A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  I hope this is okay.

  Thanks for the opportunity.

  Warmest regards,

  Dallaire

  Ron Haviv-VII

  A defaced photograph of a Muslim family found when they returned to their home after the Dayton agreement. The Serbs had looted the family’s furniture, appliances, cabinets, sinks, and window panes. The photo was virtually all that remained.

  Chapter 11

  Srebrenica: “Getting Creamed”

  On July 11, 1995, a year after Tutsi rebels finally halted the Rwandan genocide and a full three years into the Bosnian war, Bosnian Serb forces did what few thought they would dare to do. They overran weak UN defenses and seized the safe area of Srebrenica, which was home to 40,000 Muslim men, women, and children.

  The Srebrenica enclave had been declared “safe” back in the spring of 1993, just after the Clinton administration abandoned its proposal to lift the arms embargo against the Muslims and bomb the Serbs. Srebrenica was one of six heavily populated patches of Muslim territory that the UN Security Council had sent lightly armed peacekeepers to protect.

  The UN had hoped that enough peackeepers would be deployed to deter Serb attacks, but President Clinton had made it clear that the United States would not send troops, and the European countries that had already deployed soldiers to Bosnia were reluctant to contribute many more peacekeepers to a failing UN effort. Those blue helmets that did deploy had a tough time. Sensing a Western squeamishness about casualties after Somalia and Rwanda, outlying Serb forces frequently aimed their sniper rifles at the UN soldiers. They also repeatedly choked off UN fuel and food. By the time of the July attack on Srebrenica, the 600 Dutch peacekeepers were performing most of their tasks on mules and were living off emergency rations. So few in number, they knew that if the Bosnian Serbs ever seriously attacked, they would need help from NATO planes in the sky. In 1994 the Western powers had established a process by which UN peacekeepers in Bosnia could appeal for “close air support” if they themselves came under fire, and they could request air strikes against preselected targets if the Muslim-populated safe areas came under serious attack. In a cumbersome command-and-control arrangement meant to limit the risk to peacekeepers, the NATO foreign ministers agreed that “dual keys” had to be turned before NATO jets would be sent to assist UN troops in Bosnia. The civilian head of the UN mission, Yasushi Akashi, had to turn the first key. If this happened, then NATO commanders would need to turn the second. Most requests were stalled at the initial stage, as UN civilians were openly skeptical of NATO bombing. They believed it would destabilize the peace process and cause the Serbs to round up UN hostages, as they had done in November 1994 and May 1995.

  When the Serbs called the international community’s bluff in July 1995, their assault went virtually uncontested by the United Nations on the ground and by NATO jets in the sky. At 4:30 p.m. on July 11, the ruddy-faced, stout commander of the Bosnian Serb army, Ratko Mladic, strolled into Srebrenica. General Radislav Krstic, the chief of staff of the Drina corps, which had executed the attack, accompanied him. Krstic had lost his leg the year before when he ran over a mine planted by Muslim forces. So the victory was particularly sweet. With Krstic standing nearby, Mladic announced on Bosnian Serb television, “Finally, after the rebellion of the Dahijas, the time has come to take revenge on the [Muslims] in this region.”1

  Over the course of the following week, Mladic separated the Muslim men and boys of Srebrenica from the women. He sent his forces in pursuit of those Muslims who attempted to flee into the hills. And all told, he slaughtered some 7,000 Muslims, the largest massacre in Europe in fifty years. The U.S. response, though condensed in time, followed the familiar pattern. Ahead of and during the Serb assault, American policymakers (like Bosnian civilians) again revealed their propensity for wishful thinking. Once the safe area had fallen, U.S. officials narrowly defined the land of the possible. They placed an undue faith in diplomacy and reason and adopted measures better suited to the “last war.” But a major difference between Srebrenica and previous genocides in the twentieth century was that the massacres strengthened the lobby for intervention and the understanding, already ripening within the Clinton administration, that the U.S. policy of nonconfrontation had become politically untenable. Thus, in the aftermath of the gravest single act of genocide in the Bosnian war, thanks to America’s belated leadership, NATO jets engaged in a three-week bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs that contributed mightily to ending the war.

