A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  The Somalia intervention made it far less likely that the United States would do something to curb the killing in Bosnia. Bush had ordered a humanitarian intervention; U.S. troops were otherwise engaged.

  Meanwhile, the war raged on in Bosnia. The only good news Bosnians received as they endured their first winter of war was that their interventionist ally Bill Clinton had won the U.S. presidential election. Help, they felt sure, was on the way.

  Response (Clinton)

  “An Early and Crucial Test”

  If Americans have learned to shrug off campaign pledges, the potential beneficiaries of those promises overseas are often less jaded. Clinton the presidential candidate had argued that the United States did have a dog in the Bosnian fight. And even though President Bush had used the bully pulpit to argue against action, by the time of Clinton’s inauguration in January 1993, some 58 percent of Americans believed military force should be used to protect aid deliveries and prevent atrocities.95 Clinton chose as his top foreign policy adviser Anthony Lake. Lake had earned a reputation as a man of conscience for resigning from the National Security Council to protest President Nixon’s 1970 decision to send U.S. troops into Cambodia. In Foreign Policy magazine in 1971, Lake and a colleague had reflected on the process by which Americans of noble character could have allowed themselves to wage the Vietnam War, which had such immoral consequences: “The answer to that question begins with a basic intellectual approach which views foreign policy as a lifeless, bloodless set of abstractions,” they wrote:

  A liberalism attempting to deal with intensely human problems at home abruptly but naturally shifts to abstract concepts when making decisions about events beyond the water’s edge. “Nations,” “interests,” “influence,” “prestige”—all are disembodied and dehumanized terms which encourage easy inattention to the real people whose lives our decisions affect or even end.96

  When Lake and his Democratic colleagues were put to the test, however, although they were far more attentive to the human suffering in Bosnia, they did not intervene to ameliorate it.

  Soon after being tapped to become national security adviser, Lake received a lengthy memo from Richard Holbrooke, who had just returned from Bosnia. On this trip, his second, taken just after Christmas 1992, Holbrooke visited Sarajevo, where he saw the town’s Muslims burning books in an effort to warm their frigid homes. He stayed in the Holiday Inn, whose rooms were still stained with blood left over from the early killings. He also interviewed survivors of Serb camps in northern Bosnia. One man who described the horror of life in the Manjaca camp fished out two wooden figures from beneath his mattress. The figures, which he had carved with a piece of broken glass, depicted prisoners as they had been forced to stand: with their heads down and hands tied behind their backs. When Holbrooke had made a motion to hand them back, the former prisoner stopped him. “No,” he said. “Please take them back to your country and show them to your people. Show the Americans how we have been treated. Tell America what is happening to us.” On January 1, 1993, while Holbrooke waited at Sarajevo airport for Serb clearance to depart, he wrote in his journal: “If I don’t make my views known to the new [Clinton] team, I will not have done enough to help the desperate people we have just seen; but if I push my views, I will appear too aggressive. I feel trapped.”97 He returned to the United States and carried the carved figures around with him, appearing with them on the Charlie Rose show and getting them photographed and printed in a full-page, color spread in the New York Times Magazine. In his memo to Lake and Clinton’s new secretary of state, Warren Christopher, Holbrooke offered to serve as a U.S. mediator in the Balkans. He never received a response to his offer.

  The Clinton foreign policy team did undertake a thorough Bosnia policy review. The foreign service veterans who had served in the Bush administration needed time to adjust to the new sense of possibility. “Career officers, who had been conditioned to temerity through two years of Bush administration inaction, inattention, and pre-election jitters, did not seem to realize that they could now speak openly and even favorably of military solutions,” Bosnia desk officer Harris later observed.98

  The Clinton team at least seemed prepared to offer a candid diagnosis of the conflict. On February 10, 1993, ten months after the start of the war and with some 100,000 estimated dead, Secretary Christopher, another veteran of the Carter administration, issued a statement far sterner than any of those of senior Bush administration officials:

