For the first time in its history, Human Rights Watch found that a country had committed genocide. Often a large number of victims is required to help show an intent to destroy a group. But in the Iraqi case the confiscated government records explicitly recorded Iraqi aims to wipe out rural Kurdish life.
Having documented the genocide, Human Rights Watch assigned lawyer Richard Dicker to draw up a legal case in the spring of 1994. He hoped to get Canada, the Netherlands, or a Scandinavian state to enforce the genocide convention by at least filing genocide charges before the International Court of Justice. “My role was to make it happen by preparing a tight case and persuading a state to take it on,” Dicker remembers. “Of course I failed spectacularly.” Diplomats initially argued that Iraq had not committed genocide. “They would say, ‘Gee, this doesn’t look like the Holocaust to me!’” Dicker recalls. But once they became familiar with the law, most officials dropped that objection and worried out loud about the consequences of scrutinizing a fellow state in an international court.
If a genocide case were filed at the ICJ, the court could recommend that Iraqi assets be seized or that Iraqi perpetrators be punished at home, abroad, or in some international court. International criminal punishment had not been levied since Nuremberg, but human rights lawyers hoped that the Iraq case would renew interest in prosecution. After several years of badgering by Dicker and colleague Joost Hiltermann, two governments confidentially accepted the challenge, but they refused to file the case unless a European state would join them. To this day no European power has agreed.
The U.S. Senate had ratified the genocide convention, but Dicker and others believed that the United States should keep a “low profile” on any ICJ genocide case against Iraq because of its nettlesome reservations to the treaty. Advocates feared that Hussein might use the American reservations to deny the ICJ jurisdiction.170 Although Human Rights Watch did not request American participation in the case, it did hope the United States would support the effort. After initially opposing the campaign, the State Department legal adviser received innumerable legal briefs and evidentiary memos from Dicker and Hiltermann, and changed his mind. In July 1995 Secretary of State Warren Christopher signed a communiqué that found Iraq had committed genocide against Iraq’s rural Kurds and that endorsed Human Rights Watch’s efforts to file a case against Iraq.
To this day, however, no Iraqi soldier or political leader has been punished for atrocities committed against the Kurds.
Ron Haviv-VII
Muslim and Croat prisoners in the Serb concentration camp of Trnopolje.
Chapter 9
Bosnia: “No More than Witnesses at a Funeral”
“Ethnic Cleansing”
If the Gulf War posed the first test for U.S. foreign policy in the post–Cold War world, the wars in the Balkans offered a second. Before 1991 Yugoslavia was composed of six republics. But in June of that year, when Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic began to stoke nationalist flames and increase Serb dominance, the republic of Slovenia seceded, sparking a relatively painless ten-day war. Croatia, which declared independence at the same time, faced a tougher exit. Because Croatia had a sizable Serb minority and a picturesque and lucrative coastline, the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) refused to let it go. A seven-month war left some 10,000 dead and 700,000 displaced from their homes. It also introduced the world to images of Serb artillery pounding civilians in towns like Dubrovnik and Vukovar. By late 1991 it was clear that Bosnia (43 percent Muslim, 35 percent Orthodox Serb, and 18 percent Roman Catholic Croat), the most ethnically heterogeneous of Yugoslavia’s republics, was in a bind. If Bosnia remained a republic within rump Yugoslavia, its Serbs would receive the plum jobs and educational opportunities, whereas Muslims and Croats would be marginalized and likely physically abused under Milosevic’s oppressive rule. But if it broke away, its Muslim citizens would be especially vulnerable because they did not have a parent protector in the neighborhood: Serbs and Croats in Bosnia counted on Serbia and Croatia for armed succor, but the country’s Muslims could rely only upon the international community.
Map of Yugoslavia, depicting Serb gains, 1991–1995.
