THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  III.

  When President Clinton said, mistakenly, that the current conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina goes back to the eleventh century, he exposed more than a careless speechwriter of dubious erudition; rather he showed that he was unable to appreciate just what had happened.

  The war in Bosnia was the culmination of a constitutional implosion that occurred in Yugoslavia as a result of the collapse of a one-party Communist dictatorship and its replacement by means of media-dominated multiparty elections. This implosion propelled Slobodan Milosevic into the leadership of the Serbian Communist Party and his reinvention of the Party as the nationalist champion of Serbs. His subsequent actions, when coupled with a system of free elections in the federated states of Yugoslavia, led to the rapid secession of Slovenia and Croatia, which in turn led, finally, to the dismemberment of Bosnia. Four wars were fought—in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo—and four new states ultimately emerged from this constitutional and strategic process: Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro, and the Croatian-Bosnian Confederation.

  There are two parts to this story. In the background is the history of the evolution of the Yugoslav state. In the foreground is the story of killers who came to Bosnia, at first timorously but murderously, and who were repeatedly frightened away by declarations on the part of the great powers, but who returned when these declarations proved to be mere threats. These killers returned, time and again, until 144,108 persons, including 16,795 children, had been murdered; 171,837 wounded (including 34,520 children), 12,290 disabled (including 1,879 children); in Sarajevo alone 10,436 were killed (of whom 1,592 were children). Not included are the statistics for the U.N.-declared “safe areas” of Srebrenica or Zepa, where the figures for massacres conducted by Serbian forces in the presence of U.N. peacekeepers were not complete as of this writing.4 As will be seen, the constitutional metamorphoses that the Yugoslav state underwent are intimately connected to the slaughter and degradation of the Bosnian Muslims, leading finally to the discrediting of the United Nations and the Wilsonian system of international law.

  But first we must acquaint ourselves with some background information: the history of the Yugoslav nation-state, its national composition, and then a more detailed year-by-year recitation of the events from 1991 to 1995.

  The post-Versailles constitution of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes of 1921 provided for a parliamentary democracy. This state located its capital in Belgrade and was quickly dominated by Serbs, to the disadvantage of Croat political groups. In 1928 Stjepan Radich, the Croat political leader, was shot to death on the floor of the National Assembly. The following year King Alexander dissolved the parliament, suspended the constitution, and seized absolute power. In Croatia a separatist group was formed, the notorious Ustasa, which assassinated Alexander in 1934. When the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, the Ustasa allied with the invaders and governed that portion of the country it was able to pacify. The Ustasa forced Orthodox Christians to convert to Roman Catholicism, rounded up Jews, and massacred about 400,000 Serbs. This post-Versailles, fascist campaign was the first occasion of a war between Serbs and Croats. It is not true that there is a long history of conflict between these native Balkan groups.

  In addition to the claim that the recent wars in Yugoslavia are a continuation of an ancient conflict, it is often said that the war in Bosnia is an ethnic war. This too tends to obscure the issue, exaggerating the strangeness and the intractability of the conflict's sources. One way to appreciate the cultural history of the Balkans is to imagine three great cultural tectonic plates that come together there. To the west is the inheritance of Rome: the experience of the Renaissance, the Roman Catholic Church, the entire collection of attitudes that we think of as “Western.” From the east, the legacy is Byzantine: Eastern Orthodox in religion, authoritarian in politics. From the south comes the Islamic tradition brought to Europe by the Turks.

  These three cultural plates divide what is ethnically a single people, the Slavs of the southern peninsula. All the Yugoslav groups in the war— Croats, Serbians, and Muslims—speak the same language, have the same genetic characteristics, and are to a very large degree intermarried. Indeed, until the twentieth century Croats and Serbs collaborated to fight the Turks and to free themselves from the Austro-Hungarian empire. The Muslims, whom the Serbian terrorists are fond of calling “Turks,” are in fact generally believed to be descendants of Bogomil Christians who suffered forcible conversion at the hands of the Ottoman Turks.