  This conflict may be far from our shores, but it is certainly not distant from our concerns. We cannot afford to ignore it. . . . Bold tyrants and fearful minorities are watching to see whether ethnic cleansing is a policy the world will tolerate. If we hope to promote the spread of freedom, if we hope to encourage the emergence of peaceful ethnic democracies, our answer must be a resounding no.99

  The secretary then vividly described Serb ethnic cleansing “pursued through mass murders, systematic beatings, and the rape of Muslims and others, prolonged shellings of innocents in Sarajevo and elsewhere, forced displacements of entire villages, [and] inhuman treatment of prisoners in detention camps.” He said he recognized that the world’s response would constitute “an early and crucial test of how it will address the critical concerns of ethnic and religious minorities in the post–Cold War world.”

  But Christopher’s prescriptions were weak. He vowed to bring “the full weight of American diplomacy to bear on finding a peaceful solution.”100 He did not deliver an ultimatum to the Serbs. He did not mention military force. The Serbs faced only the familiar obligation to turn up for peace talks. Deprived at home of running water, gas, electricity, and basic goods, most Balkan officials welcomed the opportunity to take diplomatic (and shopping) trips to plush hotels in New York, London, and Geneva.

  Although interventionists within the State Department were distraught at the vagueness of the newly unveiled policy, they attempted to put a positive spin on the announcement. “We saw we had started with this horrible Christopher statement,” Harris recalls. “But we knew things were bad and weren’t going to get better, particularly after Milosevic himself saw this statement. At least this administration understood what was going on over there. We figured events would quickly force Christopher to revise our policy.”

  Open Dissent

  On the eve of Christopher’s much-anticipated policy announcement, career foreign service officers Hooper and Johnson had stepped up to the microphone at the State Department’s “open forum,” a program that enables department employees and guests of employees to speak in small or large settings about pressing policy dilemmas. Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani had used the same forum to urge the United States to respond to Saddam Hussein’s Anfal offensive against the Kurds. Whereas just two dozen people had turned up to hear Talabani in 1988, however, more than 200 gathered to hear Hooper and Johnson in 1993. In Hooper’s ten-minute speech, which he had agonized over for weeks, he relayed the message he had received earlier from Eagleburger’s office director: Overwhelming support for intervention among the department’s rank and file was not being communicated up the chain. Just because his colleagues were hearing people by their watercoolers speaking about Bosnia did not mean that the message was reaching the seventh floor, where power (in the form of the secretary and his or her most senior advisers) is concentrated.

  Hooper denounced the Western powers’ reliance on mere negotiations, declaring:

  If the conflict reflected legal and constitutional differences over the breakup of Yugoslavia, creative diplomacy and split-the-difference negotiations would offer promise. We could rely on the tools of our profession—memos, cables, communiqués, meetings, visits, and talking points—to facilitate a genuine peace process. But the conflict is driven by a Serb bid for racial and national supremacy. As such, it can be halted, reversed, and defeated only by military force.

  This was the first time in a twenty-year bureaucratic career that Hooper had allowed his frustration to erupt in public. He likened
America’s “self-deluding” faith in the peace process to that of the Allies before World War II, reminding listeners, “The problem with Munich wasn’t its clauses or the map.” Hooper referenced the history books he had been reading, playing up the department’s quietude during Hitler’s genocide. “Not every institution gets a second chance,” Hooper said, pausing for effect. “This is our second chance.” The department should declare “unequivocally, officially, and publicly” that Serbia was practicing genocide. Hooper’s remarks were unclassified and disseminated via cable to all diplomatic posts. “You would not believe the number of people in the department who came up to me after that speech to thank me,” he recalls.

