In November 1991, Serb troops surrounding Dubrovnik broke a multiple cease-fire, negotiated weeks before, and began shelling the beautiful medieval city. On December 6, Dubrovnik was shelled for ten hours; the attack would leave its inhabitants without electricity or water for a month. All of its citizens (including Serbs) were engaged in the defense of the city.22
Accounts of brutality filtered out of Croatia. Gutman told the world what he had learned of the ghastly conditions in the Omarska prison camp. He interviewed survivors, who described the unbelievable tragedy. One man said:
I will tell you about the conditions in the camps. All the grass has been eaten by the people. Every day in Omarska between 12 and 16 people die. In the first six days, they don’t receive any food. There is no possibility of any visit. No possibility of packages. No medical help. Two thirds of them are living under open skies, in an area like an open pit. When it rains, many of them are up to their knees in mud.23
Gutman found eyewitnesses and former detainees who described death camps where “emaciated men with their heads shaved in an open field” were routinely slaughtered.24 The first British television photos of Omarska appeared, deeply shocking Europe.
By this time, reports of savage fighting in the former Yugoslavia were appearing in the Western media. The Washington Post, the New York Times, and other major newspapers published accounts of the destruction of Vucovar, and of tens of thousands of Croats and Bosnians driven from their homes and stripped of their possessions. In Europe, reports in Le Monde and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung estimated that five hundred thousand persons had become refugees in Croatia alone in the weeks after the fighting broke out, and that the Serbs were using rape as a weapon.
As Ambassador Warren Zimmerman later wrote, “The pattern of Serb atrocities that continued throughout the war was set in these first few days. Typically, the Serbian paramilitaries would storm a town, killing civilians in the assault, would expel the Muslim population, and would turn the town over to Serbs, who, protected by the JNA, could destroy mosques and other Muslim symbols at leisure. Military-age Muslims were sent to concentration camps or executed.”25 Beatings, rapes, and murder were ubiquitous.26
The pressure to act against these atrocities mounted, and blame began to rub off on the Western powers. Some observers believed that Milošević could not have launched the attacks without the acquiescence of the United States and Western Europe, or at least that their passivity could easily be interpreted as acquiescence.
On December 17, 1991—in its first significant unilateral move in foreign affairs since the end of World War II—Germany announced that it would recognize Slovenia and Croatia on January 1, 1992. It was a bold move that reflected foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher’s determination to do something for Croatia and Slovenia. But it was a sharp disappointment to Lord Carrington and the U.S. diplomats, who believed that the chances of containing the violence would be far better if no government granted diplomatic recognition to any republics that unilaterally declared independence. Repelled by the Serb offensive, the EC and the Vatican soon followed Germany in recognizing Croatia and Slovenia.
On February 21, the Security Council passed Resolution 743, establishing a small peacekeeping force for Croatia (UNPROFOR), pending a solution of the Yugoslav crisis. The resolution authorized a force of 45,000 troops, but reached a maximum strength of only 39,922. The force was to serve as a buffer—separating the Krajina Serbs and the Croatians, monitoring cease-fires, and facilitating the return of refugees. In Bosnia, the force was also to escort humanitarian convoys and deter attacks on safe areas. Its cost over four years was approximately $4.6 billion.27 UNPROFOR’s size and mandate were repeatedly enlarged as the situation deteriorated throughout 1992. Although Bosnia-Herzegovina had also become a major target of Serb aggression, Boutros-Ghali rejected the appeals of France, Germany, and Poland to deploy a peacekeeping force there. Violence spread in Bosnia, as regular and irregular Serb forces moved with impunity from village to village, pillaging and driving out the inhabitants.
