DECISION: DECIDING TO ACT
Pope John Paul II was one of those leaders who provided states with reasons to intervene in Bosnia. He issued a statement after the Mazowiecki report that read in part: “The news and pictures from Bosnia, particularly from Srebrenica and Zepa, testify to how Europe and humanity are still collapsing into the abyss of degradation… They are crimes against humanity [which amount to] a defeat for civilization.”30
Whose job is it to defend civilization, however? States have an interest in protecting the worth and value of civilized life. Achilles' shield depicts, it will be recalled, not only war and the law courts, but also religious ceremonies and wedding feasts. But what motivates states is not the same as what might move an individual or a nongovernmental organization or even a particular group of states, like an alliance, to intervene in an emergency. The case of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait provides an instructive example.
It is frequently remarked that the reason the United States led a coalition of states in a campaign to expel an Iraqi occupation force from the state of Kuwait was because vast oil reserves lay within the territorial domain of Kuwait. Allowing these reserves to fall into hostile hands would have threatened the economic and military security of the West, of which the United States was the leader. If Iraq had invaded a state poor in resources, like the Kurdish section of Iran, the West would have done nothing, as indeed it did nothing during the Iraqi invasion of Iran.
This description of events is a kind of half-truth: it is true that the potential possession of crucial raw materials by an enemy gives a state a good reason to be sensitive to the actual seizure of those raw materials. With the vast new reserves Kuwait would have brought him, Saddam Hussein might have been able to raise oil prices to the economic detriment of many industrialized countries; certainly he was no counsel of oil-price restraint, as the Kuwaitis have been. Absent such a reason, it is quite possible that the United States and other powerful states would not have marshalled the enormous forces that won the Gulf War. But it is not true that the United States would have found such a threat to its prosperity a sufficient reason to intervene. Imagine, for example, what America would have done if, instead of simply invading and annexing Kuwait, Saddam Hussein had fomented a democratic uprising against the notably undemocratic Kuwaiti regime, and later contributed troops to aid a provisional government that had nominally maintained Kuwait's independent status but had overthrown its monarchy. It is highly implausible to imagine that the United States would have sent 400,000 men to the Arabian desert in such circumstances. What proved crucial in the Gulf conflict was the combination of both material reasons for intervention and the threat posed to the foundations of the states system. The Iraqi attack on Kuwait was the first time since the founding of the United Nations that one member state had invaded another, conquered, and annexed it. It was this intersection of interests, strategic and constitutional, that galvanized great power leadership.
Similarly, in Bosnia it was necessary for world leaders to recognize both the strategic reasons for acting and the legal imperatives to do so. Stopping a campaign of ethnic cleansing, which threatened the most basic human norms of decency, could provide one; the recognition of Bosnia as a true European state, with a right to exist, could afford the other.
For this reason, the answers to two apparently quite unconnected questions were both critical to moving the United States and other states to act: first, were the atrocities in Bosnia part of a systematic campaign of ethnic and cultural extermination against the Muslims or were the atrocities simply examples artfully chosen by the media of acts that had been in fact committed by all sides to the conflict? And second, were the borders of the Bosnian state worthy of legal respect or were they merely an arbitrary, anomalous hindrance to the recognition of the principle of self-determination by national groups? Dimitri Simes put these questions powerfully when he wrote, on March 10, 1993:
It is hard to justify U.S. intervention on moral as well as geopolitical grounds. First, all sides in the war in Bosnia have committed atrocities, although the Serbs have committed more than the others, partly because their military advances gave them more opportunities. Paradoxically, because of Western insistence that the Serbian Army stay out of the confrontation, the fighting was assigned to the ill-disciplined Serbian militia in Bosnia, thereby increasing the likelihood for abuses. Second, do we really believe that the administrative borders in the ex-Yugoslavia—set up by Tito's Communist regime and based neither on history nor on current demography—should be treated as sacred?31
Simes may have been misinformed about the role of the Serbian army. In fact we know that Serbian irregulars (many of them members of the JNA who were detached from their regiments) were deliberately deployed in order to confuse the situation legally, disguise the role of Belgrade, and give the appearance of a Bosnian civil war rather than a Serbian invasion. Simes, however, was not alone, and with his customary insight, he had gone right to the heart of the matter: both of his questions had to be answered before a decision to act would be taken.