  To say that this is an “ethnic conflict” is thus not quite right. There are no “ethnic Muslims” and in a strict sense there are really no ethnic Serbs or Croats, unless you think that Catholic Anglo-Canadians and Protestant Anglo-Americans are “ethnically” distinct. Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, and Muslims in all of these states are all Slavs: indeed the word “Yugoslavia” means “the land of the South Slavs.”

  Serbian resistance to the Nazis and the Ustasa was initially led by Draza Mihailovic with military support by the British. This group was known as the Chetniks. After the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany in the summer of 1941, a communist insurgency known as the Partisans arose. This force, led by Josip Broz, was more successful than the Chetniks against the Nazis and Croats. Eventually Broz's partisans were armed and supported by the British, despite the fact that the arms were often used against the former allies of the British—the Mihailovic forces—and were ultimately, and predictably, used to seize power for the Communists after the war.

  Broz, whose partisan name was “Tito,” ruled a brutal police state from 1945 until 1980. His conflicts with Stalin, however, and his position as a leader of the world nonaligned movement made him an attractive figure to many in the West. Moreover, because he was a Communist Croat, he seemed to bridge the conflicts of the Yugoslav experience in the Second World War. For these reasons, perhaps, the extent of his postwar domestic violence was greatly underappreciated by the international community.

  Because Yugoslavia faced the virtual certainty of invasions by both the Warsaw Pact and NATO should war between those two alliances break out, Yugoslavia built up a well-equipped, well-supplied, modernized armored force. About half the federal budget of Yugoslavia went to the National Army (JNA). The officer corps was two-thirds Serbian, and the bureaucratic apparatus of the Communist Party and the organs of state were also dominated by Serbs.

  Under Tito, Yugoslavia became again a federation of six republics. These boundaries roughly conformed to the ancient provinces that had existed in this region since the Middle Ages, but they did not strictly conform to any particular cultural division. Indeed, Serbia itself is only about 80 percent Serbian; Bosnia has no clear majority, being somewhat less than half Muslim. In 1974 Tito took constitutional steps to give more authority to the republics. It is this constitution that set the context for the conflict of the 1990s, because the controversial constitutional rearrangement of 1974 was in place when the shattering events of the late 1980s swept away the communist governments of Eastern and Central Europe. In addition to devolving power from Belgrade to the six capitals, the 1974 constitution granted autonomous authority to two provinces within Serbia itself. Kosovo (largely Albanian in makeup with a Serbian minority), and Vojvodina (largely Hungarian with a Serbian minority) border on Albania and Hungary, respectively. Granting them political autonomy was deeply resented by Serbia, and there were frequent reports in the Serbian media of mistreatment of the Serbian minorities in these two provinces.

  In 1980 Tito died, and the federal presidency now circulated among the presidents of each of the six republics. Six years later, the Serbian Communist leader Slobodan Milosevic came to power in Belgrade. He saw that his future leadership and the future of Serbia lay not with the crumbling Communist powers in Central and Eastern Europe but rather, paradoxically, in the ethnically fraught province of Kosovo. It was in Kosovo that the Albanian majority, which is Muslim by religion, had been harassing Serbs and driving them out by various means. In
1987, Milosevic got control of the Serbian press, and he immediately made Kosovo the centerpiece of his campaign. The state-controlled press repeated a drumbeat of atrocity stories in which Albanian Muslims in Kosovo were reported to have terrorized minority Serbs. That same year Milosevic went to Kosovo and after an all-night mass meeting with Serbs in the province dramatically promised them that “nobody would ever beat the Serb again.” During the next two years, Milosevic organized a pan-Serb movement and sponsored solidarity meetings throughout Yugoslavia on the pretext of helping the embattled Kosovo Serbs. In 1988 Milosevic was able to seize control of the Kosovo government and force the Albanian leaders to resign in the face of mob violence. Later these leaders were arrested. He then turned his attention to Vojvodina, where he was able to replicate his Kosovo campaign with an “antibureaucratic revolution” aimed at the provincial government.