The seven members of the Bosnian presidency (two Muslims, two Serbs, two Croats, and one Yugoslav) turned to Europe and the United States for guidance on how to avoid bloodshed. Western diplomats instructed Bosnia’s leadership to offer human rights protections to minorities and to stage a “free and fair” independence referendum. The Bosnians by and large did as they were told. In March 1992 they held a referendum on independence in which 99.4 percent of voters chose to secede from Yugoslavia. But two Serb members of the presidency, who were hard-liners, had convinced most of Bosnia’s Serbs to boycott the vote.1 Backed by Milosevic in Belgrade, both Serb nationalists in the presidency resigned and declared their own separate Bosnian Serb state within the borders of the old Bosnia. The Serb-dominated Yugoslav National Army teamed up with local Bosnian Serb forces, contributing an estimated 80,000 uniformed, armed Serb troops and handing almost all of their Bosnia-based arsenal to the newly created Bosnian Serb Army. Although the troops changed their badges, the army vehicles that remained behind still bore the traces of the letters “JNA.” Compounding matters for the Muslims and for those Serbs and Croats who remained loyal to the idea of a multiethnic Bosnia, the United Nations had imposed an arms embargo in 1991 banning arms deliveries to the region. This froze in place a gross imbalance in Muslim and Serb military capacity. When the Serbs began a vicious offensive aimed at creating an ethnically homogenous state, the Muslims were largely defenseless.
In 1991 Germany had been the country to press for recognizing Croatia’s independence. But in April 1992 the EC and the United States took the lead in granting diplomatic recognition to the newly independent state of Bosnia. U.S. policymakers hoped that the mere act of legitimating Bosnia would help stabilize it. This diplomatic act would “show” President Milosevic that the world stood behind Bosnian independence. But Milosevic was better briefed. He knew that the international commitment to Bosnia’s statehood was more rhetorical than real.
Bosnian Serb soldiers and militiamen had compiled lists of leading Muslim and Croat intellectuals, musicians, and professionals. And within days of Bosnia’s secession from Yugoslavia, they began rounding up non-Serbs, savagely beating them, and often executing them. Bosnian Serb units destroyed most cultural and religious sites in order to erase any memory of a Muslim or Croat presence in what they would call “Republika Srpska.”2 In the hills around the former Olympic city of Sarajevo, Serb forces positioned heavy antiaircraft guns, rocket launchers, and tanks and began pummeling the city below with artillery and mortar fire.
The Serbs’ practice of targeting civilians and ridding their territory of non-Serbs was euphemistically dubbed etničko čišcenje, or “ethnic cleansing,” a phrase reminiscent of the Nazis’ Säuberung, or “cleansing,” of Jews. Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg said of the Nazi euphemism: “The key to the entire operation from the psychological standpoint was never to utter the words that would be appropriate to the action. Say nothing; do these things; do not describe them.”3 The Khmer Rouge and Iraqi Northern Bureau chief al-Majid had followed a similar rule of thumb, and Serb nationalists did the same.
As the war in Bosnia progressed, outsiders and insiders relied on the phrase “ethnic cleansing” to describe the means and ends employed by Serb and later other nationalistic forces in Bosnia. It was defined as the elimination of an ethnic group from territory controlled by another ethnic group. Although the phrase initially chilled those who heard it, it quickly became numbing shorthand for deeds that were far more evocative when described in detail.
The phrase “ethnic cleansing” meant different things on different days in different places. Sometimes a Serb radio broadcast would inform the citizenry that a local factory had introduced a quota to limit the number of Muslim or Croat employees to 1 percent of the overall workforce. Elsewhere edicts would begin appearing pasted aro
und town, as they had in 1915 in the Ottoman Empire. These decrees informed non-Serb inhabitants of the new rules. In the town of Celinac, near the northern Bosnia town of Banja Luka, for instance, the Serb “war presidency” issued a directive giving all non-Serbs “special status.” Because of “military actions,” a curfew was imposed from 4 p.m. to 6 a.m. Non-Serbs were forbidden to:
•meet in cafes, restaurants, or other public places
•bathe or swim in the Vrbanija or Josavka Rivers
•hunt or fish
•move to another town without authorization
•carry a weapon
•drive or travel by car
•gather in groups of more than three men
•contact relatives from outside Celinac (all household visits must be reported)
•use means of communication other than the post office phone
•wear uniforms: military, police, or forest guard
•sell real estate or exchange homes without approval.4
Sometimes Muslims and Croats were told they had forty-eight hours to pack their bags. But usually they were given no warning at all. Machine-gun fire or the smell of hastily sprayed kerosene were the first hints of an imminent change of domicile. In virtually no case where departure took place was the exit voluntary. As refugees poured into neighboring states, it was tempting to see them as the byproducts of war, but the purging of non-Serbs was not only an explicit war aim of Serb nationalists; it was their primary aim.