On the last day of February 1992, a referendum in Bosnia produced a Bosnian Serb boycott and a strong Muslim-Croat vote in favor of independence. On April 21, the shooting started in Sarajevo, Bosnia’s multiethnic capital city. Heavy shelling continued throughout April; but no action was taken to defend the unarmed Bosnians. In late May, James Baker announced that the United States had joined in discussions on adopting Chapter VII sanctions (authorizing the use of force). Still, the ever-cautious Baker added a caveat: “[B]efore we consider force, we ought to exhaust all of the political, diplomatic and economic remedies that might be at hand.”28
Almost all the parties to this increasingly violent situation were slow to realize that they were truly at war. Nowhere was this clearer than in the extraordinary events surrounding the kidnapping on May 2 of Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovíc, who was returning to Sarajevo after a day of fruitless negotiations in Lisbon. No one realized that the JNA had taken over the airport. Minutes after Izetbegovíc’s plane landed, he was a prisoner of the Serbs. In the negotiations that followed, he sought to save himself, his daughter, his party, and his position as president, while the JNA sought to secure its control of the airport, Izetbegovíc, and the Bosnian government by imposing a coup d’etat. UN commander general Lewis MacKenzie described it as “the worst day of my life.”29 In extremely complex conversations, President Izetbegovíc managed to secure his freedom and that of his daughter, while Bosnia’s military commanders ambushed the JNA forces at the airport. By the end of the day, it was clear that the Serbs and Bosnians were engaged in a fight to the death.
In the weeks that followed, the situation worsened. Cease-fires were negotiated and violated. Pledges were made and broken. The Sarajevo airport remained closed. The “safe routes” created for delivery of humanitarian supplies remained tightly shut. Serb mortars pounded Sarajevo’s neighborhoods. On May 27, 1992, as the inhabitants of Sarajevo stood in a long line waiting to buy bread, Serbs shelled the bread line, killing twenty-two people and wounding many others.
In the spring and summer of 1992, the UN Security Council passed a series of resolutions calling for the reopening of the Sarajevo airport, which had been closed since early spring. On May 15, 1992, the Security Council passed Resolution 752, demanding that all parties cease efforts to change the ethnic composition of any part of the former Yugoslavia, that Croatians and Serbs who had not lived in Bosnia withdraw from Bosnia, and that all parties cooperate to ensure access to Bosnia’s airports and the delivery of humanitarian assistance. The United States joined in Resolution 757, which passed on May 30, 1992, imposing a trade embargo on Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) and freezing Yugoslav assets abroad and in the United States. Resolutions 758 and 761 banned all military flights over Bosnia-Herzegovina and demanded that the UN and humanitarian organizations be given open access to camps, prisons, and detention centers. But none of these good things happened. Finally, in June 1992, the Security Council passed Resolution 762, belatedly authorizing the deployment of peacekeeping forces to Sarajevo.
The Western organizations did not deal well with this conflict. Neither the EC nor the UN nor the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) roused itself quickly to oppose the violence, which had forced 2.2 million Bosnians to flee their homes by mid-July 1992, and reintroduced into Europe the barbaric notion of “ethnic purification” that was thought to have died with Adolf Hitler. The international failure to counter this Serbian aggression could be traced to a diverse set of motives. Some governments were inhibited by their historic ties to Serbia. Some argued that the conflict was a hopelessly complicated ethnic struggle in which outsiders should not become involved, or that blame was so evenly divided among the parties that there were no meaningful moral issues. Some governments (notably France) opposed NATO’s involvement, anxious to avoid setting a precedent for a post–cold war U.S. role in Europe. Everyone equivocated.
Reminding the world that
leaders make a difference, recently retired heads of state Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan signed public appeals deploring the Serb violence and demanding that Milošević cease military action against Bosnia and the flow of weapons to Serb forces in Bosnia, turn over heavy weapons to an international body, and permit Bosnian civilians to return to their homes under international protection—or else expect NATO airpower to target and destroy Serb military assets.30
Secretariat du Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan
PO Box 6—1211
Geneva 3 Switzerland
Telephone: (022) 346 8866
Telex: 129825 MUROCH
Fax: (022) 347 9159
18 November 1992
WORLD LEADERS URGE BOSNIAN ACTION
We are now witnessing in Bosnia a replay of one of the darkest eras of modern history: the invasion of one sovereign nation by another. It is the attempted genocide of people who have lived in peace and tolerance with their neighbors for centuries. The scale of atrocities and the appalling human suffering tell the story.
The savagery can and must be stopped or the tragedy will spread far beyond Bosnia. People of conscience must speak out now.