  Warning

  “The Sitting-Duck Position”

  Diplomats, journalists, peacekeepers, and Bosnian Muslims had lived for a long time with the possibility that the Serbs would seize the vulnerable safe areas of eastern Bosnia. The enclaves were so unviable that U.S. intelligence analysts placed bets on how long they would survive. Richard Holbrooke had finally become involved in shaping America’s Bosnia policy in September 1994 when he was appointed assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs. He says he told the queen of the Netherlands that Dutch troops in Srebrenica were in the “Dien Bien Phu of Europe” facing a “catastrophe waiting to happen.”

  In June 1995 the UN force commander Bernard Janvier had unveiled a proposal at the Security Council to withdraw the blue helmets from the three eastern enclaves. He argued that peacekeepers were too lightly armed and few in number to protect Muslim civilians. U.S. ambassador Albright, a strong defender of what was left of Bosnia, exploded. She said Janvier’s plan to “dump the safe areas” was “flatly and completely wrong.” Albright had lost countless battles at the National Security Council to convince the president to order the bombing of the Serbs. Now, though she was rejecting Janvier’s proposal as inhumane, she knew she could offer no suggestions as to how either the Muslim civilians or the lightly armed peacekeepers would survive in the face of Serb attack. The reality, obvious to all, was that the safe areas would be safe only as long as the Serbs chose to leave them so.

  Many western policymakers secretly wished Srebrenica and the two other Muslim safe areas in eastern Bosnia would disappear. By the summer of 1995, both the Bosnian Serbs and the Muslim-led government were exhausted, and western negotiators thought they were closer than ever to reaching a settlement. But because the three eastern enclaves did not abut other Muslim-held territory, they were a recurrent sticking point in negotiations. The international community could not very well ask the Muslims, the war’s main victims, to leave the enclaves voluntarily, especially since most of the Muslims inhabiting them had already been expelled from their homes in neighboring villages. The Muslim government would be lambasted by its own citizens if it handed over to the Serbs any of the few towns still in Muslim hands. And the Serb nationalists were not about to agree to a peace deal that preserved Muslim enclaves, which tied down Serb troops and kept nettlesome Muslims in their midst. The whole idea behind Republika Srpska had been the creation of an ethnically pure Serb state.

  Whatever the West’s secret hopes or stated fears that the enclaves would crumble, when the Serbs began their attack on Srebrenica on July 6, 1995, nobody besides the besieged Dutch peacekeepers and the Muslims within Srebrenica took it especially seriously. Mladic’s forces began the attack by firing tank rounds at the white UN lookout cabins and sending the Dutch scrambling from their observation posts. The Serbs took Dutch hostages and stole their weapons, body armor, vehicles, and blue helmets and berets.

  UN peacekeepers in Srebrenica were probably the least well informed of all the interested parties. Like Dallaire’s hamstrung forces in Rwanda, the UN troops in Bosnia lacked an intelligence-gathering capacity of their own. The UN military observers (UNMOs) who provided the mission with its visual intelligence rarely spoke Serbo-Croatian and paraded around the countryside in luminous white four-wheel drives. Anybody interested in hiding anything could do so at the sight of the lumbering vehicles approaching. Thus, UN commanders depended upon intelligence input from the more powerful UN member states, who rarely delivered.
If U.S. spy satellites or NATO planes picked up visual evidence or word of Serb troop advances toward Srebrenica, they did not share it with UN peacekeepers. Just as Dallaire’s troops had to encounter militias in person if they hoped to document their activities, so, too, here, Dutch peacekeepers interested in learning the location of Serb troops had to patrol until they met up with Serb gunfire.2 It was a twisted, Balkan game of blindman’s bluff.

