A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  Shattuck urged the protection of the remaining safe areas, arguing that the Muslims in Bosnia’s safe areas had relied on the “international community’s promise,” which was “clear, proper and well-considered.” He argued that a failure to act would mean not only the fall of the safe areas but a UN withdrawal. If the Europeans pulled out their peacekeepers, the United States would have to follow through on prior pledges to assist in their evacuation. This would be messy and humiliating. Shattuck warned, “U.S. troops will be on the ground helping the UN force pull out while Bosnian Serbs . . . fire upon them, and fearful Muslim civilians try to block their exit.” This was the image that most haunted U.S. policymakers, and Shattuck hoped the threat of bloody U.S. involvement down the road would tip the balance in favor of immediate intervention.

  The most detailed early evidence of the Bosnian Serbs’ crimes came on July 20, 1995, when three Muslim male survivors staggered out of the woods with the bullet wounds to prove what to that point had simply been feared: Mladic was systematically executing the men in his custody.

  A lack of food, water, and sleep and a surfeit of terror had left the men delirious. But they told their stories first to Bosnian Muslim police and then to Western journalists. Each account defied belief. Each survivor had prayed and assumed that his experience had not been shared by others. There were uncanny parallels in the killing tactics described at three different sites. Some massacres took place two by two; others twenty by twenty. The men were ordered to sit on buses or in warehouses as they waited their turn. One man remembered the night of July 13, which he spent on a bus outside a school in Bratunac. The Serbs pulled people off the buses for summary execution. “All night long we heard gunshots and moaning coming from the direction of the school,” the man said. “That was probably the worst experience, just sitting in the bus all night hearing the gunfire and the human cries and not knowing what will happen to you.” He was relieved the following morning when a white UN vehicle pulled up. But when the four men dressed as UN soldiers delivered the Serb salute and spoke fluent Serbian, he realized his hoped-for rescuers were in fact Serb reinforcements who had stolen Dutch uniforms and armored personnel carriers.33

  At the Grbavici school gym, several thousand men were gathered and ordered to strip down to their underwear. They were loaded in groups of twenty-five onto trucks, which delivered them to execution sites. Some of the men pulled off their blindfolds and saw that the meadow they approached was strewn with dead Muslim men. One eyewitness, who survived by hiding under dead bodies, described his ordeal:

  They took us off a truck in twos and led us out into some kind of meadow. People started taking off blindfolds and yelling in fear because the meadow was littered with corpses. I was put in the front row, but I fell over to the left before the first shots were fired so that bodies fell on top of me. They were shooting at us . . . from all different directions. About an hour later I looked up and saw dead bodies everywhere. They were bringing in more trucks with more people to be executed. After a bulldozer driver walked away, I crawled over the dead bodies and into the forest.34

  The Serbs marched hundreds of Muslim prisoners toward the town of Kravica and herded them into a large warehouse. Serb soldiers positioned themselves at the warehouse’s windows and doorways and fired their rifles and rocket-propelled grenades and threw hand grenades into the building, where the men were trapped. Shrapnel and bullets ripped into the flesh of those inside, leaving emblazoned upon the walls a montage of crimson and gray that no amount of scrubbing could remove. The soldiers finished off those still twitching and left a warehouse full of corpses to be bulldozed.35

  Remarkably, Muslim survivors of the massacre continued to hope. Only hours after Serb soldiers had shot up the warehouse and its human contents, one Serb returned and shouted, “Is anyone alive in there? Come out. You’re going to be loaded onto a truck and become part of our army.” Several men got up, believing. The Serbs returned again a while later, this time promising an ambulance for the wounded. Again, survivors rose and left the warehouse. One Kravica survivor who laid low and eventually escaped remembers his shock at the credulity of his peers. He also remembers his own disappointment on hearing successive rounds of gunshots outside.36

  Graves

  On July 21, 1995, the allied leaders gathered in London for an emergency conference meant to iron out a new Bosnia policy. The Zepa enclave still hung in the balance, and the evil in Srebrenica had been broadly publicized. But the allies stunned Bosnia’s Muslims by issuing what became known as the London declaration. The declaration threatened “substantial and decisive air-power,” but only in response to Serb attacks on the safe area of Gorazde, one of the few Bosnian safe areas not then under fire. The declaration did not mention Sarajevo, which continued to withstand fierce artillery siege; Zepa, which had not yet fallen; or the men of Srebrenica, some of whom were still alive.