Every assistance should be provided to help the Bosnian refugees; otherwise countless more will die.
The Hon. Gerald Ford
The Hon. Ronald Reagan
Baroness Margaret Thatcher
Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick
General Alexander Haig, Jr.
Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan
In the summer of 1992, François Mitterrand, the oldest of the Western presidents, flew into Sarajevo in a French helicopter, donned a flak jacket, and spent seven hours under continuous mortar and sniper fire. “The people of Sarajevo are truly prisoners, condemned to murderous blows, and I feel an overpowering sense of solidarity with them,” he declared.31 But his trip had few consequences, perhaps because, in spite of his expression of solidarity, he took no formal action.
The shelling eventually became so heavy that General MacKenzie suspended the ongoing airlift of food and medicine, which had barely sustained the city. By this point Sarajevo had little electricity or water. Many civilians were killed and wounded by mortars and bombs, and the city’s hospitals were severely damaged. On August 13, acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the Security Council passed Resolution 770, authorizing states to use “all measures necessary” to deliver food and medicine and fuel to Bosnians trapped in cities under siege, and imposing a ban on military flights over all of Bosnia-Herzegovina, except for flights in support of UN missions.32 A month later, a follow-up Resolution (786) was passed providing for monitoring (but not enforcing) the no-fly zone.
In an oblique threat, Baker said that the United States would not accept the blockage of the airport and humanitarian relief. He warned Karadzic that the United States might use air and naval units in Europe to attack Serbian artillery around Sarajevo. Baker held intensive consultations with the other members of the Security Council on how to get food and medicine to Sarajevo, which by now had been surrounded by Serb forces for months. In the United States, impatience grew. Democrats in the Senate—including Claiborne Pell (RI), Paul Simon (IL), and Joe Biden (DE)—demanded U.S. participation in delivering food and medicine.
General MacKenzie was scheduled to leave the Balkans in the first week of July 1992, and the Canadian battalion, 850 strong, would be leaving with him. It was rumored that he was being removed at the request of the UN because of the Bosnian government’s strong feeling that he favored the Serbs. (A few years later, the secretary-general would request the recall of French generals Philippe Morillon and Jean Cot because the Serbs felt they favored the Bosnians.)
Throughout MacKenzie’s last day, urgent appeals for help flooded in from amateur radio operators in the Muslim town of Gorazde, which had suffered months of siege and repeated ethnic cleansing. Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovíc appealed again to President Bush for American air attacks on Serb artillery positions to break the sieges of Gorazde and Sarajevo and to clear the way for new shipments of food and water. Bosnian foreign minister Haris Silajdzic appealed for more decisive action from the Security Council or the United States. But the world stood by—the NATO forces idle—while heavily armed Serbs slaughtered civilians in the heart of Europe.
Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali’s response was unfathomable. Despite urgent appeals, he refused to provide UN peacekeepers for Bosnia when he deployed UNPROFOR troops in Croatia. This elegant francophone Egyptian Copt, who often called himself an African, was preoccupied with Somalia, not Bosnia, which he described as a “war of the rich.” It was his stated view that the Bosnian Serbs and the Yugoslav government should not be blamed for the violence in Bosnia.33 Again and again, he found excuses for those who attacked Bosnian Muslims. Eventually, the evidence overwhelmed his prejudice—but not until two million Croatians and Bosnians had been “relocated” under conditions that resembled the Nazi relocation of Jews: stuffed for days in stifling boxcars without food or water; crowded into prisons and army barracks, where women were raped, men beaten to death, and people “disappeared.”
“We have reached the end,” Bosnian president Izetbegovíc told Bernard-Henri Levy early in July 1992. “We have no food, no arms, no hope. We are the Warsaw ghetto. Will the world once more leave the people of the Warsaw ghetto to perish?”34 On July 14, an amateur radio operator in Sarajevo transmitted a similar message: “We are awaiting death together. Please tell the world that we beg them to do something to stop these attacks as quickly as possible.”
