A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  Many on the Clinton team were still nervous about of the use of force. Memories of the Vietnam War made Lake and the U.S. military planners especially fearful of open-ended commitments. But senior U.S. officials were emboldened by a new development in the Balkans. Croatia, which had been occupied by rebel Serbs since its war of independence in 1991, had launched an offensive aimed at reconquering lost territory and expelling members of its Serb minority. At the time Lake was unveiling America’s “endgame,” the Croatian army was sweeping through Serb-held territory in Croatia and western Bosnia. Croatia’s success showed that the so-called Serb juggernaut was more of a paper tiger, a vital piece of news for those who had deferred for years to alarmist Pentagon warnings of steep U.S. casualties. It also showed, crucially, that Serbian president Slobidan Milosevic was prepeared to stand back and allow Serbs in neighboring Croatia and Bosnia to be overrun. If NATO intervened, it would face only the Bosnian Serbs, not the Yugoslav National Army.

  A number of Western negotiators were secretly relieved that the Serbs had taken Srebrenica and Zepa because the loss of the two Muslim enclaves had tidied the map of Bosnia by eliminating two nettlesome non-contiguous patches of territory. A peace deal seemed easier to reach and, once reached, easier to enforce. And Western diplomats had at last come to the slow realization that they were negotiating not with gentlemen but with evil. Military force was the only answer.

  The full-court press produced an immediate turnover. At the July conference of Western leaders, the United States had secured a commitment to bomb the Serbs if they attacked the Gorazde safe area. In the coming weeks Lake, Holbrooke, and others pressed successfully to extend NATO’s protective umbrella to three other safe areas—Bihac, Tuzla, and Sarajevo. One of the “keys” that needed to be turned before air strikes could be launched was removed from the hands of the gun-shy civilian head of the UN mission, Akashi, and placed in the hands of UN force commander Janvier, which at least left two generals in charge. More important, Washington and its European allies understood that the next time NATO bombed, it could not launch only pinpricks and it could not allow Serb hostage-taking to diminish allied resolve. UN peacekeepers were withdrawn from Serb territory in late August, where they were achieving almost nothing besides serving as potential hostages.

  On August 14, 1995, Secretary Christopher had given Assistant Secretary Holbrooke command over U.S. diplomacy on Bosnia. On August 19 Holbrooke’s five-man negotiating team drove over Mount Igman into Sarajevo. The Sarajevo airport had been shut down by Serb shelling, and the Serbs had refused to guarantee the safety of international flights. As a result, the U.S. delegation had no choice but to drive its bulky vehicles along the perilous mountain road that had been widened unsatisfactorily to accommodate Bosnian truck drivers bringing goods into the city. A UN armored personnel carrier transporting part of the U.S. delegation slipped off the road and tumbled down the mountain. Three of Holbrooke’s colleagues and friends, Nelson Drew, Robert Frasure, and Joseph Kruzel, were killed. This was the first time American officials had died in the Balkan wars. Holbrooke brought the bodies back to the United States, flying part of the way with his knees wedged up against one of the coffins. The tragedy further energized the new diplomatic effort and heightened U.S. determination to end the war. “For the first time in the entire conflict, we took deaths,” Holbrooke says. “And these were the deaths of three treasured senior public servants and friends. Everyone was torn apart. Suddenly, the war had come home.”

  On August 28, 1995, a shell landed near the very same Sarajevo market where sixty-eight people had been killed in February 1994. This time the Serb attack killed thirty-seven and wounded eighty-eight. From Paris, Holbrooke called Washington, frantic. Clinton, Gore, Christopher, Perry, and Lake were all away on vacation. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott asked Holbrooke what he wanted to recommend to Christopher and Clinton. “Call us the negotiation team for bombing,” Holbrooke said. “We’ve got to bomb.”

  And at last NATO did. Beginning on August 30, 1995, and continuing consistently for the next three weeks, NATO planes flew 3,400 sorties and 750 attack missions against fifty-six targets. They avoided aged and rusty Serb tanks and concentrated on ammunition bunkers, surface-to-air missile sites, and communications centers. They called the mission Operation Deliberate Force, as if to announce up front that what might have been called “Operation Halfhearted Force” was a thing of the past. The Bosnian Serb army was sent into a tailspin, and Muslim and Croat soldiers succeeded in retaking some 20 percent of the country that had been seized and cleansed in 1992. When Lake got word that the planes were raining bombs upon the Serb positions, he phoned the president, who was in Wyoming.

