A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  If the first bout of wishful thinking occurred in not predicting that the Serbs would attack Srebrenica when they did, the second lay in not anticipating the speed with which the Serbs would seize the safe area. Seeing no response from Washington or New York, the Serbs, like the Rwandan Hutu government and militia before them, kept pressing. Many Muslims in Srebrenica expected the Serb assault would be temporary and the international community would intervene. One fifty-five-year-old Muslim later recalled:

  By July 11, UNPROFOR soldiers were in a constant retreat. . . . I locked the door of my house and joined the retreating civilians and soldiers. . . . So many people like myself thought that what was happening would only be a temporary thing. . . .“It was a U.N. ‘safe haven,’ there is no way it will be allowed to fall,” I thought. That’s why I didn’t take anything with me when I left my house. I just locked my door and figured I’d be back in a few hours or a few days at the longest. Now all I have with me—of all the things I owned—are the keys to the front of my house.6

  While Muslim civilians coddled their house keys and mistakenly looked to the UN for protection, the peacekeepers expected the town’s largely unarmed Muslim defenders to offer the first line of defense and NATO airpower to supply the second. But crammed into what amounted to an ethnic ghetto for more than two years and disgusted by the corruption of their local leaders, the morale of Srebrenica’s Muslims had plummeted. Reluctant to fight, they were told for a long time they would not have to. Up until hours before the Serbs entered Srebrenica, Colonel Tom Karremans, the Dutch commander of UN troops in Srebrenica, promised NATO air strikes. On July 10 Karremans met with Muslim military leaders and assured them that forty to sixty NATO planes would soon arrive to stage a “massive air strike.” “This area will be a zone of death in the morning,” Karremans told the desperate Muslim leaders, pointing to a broad swath of territory that the Serbs had just occupied south of Srebrenica. “NATO planes will destroy everything that moves,” he said.7 That night Dutch peacekeepers and Bosnian soldiers and civilians kept one eye on the sky, longing to see NATO bombers, and the other eye on Serb trucks, armored personnel carriers, tanks, and infantrymen closing in on the town. Because the United Nations had promised bombing, the Muslims had not reclaimed the tanks and antiaircraft guns they turned over to the UN in 1993 as part of a demilitarization agreement. They knew that on their own they would eventually be overrun by Serb forces. They needed the UN and NATO, and they feared that if they took back their weapons, the blue helmets would use this as an excuse to shirk their duty to defend the pocket.8

  Finally, around midday on July 11, four hours after the Dutch commander in Srebrenica had submitted that day’s futile request for NATO assistance and five days after he had made his first appeal, a NATO posse of eighteen jets set off from their base in Italy. Muslim civilians had already begun fleeing the town. When the NATO planes arrived overhead, one pair of U.S. F-16s could not find the Serb targets and another NATO pair bombed near a Serb tank with little effect. The Serbs threatened to kill Dutch hostages if air attacks continued, and the Dutch government and the United Nations commanders opted to negotiate a surrender.

  While the bombers were roaring across the Balkans toward Srebrenica, at 2:30 p.m. Bosnian time, 8:30 a.m. back in the United States, President Clinton was deflecting a question from a reporter about the Serb attack.

  “Sir,” the reporter asked, “the Bosnian Serbs are moving into Srebrenica fast, according to reports. Is it time for NATO air strikes?”

  “We may have something to say on that later today,” the President said. “But let me say I’m concerned about the people who are there, and I’m also concerned about the UNPROFOR troops—the Dutch—who are there.”9

  Meanwhile, some 15,000 Muslims—most of whom were men, fewer than one-third of whom were armed, and none of whom believed that the UN would protect them—had taken to the hills in anticipation of Mladic’s arrival. They had little chance of surviving a thirty-mile night-time journey through dense forests, scattered minefields, and Serb shell and machine-gun fire. Still, they preferred their dim odds to entrusting their fates to the Serb general who had commanded the brutal Serb war effort since 1992. Some 25,000 others, including the town leaders, remained in the enclave, certain that the international community would preside over their evacuation. They spent the evening of the 11th pressed up against a UN base in the small village of Potocari, four miles north of Srebrenica center, clambering to be allowed behind the protective UN sheath. Dutch commander Karremans reported to his UN superiors that the Muslims who had gathered outside UN gates were “in an extremely vulnerable position: the sitting duck position.”10