“Everywhere,” Roy Gutman wrote, “Serb ethnic cleansing, the euphemism for murder, rape, and torture, was continuing against Muslims and Roman Catholic Croats. The Serb onslaught had displaced two million civilians and left ten thousand dead. It was the most vicious conflict seen in Europe or nearly anywhere else since World War II. But the steam had run out of Bush’s presidency.”35 According to Gutman, at the G-7 meeting early in July 1992, when violence was already widespread in Yugoslavia, Bush had said, “I don’t think anybody suggests that if there is a hiccup here or there or a conflict here or there that the United States is going to send troops.”36
Bush’s reaction was no different from that of other Western leaders, all of whom were essentially passive in the face of near genocide in Bosnia. Despite reports of cruelty worse than anything seen in Europe since World War II, the Western leaders equivocated, procrastinated, and offered only the most measured and detached responses. Though conditions in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina worsened throughout 1991 and 1992, the Western leaders responded to Serbian aggression mainly by assuring one another that there was little they could do.
At the end of 1992, Robert Gates, Bush’s CIA director, reviewed the war’s human costs: “At least nineteen thousand persons have been killed…and perhaps another hundred thousand have died as a result of the hardships created by the war. At least three million Bosnians have lost their homes, and more than five hundred thousand have fled to neighboring nations…Most of the victims have been Slavic Muslims, who formed 44 percent of the republic’s population before the war, while Serbs made up about 31 percent.”37
The harsh, dehumanizing policies imposed by Serbs in conquered Bosnian territory bore a stark resemblance to those imposed by Nazi occupiers a half century earlier. In September 1992, the Associated Press published an abbreviated version of the declaration issued in the Bosnian town of Celmac.38 Among the many restrictions, non-Serb citizens were not allowed to move around the town from 4:00 PM to 6:00 AM; to swim in the rivers, fish, or hunt; drive motor vehicles; to gather in groups of more than three; to use telephones except in post offices; or to wear uniforms of any kind. They were expected to do any tasks and work assigned to them.
The behavior of Bosnia’s neighbors and the international organizations in ignoring Serbian brutality demonstrated the inadequacy of the elaborate arrangements that had been constructed to deal with international crises. It also called to mind a July 1938
conference in Evian, France, assembled to consider how to deal with Adolf Hitler. In that infamous meeting, a New York Times correspondent wrote, “[L]eaders of the three great democracies—the United States, the United Kingdom and France—engaged in a nontruthful poker game…in which each of the players refused even to contemplate raising the stakes.”39
The UN response to Serbia was distorted by a persistent attitude of neutrality toward victim and victimizer, and by the mistaken expectation that an arms embargo would diminish the violence, when it actually empowered the Serbs while denying Croats and Muslims the weapons they needed to defend themselves. U.S. and NATO officials repeatedly told one another that “no one was innocent” in the Balkans, implying that no one was to blame. But in fact Serbia was clearly the aggressor, and Bosnia and Croatia unmistakably victims. The passivity and impotence of the UN, the United States, the EC, the Western European Union (WEU), and NATO in facing this horror sapped the political and moral foundations of collective action.
The Bush administration, which had taken the lead in Kuwait, offered several explanations for its failure to act, notably the “unsolvable nature” of the tragedy of interethnic violence and the “European” character of these Yugoslav wars. Assistant Secretary of State Ralph Johnson offered this limp excuse: “The bottom line is that the world community cannot stop Yugoslavs from killing one another so long as they are determined to do so…. Only the people of Yugoslavia and their leaders can do that.”40 That excuse was a convenient way of blaming the victim and excusing the observer.
Secretary of State James Baker, having concluded that it was in the interest of the United States to prevent this humanitarian nightmare from continuing, emphasized the importance of multilateral pressure to enforce an ending to the conflict.41 He took a series of diplomatic measures, withdrawing recognition from Belgrade’s ambassador to the United States, closing the Yugoslav consulate in Chicago, stepping up consultations with allies on relief operations in Sarajevo. Baker seemed astonished at the Serbians’ behavior: “It’s hard to believe,” he testified later, “that armed forces will fire artillery and mortars indiscriminately into the heart of a city, flushing defenseless men, women and children out into the streets and then shooting them.”42 But his disbelief never moved him to address the crisis effectively.
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