  “Whoooppeee!” Clinton whispered, confirming, as Congressman Frank McCloskey had told him the year before, that bombing the Serb military did make him feel good.92

  Backed by the newly credible threat of military force, the United States was easily able to convince the Serbs to stop shelling civilians. In November 1995, the Clinton administration brokered a peace accord in Dayton, Ohio. The agreement left Serbs, 31 percent of the population, with 49 percent of the land. Croats, who made up 17 percent of the population, received 25 percent, and the Muslims, who constituted 44 percent, were allocated just 25 percent. Three ethnically “pure” slivers of territory were almost all that were left of Bosnia. The three groups were kept together in a single country, but under an extremely weak central government. More than 200,000 people had been killed since the war began in April 1992. One out of two people had lost their homes. In December 1995, speaking from the Oval Office, President Clinton movingly invoked the massacres in Srebrenica and the recent killings in the Sarajevo marketplace to justify the deployment of 20,000 U.S. troops to Bosnia.

  Although the war was over, Clinton had a small problem. Ever since his administration had abandoned its lift-and-strike policy proposal in May 1993, senior officials had been arguing that Bosnia constituted “a problem from hell.” They had said that intervention would be futile or would imperil U.S. interests. It would thus be difficult for those same officials now to retract their earlier rhetoric and convince the American people of the sudden worthiness of contributing troops to enforce the Dayton peace. Entering an election year, the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill was poised to strike.

  Several of Clinton’s Republican challengers did try to score points, telling the public that Bosnia was not worth a single American life. But Clinton’s presidential challenger, Senator Dole, closed ranks behind the commander in chief. In the late fall, Dole teamed up with Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican and fellow war hero. The pair publicly backed the president’s decision to deploy U.S. troops to Bosnia. Dole and McCain knew that their Republican colleagues would be upset by their refusal to attack Clinton. Dole’s campaign managers in New Hampshire told him, “You already got problems. You don’t need this!” Dole tried to head off some of the intra-party criticism by calling a meeting with a dozen angry Republican senators. McCain remembered the session. “The rhetoric was intense and emotional: ‘Don’t put our boys in harm’s way.’ ‘Body bags.’ All that,” McCain said. “They were just pounding us. . . . I was getting more and more depressed.” When the meeting finally ended and the Republican critics filed out into the hall, the Arizona senator despaired. But as McCain walked out with Dole, who had said almost nothing, the majority leader cheerily observed, “Makin’ progress!” As bad as it had been, Dole had expected it to be much worse.93 In the end Dole helped convert twenty-eight Republicans to Clinton’s cause. The Senate approved the deployment of U.S. troops to Bosnia by 60 votes in favor, 39 opposed.

  Clinton knew significant casualties would harm his prospects in November. “The conventional political wisdom,” he said, was that there was “no upside and tons of downside” to the U.S. deployment. But he was willing to risk it: “You have to ask yourself which decision would you rather defend ten years from now when you’re not in office.” Clinton said. “I would r
ather explain why we tried” than why “NATO’s alliance was destroyed, and the influence of the United States was compromised for ten years.”94 For the first time, Clinton saw the costs of noninvolvement as greater than the risks of involvement.

  President Clinton defeated Senator Dole handily in 1996. A year later, in November 1997, Clinton appointed his former challenger chairman of the International Commission on Missing Persons, which had been established to locate some of the 40,000 still missing from the wars in the former Yugoslavia, including the more than 7,000 who disappeared from Srebrenica. The Balkan commission funded the collection of forensic data, DNA identification, and the de-mining of grave sites. Upon accepting the chairmanship, Dole delivered some brief remarks. “Some may question and some do question why we’re involved in Bosnia in the first place,” Dole said. “I think that’s a very easy answer: because we happen to be the leader of the world.”95

  Ron Haviv-VII

  A KLA soldier presents a wallet containing photos of his relatives and one of President Clinton, Summer 1999.

