by Sheri Fink
When the map was drawn, as Srebrenicans had feared, Srebrenica and Žepa were left to the Serbs.
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THE WOMEN AND CHILDREN AND ELDERLY of the Drina Valley remained huddled in displaced persons tents on the Tuzla airbase, still waiting for their husbands and fathers and sons, the ones whom Christina had seen being separated into columns by Serb soldiers and the ones who’d fallen behind Ilijaz’s group in the hills and given themselves up, surrendering to the Serbs. Where were these thousands of missing? The International Committee of the Red Cross demanded the right to visit them. Serb authorities did not reply. The United States dispatched Assistant Secretary of State John Shattuck to Bosnia to speak with refugees. Stories of massacres convinced the C.I.A. to review satellite photographs of the areas where mass killings were rumored to have occurred. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, showed these satellite photographs at a closed session of the U.N. Security Council on August 10, 1995, a month after Srebrenica fell. They revealed large land disturbances in areas where Dutch soldiers had seen prisoners being held: evidence of mass graves.
With a faxed copy of one of the photographs in hand, David Rohde, an intrepid American reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, slipped into a Serb-held field in eastern Bosnia where a survivor had alleged that a massacre took place. Rohde saw bones protruding from the ground and found the personal effects of several men. Noticed by a shepherd, arrested, and threatened with death, Rohde was released after ten days of high-level pressure. His findings were published and his work led to forensic, journalistic, and legal investigations to determine what had happened to Srebrenica’s missing.
As of July 2004, the International Commission on Missing Persons had collected blood samples (for DNA matching purposes) from the family members of 7,779 missing persons. The number of those killed in Srebrenica very likely exceeds this figure—for example the DNA profiles from some bodies have no matches in the family member database. Exhumations have been complicated by the fact that many bodies were dug up and reburied in October 1995, presumably by Serb military attempting to hide evidence. Still, by July 2004, the family members of 1,431 missing individuals had been matched with loved ones and informed, after years of uncertainty, of their deaths.
Forensic studies have demonstrated that the majority of the dead were massacred, not killed in combat. These studies, combined with the testimony of survivors and participants in the events, have revealed a story of organized massacres at farms and abandoned factory buildings, where unarmed captives, blindfolded, hands tied behind their backs, were shot with automatic weapons or killed by hand grenades, and then buried in mass graves. Torture preceded some of the killings. Most of the victims were men and boys; a few were women.
On the basis of this evidence, the leaders of the army corps in which Dr. Boro Lazić served are accused of having engaged in widespread and organized killings and mass executions of thousands of people fleeing Srebrenica between July 11 and 18. They are accused by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia of having committed the most heinous crime against humanity—genocide, the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic or religious group.
In 1999, the successor to Boutros Boutros-Ghali as U.N. Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, who had been undersecretary for peacekeeping affairs at the time of Srebrenica’s fall, delivered a report on the United Nations’ role in the fall of Srebrenica:
Srebrenica crystallized a truth understood only too late by the United Nations and the world at large: that Bosnia was as much a moral cause as a military conflict. The tragedy of Srebrenica will haunt our history forever.
…the provision of humanitarian assistance could never have been a solution to the problem in that country. The problem, which cried out for a political/military solution, was that a Member State of the United Nations, left largely defenceless as a result of an arms embargo imposed upon it by the United Nations, was being dismembered by forces committed to its destruction. This was not a problem with a humanitarian solution.
It was what Eric Dachy had believed all along.
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WHO BEARS THE BLAME FOR THE TRAGEDY OF SREBRENICA? Clearly, it lies principally with the individuals who committed the massacres or had command responsibility over them. In April 2004, an appeals chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia unanimously found that genocide was committed in Srebrenica. By July 2004, the tribunal had indicted fifteen soldiers and civilian officials for committing crimes against humanity in or around Srebrenica. Just over half of these men had appeared before the tribunal, a result of the unwillingness of Bosnian Serb and Serbian authorities to turn over many of the suspects sheltered in their territories. The tribunal was short of funds and under UN Security Council pressure to wrap up its work. Moreover, the Bosnian Serbs’ military leader, General Ratko Mladić, and civilian president, Dr. Radovan Karadžić (the first physician to be indicted for war crimes since the 1946 Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial), as well as Boro Lazić’s hated commander, tall, redheaded Vinko Pandurević (the same officer who delayed Eric Dachy’s aid deliveries to Srebrenica, watching aid workers buzz around him as if they were flies hitting glass walls), remained at large. Mladić was sighted from time to time dining comfortably in Belgrade, reportedly under the protection of Yugoslav army forces. The governments contributing to Bosnia’s international stabilization force, including the United States, were reluctant to put their troops at risk by arresting indicted war criminals as they are authorized, and in fact in certain circumstances required, to do by the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords.
