Milosevic
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Even by Balkan standards, Milosevic’s tactic of using an enemy army to bring uppity satrapies under control was a masterstroke. His plan was to boost an alternative, supposedly ‘moderate’ (by Bosnian Serb standards) leadership, based in the northern city of Banja Luka, which he could use to break Karadzic’s power base in the town of Pale, just outside Sarajevo. Milosevic told Sarinic: ‘The Serbs cannot get more than fifty per cent of Bosnia, and Sarajevo cannot be a Serb city. A majority in the Pale parliament comes from the Banja Luka region and it is through them that I will topple Karadzic, but in return I will have to strengthen this part territorially.’3
Milosevic realised that he had to take control of Pale after the Bosnian Serbs had rejected first the Vance-Owen peace plan, and then its main successor, known as the Contact Group plan. The 1993 plan devised by Cyrus Vance and Lord Owen claimed to support the idea that Bosnia should be a single state, and refugees would have the right to return. Bizarrely, this was to be achieved through dividing the country into ten semi-autonomous provinces, each of which would be ‘predominantly’ either Serb, Croat or Muslim. There would be a weak central government with no army, and no means of enforcing the right of return for refugees. Which are just a few of the reasons why Milosevic and Tudjman welcomed the Vance-Owen plan. Ironically, the maps delineating the cantons triggered a fresh outbreak of fighting in central Bosnia, as the Bosnian Croats attempted to grab the lands marked as Croat cantons. The Bosnian Croats joked that the initials of their army, HVO, now stood for ‘Hvala Vance Owen’, meaning ‘Thank you, Vance Owen’.
The plan was to be considered by the Bosnian Serb assembly. To make sure they got the message, Milosevic summoned Montenegro’s leader, Momir Bulatovic, and the president of Serbia, Dobrica Cosic, to help draft a letter to the Bosnian Serbs. Among its many haughty paragraphs was one which said:
Now is not the time for us to compete in patriotism. It is the right time for a courageous, considered and far-reaching decision. You have no right to expose ten million citizens of Yugoslavia to danger and international sanctions merely because of the remaining open issues which are of far less importance than the results achieved so far.4
The Yugoslav foreign minister, Vladislav Jovanovic, was woken up and despatched by helicopter to read the letter out to the Bosnian Serb assembly. He was not welcome. Biljana Plavsic, the hard-line vice-president, responded: ‘Who is this Milosevic, this Bulatovic, this Cosic? Did this nation elect them? No it did not.’5 The Bosnian Serbs voted against the Vance-Owen plan.
Milosevic then attempted to exploit Greece’s traditional pro-Serb sympathies. The Greek prime minister, Constantin Mitsotakis, hosted a two-day summit in Athens at the beginning of May to discuss Vance-Owen. There, under intense pressure from Milosevic and the international community, Karadzic signed the plan, although he had no intention of sticking to it. The whole circus then moved from Athens to Pale, where Milosevic planned to speak to the Bosnian Serb assembly and persuade them to ratify Karadzic’s decision. But Karadzic had not survived years at the top of the Bosnian Serb leadership without knowing a few tricks himself. Like Milosevic, he used the media to get his message across. Risto Djogo, the newsreader on Pale Television, pretended to commit suicide on television by shooting himself in the head. He announced: ‘The Serbs of Bosnia are not about to commit suicide.’6
When Milosevic arrived, Biljana Plavsic refused to shake his hand. Milosevic, Mitsotakis and Cosic all called for the Bosnian Serbs to accept the plan. Karadzic prevaricated, and played his trump card, General Mladic, who produced two maps, one showing current Serb-controlled territory, and the other illustrating how much would have to be given up. This time the assembly voted 51–2 against acceptance, with twelve abstentions. Biljana Plavsic earned Milosevic’s eternal loathing for her acute observation: ‘He was not normal. This could be seen on his face and on his hands . . . He did not know how to behave himself in parliament, because he never attended parliamentary sessions.’7 The Pale performance was one of the worst setbacks of Milosevic’s career. He was tired, angry, and perhaps uncomprehending. Even worse, Milosevic’s defeat had been observed by diplomats, foreign ministers and the world’s media.