  Bosnian Serb general Mladic held the fate of Srebrenica’s Muslims in his hands. Soon after seizing the town on July 11, he summoned Colonel Karremans for a pair of meetings at the local Hotel Fontana. Mladic delivered a blistering harangue and then insisted Karremans drink with him “to a long life,” an image of amiability that was broadcast around the world. Off-camera, Mladic warned that if NATO planes reappeared, the Serbs would shell the UN compound in Potocari, where the refugees had gathered. Later, with Karremans looking on, Mladic asked the Muslim representative of the Bosnian government who had been called to negotiate whether the Muslims wanted to survive or “disappear.”

  AP/Wide World Photos

  Bosnian Serb army General Ratko Mladic, left, drinks with Dutch Col. Tom Karremans, the commander of UN peacekeepers in Srebrenica, on July 12, 1995, the day after Serb forces seized the UN-declared “safe area.”

  Recognition

  “They’re All Going Down”

  General Mladic arrived back in Srebrenica the next day, television cameras in tow. Looking well rested and tanned from the summer offensive, he urged the Muslims of Srebrenica gathered before him to be patient. He and his men were filmed passing out chocolates to young Muslim children. “Those who want to leave can leave,” Mladic said. “There is no need to be frightened.” Patting the head of a terrified young boy, Mladic offered soothing words that did not come easily to a man brusque by nature who was surrounded by thousands of people he had come to despise. “You’ll be taken to a safe place,” he said, assuring the anxious throngs that women and children would go first. Under general Krstic’s logistic leadership, some fifty to sixty buses and trucks arrived in the next twenty-four hours to carry out the deportation.

  The Serbs initially allowed Dutch peacekeepers to ride on the buses, but they quickly changed their minds. When a peacekeeper tried to prevent a bus from being loaded without UN supervision, General Mladic grinned and said, “I am in charge here. I’ll decide what happens. I have my plans and I’m going to carry them out. It will be best for you if you cooperate.”11

  In the next several hours at Potocari, the Serb general ordered men separated from women and children. While the UN soldiers looked on, armed Serbs ripped fathers, brothers, and sons from the hysterical grip of the women. Mladic claimed he was simply screening Muslim men for “war crimes” or detaining them for a prisoner exchange. Eventually, they would all be reunited in safety. Those who contested Mladic’s order were brutally punished. One Muslim woman described her horrific experience at the UN base:

  At 4:00 [on July 12], they took my husband away. And then my son Esmir. . . . It is just so hard to talk about this, I can’t, it just breaks my heart. . . . I was holding him in my arms. . . . We were hugging, but they . . . grabbed him and just slit his throat. They killed him. I just can’t say anymore, I just can’t, you have to understand that it is breaking my heart. I’m still hoping the authorities or anyone can still get my other son or my husband free.12

  Many westerners quickly overlooked Mladic’s brazen deceits of recent days and trusted Serb promises to adhere to the Geneva conventions. But others saw the writing on the wall. Christina Schmidt, a German-born nurse with Doctors Without Borders, sent her July 12 journal entry to the organization’s Belgrade office, which publicly transmitted it. “Everybody should feel the
violence in the faces of the [Bosnian Serb] soldiers directing the people like animals to the buses,” Schmidt wrote. “A father with his one-year-old baby is coming to me, crying, accompanied by [Serb soldiers]. He doesn’t have anybody to take care of the baby and [the Serbs] selected him for . . .? It’s a horrible scene—I have to take the baby from his arm—writing down his name and feeling that he will never see his child again.”13

  The Dutch around Potocari began finding bodies on July 12. One fourteen-year-old girl was found hanging from a rafter. The night before she had been taken away by Serb soldiers for an hour and had returned with blood running down her legs. A young Muslim boy led two Dutch soldiers to nine Muslims who had been executed. The boy waited quietly while the peacekeepers snapped photos of the bodies. In the vicinity of the town of Nova Kasaba, the Dutch drove by a soccer field and spotted thousands of Muslim men on their knees with their hands on their heads. A table had been set up to register them, and their small knapsacks and bags lay in the grass. When these same Dutch later heard single gunshots from the field, some began to suspect, in the words of one sergeant, “They’re all going down.”14 Others allowed themselves to believe the tales told them by the Serbs: The gunshots were a “celebration” of enlistment of a new recruit. Or the areas the Dutch might like to inspect were “too dangerous,” as “Muslim attacks” were ongoing.

