THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  On September 22, 1991, during the war in Croatia, the New York Times wrote in an editorial:

  Destruction on this scale has no precedent in Europe since Nazi Germany's vengeful “Baedeker” raids on English cathedral cities in 1942, and the Allied firebombing of Dresden… The loss of life in Yugoslavia is tragic. It piles horror upon horror to engage as well in cultural extermination.16

  The Washington Post picked up this theme when the war in Bosnia began, publishing on October 16, 1992, this passage:

  The atrocity of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia is apparently an even more thorough business than the evidence of widespread murder, deportations and brutality would indicate… Serbian attacks… have purposely and successfully targeted national libraries, museums and archives… a kind of “ethnic cleansing” that adds a chilling new dimension to the atrocities that now dominate the news.17

  Articles of this kind added depth to the CNN reporting by asking the public to notice a dimension of the emergency that is hard to picture on television, the cultural aspect of the ethnic cleansing of the Serbian campaigns.

  The New York Times was also willing to expose efforts by the U.S. government to avoid notice. On August 27, 1992, the Times* charged that the State Department had purposefully not tried to confirm reports of Serbian ethnic cleansing for fear of triggering the Genocide Convention. On December 20, 1992, the Times reported that, having received reports in the spring of concentration camps where Muslims were tortured and murdered, “Washington did not press for immediate investigation of the camps. Instead, it tried to keep the reports from becoming public.” It was not until the summer of 1992 that a reporter was able to visit the camps and publish testimony of murders and atrocities. Even then, “the U.S. [merely] expressed concern and insisted that the Red Cross be allowed into the camps. It said nothing about freeing those imprisoned or punishing the perpetrators.” Le Monde reported that the United Nations had attempted to suppress its own report for more than a year showing that “Serbs alone have pursued ethnic cleansing as a planned and systematic government policy.”18

  Finally, print media called attention to the role of the media itself in creating Serbian fanaticism and in attempting to prevent the world from noticing the crisis. The Times in an editorial published November 7, 1992, pointed out that when the JNA began the siege of Sarajevo one of the first targets of their bombardment was the television tower that allowed Bosnia's independent, multiethnic TV station to broadcast. Milosevic's media campaigns were widely noted, including the observation by the Times that “a climate of hate did not exist throughout Yugoslavia before warmongers created it, partly by manipulating the news.”

  At first, intelligence reporting and official reaction seemed to be in synch. As early as September 1991—three months after the outbreak of the First Yugoslav War (in Slovenia)—Secretary of State James Baker denounced the JNA for “actively supporting local Serbian forces… causing the deaths of citizens it is constitutionally supposed to protect” and went before the U.N. Security Council to say that “the Serbian leadership” and the JNA were “working in tandem [to] create a ‘small Yugoslavia' or ‘greater Serbia.’” But it simply wasn't clear that events in Yugoslavia, which had successfully been brought to the attention of world leaders and their publics, constituted a real emergency—a systematically organized mass killing—and should be understood that way. Instead, for a long time it appeared that preserving the Yugoslav state in its entirety could stave off a true emergency. As a result, some eight months after Slovenia made its first formal move toward secession, the United States and the E.C. member states, as well as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), were still voicing continued support for a unified state under Belgrade. Baker asserted that the United States would not recognize the independence of Slovenia and Croatia “under any circumstances.” When independence was declared by the two republics, “[b]oth the Bush administration, through the personal visit to Belgrade… of Secretary of State James Baker, and the members of the European Community… warned Slovenia and Croatia that they will find neither diplomatic recognition nor economic assistance following a unilateral decision on their part to quit the Yugoslav system and declare themselves independent.”19

  Thus it was obviously not enough to merely notice, as Baker clearly did. There also had to be a recognition of emergency, and this required an understanding of the situation that, for a long time, eluded the United States and its European allies.

  DEFINITION: RECOGNIZING AS AN EMERGENCY

  This recognition was long in coming. Indeed, several ideas were deployed, at different times, to effect what the Washington Post called “a flight from reality” and a condition of “denial.”20 Perhaps the most potent of these was that the conflict in Bosnia was a “civil war” and thus part of the normal evolution of state formation. Events worthy of notice were taking place, perhaps, but they did not constitute a true emergency. The appropriate use of the term “siege” was debated, with the inference that Sarajevo and other surrounded and bombarded cities were not really under siege because their citizens could have fled, quite consistently with the mission of the Serbs (who were more than happy to see them go), and were restrained from leaving either by fear or by actions of the Bosnian government that tried to keep its beleaguered citizens from deserting the capital. The Balkans were often described as a place with a long history of unfathomable violence, implying that war in Bosnia was really not so out of the ordinary. Finally, for a period there was doubt cast upon the persistent rumors of a network of Serb concentration camps, including specifically rape camps.