He prepared a slow revenge. Over the next few months Radovan Karadzic was no longer lauded by the pliant Belgrade media as a national hero. Instead there were repeated allusions to black marketeering and war-profiteering, and the Serb statelets in Bosnia and Croatia were portrayed as obstacles to peace. On 7 June 1994 the Yugoslav President, Zoran Lilic, announced in an interview: ‘Ten million citizens of Yugoslavia cannot be held hostage to any leader who came from the territory of Yugoslavia, neither Republika Srpska, nor Republika Srpska Krajina.’8 The warning to the Serb leaderships in Knin and Pale could not have been clearer.
The Contact Group, whose plan followed Vance-Owen, was composed of representatives from Britain, France, Russia, Germany and the United States. Their plan split Bosnia into two: 51 per cent for the Croat–Muslim federation, and 49 per cent for the Serbs. This was fine for Milosevic, for whom the only thing that mattered was the lifting of the sanctions. The Sarajevo government agreed grudgingly, knowing that they would be blamed for prolonging the war if they refused, and gambling that it didn’t really matter because the Bosnian Serbs would reject the plan. Which they did, for the third time, on the night of 3 August 1994.
Milosevic immediately blockaded the border between Yugoslavia and Bosnia. Even telephone lines were cut off. Biljana Plavsic spoke for many when she said: ‘No one would have expected such a dagger in the back.’9Milosevic’s media machine went into overdrive. Even by Milosevic-era standards, Yugoslav President Zoran Lilic’s attack on Pale was a tour de force. ‘How many times have they promised that they would not shell Sarajevo, and perpetuate the agony of civilians in this city? How many times have they promised to arrest the bands and paramilitary units which are terrorising civilians and besmirching the honour of the Serbs?’10Lilic, of course, did not mention who had supplied the shells landing on Sarajevo and armed the paramilitary units now revealed to be ‘terrorising civilians and besmirching the honour of the Serbs’.11
A terrible few days in July 1995 changed everything. On 11 July General Mladic announced that he would give Srebrenica as a ‘present to the Serb nation’. The town had been designated by the UN as a ‘Safe Area’12since French UN General Philippe Morillon had barged his way through the Serb lines in March 1993, and raised the blue UN flag, declaring Srebrenica to be under UN protection. His brave, quixotic gesture sent UN diplomats in New York into fits of anguish as they struggled to find a formula that would prevent any genuine commitment to defend the enclaves. The proposal by the non-aligned countries that Srebrenica be declared a ‘Safe Haven’ – obliging the UN to defend the town – was rejected after opposition from Britain, France and Russia. Instead the term ‘Safe Area’ was agreed on, meaning that none of the warring parties should operate militarily within the enclaves. But while the Bosnian government troops inside Srebrenica surrendered many of their weapons, the Bosnian Serbs did not. There was neither the international will, nor the necessary UN mandate, to ensure that the enclaves were secure from attack. The ‘Safe Areas’ were some of the most dangerous places in the world.
Srebrenica was supervised by 110 lightly-armed Dutch peacekeepers, known as ‘Dutchbat’, who offered no resistance when General Mladic stormed in. Demands for air-strikes were somehow lost or delayed in the UN bureaucracy. Instead the Dutch troops – indeed the whole world – stood by and watched as the Bosnian Serbs separated men from women and children, and took the men off to their deaths. Srebrenica was indeed a bloody gift. Over the next few days, the fields and woods around the city became the site of the biggest single atrocity of the Bosnian war as Mladic’s men killed more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys. Many died as they tried to trek through to Bosnian-government-controlled Tuzla in the north. The massacre triggered a worldwide wave of revulsion. Graphic accounts by survivors of how the Bosnian Serbs had lined up m
en before the machine guns evoked scenes of the Second World War, when Nazi Einsatzkommandos on the eastern front had shot rows of Jews into trenches.
Even now many questions remained unanswered about this darkest episode of the Bosnian war. Without air-support or proper reinforcements, Dutchbat certainly could not have held off General Mladic’s men for long.13 However, the question remains: if Dutchbat had resisted, would General Mladic have been prepared to kill 110 UN soldiers?14
The commander of the Muslim forces defending Srebrenica was Nasir Oric, who had once been one of Milosevic’s bodyguards. Through the long years of siege, he had led night raiding parties through Serb lines to attack local villages and steal food. Many Bosnian Serbs were killed in these attacks, including civilians and the elderly, and their houses destroyed. The peculiar squalor of the conflict in and around Srebrenica was a throwback to the Thirty Years War. In the wake of Oric’s fighters, a ragged wave of starving Muslims known as ‘torbari’, or ‘bag-carriers’, would swoop down on the charred houses and pick over the remains for food or other valuables.