  UN officials at headquarters focused on the damage the fall of the safe area would do to the UN’s reputation. At a July 12 meeting, Akashi, the top UN civilian, blamed the Muslims for their “provocation” and said, “It would help if we had some TV pictures showing the Dutch feeding refugees.”15 When asked at a press conference that day whether the fall of Srebrenica represented the UN’s biggest failure in Bosnia, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali answered: “No, I don’t believe that this represents a failure. You have to see if the glass is half full or half empty. We are still offering assistance to the refugees . . . and we have been able to maintain the dispute within the borders of the former Yugoslavia.”16

  Unlike Dallaire, who rapidly relayed grisly reports from Rwanda and who seized any microphone placed in his vicinity, UN officials in the former Yugoslavia resisted publicizing atrocity reports. Officials at UN headquarters in New York ended up learning more from journalists than they did from their own delegates in the field. A piqued July 18 cable from headquarters to Akashi inquired: “What about the reports of mass murder coming from refugees? They are widespread and consistent and have been given credence by a variety of international observers. We have, however, received nothing on the subject from UNPROFOR.”17

  The women, children, and elderly the Serbs forced onto buses endured a ghastly journey from Potocari to just outside Tuzla, another of the Muslim-held towns that had been declared “safe” in 1993. On the two-and-a-half-hour drive, many pressed their faces up to the glass of the bus windows in the hopes of spotting their men. Bodies were strewn along the roadside, some mutilated, many with their throats slit. Trembling young Muslim men were coerced into giving the three-finger Serb salute. Large clusters of men, hands tied behind their backs, heads between their knees, sat awaiting instructions. The buses were frequently stopped along the way so that Serb gunmen could select the young, attractive women for a roadside rape. By 8 p.m. on July 13, the UN base near Srebrenica had been virtually emptied.

  Citizens and policymakers in the United States and Europe followed this entire sequence. The western media reported the fall of the enclave, the alleged “screening” of the Muslim men for war crimes, and the terror of the bus journey.18 The first suggestions of summary executions appeared on July 14. Although reporters were typically reluctant to extrapolate on the basis of individual reports of murders, Bosnian Muslim officials and refugees offered a devastating picture.

  Reporters at the State Department asked spokesman Nicholas Burns whether he could verify that the Serbs were separating the men from the women, the children, and the elderly. Burns replied:

  I don’t have specific information about elderly people, women, and children being separated from males. I do have information that a great number of people are being herded into a football stadium. Considering what happened three or four years ago in the same area at the hands of the same people, the Bosnian Serb military, we are obviously concerned, greatly concerned, gravely concerned about this situation. And we are sending a public message today to the Bosnian Serbs that they have a humanitarian responsibility to treat these people well.

  Yet the only threat he issued on behalf of the United States was that Serb gunmen would eventually be held accountable at the UN war crimes tribunal.19 President Clinton made no threats.

  The Bosnian ambassador to the UN, Mohammed Sacirbey, received reports of massacres that were more disturbing than any he had heard before. He had been told that the men General Mladic brought to the stadium had been killed en masse. Sacirbey telephoned Ambassador Albright with the report. A cable from the U.S. embassy in London to the State Department on July 13 related Sacirbey’s “alarming news” that the Bosnian Serbs were committing “all sorts” of atrocities. It was public knowledge that women between fifteen and thirty-five were being singled out and removed from buses, while boys and men were being taken away to unknown destinations.