Serbia’s governmental corruption and international isolation spurred a popular movement to vote out Serbian President Slobodan Milošević and then, when he refused to leave office, to depose him. Under international pressure, his replacements handed him over to the tribunal, where he faces, among other charges, the charge of genocide for his command responsibility in Srebrenica. At last, Ilijaz and the other villagers from Gladovići—who watched bombers fly and tanks fire at them from Serbia long after Milošević insisted his troops were no longer involved in the Bosnian war—may be vindicated in court. Milošević’s poor health, however, has repeatedly threatened his trial’s progress.
Many Bosnian Serbs, including those involved in the attack on Srebrenica—Dr. Boro Lazić among them—have long refused to accept that a massacre of more than 7,000 Srebrenica residents took place. In June 2004, a Bosnian Serb governmental commission released an official mea culpa, setting responsibility for war crimes in the town squarely on the shoulders of Bosnian Serb military and police. The report, made under strong pressure from Bosnia’s foreign governing High Representative, Paddy Ashdown, came months after two senior Bosnian Serb officers involved in organizing the killings accepted plea agreements at the tribunal, admitting their guilt and providing astounding details about the role of Bosnian Serb forces in planning and carrying out war crimes in Srebrenica. Still, many Bosnian Serbs were said to doubt the veracity of the admissions, preferring to believe, instead, that most of those who died in Srebrenica were killed fighting their way out of the enclave. The gaping perceptual divide between Serbs and Muslims over Srebrenica could prepare the ground for future conflict, just as manipulation of history cultivated the previous war.
Some Bosnian Serbs also assert that any executions that may have been committed by Mladić’s forces at Srebrenica were acts of vengeance, understandable responses to atrocities committed by Naser Orić, his troops, and the Srebrenica hapsi in the course of military actions undertaken by the Muslims in the early part of the war. The Orthodox Christmas attack on Kravica, described in this book, is cited as one example. On April 10, 2003, Naser Orić was arrested by NATO-led forces and brought before the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague where he faced charges of having violated the laws or customs of war through acts committed by forces and individuals under his control. These included murder and cruel treatment of severa
l Serb detainees, and wanton destruction and plunder of at least fifty villages and hamlets, including Bjelovac, Kravica and Jezestica, between June 1992 and March 1993.
While some Srebrenicans almost certainly committed atrocities against Serbs in 1992 and early 1993, there exists no earthly excuse for the genocide Mladić’s forces committed against thousands of Srebrenica’s Muslims two years later. The victims of Europe’s worst massacre in fifty years cannot justly be blamed for the crime committed against them. Many of the soldiers who participated in the killings, including Drazen Erdemović, a Bosnian Croat conscript in the Bosnian Serb army who turned himself in to the tribunal and admitted his role in shooting hundreds of unarmed prisoners, had nothing to do with eastern Bosnia, and no family members or friends killed there. In any case, nothing, not even vengeance, justifies genocide.
Although Bosnian Serb forces are responsible for committing genocide, others bear responsibility for having failed to prevent it. The United States, Great Britain, and France among others, had ratified the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. The leaders of these countries certainly had the power to prevent genocide in Srebrenica. They failed. As the events in this book showed, for three years they lacked the will.
Lawyers for Srebrenica survivors have sought monetary compensation from the United Nations and the Dutch Government. Perhaps out of fear of similar actions, most countries involved in the Balkan wars have failed to investigate the role of their governments in Srebrenica’s fall, in spite of the fact that U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan requested they do so in his 1999 U.N. report on Srebrenica. Stressing that U.N. member states, by imposing an arms embargo on Bosnia-Herzegovina, had assumed the duty to protect it, he called on members of the Contact Group (the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and the Russian Federation), the Security Council, and “other Governments which contributed to the delay in the use of force” to accept their share of responsibility for allowing the tragedy to occur. A key question left unanswered in the U.N. report, because of the unwillingness of member states, including the United States, to turn over intelligence reports, is whether any states had prior knowledge of the Serb attack on Srebrenica and the massacre that followed.
As of the summer of 2004, only France and the Netherlands had heeded Annan’s call and convened public parliamentary inquiries to investigate their roles in and responsibilities for the fall of Srebrenica. The French inquiry came at the persistent instigation of none other than the French section of Doctors Without Borders, several of whose local staff members were executed in Srebrenica. MSF demanded that the government establish political and military responsibility for the events and “determine how far France’s political and military authorities were responsible for the paralysis of the United Nations and NATO in the face of the Bosnian Serb attack on Srebrenica.” MSF challenged the government to investigate rumors that it had interfered from outside the U.N. chain of command to prevent the launching of air strikes during the Serb offensive on Srebrenica and that it had concluded an agreement with Serbs to release 300 peacekeeping forces taken hostage in May 1995, in exchange for a guarantee not to launch future air strikes.