  In the spring of 1990, elections following the disintegration of the single-party system in Yugoslavia brought nationalists to power in Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia. Thus by the time the Communist Party collapsed in 1990 Milosevic had been able to segue from his position as head of the Serbian Communist Party to a new role as the leader of the Serbian nation. In Croatia the Croatian extremist Franco Tudjman, formerly a henchman of Tito, came to power on a platform of secession from the Yugoslav state.

  In May of 1991, Milosevic sent the JNA into Kosovo and Vojvodina, effectively ending their autonomous status and turning them into police states. These measures redeemed his pledge to reunite a Serbia divided by the 1974 constitution.5 Public demonstrations staged by Milosevic had already ousted the Montenegrin party leadership in 1989 and installed a Milosevic ally in power there. Serbia now controlled four out of the eight votes governing the federal presidency. Milosevic then refused to permit the Croat president to rotate into the Yugoslav presidency, as provided by the constitution. All this had the effect of completely unsettling the populations in the other Yugoslav provinces. It appeared that Milosevic had hit upon an effective strategy for turning the Yugoslav constitution into an instrument by means of which he could create a Serbian state. That same month the Croatians voted overwhelmingly in favor of independence, as had Slovenia the preceding December. Initially the two republics had sought greater autonomy within Yugoslavia, but Milosevic had blocked this; now the experiences of Kosovo and Vojvodina gave fresh impetus to complete secession.

  On June 25, 1991, Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence from the state of Yugoslavia. This set off a brief war between Slovenia and the JNA, and a protracted war in Croatia between the newly independent government of Croatia and the Serbian minority, supported by the JNA. The ten-day war in Slovenia ended in mid-July with the withdrawal of the JNA and the transfer of full-scale hostilities to Croatia. In August a Serbian revolt in Croatia broke out in Dalmatia and around Knin.

  Serb minorities believed they faced real dangers in Croatia along the coast of the Adriatic, and above the northern tip of Bosnia, on the border between Serbia and Croatia, and in a land-locked enclave about seventy miles west of Serbia. Here the Serbs had experienced some of the worst atrocities of World War II, and here they now followed with apprehension the rabid nationalist campaigns of Tudjman. When war finally came to Croatia, it was largely owing to Milosevic's success in portraying his struggle for “Serb rights” as part of the constitutional campaign to preserve Yugoslavia. This brought the JNA into Croatia on the side of the Croatian Serbs. Local Serb tactics in Krajina, a Serbian enclave in Croatia, engaged Croat forces in armed conflict, thereby enabling the JNA to intervene, claiming to separate the parties, but in effect, protecting and arming the insurgent Serbs. In the midst of the Serbian/JNA campaign in Croatia, the Bosnian Serbs set up their own parliament. By August, one-third of Croatia had fallen to the Serbs and Croatia had been stripped of its federal weapons and munitions.

  Thus the war in Croatia was significantly different from that in Slovenia. It was driven by Serb secessionists who wished to dismember Croatia, not by Croatian secessionists who wanted to leave Yugoslavia. Or, to put it differently, “[u]ltimately the war in Croatia, and later in Bosnia, was not so much a war of secession but a war provoked and waged by Serb nationalists and the Yugoslav army to establish a new Yugoslavia with new international borders.”6 It was a crucial mistake for the West to credit Milosevic's assertions that the state of Yugoslavia persisted at this point, allowing him to lay claim to the enormous magazines and matériel stationed in Slovenia on the northern border of Yugoslavia, where a Cold War invasion had been anticipated, and permitting him to return these stores to Serbia. But other European countries were pleased to have stopped the fighting in Slovenia through the Brioni Agreement and sympathized with Milosevic's protest that he had thereby lost a wealthy and important province. In fact, Milosevic was only too happy to see Slovenia go. This development now gave him a majority of 4 – 3 in the federal presidency, allowed him to quiet fears about German intervention on behalf of Slovenia, and permitted him to turn his attentions to Croatia. Unlike Slovenia, which had a small Serb minority, Croatia had about 600,000 Serbs living in four separated areas.