  For all the outrage among world leaders over what the Serbs had done, policymakers did not readily make the leap from the dismay over the Serbs’ seizure of UN-protected territory to alarm about the fate of the people who had lived within it. Ambassador Sacirbey attempted to keep the focus at the UN on the safe area’s living contents. “The most important thing to keep in mind,” Sacirbey kept telling people, was that “the safe area is gone, but the safe area was not the land; it was the people, and they can still be saved.” But as they had done during the genocide in Rwanda, senior U.S. and UN officials behaved as if they were conducting business as usual. UN special representative Akashi sent a bland cable to New York on July 14 that described the food stocks and the shelter needs of the women and children arriving in Tuzla and the status of Dutch hostages. Only in the eighth paragraph of the second page did Akashi casually reference the missing Muslim men, stating, “We are beginning to detect a short-fall in [the] number of persons expected to arrive in Tuzla. There is no further information on the status of the approximately 4,000 draft age males.”20 In the U.S. government, none of the atrocities that had occurred in Bosnia or Rwanda in the previous three years had made the threat to distant foreigners any less abstract. “People are very far from these issues,” Holbrooke says. “Very few people in Washington have ever visited a refugee camp. They feel really detached from the stakes.” The capacity and willingness of Western policymakers to imagine what was occurring out of range of the cameras was limited. But this could not be forgiven by the limits of experience alone. “Going to a refugee camp might help,” National Security Adviser Anthony Lake notes. “But not having gone to a refugee camp is not an excuse for not having an imagination.”

  John Menzies, a foreign service officer who had long favored bombing the Serbs and had signed the “dirty dozen” letter prepared by Bosnia desk officer Harris back in April 1993, had recently been nominated to become U.S. ambassador to Bosnia. On July 13, 1995, he met with Hasan Muratovic, the Bosnian president’s chief confidant. Menzies remembers Muratovic, a typically unflappable operator, “utterly flapped.” Muratovic made wild appeals for NATO planes to drop radios into the Srebrenica enclave so the disoriented men who were trying to escape might use them to find a safe exit out of the woods. “He was at a loss for constructive ideas,” Menzies recalls. “I had never seen this level of helplessness.” Over the next several days, Menzies could do nothing more than relay Muslim distress signals to Washington. He heard little encouragement from his political masters.

  Response

  The Constraint: The Rules of the Road

  When the safe area fell, U.S. policymakers considered themselves constrained by two fundamental facts. First, as a policy matter, the United St
ates would not deploy its troops on the ground in the Balkans to wage war; that remained nonnegotiable. Second, though many in the Clinton cabinet backed the idea of NATO air strikes from the skies, they believed the United States was at the mercy of the “dual-key” arrangement that had placed one key in the hands of UN officials (backed by European governments) determined to stay neutral in the conflict. U.S. officials “did not like” the mechanism, they said, but the “rules of the road” had been established and the United States had to live with them. Reporters were told to steer their inquiries toward the Europeans who had peacekeepers in Bosnia. Clinton’s campaign promises long forgotten, Spokesman Burns said the United States was “not a decisive actor” in the debate:

  We’ve chosen not to put troops on the ground because we don’t believe it is in the vital interests of the United States to do so, which should always be the standard when a decision is made to put American troops into battle, combat situations. We took that decision, the last administration took that decision, this administration has reconfirmed, reaffirmed that decision, and that is United States policy. So therefore, the United States has influence on the margins.21

  There was much the United States might have done. It might have used the Serb seizure of Srebrenica and the ghastly television images to convince its European allies to rewrite the rules of the road in urgent fashion. It might have threatened to bomb the Serbs around Srebrenica and elsewhere in Bosnia if their troops did not depart the enclave, turn over the male prisoners unharmed, or at the very least stop shelling the Muslims who were in the woods trying to escape. It might have acted preemptively, warning the victorious Serbs that they would be met with stiff retaliation if they turned their sights on Zepa, the safe area just south of Srebrenica, which was home to 16,000 vulnerable Muslims. If the United States failed to win support for such an aggressive response, and if the allies refused to support bombing, senior U.S. officials might, at the very least, have made the fate of the Muslim men their chief diplomatic priority. They might have warned Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic that economic sanctions would be stiffened and prolonged if the men in Mladic’s custody were ill treated. They might have carefully tracked the whereabouts of the prisoners so as to send a signal to Mladic, Krstic, and the other Serb officers that they were being watched. Instead, the United States did none of the above.