ETHNIC CLEANSING
On November 20, four months before Simes's article in the New York Times, Mazowiecki noted that particular attention should be drawn to the “appalling extent of persecution by ‘ethnic cleansing' against those of Muslim ethnic origin [who are] threatened with extermination.”32 By contrast, in Simes's view, there is nothing unique about “ethnic cleansing”: the atrocities committed by the Serbs were no different, though perhaps they were somewhat more numerous, than those committed by all the other parties to the Yugoslav conflict. To the extent that Serbian atrocities were more numerous, according to Simes this was partly because the JNA had not been an active party to the war, forcing Serbia to rely on irregular partisans, and partly a result of the large amounts of Bosnian territory under Serb control. To assess the truth of these observations, we might begin by asking: What is ethnic cleansing? Is it a random affair of irregular militias? Did all the parties to the Yugoslav conflict participate in such campaigns?
The forced resettlement of populations on the basis of their cultural identity is hardly novel or peculiar to the Balkans. Assyrian, 33 Greek, and Roman conquerors—to say nothing of the treatment of the American Indians—all provide precedents for such behavior.34 Even the calculated destruction of an ethnic group and its culture, as was attempted by the Nazis against Jews, by the Turks against Armenians, by Australians against Tasmanian Aborigines, is hardly unique to Bosnia. What makes “ethnic cleansing” so odious is precisely the world's experience with it, especially in this century. The very term, with its eugenic overtones of extermination, repels and chills because it is not new—because, that is, it reminds us of precedents, of other horrors and other places.
The first English use of this term that I have been able to locate35 occurred when a Reuters reporter in Belgrade quoted Croatia's Supreme Council as charging that “the aim of [a particular Serbian expulsion of Croats] is obviously the ‘ethnic cleansing' of the critical areas to be annexed to Serbia.”36 One year later, a reporter writing in the New York Times in the summer of 1992, noted that “the precondition for [the creation of Greater Serbia] lies in the purging—‘ethnic cleansing' in the perpetrators' lexicon—of wide areas of Bosnia of all but like-minded Serbs.” Indeed what partly made the term so shocking was its casual use by the Serbs until the world community seized on this phrase. One scholar, Norman Cigar, has traced the phrase to the original program of the Serbian Chetnik leadership, issued on December 20, 1941. Two of the stated objectives of this program were
to cleanse the state territory of all national minorities and anti-national elements… [and] to create a direct, continuous, border between Serbia and Montenegro, and between Serbia and Slovenia, by cleansing the Sandzak of the Muslim inhabitants and Bosnia of the Muslim and Croatian inhabitants.37
Why was this necessary? Why didn't ethnic dominance suffice in those areas where Serbs were in a majority? To understand the answer to this is to
see why ethnic cleansing is a strategic and tactical set of ideas, and not just an emotive name for atrocities; it is also to see why the multiethnic state of Bosnia, unlike the states of Croatia and Serbia, is unlikely to have been a perpetrator of this strategy.
The biologists Stjepkp Golubic, Thomas Golubic, and Susan Campbell have published a demographic study of the Bosnian population that quantitatively demonstrates its essential indivisibility without mass resettlements.38 Working from the 1991 census, they show that the districts in which various groups—Serb, Croatian, Muslim—were dominant prior to the war were neither homogeneous nor contiguous. Each of these areas in which a particular group had a dominant plurality also include a substantial percentage (between 22 percent and 43 percent) of another group. Moreover, each collection of dominant districts that was aggregated by contiguity amounted to only a fraction of the total population of the group, leaving between 35 percent and 68 percent of that group outside the area of its dominance.
Nor did dominance correlate with cultural purity: Bosnian Croats in the north of Bosnia, where they were the dominant group, lived with substantial minorities of Muslims, as they had (peacefully) for centuries. If statistical dominance does not correlate with cultural purity, and if the areas of dominance are not contiguous, then to achieve the dictatorship of one cultural group would require a use of force like ethnic cleansing. Moreover, the cultural patrimony of historic Bosnia would also have to be destroyed:
Architecture… bridges [and] monuments built by the Ottomans were the most visible, most immediately tangible signs of Bosnia's “otherness.” These became targets of relentless artillery bombardment or straightforward demolition. [L]ibraries housing rare books and priceless manuscripts were deliberately destroyed… Hundreds of delicately designed mosques, large and small, that had stood for centuries unharmed, untouched, disappeared overnight.39
One reason why the Vance-Owen Plan, which envisioned ten separate provinces, was criticized as a concession to Milosevic's program was that it was estimated that an additional two million persons would eventually be forced to leave their homes.40
Ethnic cleansing is more than simply a new name for forced resettlement, however. It is a calculated strategy that occurred when the political objectives of the parliamentary nation-states Serbia and Croatia (though they may have been led by communists or fascists) confronted the complex demography of the state of Bosnia.
