twentieth century! On the other side, one was supposed to find the "best" and most "civilized" forces of the modern world -- in particular, the Western European democracies and the UN . In fact, in the aftermath of the cold war -- in a world whose confused and contradictory inner spirit we little grasped, these "good" forces were espousing a weird mix of rigid moral neutralism and the non use of force to replace traditional military engagement.
Could such idiocies really be taken seriously? Actually, it was worse, as they were becoming increasingly the mode of engagement in the world following the cold war. Soon the "good" side -- the UN , the European Community, the humanitarian organizations--put in "neutral" troops with the unrewarding cry to everyone to "just stop fighting!" And so, finally, two hundred fifty thousand mostly innocents died because of these "good" people's unwillingness even to make judgments about whether mass murder was worthy of critical moral judgment.
One morning in the spring of 1993, for instance, I walked into the offices of Cedric Thornberry, then the civilian director of UN operations in Zagreb, Croatia, and the first thing this dedicated former human rights lawyer from Northern Ireland told me, in a voice that seemed strangely excited, yet relieved at the same time, was, "Georgie Anne, we know now ... the atrocities are balanced."
Since anyone with reports to read knew that the Serbs were responsible for at least 90 percent of the worst atrocities in Europe since the Nazis (even the UN reports would finally admit this), I sat down, fixed my eyes on him and said simply, "Are you serious?"
The next day, for instance, while sitting in the office of our charge in the American embassy in Zagreb, I recalled this experience to him, and we discussed the mindset of so many in the UN and in the Western armies in Bosnia. "They've been Stockholm-syndromized," he finally explained sadly.
This man, deputy chief of mission at the embassy, then referred to the early 1970s when several young Swedish women in Stockholm were taken hostage by Middle East terrorists, and everyone correctly feared for their lives. When they were released several days later, however, observers were even more distressed because these educated young women came out of captivity "in love with their captors." Such a psychological syndrome came to define dependent people who became enamored of oppressive power.
Soon, it was popularly known as the "Stockholm Syndrome." Essentially, it meant that the power that the captors were able to wield made their captors feel that even their oppressors must somehow be worthy people -- the dependent prisoners had to "fall in love" with their captors, if only to explain their captivity to themselves and to expunge their humiliation.
Indeed, the UN officials and military -- by virtue of the "mission" and "mandate" of being neutral and never even defending themselves -- had been themselves passively "held hostage" by the Serbs in Bosnia. Worse, they had even effectively given themselves up as hostages.
In earlier years, my instinct had impelled me to write about the new forms of warfare that I saw gaining ascendancy world-wide-- guerrillas, militias, terrorists, liberation movements, liquidation squads, comites para la defensa de la revolución .... But in the former Yugoslavia, I became convinced, we were dealing with a mingling of new factors: the Third World "anti-imperialist" neutralism bred in many former colonial countries, an ideological one-world "brother" neutralism in the UN charter, and a matching and parallel permissive/therapeutic attitude on the part of the Clinton administration.
One day in New York during the spring of 1994, when it seemed that Bosnia could not get worse, but still would and did, I sat in the elegant Sutton Place East River townhouse of UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. He began to explain the concept behind the moral confusion (my term), saying, "Our whole philosophy is based on talk -- negotiate -- and then talk again. To use force is an expression of failure. Our job is diplomacy, the peaceful resolution of problems.... " He paused. "If we have to use force, we have failed," he summed up.
Shortly afterward, that same summer, I was interviewing Boutros-Ghali's "Special Representative," Yasushi Akashi, in Zagreb. I asked the cool-eyed, distant little Japanese diplomat, who had lived his entire adult professional life within the hothouse bureaucracies of the UN , whether there had not perhaps been some "gigantic mistake over human nature" (I was being polite) underlying the policy the UN had pursued in Bosnia.
"Your question is a haunting one," he replied, "and it might lead to the conclusion that people might fight a bit more to have a better moment to make peace. But we UN people have a professional stake in stopping bloodshed." The UN could not use force, he went on, because "we would be perceived as the enemy and that would endanger our carefully constructed relations with the parties. We are impartial; we are in a war but we are not at war. Once we became a party to the war, we would have to liquidate our efforts -- withdraw or cut down."