  Still, Hooper knew that few of his concerned colleagues would dare to challenge their superiors. He decided to enlist a voice of moral authority from outside the building: Elie Wiesel. Wiesel had already played a key role convincing Eagleburger to name names in December 1992. And on April 22, 1993, at the opening ceremony for the Holocaust Museum in Washington, Wiesel spoke extemporaneously to President Clinton, who was seated behind him. “Mr. President, I cannot not tell you something,” Wiesel memorably declared, turning away from the podium to face the president. “I have been in the former Yugoslavia last fall. I cannot sleep since what I have seen. As a Jew I am saying that. We must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country.”101

  President Clinton was quick to distinguish the two crimes. “I think the Holocaust is on a whole different level,” he told reporters later in the day. “I think it is without precedent or peer in human history.” U.S. inaction over Bosnia could not be compared with the U.S. failure to bomb the railroads to the Nazi camps. Still, he acknowledged that “ethnic cleansing is the kind of inhumanity that the Holocaust took to the nth degree,” and said, “I think you have to stand up against it. I think it’s wrong.” But then he again revealed his ambivalence, cautioning, “That does not mean that the United States or the United Nations can enter a war.”102

  On April 28, 1993, at Hooper’s request, Wiesel spoke out again—this time to a packed Dean Acheson Auditorium at the State Department. More than 300 people assembled to hear Wiesel critique U.S. idleness. The most dramatic moment occurred not in the auditorium but at a small lunch gathering after the event. Wiesel remembers turning to Peter Tarnoff, the undersecretary for political affairs and exclaiming, “These are camps, for heaven’s sake! Can’t you just liberate one of them?” Tarnoff did not respond, but Ralph Johnson, the principal deputy assistant secretary for European affairs, attempted to defend the administration. “We’re afraid that if we did try to liberate them, there would be retaliation and the prisoners inside would be killed,” Johnson said. After a long, awkward silence, Wiesel looked up, eyes flashing, and he said quietly, “Do you realize that that is precisely what the State Department said during World War II?”

  As Hooper, Wiesel, and others continued to try to provoke a more aggressive policy by pointing to the Holocaust, Clinton’s team entered an ungainly wiggle campaign to avoid calling events genocide.

  On March 30, 1993, at a Senate Foreign Operations Subcommittee hearing, Senator Dennis DeConcini (D.– Ariz.) challenged Christopher: “Is there any doubt in your mind that indeed genocide has occurred in Bosnia-Herzegovina?” he asked. The secretary of state responded: “There’s no doubt in my mind that rape and ethnic cleansing and other almost indescribable acts have taken place and it certainly rises to the level that is tantamount to genocide. The technical definition is not perhaps what’s important here, but what is important is that it is atrocious conduct, it is atrocity after atrocity and must be stopped.”103 Both Clinton and Christopher tended to speak about the conflict as if they were still on the campaign trail and not the individuals best positioned to bring about the stoppage.

  Congressman McCloskey, the Democrat from Indiana, became the Hill’s most forceful crusader to see the term applied. In November 1992 McCloskey had traveled for a second time to the region, this time to Bosnia, where he saw that the dire predictions issued to him in Belgrade the previous year had been borne out. He heard tales of rapes, beatings, and castrations with gardening shears that invigorated his efforts on the House Armed Services Committee. “The stories of the people were unbelievable,” McCloskey recalls. “It was almost a Pol Pot–like scenario in terms of what the Serbs were doing to the intellectuals, the teachers, the engineers.” McCloskey was particularly moved by an eighty-one-year-old Muslim woman who took McCloskey aside and described watching the Serbs kill her entire family. Before the Serbs entered her home, she had begged her son to shoot her to spare her what she knew she would witness. But he refused, and she had to watch Serb militiamen butchering him. When she met McCloskey, she was so devastated by her memories that she faulted her son for lacking the courage to kill her.

  When McCloskey returned to the United States, he told this woman’s story again and again to relay not only the savagery of the Bosnian war but the tragedy of its legacy. Atrocity survivors were often bracketed as the “lucky ones,” but many were left with parting images of their loved ones so horrific that they envied the dead. The memories were doubly devastating. A friend or relative being bludgeoned, stabbed, or shot. And the sight of the person reduced in their final moments to primal behavior. In Bosnia, where gardens were so often turned into killing fields and homes became infernos, families who were minding their own business inside were rarely prepared for the late-night knock on the door. And for those executed in the middle of the night, it was this very lack of preparedness—the fact that they were enacting their humanity until the very end—that ensured they had tasted life too recently to surrender it. They had not yet given up either on the possibility of persuasion or the killer’s capacity for mercy. Although they felt shame in doing so, they went to unseemly lengths to hang on. While the victims’ hopes were rewarded with a bullet down the throat or a knife in the groin, the survivors’ memories of those last moments drowned out all others.104 Instead of remembering friends and loved ones for the ways they lived, survivors remembered them for the ghastly ways they died.

