THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  On April 27, Milosevic declared a new Yugoslav state composed of Serbia and Montenegro. On May 22, Bosnia was admitted to the U.N. as a member state along with Yugoslavia, Slovenia, and Croatia. Milosevic declared that all federal troops had been withdrawn from Bosnia; in June a report of the Secretary General of the U.N. also claimed that there were no Serbian soldiers in Bosnia. While this may have been formally true—JNA soldiers were “released” to join the Bosnian Serb army—it was not the reality. Indeed as James Gow noted:

  The continuing presence in Bosnia after independence of the JNA, loyal to Belgrade, meant that although there were significant incursions across the River Drina between Serbia and Bosnia, there were also 80,000 troops already based in Bosnia.9

  In 1992, the Bosnian Serbs set up a gulag of prison camps and detention facilities holding tens of thousands of Muslims and Croats. International investigators were denied access, though escapees described atrocities that they claimed were perpetrated in these camps. In the summer of 1992, an intrepid Newsday reporter penetrated one of the Serbian concentration camps, verifying these claims and exposing horrors that Europe had not seen since 1945. These exposés prompted Governor Bill Clinton to say on August 5, during his campaign for the presidency, “If the horrors of the Holocaust taught us anything, it is the high cost of remaining silent and paralyzed in the face of ethnic cleansing.” The next day, asked what he proposed, he stated, “We cannot afford to ignore what appears to be a deliberate and systematic extermination of human beings based on their ethnic origin; I would start with air power against the Serbs.”10

  In response to mounting public outcry, the United Nations Security Council voted to send U.N. peacekeepers to Bosnia. Although it was estimated that 35,000 troops would be required for this mission, less than 7,000 were sent, largely drawn from British, French, Canadian, and Dutch forces. The arrival of U.N. troops was greeted with euphoria in Bosnia. Serb forces halted their attacks for a time in order to determine what effect the U.N. presence in Bosnia would have. These forces proved, along with the U.N. arms embargo, to be a fatal addition to the Bosnian equation. Now the Europeans—particularly the British—would be able to veto any actions against the Serbs on the grounds that U.N. or NATO armed action exposed their peacekeepers to reprisals.

  In October 1992 Cyrus Vance, representing the U.N., and David Owen, who had replaced Lord Carrington for the E.C., proposed a new peace-keeping plan. It effectively recognized the ground gains by the Serbian forces and carved up Bosnia into various enclaves. The U.S. ceased supporting the no-fly zone which the British in December had argued against enforcing in any case—and which, though adopted by the Security Council in October 1992, would not actually be enforced until April 1993 by NATO—and began looking to the Vance-Owen Plan as offering a way out. Milosevic urged the Bosnian Serbs to accept the Vance-Owen Plan, and the United States strongly advised the Bosnian Muslims to agree, despite some misgivings over the Plan's apparent validation of Serbian territorial aggression.

  In February 1993 the new American secretary of state, Warren Christopher, said that the “full weight of American diplomacy [would be brought] to bear” to win acceptance of the Vance-Owen peace plan that left the Bosnians only a fraction of their national territory. When the Bosnians were eventually coerced by the Americans into agreeing to the plan, the Bosnian Serbs rejected it. The Serbs saw no reason to give up any of their gains. Indeed, now the killing began in earnest as Serbs tried to garner new territory that might be converted at the diplomatic table into legitimate possession by another international peace plan. A new term had entered the world's lexicon: “ethnic cleansing.” This phrase was applied to the Serbian strategy of terrorizing the countryside in order to drive Muslims into surrounded and shelled cities. In this they were inadvertently encouraged by the United States, which had pressed for acceptance of a plan that ratified Serbian ground gains.