  In the summer of 1991, following the end of the war in Slovenia, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands proposed sending a ground force to Yugoslavia. Reports of atrocities in Slavonia and other parts of Croatia were coming out of the now-collapsed state. Britain, however, resolutely opposed all efforts at sending troops and on September 19 was able to broker a statement on behalf of the European Community to the effect that no military intervention by E.C. states was contemplated. Within days, the Serbs unleashed massive attacks on various points in southern Croatia. The ancient and defenseless Adriatic city of Dubrovnik was shelled from the sea under the eyes of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, which duly reported each salvo but did not interfere. At the same time the Serbs began the siege of Vukovar, which was to prove a model for future campaigns. During the shelling of Dubrovnik, Serbian naval forces had been markedly anxious out of fear that the overwhelming power of the U.S. carrier task force that shadowed them might be used to destroy their attacking vessels. When nothing happened, the Serbs were emboldened. When the city of Vukovar surrendered in November, its inhabitants were massacred by Serb irregulars, and several hundred wounded Croatian soldiers were taken from a hospital in Vukovar, shot in a field, and buried in a mass grave. International forensic experts were subsequently denied access.7

  In September the European Community sponsored a peace conference at The Hague. Lord Carrington was appointed by the European Union (as the E.C. became in November 1993), and in October he began efforts at mediation. This greatly respected figure saw the conflict as a reprise of the World War II Serb-Croat fighting. Both sides were equally culpable, and the trick was to contain the bloodshed through partition. That same month, Britain suggested to Serbia that it seek an arms embargo covering all the states of Yugoslavia. Perhaps it was thought in London that by this means any illusions about breaking away from Yugoslavia would be stilled in Bosnia, or at least that the parties would quickly come to terms with Serbia because without arms it would be futile to oppose the well-equipped JNA. In any event, in September the United Nations Security Council duly imposed an arms embargo against all the states of the former Yugoslavia.

  In January 1992 the U.N. envoy Cyrus Vance achieved a negotiated cease-fire, and U.N. peacekeepers were stationed in Croatia to monitor compliance with the agreement. In accordance with the U.N. cease-fire, the JNA withdrew from Croatia. It proceeded to turn over its weapons* to the Bosnian Serbs, and Serbian/JNA heavy artillery took up positions around the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. The former states of Yugoslavia now braced for the third Yugoslav war—in Bosnia, where the Serbs now had a monopoly on heavy and advanced weaponry, while the Bosnian government was constrained from obtaining arms by the international embargo.

  Near the end of the previous year, Bosnia had been forced to confront the possibility that it would have to withdraw from the Yugoslav federation. The Bosnian pre
sident, the former anti-Communist dissident Izetbe-govic, had traveled to Ljubljana and Zagreb on countless missions desperately trying to get the Slovenes and Croats to stay in the federation. The last thing the Bosnian leadership wanted was to face new independent states in Serbia and Croatia that could carry their war into Bosnia in order to incorporate areas with substantial Croat and Serb populations. The multicultural state of Bosnia could only survive within the umbrella of the Yugoslav federation. Milosevic, however, had methodically destroyed this option. The Hague peace conference had given an offer of E.C. recognition to any republic that met certain criteria for statehood; when Croatia and Slovenia prepared for independence, the Bosnians realized they could not remain in a federation virtually alone with Milosevic. Bosnia could not risk becoming the Kosovo or Vojvodina of the 1990s.

  In January 1992 the E.C., after considerable debate and over Carrington's objections, recognized Croatian and Slovenian independence. The E.C. deferred action on Bosnia pending a referendum. Bosnia then held a referendum on independence in March. In an election boycotted by the Bosnian Serbs, 65 percent voted for statehood.

  By April, there were reports of widespread shootings and bombings in Banja Luka and Mostar by Serb irregulars.8 The JNA announced it was necessary to intervene in Bosnia to protect Serbs. In the first six weeks of the Bosnian war that ensued, Serb forces, using the JNA command structure and weapons, seized about 60 percent of Bosnia. Bosnian Croats took another 15 percent. The Bosnian army itself was without JNA weapons and, in an absurd gesture aimed at reducing tensions, had voluntarily given up its territorial arms.