  A convoy of Dutch peacekeepers departed Srebrenica the same day. They arrived to a heroes’ welcome at UN headquarters in Zagreb. At a press conference the Dutch defense minister announced that the Dutch had seen Muslims led away and heard shooting. He also said they had heard that some 1,600 Muslims were killed in a local schoolyard. The rumors, he said, were too numerous and “too authentic” to be false. Yet this was the first the Dutch had spoken publicly about their suspicions. Moreover, apart from the defense minister’s grim reference, he presented a relatively mild general picture. He complained that the Serbs were still denying the Red Cross access to some 6,000 Muslim prisoners. When the dazed Dutch commander Karremans spoke, he praised Mladic for his “excellently planned military operation” and reflected that “the parties in Bosnia cannot be divided into ‘the good guys’ and ‘the bad guys.’”37 That night at a festive UN headquarters in Zagreb, the Dutch drank and danced well into the early morning.

  On July 24 the UN special rapporteur for human rights for the former Yugoslavia, onetime Polish prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, described the findings of his week-long investigation. He said 7,000 of Srebrenica’s 40,000 residents seemed to have “disappeared.” He appealed to the Western powers to ensure that Zepa’s 16,000 residents not meet the same fate. Zepa’s Muslim defenders continued to hang on, even though the UN had already announced that it would not summon air strikes to aid their defense.38

  On July 27, 1995, Mazowiecki announced his resignation. He was sickened by the UN refusal to stand up to the Serbs in Srebrenica and Zepa. In his resignation letter, he wrote:

  One cannot speak about the protection of human rights with credibility when one is confronted with the lack of consistency and courage displayed by the international community and its leaders. . . . Crimes have been committed with swiftness and brutality and by contrast the response of the international community has been slow and ineffectual. . . . The very stability of international order and the principle of civilization is at stake over the question of Bosnia. I am not convinced that the turning point hoped for will happen and cannot continue to participate in the pretense of the protection of human rights.39

  When Galbraith returned to his post in Croatia, he received even more damning news about the Srebrenica men. His fiancée, a UN political officer, happened to be in Tuzla, where she overheard a UN interview with one of the male survivors of a mass execution. On July 25, 1995, Galbraith sent Secretary Christopher a highly classified, “No Distribution” cable headed, “Possible Mass Execution of Srebrenica Males Is Reason to Save Zepa”:

  1. A UN official has recounted to me an interview she conducted of a Srebrenica refugee in Tuzla. The account, which she felt was highly credible, provides disturbing evidence that the Bosnian Serbs have massacred many, if not most, of the 5,000 plus military age men in their custody following the fall of Srebrenica.

  2. If the Bosnian Serb army massacred the defenders of Srebrenica, we can be sure a similar fate awaits many of the 16,000 people in Zepa. The London Declaration implicitly writes off Zepa. In view of the numerous accounts of atrocities in
Srebrenica and the possibility of a major massacre there, I urge reconsideration of air strikes to help Zepa. . . .

  3. If this account is accurate, there may be no survivors of the men rounded up in Srebrenica. We should redouble efforts to see these men. If the Serbs refuse access, the implications are obvious.

  4. Again, it is not too late to prevent a similar tragedy at Zepa. Zepa’s defenders valiantly continue to hold on. Undoubtedly they realize the fate that awaits them. They should not be abandoned.

  The cable had no effect on UN or NATO policy toward Zepa, which surrendered two days later. Most of the men there who entrusted their fates to the Serb authorities were murdered.