  McCloskey replayed his unexpected and unwanted bloody Balkan anecdotes often enough to irritate his colleagues on the Hill. All told he made nearly a dozen trips to the region during the three-and-a-half-year war. On his return McCloskey chased potential allies around the halls. “Staking out these issues, people looked at you like you were living on the moon,” he recalls. “They would say to me, ‘But that has nothing to do with Decatur, Illinois,’ or ‘My constituency isn’t interested in that.’” Most of McCloskey’s colleagues found ways to avoid him. McCloskey was especially disappointed when his colleagues attacked him personally for his stand. Ron Dellums (D.–Calif.), the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, castigated McCloskey as a warmonger. McCloskey recalls: “I almost walked out of the meeting and resigned right then and there from the committee. There was no justice to allowing people to be killed and mutilated. To me it was a very obvious issue. I guess I could understand somebody not agreeing with me, but to call me a ‘warmonger,’ that was just too much.”

  McCloskey had secured a copy of the genocide convention and frequently returned to its text. “There are degrees of genocide and different genocidal leaders have different capabilities for destruction,” McCloskey recalls. Like Lemkin and Galbraith, McCloskey was adamant that the Holocaust not be treated as the threshold for action. “I had to show people there was nothing in the genocide convention that says a crime has to hit Nazi proportions to count as genocide.”

  On April 1, 1993, at a House International Operations Subcommittee hearing, McCloskey began the first of a memorable series of exchanges with Secretary Christopher on the use of what became known as the “g-word”:

  Rep. McCloskey: Previously to the Congress in response to a question as to whether or not genocide has taken place in Bosnia, the reply from State was that acts tantamount to genocide have taken place. I think that’s not a clear answer to a very important and policy-d
riving question. Would you order a clear, explicit determination, yes or no, if the outrageous Serb systematic barbarism amounts to genocide?

  Sec. Christopher: With respect to the definition of the circumstances in Bosnia, we certainly will reply to that. That is a legal question that you’ve posed. I’ve said several times that the conduct there is an atrocity. The killing, the raping, the ethnic cleansing is definitely an atrocious set of acts. Whether it meets the technical legal definition of genocide is a matter that we’ll look into and get back to you.105

  Later that month outgoing department spokesman Richard Boucher asked Bosnia desk officer Harris to draft a statement that said that “the United States Government believes that the practice of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia includes actions that meet the international definition of genocide.” But the statement was killed—according to Harris—by incoming spokesman Thomas Donilon after he consulted with Secretary Christopher.

  A Healthy Exchange

  As the policy horizon became clear, those who worked the issue day to day grew more, not less, uneasy. Harris, an eight-year veteran of the State Department, decided he had little to lose by openly challenging the administration’s timidity. Soon after Christopher’s appearance on Capitol Hill, just as the Serbs looked destined to overrun the Muslim-held town of Srebrenica, Harris drafted a letter to Christopher that noted that the United States was trying to stop a Serb “genocide” with political and economic pressures alone. “In effect,” the letter said, “the result of this course has been Western capitulation to Serbian aggression.”106 The policy had to change. Every State Department country officer that Harris approached agreed to sign the letter—desk officers for Serbia and Montenegro, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Croatia, Slovenia, as well as several officials involved in East European affairs and U.S. policy at the United Nations—forming a group that became known as the “dirty dozen.” Harris believes he could have got many more signatures if he had had the time to do so. “When you are in a bureaucracy, you can either put your head down and become cynical, tired and inured,” Harris observes. “Or you can stick your head up and try to do something.”