Before Srebrenica fell, Oric and his commanders had been pulled out under orders from Sarajevo, and forbidden to return. For the Bosnian leadership, Srebrenica was no longer a political priority. Many believed that Sarajevo was coming under increasing pressure from the West, especially Washington, D.C., to cut a deal with Milosevic and thought that a cynical pact had been made to exchange Srebrenica for Bosnian-Serb-held land around Sarajevo. Certainly, the fall of Srebrenica – or perhaps its removal as an obstacle to the new maps being drawn up in Washington – fitted in with US policy at this time. Sandy Vershbow, an advisor to President Clinton said: ‘Well, already in June [1995], the fate of Srebrenica seemed pretty gloomy. We already then were considering some kind of swap for at least the smaller of the eastern enclaves for more territory in central Bosnia might be one of the things that would be wise.’15 Milosevic doubtless would have seen this policy option as a de facto green light to capture the enclave.
But there is a difference between capturing territory and slaughtering every male inhabitant. The grim leitmotif of the Bosnian war was ‘ethnic cleansing’, that is, population displacement, not extermination. Even by the bloody standards of the Bosnian war, the Srebrenica massacre was unprecedented. Milosevic’s precise relationship to the details of the fall of Srebrenica – and many other war crimes in Bosnia – remains unclear. The issue will be closely examined during the course of his trial at the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague under the terms of his indictment for genocide and war crimes in Bosnia. As one senior US official said: ‘What remains unknown to me, and to everybody, is how direct a role he played at Srebrenica and the capture of the enclaves, and in the shelling of Sarajevo. Did he order it, did he approve it, what was his role?’16
Yet even through the fog of war, some contours of the command and control relationship can be distinguished. Two years earlier, in spring 1993, when it first appeared that Srebrenica was about to fall, Lord Owen had asked Milosevic to use his influence with the Bosnian Serb leaders to stop the attack. ‘Milosevic believed it would be a great mistake for the Bosnian Serbs to take Srebrenica and promised to tell Karadzic so,’ wrote Owen in his memoirs.17 The Bosnian Serbs did then eventually pull back.
Western military analysts reported that there were strong links between General Mladic and Belgrade. Writing in Jane’s Intelligence Review, Dr James Gow noted that Mladic ‘communicates daily with both the defence ministry of the “Serbian Republic in Bosnia” and the Yugoslav Federal Ministry of Defence, conveniently located close to each other in the Serbian capital. It is from Belgrade that General Mladic appears to take his orders, although these seem to give him broad control at the operational level.’18The key phrase here is ‘broad control at the operational level’: Mladic exerted day-to-day command over his forces on the ground.
However the relationship between Milosevic and the Bosnian Serb leadership in July 1995 was very different from that of April 1993. After the rejection of the Vance-Owen and Contact Group Bosnian peace plans, relations had broken down between the Pale and Belgrade political leaderships. And so, when NATO launched pin-prick air-strikes against the Bosnian Serbs in May 1995, and Mladic responded by taking over 400 UN peacekeepers hostage, Milosevic despatched his trusted intelligence chief, Jovica Stanisic, to ‘persuade’ Radovan Karadzic to release the UN troops. Milosevic told the British ambassador Ivor Roberts, ‘Stanisic will tell Karadzic that I will have him killed if he doesn’t release the hostages. He knows I can do it.’19
Milosevic’s main objective then was the lifting of sanctions on Serbia. There was no benefit in ordering a massacre of more than 7,000 prisoners, with all the ensuing anti-Serb backlash. The official report commissioned by the Dutch government into the massacre found no evidence of political or military liaison with Belgrade concerning the mass killings.20 It seems more likely that, by this time, the Bosnian Serb military leadership was simply out of control, and General Mladic was unable to contain his blood lust.21 None the less, the US diplomat Louis Sell notes that: ‘. . . throughout the Srebrenica crisis, Milosevic was in direct personal contact with Mladic.’22Sell also says that Carl Bildt observed Milosevic alternate ‘between begging and giving orders to Mladic’.23When the author Laura Silber asked him what happened in Srebrenica, Milosevic replied: ‘A moment came when you could no longer expect any kind of rational control. I don’t exactly know what happened there.’24
What did the West know? The US certainly knew about the Serb preparations to take Srebrenica: U-2 spy planes were patrolling the area, and a stream of satellite intelligence was also being fed back to Washington. On 9 August 1995 Madeleine Albright, the US ambassador to the UN, presented two photographs of the area around Srebrenica to the UN Security Council. The first shot, of an empty field, was taken shortly before Srebrenica fell. The second showed the same field a few days later, with mounds of freshly turned earth – the mass graves where the victims had been buried. In addition, an extensive investigation published in the New York Review of Books suggested the US was aware of liaison between General Momcilo Perisic, chief of staff of the Yugoslav army, and General Mladic.