  Immediately after receiving Galbraith’s cable, Secretary Christopher dispatched Assistant Secretary for Human Rights Shattuck and Assistant Secretary of State for Refugees Phyllis Oakley to Tuzla to verify the survivors’ claims. The United States was far quicker to debrief survivors and witnesses than it had been in Charles Twining’s days at the Cambodian border. Shattuck prepared a detailed report on the basis of two days of interviews with a dozen Muslim refugees, including two survivors of mass executions—a teenage boy, and a fifty-five-year-old crippled man. Shattuck reported back to Washington: “It is impossible at this point to estimate accurately how many have been killed, but clearly that number is very substantial. The accounts that I have heard . . . indicate that there is substantial new evidence of genocide.” Yet knowing that the United States did not intend to deploy ground troops, bomb unilaterally, or immediately rally its European allies into multilateral action, the only recommendation Shattuck mustered was that further war crimes indictments be issued at the UN criminal tribunal that had been set up at The Hague.40

  Shattuck’s findings finally prompted a serious review of U.S. intelligence data for evidence of mass executions. Since the Muslim survivors had supplied Shattuck with the precise names and locations of alleged killing sites, the CIA could scan the aerial photos that its satellites had snapped over the past few weeks with geographic coordinates in mind. On August 2, 1995, a CIA imagery analyst stayed up all night examining the hundreds of aerial photos around the small village of Nova Kasaba near Srebrenica. He noticed severe discrepancies. In one spy photo several hundred prisoners were gathered at the neighborhood soccer field where the Dutch had spotted them. Several days later the prisoners had vanished and four mounds of earth, testaments to fresh digging, appeared nearby. The National Intelligence Daily reported this evidence on August 4, and Albright pressed for its public release. At a closed session of the UN Security Council on August 10, Albright presented enlargements of the photographs that showed the movement of earth. The evidence indicated these were mass graves:

  •newly disturbed earth where refugees were known to have been;

  •heavy vehicle tracks where there were none shortly before;

  •no apparent military, industrial, or agricultural reason for such tracks or disturbed earth;

  •multiple, confirming reports from refugees; and

  •no vegetation on the site.

  Albright concluded, “The Bosnian Serbs have executed, beaten, and raped people who were defenseless. They have carried out a calculated plan of atrocities far from a battlefield and with the direct involvement of high-level Bosnian Serb Army officials. There can be no excuse.”41 Albright declared:

  Innocent lives remain at stake. Some 10,000 civilians from Srebrenica and around 3,000 from Zepa are missing and unaccounted for. Some may be in hiding. Some may be in detention. Some are most certainly dead. We have a responsibility to investigate, to find out what we can, to see that those in hiding are granted safe passage; that those in detention are well-treated or released; that the names of those who died or who have been killed are made known to their families; and that those responsible for illegal and outrageous activities are brought to justice.

  Something evil had transpired, but even those most prepared to believe the worst could not have believed how evil.42

  No amount of wishful thinking or reenergized U.S. diplomacy could change a most grisly fact: In the month since Srebrenica had fallen, and mainly in the ten days after the Muslim surrender, Ratko Mladic and his associate Radislav Krstic had overseen the systematic slaughter by ambush or execution of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys.

  It would not have mattered if the United States had predicted precisely when the Serbs would attack Srebrenica. Zepa fell more than a fortnight after Srebrenica in plain view of the international community, revealing that the will to confront the Serbs was absent in the face of full knowledge. “The failure was not an intelligence failure,” says Assistant Secretary Gati. “Ethnic cleansing was not a priority in our policy. . . . When you make the original decision that you aren’t going to respond when these kinds of things happen, then, I’m sorry, but these things are going to happen.”