  At the morning press conference in Sarajevo on July 8, the garrulous UN spokesman Gary Coward mechanically rattled off the names of the Dutch UN observation posts around Srebrenica that the Serbs had seized. When I approached him after the press conference and asked for his best estimate of the Serb objectives, he shrugged, grabbed a sheet of scrap paper from a nearby table, and drew a large, oblong circle meant to represent the safe area. “We think the Serbs want to do this,” he said, blotting out the bottom third of the circle with scribbles. By taking control of the southern portion of the pocket, Coward and other UN analysts were predicting, the Bosnian Serbs could secure the hills that overlooked a crucial supply road. Coward then drew a second circle. “But we are afraid the Serbs want to do this,” he said, scribbling out the entire circle so that nothing remained. “We simply don’t know.” The following day, when I asked Bosnian prime minister Haris Silajdzic to gauge Serb intentions, the prime minister pointed to the large map on the wall behind him. “You see those green dots?” he said, indicating the three specks representing the UN-declared safe areas in eastern Bosnia that were stranded apart from the rest of Muslim holdings. I nodded. “The Serbs want those to disappear,” he said.

  The Muslim-led government had cried wolf in the past often enough that it was difficult to know when to rely on its warnings. Silajdzic seemed to have received general alarms about Srebrenica’s peril, but he did not know precisely what lay in store for the enclave’s inhabitants. Certainly it seemed obvious that as winter approached the Serbs would seek to establish even more favorable “facts on the ground.” Although the Serbs still controlled 70 percent of the country, the Muslim army had begun nibbling away at Serb gains. Deserted by Western nations, the Sarajevo government had begun receiving arms and advice from Islamic groups and governments around the world, and looked to get stronger with time. The Serbs needed to free up the 1,000 or so troops that ringed Srebrenica. Even without any intelligence, one only had to look at the map to know the Bosnian Serbs’ strategic objectives.

  Still, the Serbs’ day-to-day plans were another matter. However untenable the isolated islands of thinly guarded territory, the map had also come to seem oddly destined to endure. Some combination of Serb caution, UN deterrence, NATO airpower, Muslim resistance, and historic inertia would leave the safe areas intact. No major Bosnian town had changed hands in the past two years, and most Balkan watchers had difficulty imagining outright conquest. Srebrenica in particular was a place that had captured headlines in 1993 when it was declared one of the six safe areas. But it had since faded from public concern.

  Prime Minister Silajdzic’s warning sounded more like a sigh than a siren. Bosnia’s Muslims had suffered for so long and so prominently that after years of protestations—“How could you let this happen to us?”—most now seemed resigned to the outside world’s indifference. The UN arms embargo remained in place. NATO planes flew overhead but had only undertaken a handful of pinprick bombings against Serb forces shelling the safe areas. Whenever the Serbs had rounded up and humiliated UN peacekeepers, the NATO powers had simply backed down. Western policymakers clung to their neutrality in the conflict and refused to line up behind the Muslims. Silajdzic’s caustic fatalism reflected the mood in the capital, where people no longer dashed behind barricades at the hint of flying metal or moved circuitously around town to avoid deadly junctions. Most now chose the quickest route to their destinations. “If you run, you hit the bullet,” the Sarajevo saying went. “If you walk, the bullet hits you.” Foreigners who remained in the city had once been welcomed as messengers, but now they were reminders of an outside world that had watched Bosnia perish. Doors were slammed in the faces of reporters; the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) was mocked as the UN Self-Protection Force. With so many broken promises and broken lives, nothing could surprise the Bosnians. The prime minister sounded like a man who had run out of options:

  To whom am I supposed to talk at this stage? We know the American people have a sympathy for the underdog. They know what is happening to us, and it bothers them. But the American government talks only about its interest—which is to do as little as possible. Bosnia is not a vital U.S. interest, so why would America risk its name, credibility, and prestige here?

  Yet there was defiance in Silajdzic’s tone as well. “In the first year of the war, we were in great danger of disappearing from the earth, but Bosnia has escaped execution,” he said. “We are now like men walking the streets saying hello to people who had seen us hanging from the gallows the day before.” In fact, although many in the country had escaped death, the men of Srebrenica would not.