The French inquiry failed to answer MSF’s questions. It acknowledged that France deserved a share of the blame, but diluted that share by fingering other blameworthy parties. It accused the United States for having failed to engage meaningfully in the Balkans, Dutch UNPROFOR soldiers for failing to fight back against the Serb attack on Srebrenica, and even the Bosnian government for having accepted the seizure of Srebrenica as a fait accompli. However, the French parliamentarians concluded definitively that Srebrenica could have been saved with massive air strikes along the southern road and criticized themselves, along with the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Bosnian government, for the “lack of political will to intervene in Srebrenica.” Finally, the report showed that the French government had at last recognized, just as the United Nations did, but much too late, that the very approach of the international community to the war in Bosnia was faulty. Asking the United Nations “to maintain a non-existent peace [in Bosnia] using strictly humanitarian logic” rather than “opposing one of the parties or stopping the conflict” was what led, inexorably, to the genocide.
The Dutch government has made three notable attempts at soul-searching. In 1999, it published a debriefing report of its U.N. peacekeeping troops deployed in Srebrenica. Then, in April 2002, the governmentappointed Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD) released the results of an extensive inquiry into Srebrenica. The NIOD’s 7,600-page report laid part of the blame for the fall of Srebrenica at the feet of the Dutch government. Days later, the government resigned in recognition of its political responsibility for the failure to protect the Srebrenica population and prevent the massacre. Srebrenica survivors, viewing the resignation as a token gesture, demanded a more specific assignment of responsibility and guilt among Dutch soldiers and officials. A leader of the Association of Victims’ Families demanded to know why Dutchbat members, having observed men and boys being separated and killed, nonetheless handed the last men sheltering inside the U.N. base to the Serbs rather than protecting them.
Subsequently, in January 2003, the Dutch government released the results of a parliamentary inquiry into its own actions before, during, and after the fall of Srebrenica. It concluded that the attack on Srebrenica met all conditions for the use of air support and blamed U.N. Force Commander General Bernard Janvier for delaying its implementation. Further, it suggested that better protection could have been offered to Srebrenica men after the town fell, but concluded that Dutchbat was not in a position to “conclusively prevent the evacuation” carried out by Serb forces.
Dutch officers argued that the responsibility for preventing the massacre lay with NATO. “The air strikes should have been massive, without regard for possible victims in the Dutch battalion or civilians,” former Dutch Commander Ton Karremans testified before the inquiry committee on November 19, 2002. “Then we could have turned the tables. Those chances were just thrown away.”
And what of NATO’s powerhouse, the United States? There has been shockingly little public examination of the responsibility of the 1990s’ sole superpower for the genocide committed in Srebrenica. As detailed in this book, the United States abdicated primary responsibility for dealing with the war in Bosnia to Europe until after the fall of Srebrenica. Still, the U.S. government kept close tabs on the war. I reviewed thousands of pages of internal communications about Srebrenica released by the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, the CIA, and the National Security Agency in response to Freedom of Information Act requests. These reveal that the U.S. government had vast knowledge of the atrocities taking place in Bosnia since 1992.
As just one example, in January 1993, a secret State Department report reviewing such atrocities concluded, “An extensive review of embassy cables and intelligence reports… strongly suggests that the magnitude and egregiousness of atrocities committed by Serbs in Bosnia amount to a program of attempted genocide.” In spite of the qualification of genocide with the word “attempted,” this suggests that U.S. officials could easily predict the intentions of General Mladić’s military forces upon capturing Srebrenica. They would attempt genocide. I interviewed army intelligence officer Lt. Col. Rex Dudley (now retired, then major), who traveled to Srebrenica in April 1993. He says he warned high-ranking individuals upon his return from Srebrenica that a Serb takeover of the town would result in genocide.
The fact that the United States, knowing the pattern of Serb atrocities, failed to intervene during the five-day attack on the safe area arguably puts the United States in violation of its Genocide Convention commitment to prevent genocide.
When it comes to the events of July 1995, in and around Srebrenica, what exactly did the United States know and when? The exhaustive Netherlands Institute of War Documentation investigation revealed several points. U.S. officials received daily confidential briefings
from Dutch governmental officials whose troops were inside of Srebrenica. The chairman of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Shalikashvili, was briefed by the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General George Joulwan. Two days before Srebrenica’s fall, Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović appealed to President Clinton, among other leaders, to use his influence to prevent the genocide of Srebrenica’s citizens.