  Chapter 12

  Kosovo: A Dog and a Fight

  The Road to Confrontation

  In the aftermath of NATO’s bombing and troop deployment, Bosnia remained fairly peaceful. Many foreigners complained about the lingering hostility among Muslims, Croats, and Serbs and the refusal of the nationalist authorities to allow refugees to return to their homes. But however fragile and unsatisfying the terms and the implementation of the Dayton peace agreement, U.S. leadership had brought the savage war in Bosnia to an end. As 60,000 NATO troops patrolled the war-torn country, they oversaw the demining of former confrontation lines, helped demobilize soldiers and train new army and police forces, escorted families back to burned-down villages, and created an overall sense of security and the stirrings of normalcy.

  But NATO forces went only part of the way. Since its creation in 1993, the UN war crimes tribunal at The Hague had compiled a long list of suspects. When Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic signed the Dayton accords on behalf of his Bosnian Serb accomplices, he had urged U.S. officials to defer deciding whether suspected war criminals could hold high office in Bosnia. “In the house of a man just hanged,” he said, “don’t talk about rope.”1 Western leaders had listened. The wording of the Dayton agreement was deliberately vague, and Washington, fearing casualties and “another Somalia,” refused to order arrests. Indeed, soon after NATO forces were deployed, Commander Admiral Leighton Smith appeared on Bosnian Serb television and publicly denied that his troops had the authority to round up suspects. Smith did not provide his troops with the names or photographs of indictees for whom they should be on the lookout. U.S. military officers said they would make arrests only if ordered to do so directly by the president. They were not going to be hung out to dry, as they felt they had been in Somalia. For the first two years of the “peace,” therefore, nationalist thugs in the Balkans continued to run wild.

  Only one voice within the Pentagon regularly dissented: that of Wesley C. Clark. Clark, a decorated Vietnam vet and former Rhodes scholar, had been the J-5, or director for strategy and planning on the Joint Chiefs, during the Rwanda genocide and for much of the Bosnian war. He had been with Holbrooke in August 1995 when the UN APC had crashed and killed their three colleagues. And he had served as military liaison to the Dayton peace talks and watched Milosevic up close. He urged that war criminals be arrested immediately, while the parties were still smarting from NATO bombing. Not for the last time, Clark was ignored. Instead of ordering arrests, U.S. and European diplomats continued to rely upon Milosevic to stabilize the situation. Although they deemed the Serbian dictator responsible for genocide in Bosnia, Western policymakers treated him as an indispensable diplomatic partner. Their first stop was always Belgrade.

  Serbia’s citizenry held their president in less esteem. The wars orchestrated and funded by Milosevic and fought by Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia had left Serbia ravaged. Five years of militarization, exacerbated by the West’s stringent economic sanctions, had sent unemployment and inflation soaring and the people’s quality of life tumbling. In 1996 and 1997 Serbia’s restive population staged massive demonstrations. Brainwashed by years of Serbian propaganda that held that Serbs were the victims of genocide, the protesters made no mention of Serbia’s war crimes. Rather, they demanded an end to Milosevic’s corrupt rule and his oppression at home. Milosevic responded by tightening control. He muzzled dissent. He authorized political assassinations. He shut down independent media stations. He stole elections his party could not win. And he began brutalizing ethnic Albanians in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo.

  Serbs had a possessive relationship with the impoverished Kosovo province. Kosovo had long been immortalized as the site of the 1389 battle on the Field of Blackbirds, in which the Turks had defeated the Orthodox Christian Serbs, ushering in five centuries of Ottoman rule.2 In the second half of the twentieth century, Serbs and Albanians competed for land, jobs, and political privileges in the province. Because of an explosive Albanian birthrate and a Serb exodus, 1.7 million Albanians had come to compose 90 percent of Kosovo’s overall population. By the 1980s, feeling outnumbered, Kosovo Serbs had begun complaining of persecution. They received moral support from nationalists in the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. In an inflammatory public memorandum in 1986, the Serbian intellectuals charged Kosovo Albanians with masterminding “the physical, political, legal and cultural genocide of the Serbian population in Kosovo.”3 The following year, Milosevic, then an undistinguished Communist apparatchik, traveled to Kosovo and stoked anti-Albanian sentiment and Serb fervor. He proclaimed before an angry Serb mob that “no one should dare to beat you!”4 In 1989 Milosevic enhanced his nationalist credentials by stripping Kosovo of the autonomy that had been granted it by Yugoslav dictator Marshal Tito. Albanians were fired from their jobs, schools were closed, and the Serb police presence expanded.