  In May 1993, Christopher began referring to the conflict as a Yugoslav civil war, despite the fact that Bosnia had been a member of the U.N. for more than a year by that time. The U.S., downplaying allegations of Serbian atrocities, now said that all parties shared responsibility for human rights violations. The New York Times noted in April 1993 that the Clinton administration had “begun to talk about Bosnia differently, to cast the problem there less as a moral tragedy which would make American inaction immoral—and more as a tribal feud that no outsider could hope to settle.” The president explained the difficulty of getting agreement on a peace plan by observing that “I would think these fights between the Serbs and the Bosnian Muslims and the Croats go back so many centuries, they have such powerful roots that it may be that it's more difficult for the people to make a change than for their leaders.”

  In May the Contact Group—formed by the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Russia—proposed a plan of safe areas into which the fleeing Muslims could go for protection, and in June the Security Council agreed to secure these areas by “all necessary measures,” including military force. The six “safe areas” announced by the U.N. Security Council were Sarajevo, Zepa, Bihac, Srebrenica, Tuzla, and Gorazde. Phillippe Morillon, the U.N. commander, negotiated an accord by which the Muslim defenders of Srebrenica handed over their weapons. He proclaimed that “an attack on Srebrenica now would be an attack on the whole world” and stated, “I will never leave you.” For a brief period, attacks on Srebrenica, swollen with refugees driven into the town by Serb offensives in the countryside, halted. But on May 14, 1993, President Clinton stated that “[o]ur interest is in seeing, in my view at least, that the U.N. does not foreordain the outcome of a civil war,” and Morillon withdrew to Sarajevo, where he was removed by the U.N. secretary-general, and was ultimately replaced by the more tractable British general, Michael Rose.

  These events had the effect of encouraging the Serb forces in Bosnia to step up the violence and press their claims more aggressively, which puzzled and bewildered the rest of the world, including the United States. Although the Serbs seemed so unreasonable, in fact they were simply responding to the incentives offered by peace plans that recognized whatever they could take on the ground. No one seemed to appreciate that such encouragement was precisely what at least one state, the United Kingdom, actually had in mind because it believed that further resistance by the Bosnians was doomed and that the sooner the war was over and Bosnia partitioned along lines that recognized the military realities, the better for all concerned. Only the Americans appeared to have clung to the illusion that the Serbs would come around to the Vance-Owen Plan, or something like it, because the international community was united in proposing it and because the Serbs would not wish to defy the great powers indefinitely.

  In one day in July 1993, 3,777 artillery shells fell on Sarajevo, a U.N.designated “safe area” and part of the “heavy weapons exclusion zone” announced by the Contact Group.* President Clinton, in Asia for an economic summit, was enraged and asked his national security advisor to submit a plan to break the siege. But the Pentagon plan that resulted called for 80,000 troops, and this was thought politically unsupportable; the president had hoped perhaps 10,000 would be enough, and he dropped the idea. Then on October 20, 1993, he announced that “the conflict in Bosnia is ultimately for the parties to resolve” and repeated this later, saying: “Until these folks get tired of killing each other… bad things will continue to happen.”

  On February 4, 1994, a mortar attack on a Sarajevo market killed sixty-eight and injured another two hundred. Again public opinion was outraged by events—Sarajevo had been under siege for almost two years at this point—and again a weapons exclusion zone around Sarajevo was proclaimed. A small number of NATO air strikes occurred, and the Serbs actually turned over heavy weapons within the zone. For a period, the daily bombardment of Sarajevo ceased. Citizens of the besieged town could walk rather than run across streets raked by sniper fire. The Serbs regrouped to determine how to continue their siege without their heavy weapons. But the U.N.
troops, lightly armed and dispersed, were effectively captives of the Serbs, and the U.N. commander, General Rose, could not bring himself to call on NATO for further support that might risk retaliation against his troops. U.S. proposals for the use of force against the Serbs were repeatedly vetoed by the U.N. Political Counselor, who reported to the U.N. Secretary-General, and the weapons turned over during this period were later simply reclaimed by the Serbs. In April, only two months later, Rose sent troops to Gorazde, one of the six safe areas, but was compelled to allow them to be disarmed by the Serbs. On April 23, President Clinton demanded that the Serbs cease shelling Gorazde, stating that if this did not happen, NATO would conduct “massive air strikes,” including “strategic targets.”11 The Serbs appear to have learned not to credit such threats and replied by taking U.N. peacekeepers hostage; when this occurred, NATO action was canceled. In May, Tuzla, another safe area, was shelled, killing seventy in a single day. On May 3, 1994, the President stated, obviously disheartened, and unable despite repeated efforts to move his allies, “I did the best I could. I moved as quickly as I could. I think we have shown a good deal of resolve.”12