A US military intelligence source who had access to the raw data coming out of Bosnia confirmed the existence of intercepted conversations about Srebrenica between Belgrade and Mladic. ‘There’s about a week’s worth,’ the source says, ‘and basically it’s Belgrade asking, “Hey [Mladic] you’re not going to Srebrenica, are you?” And [Mladic] says, “Of course I am. I’m not done yet, I’m hitting Gorazde and Zepa, too.”’25
Certainly if there was some kind of diplomatic understanding between the West and Belgrade over Srebrenica, it went horribly wrong over the fate of the inhabitants. One witness remembered Mladic surveying the rows of Muslim prisoners with satisfaction. It is cruelly ironic that the man who had directed the destruction of Bosnia’s Islamic heritage then announced a ‘meze’: the Arabic word for a long feast of many small dishes. ‘There are so many. It is going to be a meze. There will be blood up to your knees,’ he said, according to Nedzida Sadikovic, a woman survivor. He then nodded at the many young women in the crowd and told his soldiers: ‘Beautiful. Keep the good ones over there. Enjoy them.’26
One cause of Mladic’s hunger for a blood meze was that soldiers operating out of Srebrenica had attacked his home village of Visnice, and burnt down its houses. The suicide of Mladic’s daughter Ana, a medical student in her early twenties, had certainly hardened his heart. Encouraged by their commander, the Bosnian Serb soldiers descended into a frenzy of blood lust. The basic constraints of humanitarian behaviour – never very much in evidence in Bosnia – just snapped. But even if Mladic was out of control, ultimately some degree of responsibility still rests with his political masters in Belgrade.
Emboldened by their slaughter at Srebrenica, the Bosnian Serbs resumed the shelling of Sarajevo. On 28 August 1995 thirty-seven people were killed in Sarajevo’s main mar
ket by five mortar shells fired from a Bosnian Serb position, in defiance of agreements by the Bosnian Serbs to pull back their heavy weapons. This time, NATO meant business. ‘Finally the decks were cleared for a real military response, not some piece of garbage,’ said Richard Holbrooke, the US diplomat who was about to become the key player in the diplomatic negotiations with Milosevic that would end the war in Bosnia.27
The shells that dropped onto Sarajevo’s marketplace on 28 August were some of the many thousands that had fallen during the siege. They left the streets slippery with blood. Mangled corpses lay across the pavement or draped over the railings. Such gruesome scenes were common in Sarajevo: Serb gunners in the hills specifically targeted places at the time when they would be most crowded, such as Kosevo hospital during visiting hours, or the entrance to the tunnel that ran under Sarajevo’s airport runway. But coming after the Srebrenica massacre, these were five shells too many.
Two days later, the inhabitants of Sarajevo watched in awe and wonder as the NATO jets screamed overhead, wondering why it had taken so long. Haris Silajdzic, the Bosnian prime minister, said: ‘I must say that I enjoyed it. I must say that because those who killed so many people, those who aimed [at] baby hospitals, those who aimed [at] children who were playing, could finally feel what it means to be targeted, to be defenceless, and they deserved it.’28In rolling waves of air-strikes, combined with Tomahawk cruise missiles, NATO systematically destroyed much of the Bosnian Serbs’ military and communications infrastructure over the next two weeks. A barrage of more than 500 shells from the Anglo-French UN troops ensured that Bosnian Serb guns never again fired on Sarajevo. Just as the ‘laptop bombardiers’ – those journalists who called for air-strikes to defend Bosnia – had predicted, the Bosnian Serb military crumpled under attack from NATO.