Serb gunmen knew that their violent deportation and killing campaign would not be enough to ensure the lasting achievement of ethnic purity. The armed marauders sought to sever permanently the bond between citizens and land. Thus, they forced fathers to castrate their sons or molest their daughters; they humiliated and raped (often impregnating) young women. Theirs was a deliberate policy of destruction and degradation: destruction so this avowed enemy race would have no homes to which to return; degradation so the former inhabitants would not stand tall—and thus would not dare again stand—in Serb-held territory.
Senior officials within the Bush and later the Clinton administrations understood the dire human consequences of Serb aggression. This was Europe and not a crisis that could be shoved on to the desks of midlevel officials. More than ever before, Lemkinian voices for action were heard within the State Department, on Capitol Hill, and on America’s editorial pages. A swarm of Western journalists in Bosnia supplied regular, graphic coverage. Yet despite unprecedented public outcry about foreign brutality, for the next three and a half years the United States, Europe, and the United Nations stood by while some 200,000 Bosnians were killed, more than 2 million were displaced, and the territory of a multiethnic European republic was sliced into three ethnically pure statelets.
The international community did not do nothing during the vicious war. With the Cold War behind it, the United Nations became the forum for much collective activity. The UN Security Council pointed fingers at the main aggressors, imposed economic sanctions, deployed peacekeepers, and helped deliver humanitarian aid. Eventually it even set up a war crimes tribunal to punish the plotters and perpetrators of mass murder. What the United States and its allies did not do until it was too late, however, was intervene with armed force to stop genocide. So although the European location of the crime scene generated widespread press coverage, a far more vocal elite lobby for intervention, and the most bitter cleft within the U.S. government since the Vietnam War, these factors did not combine to make either President Bush or President Clinton intervene in time to save the country of Bosnia or its citizens from destruction.
Warning
“Bloody as Hell”
Serb brutality in Bosnia came with plenty of warning. Intelligence officials are severely scolded and embarrassed if they fail to anticipate a crisis, but they face less opprobrium if they offer a “false positive” by predicting a crisis that does not unfold. The intelligence community is thus more prone to raise too many flags than too few. U.S. intelligence had already failed to forecast Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union. When it came to the Balkan wars, U.S. analysts were therefore especially careful to position themselves well out in front of the carnage. The brief war in Slovenia and the longer and more bloody one in Croatia in 1991 led officials in the U.S. government to predict that Bosnia’s ethnic diversity and the Muslim plurality’s defenselessness would make the next war the deadliest of all. Although reporters spoke later of the Bosnian conflict’s “erupting,” it would be more apt to say the Bosnian conflict arrived. Indeed, many felt it was a war that arrived virtually on schedule. The war’s viciousness had been forecast so regularly and so vividly as to desensitize U.S. officials. By the time the bloodshed began, U.S. officials were almost too prepared: They had been reading warning cables for so long that nothing could surprise them.