  In the ensuing year, safe areas at Gorazde, Zepa, and Srebrenica were all isolated, bombarded, and put under siege, and a fourth safe area, Tuzla, was also again attacked. On June 5, 1995, an anguished president said, “It's tragic, it's terrible. But these enmities go back five hundred years. Do we have the capacity to impose a settlement on people who want to continue fighting? We cannot do that. So I believe we're doing the right thing.” Then on July 11, 1995, 400 Dutch peacekeepers watched as Srebrenica, one of the “safe areas,” was overrun and “sanitized” by occupying Serbs. Approximately 8,200 men and an undetermined number of women were trucked out by the Serbs and murdered, many within the hearing of the Dutch forces allegedly deployed to protect them. This left Sarajevo itself, Gorazde (which was now cut off from the outside), Bihac, and Zepa surrounded.

  Finally in August of 1995 another mortar attack on the Sarajevo market galvanized public opinion. Seven shells fell within ten minutes, killing 37 persons and wounding 84. The next day U.N. peacekeepers deserted Gorazde, which ironically was a necessary step to true protection of the safe area. Rose's successor as commander, General Rupert Smith, asked for NATO air strikes, and following a two-week series of air and artillery strikes on Serb positions, the Serb campaign against Gorazde was halted and the siege of Sarajevo was finally lifted. Croatian forces entered the war in September and relieved the safe area at Bihac, driving about 100,000 civilian Serbs out of Croatia in a Croatian variant of ethnic cleansing. An agreement was forced upon the parties by the United States at an air force base in Dayton, Ohio. The agreement was subject to all the vagaries of hostilities in Bosnia and politics in the United States, but it soon became clear that the killing of Muslims had almost completely stopped as a result of the combined efforts of NATO Rapid Reaction Force shelling, the Croatian offensive, and U.S. air intervention. Despite some constitutional legerdemain on the part of U.S. negotiators, the country was effectively partitioned, owing to the unwillingness of the West to enforce the guarantees of the agreement that provide for repatriation of those systematically driven from their homes. The hardest days, diplomatically, lay ahead over communities like Brcko that link disparate enclaves of Serbs, and complications arising from the U.S.-contrived Croatian-Muslim federation. The murder of Muslim civilians with JNA heavy weapons, however, had been stopped by air and artillery strikes that took only about fourteen days and incurred not a single American casualty.

  IV.

  Darley and Latane's work can usefully be applied to the Bosnian emergency by examining the various stages that the bystander goes through before actually acting. With some slight reworking of their categories, I take there to be five stages: notice, definition, decision, assignment, and implementation. The bystander's attention must be forcibly drawn to the event so that she realizes something unusual is happening (notice); she must then recognize the event as an emergency, and not simply an ordinary event that appears to be an emergency (definition); she must then find conclusively good reasons for action (decision); and then determine who should act (assignment); and finally commit to some particular action and see that it is done (implementation). If an ambiguity is introduced at any stage—“Did I actually hear someone cry for help, or was that the sound of the television in the next room?” —the decision procedure is aborted and the cycle must begin all over again. This anxious cycling, not apathy, is what Darley and Latane found to be the state of mind of the persons who failed to intervene in the Kitty Genovese case. In the example of Bosnia, there were frequent efforts by government officials to introduce ambiguities into the debate, no doubt because these officials had real doubts themselves as to the true nature of the facts, but also because they wished to deflect public calls for action that they believed would be futile or counter-productive, while the Serbs maintained what might well be called a “strategy of ambiguity” in order to prevent Western intervention.