  U.S. intelligence analysts had predicted Srebrenica could not survive, but when the attack began, they underestimated Serb intentions. At the CIA the National Intelligence Daily on July 9, 1995, stated that the Serb offensive against Srebrenica was “most likely to punish the Bosnian government for offensives in Sarajevo.” It was also “a means to press a cease-fire.” On July 10 the CIA assessment remained the same—the Serbs would not try to take the town because they would not want to deal with its inhabitants.3 They would “neutralize” the safe area rather than overrun it altogether. And on July 11 the chargé at the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo sent a cable at 6:11 p.m., nearly two hours after the enclave had already fallen, relaying the views of a “drained and downcast” Prime Minister Silajdzic:

  No consensus has formed among government and diplomatic contacts here as to the ultimate Serb military strategy, but most think it is interactive—that is, the [Bosnian Serb army] probes resistance and pushes until it locates an opportunity. [Muslim] officials now fear the Serb aim in Srebrenica is to “expel and occupy,” the former being pursued with brutality. . . . Another contact summed up the Serbs’ objective, “They want it all.”4

  Evidence gathered later indicates that the Serbs did in fact begin their offensive intending only to seize the southern section. But when they realized, to their amazement, that the Western powers would not resist, they opted to plow ahead and gobble the whole pocket.

  The normally ambulatory and zealous press corps paid little attention to Srebrenica in advance of its fall. The American and European journalists based in Bosnia in the summer of 1995 had not visited the town, which the Serbs had sealed off since the spring of 1994. In addition, trapped in Sarajevo, journalists were stuck relying inordinately on the United Nations. And senior UN officials, long impressed with what they said was General Mladic’s military acumen, had been conned by Serb assurances. The Dutch in Srebrenica first appealed to UN force commander Janvier to summon NATO air support on July 6. But he turned down that request and four others that followed, including a pivotal request the night before the Serbs’ final push. Janvier did not believe the Serbs would go all the way. Indeed, even when the Serbs fired on Dutch forces on the ground, clearly warranting the use of force in self-defense, the French general remained frozen by his mistrust of NATO airpower and his trust of Serb promises. “I spoke to [Bosnian Serb general Zdravko] Tolimir and he says they do not intend to take the enclave,” Janvier told a UN crisis team on July 10. “I believe him. If they do take the enclave, I’ll draw my conclusions.” Janvier also believed the Serbs when they claimed that Dutch peacekeepers had not been taken hostage. Tolimir had told him that any Dutch in Serb custody had “asked to be taken in . . . for their own safety.”5 In fact more than thirty Dutch peacekeepers had been forcibly disarmed and incarcerated.

  By this stage in the war, Janvier and other UN officers processed intelligence through a lens of a preexisting prejudice that held that the Bosnian Muslims were th
e ones destabilizing the peace and provoking the Serbs. At this same July 10 meeting, Janvier stressed that it was the Bosnian Muslims who were attacking the Serbs and the Dutch in an effort to “push us into a path that we don’t want.” His civilian counterpart, Yasushi Akashi, shared this perspective, which helped justify UN refusals to summon NATO air-power. “The [Muslim army] initiates actions and then calls on the UN and international community to respond and take care of their faulty judgement,” Akashi said. By 1995 senior UN officials spoke as if almost everything the Serbs did was merely “retaliatory,” while everything the Muslims did was “a provocation.”

  There was a grain of truth to much of the UN rhetoric. The Bosnian Muslims did stage attacks from safe areas, which were supposed to be demilitarized. Indeed, for Bosnians and foreigners alike, there was no worse feeling than hearing a hefty Bosnian artillery piece being wheeled just outside their window and then fired into the Sarajevo night; the incoming barrage was always disproportionately punishing. But most of the raids were forays to retrieve food and supplies from neighboring Serb villages, revenge attacks for the sieges to which the Serbs were subjecting them, or efforts to recapture lands from which they had been purged. Sergio Vieira de Mello, who spent 1993 living under siege in Sarajevo as the head of UN civil affairs, recalls approaching the Bosnian Serbs about a particularly heavy week of shelling. Vieira de Mello first contacted Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic to complain that for every sixty outgoing Bosnian rounds, the city of Sarajevo was earning 600 incoming. Karadzic claimed not to know what Vieira de Mello was talking about and referred him to Bosnian Serb military commander Mladic. When Vieira de Mello registered the same complaint with Mladic, the Serb general looked up and snorted, “That is the appropriate ratio.”