Jim Hooper, a fastidious U.S. foreign service veteran, worked as the deputy director of the Office of East Europe and Yugoslav Affairs in the State Department’s European Bureau from 1989 to 1991. He had joined the U.S. government in 1971 and spent the late 1980s consumed with the right kind of turbulence and upheaval—the historic roundtable negotiations that helped bring about the end of communism in Poland, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the velvet passage to democracy in Czechoslovakia. But ever since he read an article in the Economist in early 1989 that predicted the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, Hooper had been worried. In 1991, with Balkan leaders sounding ever more belligerent and nationalist militias sprouting, Hooper urged Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger to travel to the region. Eagleburger had served as U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1977 to 1981 and consulted on business there throughout the 1980s in partnership with Henry Kissinger. He spoke Serbo-Croatian and was enamored of the verdant landscape. In February 1991 Eagleburger paid a visit to the region and warned Milosevic against violence. When he returned, he said to Hooper, “I thought you were exaggerating, that you were giving me the usual bureaucratic hype. But now that I’ve been there, I think you were much too optimistic. It is going to be bloody as hell.” Eagleburger thought there was nothing the United States could do, that it was Europe’s problem, and that any attempt to get involved would fail and harm the United States in the process.
Some of the loudest early-warning sirens and moral sermons came from Capitol Hill. Some, like Republican senator Bob Dole, brought a prior interest in the region. During World War II, the young Kansan had led an attack on a German machine-gun nest in Po Valley, Italy. When Dole saw his radioman go down, he crawled out of his foxhole to retrieve him. As he did, a shell exploded nearby, shattering his shoulder and his vertebrae. Shipped from Italy to Russell, Kansas, in a full-body cast, the young war hero earned press coverage that caught the eye of Dr. Hampar Kelikian, a Chicago reconstructive surgeon. Kelikian wrote to Dole and told him that if the young veteran could find the train fare, he would perform the necessary surgery at no cost. Dole’s neighbors chipped in, filling an empty cigar box propped up in the window of the local drug store where Dole had served as a soda jerk. Kelikian not only operated on Dole in Chicago but also kept him company in the long recovery period by regaling him with stories about the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians. Kelikian had escaped to America as a boy after three of his sisters were massacred in the genocide.5 Dole, who had never before heard of these crimes, was shocked. When he joined the Senate, he kept an eye trained on the Balkans.
Dole began denouncing Yugoslavia’s human rights record in 1986. He introduced Senate resolutions expressing special concern about the state’s systematic persecution of Albanians, who made up 90 percent of the population in Kosovo, Serbia. Each year Serb forces stepped up their violence against the Albanians, and Dole in turn amplified his denunciations. By 1990, with the rest of Eastern Europe liberalizing, Dole was describing the Yugoslav government as a “symbol of tyranny and repression” that was “murdering, maiming and imprisoning” its citizens.6
But none of the Kans
as senator’s rhetorical litanies had prepared him for the official visit he paid to Kosovo in August 1990. At first the Serb authorities tried to keep Dole and six Senate colleagues from entering Serbia’s southern province, prompting Dole to storm out of a Belgrade meeting. They next tried to supply the group with a Serbian watchdog who would prevent them from speaking freely to Albanians. In the end the Belgrade regime supplied a Serb driver who roared into Kosovo’s capital at break-neck speed in order to block the American lawmakers from viewing the grim police state. As the bus entered Pristina, thousands of ethnic Albanians lined the streets and began chanting, “USA, USA.” Dole later recalled “appalling and unforgettable” scenes of hundreds of people running across the fields to wave to the speeding bus, while police with guns and clubs mauled them.7 After returning, Dole told the Washington Post of “tanks and troops everywhere, hundreds of demonstrators fleeing in all directions, trying to avoid the club-wielding security forces, and tear gas rising over the confusion and carnage.” Scores were injured and hundreds arrested.8 On the Senate floor Dole declared, “The United States cannot sit this out on the sidelines, we have a moral obligation to take a strong stand in defense of the individual rights of Albanians and all of the people of Yugoslavia.”9 Dole’s act of “witnessing” conditioned his response to future reports of atrocity. As his chief foreign policy adviser, Mira Baratta, notes, “It is one thing to have a natural inclination to care about human rights, but it is another thing entirely when you see people who only want to wave at Americans getting pummeled before your own eyes. Once you have seen that, you just can’t look away.”
A Problem From Hell Page 33