  In 1995, when NATO bombing forced the Serbs to negotiate a settlement for Bosnia, Kosovo’s Albanians had hoped that the United States and its allies would pressure Serbia into restoring the province’s autonomy. Instead, Western negotiators at Dayton affirmed Serbia’s territorial integrity and did not broach the subject of Kosovo. This embittered many Kosovo Albanians and paved the way for the rise of a shadowy band of Albanian fighters who called themselves the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).5 The KLA pledged to protect the Albanian people in their homes and win independence for the province. The KLA succeeded in raising money from Albanian émigrés and smuggling arms from its anarchic neighbor, Albania, but it failed at first to attract many recruits in Kosovo. The tide turned in March 1998, when the KLA gunned down several Serbian policemen and Milosevic struck back so violently that popular support for the KLA soared. Serbian forces swept into the region of Drenica and murdered some fifty-eight relatives of KLA strongman Adem Jashari, including women and children. With every KLA attack on a Serbian official, Serbian reprisals intensified, as Serb gunmen torched whole villages suspected of housing KLA loyalists. In the following year, some 3,000 Albanians were killed and some 300,000 others were expelled from their homes, their property burned and their livelihoods extinguished. Television cameras captured civilians chilled by winter snowfalls and terror.

  By the late 1990s, Western observers were familiar with Kosovo. Even back in 1992, when the Bush administration had insisted it had “no dog” in the Bosnia fight, it had expressed concern for Kosovo’s fate. In what became known as President Bush’s “Christmas warning,” acting Secretary of State Eagleburger had advised Milosevic that in the event of a Serbian attack on Kosovo, the United States would be “prepared to employ military force against the Serbs in Kosovo and in Serbia proper.”6 In April 1993 President Clinton’s otherwise gun-shy secretary of state Warren Christopher distinguished Kosovo from Bosnia on the grounds that deterioration in Kosovo would likely “bring into the fray other countries in the region—Albania, Greece, Turkey.” The United States, he said, feared c
onflict there would “as happened before, [broaden] into a world war.”7 Kosovo was always thought to be “different” from Bosnia because of its potential to unleash violence throughout the rest of the Balkans.

  As Serb police and militia committed more and more atrocities in 1998, informed Western journalists and human rights groups descended on the region. The atrocities of the 1990s had taught many American opinion-makers that they could not simultaneously demand both an end to genocide and a policy of nonintervention. Diplomacy without the meaningful threat of military force had too often failed to deter abuse. The Clinton administration came under pressure to respond militarily.

  In October 1998 U.S. trouble-shooter Richard Holbrooke again negotiated a deal with Milosevic. In exchange for avoiding NATO air strikes, Milosevic agreed to pull back some of his forces from Kosovo and allow the deployment of 2,000 unarmed, international verifiers. But Serb forces ignored their presence. On January 15, 1999, after pounding the small town of Racak with artillery fire for three days, Serb paramilitary and police units rounded up and executed forty-five Albanian civilians, including three women, a twelve-year-old boy, and several elderly men. The Serb forces left the bodies of those executed facedown in an icy ravine. Within twenty-four hours, Ambassador William Walker, the head of the Kosovo Verification Mission, arrived at the crime scene. Walker, who had first encountered atrocities while serving as an American diplomat in Central America, debriefed villagers and hiked up a nearby hill, where he saw the first body. “It was covered with a blanket, and when it was pulled back, I saw there was no head on the corpse—just an incredibly bloody mess on the neck,” Walker told a reporter. He examined three more bodies. On each a bullet hole was visible beneath gray or white hair. Walker roared into the television camera that the Serbs had committed a “crime against humanity.”8