Later that same week, as I puzzled over this incredibly naive new self-imposed relinquishment of power and self-imposition of impotence, I was sitting in the UN offices in Zagreb with some of the information officers. I was puzzling over the fact that, despite these motivating sentiments, they had actually fi
nally brought NATO in, although still for very restricted purposes, to threaten the Serbs.
I kept asking them "But if you won't use force, why did you bring NATO in? Why...?" Each time, they only hung their heads and looked down at the table. Suddenly I realized what was going on. "You ... you never intended to use NATO , did you?" I blurted out. Again, they looked down at the table in silence. Then, finally they admitted that the entire "strategy" had been "a bluff." Because they had not wanted to use force under virtually any circumstances, these "good" men of the era after the cold war, ultimately ruled by their Utopian illusions and by a bureaucratic fear of change, had finally become accomplices to mass murder.
In those days, too, just before his untimely death from cancer, it was the NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner, the respected former German defense minister who always gave me welcome refuge when I stopped by Brussels. From the very beginning, Woerner argued for a realistic and sure use of force against the Serbs, something that we now know would have easily stopped them from the first day onward.
When I saw him during the summer of 1994 in his spartan NATO office in Brussels, that handsome, black-haired, intelligent man burst into the room, sat down with a small flourish, then said angrily, "Miss Geyer, I am fed up! What we are doing is simply a cover-up for letting the Serbs win," he said. Before I left that day, Woerner told me a personal story that has stayed with me always. "I was ten years old when the war ended," he said disbelievingly. "I saw pictures of the concentration camps for the first time, and I physically attacked my parents... and they were not even political, they were religious people. Still, I vowed that that must never happen again." He fixed that steely gaze on me. "Now I am head of the most powerful military organization in world history," he went on, "and I can do nothing."
Like Woerner and many Americans as well, I simply could not believe that we would behave as disgracefully as we did in Bosnia. At least in 1939, in a darkening Europe, the British and Americans were still there, waiting behind the stage curtains of the theater of war. Now, both were standing aside, new and terrifying nonjudgmental "observers" of the carnage. And I was once again covering people torn from their tribes, their clans, their monarchies, and their traditions, as they roamed and roved back and forth in "virtual" centuries they vaguely "remembered," as though history were only a mere therapist's couch and time had no meaning.
Then, finally, in the fall of 1995, President Bill Clinton had had enough, NATO did really bomb the Serbs, and the Dayton peace conference was assembled in Ohio. The night of the signing, on November 21, 1995, I happened to be at a lively party at the LosAngeles Times bureau in Washington, and it was perhaps not surprising that eventually President Clinton actually appeared there, too. Only when the crowd around him thinned out did I go over to him and say, "Good evening, Mr. President, I'm Georgie Anne Geyer."
"I know," he said, for some reason not looking at all pleased at the prospect of spending a few minutes in my company.
"Congratulations on the peace accord," I went on, undaunted by the "strained" reception, "but let me ask you only one question: 'If American troops go to Bosnia, will they be able to defend themselves if they are in danger?'"
"Not only if they are in danger," he answered, with some vehemence, "but even if they think they are in danger." Then the president paused, looked me squarely in the eye, and said, unsmiling, "You ought to like that!"
"I do," I said. "Thank you." (And if at that moment I sounded a little like a prissy schoolmarm, well, what is one to do?)
***
The saga did not, however, end there. In June 1996, I made a six-week trip through Europe, Russia and Bosnia, and by then one could already begin to see the next phase of the post-cold war world.
In Brussels, NATO had now been rejuvenated by the changes wrought by the Dayton Accords -- NATO, with at least temporary American leadership, now had taken over from the military anarchy in Bosnia and twenty thousand American Troops were soon on their way. Walking again through the utilitarian corridors of NATO, I could surely feel the change since the desperate days of the late and noble Manfred Woerner; now there was a renewal of old energies.
In Russia for the presidential elections of June 16 -- the first real election of a leader in a thousand years of Russian history -- I was again invigorated when Boris Yeltsin won. This was not because Yeltsin was such a terrific president, because surely he was not! Not an alcoholic, but a man prone to drinking binges; he was sometimes coherent, many times, not. He would rise to specific challenges, then sink into weeks of torpor, surrounded at his countryside dacha by old KGB generals and corrupt drinking buddies, who by then were in effect running the country and commanding their own increasingly powerful militia of forty thousand men.