  Henry Kissinger was among those who took the view that Bosnia was not “a true nation” and had no specific cultural identity; rather it was a kind of no-man's-land where rival ethnic groups vied for power. The war in Bosnia “is a civil war,” he wrote, “not an invasion of a sovereign country by a neighbor. Croatia and Serbia support their nationals inside Bosnia, though Serbian assistance is most flagrant.”21

  If it was a civil war, however, precisely against the government of what state were the insurgent forces fighting, Bosnia being no “true” nation-state?* A civil war pits the insurrectionary forces within a state against the government of that state or against other forces attempting to seize the power of the State; by definition, it postulates a “true” State, over whose government the war is being fought. Moreover, if the conflict in Bosnia were a civil war, how could the insurgent forces have been the “nationals” of other member states of the U.N.? Rebels are the nationals of the state whose government they wish to seize; if they are the nationals of some other state, which is “supporting” them, then they are an invasion force and not the partisans of a civil war. On Kissinger's view, whose nationals were the Bosnian Muslims? They couldn't have been nationals of Bosnia, because it was, on this view, not a true nation-state. Were they then the nationals of Croatia and Serbia? And if they were, then are we to understand that the murderous attacks on them by these states were engagements in a civil war against the governments of Croatia and Serbia by rebellious Muslims, and that this civil war simply happened to take place outside the territorial borders of both states?

  The history of the four Yugoslav wars—in Slovenia (1991), Croatia (1991–, Bosnia (1992 – 1995), and Kosovo (1999)—invites confusion in characterizing the conflict, and in fact initially the United States and the European Community took the position that Slovenia and Croatia were illegal secessionists. That would have made the first two Yugoslav wars “civil” wars because there was only one state party to the war, Yugoslavia. This characterization, which eventually all parties—including even the Serbs—were forced to drop, might analogize the Belgrade regime in 1991 to that of Washington in 1861: a central federal government facing seceding states and struggling to hold the entire group together. Indeed Milosevic often made use of this analogy at the time, claiming among other things that the oppression of Serbs in the seceding states was like the practice of slavery by the American
Southern states, against which federal troops had been used. Whatever the merits of this grotesque simile, it has little application to the war in Bosnia, owing to Belgrade's agreement in 1992 to recognize Bosnia as a separate state.

  The reason that Secretary Baker and others initially characterized the war in Yugoslavia as a civil war between a central government in Belgrade and breakaway secessionist states with capitals in Ljubljana, Zagreb, and Sarajevo was simply that they believed that the breakup of Yugoslavia would lead to a bloodbath, which they of course wished to avoid. But this wholesome objective would not be served by such a characterization pre-cisely because it was wholly contrived and had no relation to constitutional events within the state of Yugoslavia. Once Milosevic found himself able to manipulate the organs of a multinational federal state to effect a Serbian dictatorship, messages such as Baker's and the E.C.'s gave him a green light to use the JNA as ruthlessly as he wished22 in pursuit of a constitutional arrangement that was itself really as much a new state as any of the others.

  Perhaps what some had in mind was not that Bosnia was engaged in a civil war against Belgrade, but rather that the Bosnian Serbs and Croats, in their attempts to dismember Bosnia and amalgamate with their respective states across the border, were fighting a civil war against Sarajevo. The reason many persons held that Bosnia was not a “true” nation-state was that there is no single ethnic, “national” group that utterly dominates the state so that it becomes the engine of welfare for that group. It is disquieting that such an argument should be made in Europe today (it would dis-quaqualify many African and Asian states) because it so clearly calls to mind a precedent one would think that statesmen would shun. When Adolf Hitler wished to incorporate Czechoslovakia into the German Reich, he quite correctly pointed out that the Sudeten Germans were a large minority in Czechoslovakia (a more discrete and insular minority than the Serbs, one might add, who speak the same language as all other Bosnians), and that the Czechs themselves were not a majority national group (being about the same 44 percent that the Bosnian Muslims are in that state). Czechoslovakia was not a true nation-state, Hitler argued, with perhaps more justice than this can be said regarding Bosnia (which after all was the result of a national referendum and not of a great-power arrangement like the one at Versailles that created Czechoslovakia). On these grounds, Hitler argued that the Sudetenland ought to be amalgamated with Germany, just as Serbian leaders in Belgrade argued that Serbian areas of Bosnia should be detached from Bosnia and added to Serbia.

  Civil wars are commonly held to be the bloodiest and most violent of wars. For our purposes, what is important about the characterization of a crisis as a “civil war” is that it blurs recognition of the crisis as an emergency. Though it makes the horrible reports coming in from the war no less horrible, they now conform to our expectations23 and such a conflict will be resolved, presumably, in the usual way. The most frequently heard argument for enforcing the arms embargo against Bosnia—which Bosnia claimed to be a violation of that state's Article 51 right of self-defense under the U.N. Charter—was that to allow the Bosnians to be supplied with arms would merely prolong the war. That is, lifting the embargo would attenuate the natural course of such conflicts, increase the casualties and suffering, to no different end. Moreover, intervention in a civil war—like intervention in a marital dispute—is not only risky but officious. In the normal course of things the parties sort these matters out among themselves; there is no emergency, at least not for the society of states.