  NOTICE: GETTING OUR ATTENTION

  There are two parallel institutions, among others, that operate to bring the events of an emergency to our attention: the news media and the intelligence agencies. The latter's work is almost exclusively confined to alerting public officials, but the former, though they deal with the mass of the public, are no less powerful in moving official opinion, partly because officials must cope with public opinion shaped by the news media. Furthermore, there is some interplay between the intelligence product and the stories reported by journalists: intelligence reports can be leaked, or tailored to give a distorted picture to the press for political reasons.

  American officials appear to have been well served by their intelligence agencies in having the looming crisis in Yugoslavia brought to their attention early on, and we may assume that the agencies of other states were also monitoring the situation. In 1990 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) correctly predicted the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia; at the beginning of 1992, with diplomatic attention focused on negotiations to achieve a cease-fire in the Second Yugoslav War (in Croatia), the CIA foresaw that the Third Yugoslav War (the war in Bosnia) 13 was about to begin. Moreover, the CIA also predicted that recognition of Bosnia might serve as a pretext for war against that state, absent some larger effort at containing or deterring the aggressive JNA and the Serbs. Finally, according to several former officials, the State Department was aware of the existence of Serbian detention centers for Bosnian Muslims as early as April of 1992, and by June had confirmed reports of torture and concentration camps.14

  The American public and the publics of other concerned countries did not have access to these reports, of course, but they were nevertheless kept informed of events in Bosnia by televised and print journalism. There really can be no doubt that Cable News Network (CNN) was an influential factor in bringing the crisis to the attention of the public. This has also been the case in other emergencies: the spectacles of starvation in Somalia and mass slaughter in Rwanda are two recent examples of events that simply would not have been noticed in earlier periods. The “CNN Effect”— the jolt to public opinion given by televised attention to foreign crises—is now beyond question.* One can see this in the preoccupation of the public with events in Somalia, but not in the Sudan, in Haiti but not in Liberia, in Chechnya but not in Nagorno-Karabakh. In the first of each pair, the public was made to notice that something unusual and dramatic was happening; in the second, owing to the difficulty of getting televised coverage of events there, the public was not provided the same riveting and anguishing images, with the result that a great number of people simply never “noticed” those events.

  In Bosnia this can be well illustrated by the televised accounts of three separate bombings of Sarajevo. In the course of the siege, more than 600,000 shells fell on a civilian capital with no significant military production. But it was three bombings of marketplaces that somehow stirred the public imagination.15 In 1992 one such
bombing led directly to U.N. economic sanctions against Serbia and Montenegro. In February 1994 a market bombing, which killed sixty-nine, prompted NATO to issue an ultimatum for Serbs to withdraw their heavy artillery. Finally, in August 1995, it was the bombing of a Sarajevo market by Serb mortars, which killed thirty-seven and wounded eighty-four, to which NATO responded with the bombing and artillery campaign that broke the siege of the city. One can only speculate about the reasons for such a reaction. After all, libraries, mosques, hospitals, and schools in Sarajevo had all been targeted and hit by the Serbs; what was it about the bombing of a market that seemed to hit a nerve in public opinion? Perhaps it had to do with the televised images such bombing provided. Unlike the scenes of bombed-out buildings, the photos of the market, with colorful clothes strewn among the vegetables and fruit stalls, the paving stones still wet and vivid with blood, provided disturbing yet compelling images. It was possible to televise such an atrocity only moments after it had occurred, with the shock still visible on the faces of the victims, and the wounded and dying bodies in disarray in what was otherwise a familiar and domestic setting. Shopping in an open-air market is so innocent and pleasant an act, so tied to bringing home food for a family, that its violent disruption is bound to capture our attention and shake our complacency.

  While the effect of televised images is hard to overstate, I am inclined to believe that it was the print media that were most effective at bringing the public to a recognition that events in Bosnia demanded their attention. This was done in three ways: first, by deepening the significance of the televised images through the evocative writing of journalists pointing out the cultural and historic importance of ethnic cleansing; second, by exposing governments in acts that were designed to obscure public notice of these events; third, by casting doubt on the role of other media, especially the Milosevic-controlled Serb media organs.