But after he effectively won the first round of the elections that prescient Sunday, I awoke on Monday morning in Moscow to the first astonishing piece of news: he had put the maverick (and honest) young General Alexander Lebed in charge of security. Tuesday he had gotten rid of the hated and corrupt Defense Minister Pavel Grachev. Wednesday he had purged all the dacha hangers-on, with their personal militias.... What a week!
But it was important mostly because, after Yeltsin won the second round on July 3, through an election process that, after all, did indeed "work" in Russia --- Yeltsin's acts had bought time for Russia. By the next election, the old communists would be so greatly diminished in numbers that they would be an unimportant minority. A true "New Russia" could emerge, somewhat democratic, if in its own way, and economically more modern.
***
Bosnia remained more complex. When I got to Sarajevo that July and saw that willfully destroyed city, I again was heartsick. But I was even more heartsick to see that our excellent troops had been sent there essentially to do nothing -- and leave. Without arresting war criminals Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, those mass murderers up in Pale, we were actually recognizing and legitimizing their mass murder. We would leave in December, and they would stay, all because Washington had the power, but, out of incompetent analysis and lack of will and courage, refused to do what was necessary to punish the aggressors and to let somebody "win."
I had been blessed to be able to grapple first-handedly with the themes of the twentieth century. Now I was beginning to see the important new theme in the world, and I feared for the twenty-first century in a world where America, the only truly "modern" country, was so easily and eagerly relinquishing its leadership.
Epilogue
But as deeply as Bosnia has moved me, when I now think of the rest of the world -- and what has happened in my lifetime -- I must say that I am not pessimistic. Two totalitarian systems and philosophies, those of Germany and the Soviet Union, both stand defeated by democratic nations and ideas. The Middle East is finally headed toward the peace between Israel and the Palestinians that so many of us prayed for. Latin America has essentially made the pivotal decision in favor of democracy and civil societies. Formerly impoverished, the Asian nations of the Pacific Rim shine as the economic stars in the global galaxy. Africa remains troubled, but its people no longer accept being poor and uneducated.
Insofar as the future is concerned, it does not seem very difficult to predict. The challenges for the developed world are: the danger of disintegration and decomposition of the nation-state and of civic society; the de-culturization of Western and other societies; and the weakening of the bonds that unite us -- particularly the irreplaceable bond of citizenship. All of these trends and tendencies span cultures and regions and are a direct result of the weakening of the power centers throughout the rest of the world. Therefore, the next battle, as I outlined in my book, Americans No More: The Death of Citizenship, will surely be the fight for coherence within societies, and the next struggle will involve finding the answer to the pressing question "Who Belongs Where?"
When I was just starting out as a young correspondent, you see, I innocently thought that the world would improve in my lifetime -- in fact, with the accustomed
immodesty of youth, I knew that it would inevitably get better. Now I opt philosophically with my late friend, the great and good doyen of Chicago society, Harriet Welling, who died in the late 1980s, much too early, at the age of ninety-four. During her life she repeatedly told her daughter, "I want to live long enough to see how it turns out." But before she died, she edited herself down. "I know now that it won't turn out," she said, "it will just keep going."
At times, of course, I tried to analyze why I had taken such a different road. During the 1990s, at the lovely wedding of the son of my two brilliant diplomatic friends, Phyllis and Robert Oakley, I had a gratifying conversation with an old friend of theirs.
"You are lucky to have a burning passion," she told me, as we chatted over champagne, "because you focus everything on that, and everything in your life falls into place. You have no doubts." A pause. "I had that when I was acting... " she said then. "But then I married and had children." I interjected, for some reason confiding in the perceived anonymity of strangers, that, "I have always felt that I was really doing something vaguely wrong." (Read: I have never done what my mother seemed to want me to do.)
She shook her head with disapproval. "That's a bad use of your time," she said. "You're lucky, you focused, look what you've created." She was relentless.
"I only know that I've done certain things, partly out of a moral or professional, compulsion, but more often just simply because I loved doing them," I said honestly. "But that passion --all that comes with a very real price tag. You have to exclude everything else, and turn your back on things that are worth a very great deal, like lasting love, like children, like the joys of everyday life."
Now she simply ignored my protestations. "A person like you has a lot of emotion," she went on, as I began to wonder again who really had sent her: the Oracle at Delphi, perhaps? "If you had gotten married, and had children, that emotion would have all been used up there."
Buying the Night Flight Page 41