  Against this view of the “normal” course of events, there intruded the insistent reports of Serb concentration camps. I believe there can be little doubt that, but for the suffering of Jews and others in the Nazi death camps in World War II, the news of Serb extermination and torture camps at Omarska, 24 Trnopolje, Susica, and elsewhere would not have had the same, sickening effect on public opinion.25 Two heroic figures stand out in this reporting: Roy Gutman of the American newspaper Newsday, who managed to talk his way in August 1992 into the Omarska camp to confirm stories of torture and executions; 26 and Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the first nonCommunist prime minister of Poland, who was appointed in August 1992 by the United Nations as special rapporteur on human rights abuses in the former Yugoslavia.

  Mazowiecki filed a series of eighteen reports over the ensuing three years. In contrast to other U.N. reports which studiedly de-emphasized or obscured the facts of mass atrocities, Mazowiecki's are unflinching, carefully documented, and filled with gritty, factual detail. One documented 119 rape-induced pregnancies (from which it has been estimated a figure of 12,000 rapes in total can be statistically extrapolated).* One of his first reports described a Serb attack on Prijedor27 the preceding May and gives a striking picture of the practice of ethnic cleansing. On the night of May 29, Serb tanks and infantry took up positions around Prijedor.

  When the attack began Serbs from the village guided the tanks to the homes of certain Muslims and the inhabitants were asked to come out and show their identity cards. Many of those who did were summarily executed…. Some 200 residents of Partisan Street were executed and a hundred homes were destroyed. During the [tank and artillery] attack the local radio continued to call for the surrender of arms, yet not one shot had been fired by the Muslims.

  When the artillery barrage stopped around noon, Serb paramilitary moved in and slit the throats of Muslims. “The bodies of the dead were carried away by trucks, which left a trail of blood.” Those not killed immediately were transferred to a convoy heading toward Omarska. Badly damaged houses were bulldozed, and their foundations covered with fresh earth. Five mosques were destroyed; the Muslim cemetery was razed.28

  Mazowiecki's final report, from Srebrenica, gives a detailed summary. This account is taken from the Report: 29 On July 11 the Muslim “safe” enclave of Srebrenica fell to the Serbs. U.N. Dutch troops stood by while between 38,000 and 42,000 Muslims were expelled from the area. A group of mainly women, children, and elderly men were taken in trucks, some of which were driven by U.N. personnel, to U.N. headquarters at Potocari, where upon arrival they were forcibly seized by armed Serbs. Beatings, abductions of women, and acts of physical violence often resulting in death then occurred; witnesses reported executions. There were many reports of shots and screams in the nearby cornfield during the night.

  A second group of about 15,000 draft-age Muslims and several women and children marched on foot out of Srebrenica toward Bosnian lines, consistent with earlier Serb campaigns of displacing Muslims. Most of this group were civilians, but between 3,000 and 4,000 may have been previously armed defenders of the city. This group was repeatedly shelled; these men who surrendered were physically assaulted, often fatally. Others were lined up against a wall and shot or were taken by the hair and their throats slit. The journey was fraught with chaos and violent attacks; thousands of persons in this group were executed by Serbs. Witnesses reported that some Serbs were disguised as U.N. officials (apparently with blue berets provided by the Dutch troops). Of this second group it is now believed that 7,500 were captured and murdered.*

  In a summary section the Report drew several conclusions, including that credible direct and circumstantial evidence existed of mass executions, countless rapes and physical assaults, and the destruction of property by the Serbs. Ominously the report noted that still unaccounted for were thousands of Muslims who were removed from Srebrenica, and that the rapporteur had been unable to verify claims that they were in detention. In fact, they were not.

  But the most startling element of the report, whose dispassion and repeated reliance on the credible “reports of international observers,” gruesome detail, and evenhandedness are notable, was the letter that accompanied it. “Speaking of protecting human rights is meaningless in the context of the lack of consistency and courage on the part of the international community and its leaders,” the letter read. The U.N.'s own leadership had frustrated Mazowiecki's efforts to call attention to the “barbarous acts and terror on an enormous scale”
that had occurred. He now resigned to protest U.N “hypocrisy” in “claiming to defend [Bosnia] but in fact abandoning it.”

  There were other figures,* including especially those conscientious young career foreign service officers who resigned their posts in protest over U.S. Bosnian policy, who enabled the world to understand that regardless of its juridical characterization, what was happening in Bosnia constituted a true emergency. By operating in tandem with the media, these officers were able to bring to the public information that otherwise was confined to diplomatic cable traffic. The New York Times, in an editorial on December 20, 1992, observed, “[T]he U.S. Government received the first unconfirmed reports from Bosnia that Serbs were setting up concentration camps in which Muslims were being tortured and killed…. Washington… tried to keep the reports from becoming public. If other countries received similar reports, they gave no public sign…. What did the world do?”

  Even still, it was not enough to provide the world with clarifying ideas that defined the crisis as an emergency, that showed us why what was happening was so unusual. Once we realized that the reappearance of concentration camps, tank and artillery supplemented by organized paramilitaries, and international complacency in the face of these facts were the salient features of the crisis, we still required a reason to act. Events were now defined as an emergency, but this would not lead to intervention unless there were some decisive reason to intervene. Notice—the awareness that something dramatic is happening—and recognition that that “something” is an emergency—still waited on a decision to act. That could only come if the emergency was defined in terms that gave bystanders good and powerful reasons for action.