  The United States tried to defend its intelligence and its policy failure. This was difficult. Clinton officials were reluctant to admit they knew the Serbs were going to do what they did and yet had done nothing about it. But to admit that they had not predicted the Serb onslaught revealed other weaknesses. Several weeks after the Serb victory, the State Department circulated a “bottom lines” memo, which supplied officials with press guidance. When challenged, U.S. officials were to say the United States knew no more in advance than the United Nations about any Serb plan to take the enclave, and it did not have evidence of Bosnian Serb troop movements. One U.S. official scribbled a reminder to himself in the corner of the memo that Srebrenica had been besieged for nearly three years and the Bosnian Serbs could have launched a military attack at any time. “We did assess that all of the eastern enclaves were indefensible unless reinforced by ground units and supported by close air support,” the note said. On the question of the likelihood of atrocities, U.S. officials were urged to fudge their response by saying, “We did not have any information on any [Bosnian Serb] intent to commit atrocities against the Muslim defenders or population of Srebrenica. We did know of the possibility of such activity given the history of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.”43 State Department and White House officials and others deplored the “failure,” the “tragedy,” and the “imperfect reality.” But they were careful not to accept responsibility for the demise of the enclave, as they did not want to own the problem, which showed no signs of subsiding.

  A few days after Srebenica’s fall, White House spokesman McCurry entered into an exchange with a reporter over whether the United States was ashamed:

  McCurry: I think everybody in this government has consistently said that it’s a devastating situation and nobody is satisfied with the performance of those who have been entrusted with the will of the international community to keep the peace.

  Reporter: But do we feel—do we accept the fact that we bear some responsibility for what happened?

  McCurry: There’s no way to assess responsibility for all the tragedy that is Bosnia. You have to look back over the work of this administration, the previous administration; frankly, you’ve got to look back into decisions taken by many governments in many different places.44

  Meanwhile, State Department spokesman Burns claimed that the administration was working behind the scenes with its European allies to develop a military strategy. Moreover, he said, much as had U.S. spokespersons during the Rwanda genocide, that the United States was providing an additional $5 million to deliver food, shelter, and water to “meet immediate needs in Srebrenica.”45 Burns stressed that the United States was on the ball. “We will meet any request that they give to us,” he continued, “because we do feel a sense of urgency.”46

  But feeling a sense of urgency and acting urgently were two different matters. In order for the Clinton administration to act on its feeling, the war in Bosnia would have to become caught up in American domestic politics. It was Bob Dole, the seventy-two-year-old, wisecracking Republican senator from Kansas, who brought Bosnia home.

  Aftermath

/>   Bob Dole, the Senate majority leader, had been committed to a more activist U.S. foreign policy in the Balkans since 1990, when he had watched Serb police maul the throngs of Kosovo Albanians who had come out to greet his American delegation. Dole’s own witnessing had sparked a sustained engagement with the region. His chief foreign policy adviser, Mira Baratta, a Croatian American attuned to Serb aggression, spurred him on further. Dole had been consistently critical of U.S. policy under Bush and Clinton. By the summer of 1995, he was regarded as the chief Republican challenger to Bill Clinton in the 1996 presidential election. Thus, he was well positioned to make the fall of Srebrenica a subject for American politics. This was the first time in the twentieth century that allowing genocide came to feel politically costly for an American president.

  All along, the central criticism of U.S. policy made by human rights advocates, engaged members of Congress, and dissenters within the State Department had been that it was timid. The central criticism of the same policy made by UN officials and America’s European allies was that it was rhetorically tough, practically weak or indifferent, and thus doing more harm to the Bosnian Muslims than if the United States had stayed uninvolved entirely.

  A shift in U.S. policy had been in the works even before Srebrenica’s demise. Indeed, by the spring of 1995, it was already clear that the UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia could not survive. In mid-June, at a Bosnia briefing meeting with his senior advisers, President Clinton had been testy about the way the United States had floated along without a policy. It had allowed nationalists in the Balkans to dictate the course of change. “We need to get the policy straight,” he had snapped, “or we’re just going to be kicking the can down the road again. Right now we’ve got a situation, we’ve got no clear mission, no one’s in control of events.”47 Most outside observers thought the president was in control.