Just as the Krajina region of Croatia, for example, is now 91% Serb, though it was only half Serb before it was seized by Serbian military and paramilitary forces in 1991, so too in Bosnia, connecting a Greater Serbia called for cleaning non-Serbs from areas of Bosnia such as Prijedor, Srebrenica, Foca, Gorazde, and Brcko where Serbs had been a minority, as well as from Banja Luka, where they had been a majority. In Zvornik, where Muslims once constituted 65% of the population, now… they are just a handful. In Prijedor, by September 1992… Serb radio announced that the Serbs were now a majority and were ready for a referendum.41
Nor is ethnic cleansing only a strategy. It is also a well-defined system of military tactics, coordinating JNA and militia forces, involving a particular set of military maneuvers including artillery bombardment, encirclement, terrorism, and the maintenance of detention camps.
The tactics of ethnic cleansing are by now well known, though not always well appreciated. In the first stage, an operation commences with isolated terrorist attacks by Serb irregulars on rural populations of Muslims.* Thereafter, the role of armor and systematic shelling by heavy weapons is integral to its operations. The U.S. submission to the War Crimes Tribunal gives numerous accounts, of which I will excerpt an example:
A 27-year-old Bosnian Muslim witnessed the Bosnian Serb artillery bombardment of Biscani at about noon on July 20, 1992. Biscani was one of many Muslim villages in the Prijedor area and had a population of about 1,000 Muslims. Since May 1992, there had been Bosnian Serb soldiers and other officials in the town. From May to July, their activities had been limited to provoking the population by insults, residential searches, and general harassment. The primary targets of the provocations appeared to be the wealthier and more prominent citizens of the town, including doctors, lawyers, and business owners. Sometime between 2 pm and 3 pm on July 20, the artillery bombardment was lifted, and the town was assaulted by a force of Bosnian Serb infantry supported by one tank and one armored personnel carrier. Members of the attacking unit were Bosnian Serbs from the Prijedor area and from areas in the vicinity, such as Sanski Most and Banja Luka. The witness recognized several of the attacking soldiers as residents of the Prijedor area. All wore camouflage uniforms, red berets, and had the Serbian flag on one sleeve of their uniforms. Small groups of soldiers quickly occupied virtually every house in the village. After they had secured each house, they shot and killed most of the male residents in or immediately outside their homes. The women and children were rounded up and placed in a small number of houses so that they would be easier to watch. The witness observed the shooting through a window from inside one of the houses. He saw two soldiers kill Vehid Duratovic and Sadik Causevic as they attempted to run away. He also saw seven Bosnian Serb soldiers assemble five male residents of the village in front of a wall of a house across the street where one of the Bosnian Serb soldiers shot and killed them. Four of the five victims were: Rifet Duratovic, Mirsad Kadiric, Ifed Karagic, and Ibrahim Kadiric. From July 20 to 27, the surviving local residents, mostly women and children, buried the victims' bodies in the local cemetery. On July 27, about 35 women and children and about 15 men were rounded up by Bosnian Serb soldiers. The witness believed that this group constituted all the remaining survivors of the village. This group was forced to walk to an unknown location near the entrance to the city of Prijedor where Serb soldiers had set up a roadblock. At about 8 pm, a bus arrived and transported the entire group to the Trnopolje detention camp. (Department of State).42
These tactics drove unarmed farmers and the residents of small villages away from their homes seeking protection. The refugees flooded into towns that swelled with their numbers. The “safe area” concept was actually quite consistent with the Serbian campaign of ethnic cleansing. It made towns like Tuzla and Zepa into concentration camps full of hungry and defenseless people without sanitation, without medicine, without effective weapons. And that brings us to the second stage of ethnic cleansing, the siege of cities that have been engorged by the arrival of rural refugees.
At this second stage, the Serbs, using JNA artillery, fired round after round into the surrounded city. When one sees the now familiar CNN film clip of a multistory apartment house in Sarajevo crashing down, one mustn't think that that is the result of isolated mortar fire. Rather, it is the result of artillery and heavy tanks in stable emplacements firing heavy caliber shells into the steel and concrete of the targeted building in a sustained bombardment.
In the third stage, the besieged city surrendered. When this occurred, the Serbs culled the men of military age. These were taken out of town and machine-gunned, and buried in mass graves. Then the tactical focus shifted to the remaining women. One element of ethnic cleansing has to do with the calculated policy of rape. This wasn't so much to eliminate the genes of Muslims (a kind of genocide), however, as it was to humiliate Muslim women so that they and their husbands would never want to return. Only when the men had been murdered and the women defiled did the buses arrive to take the remaining refugees to the humanitarian centers manned by the U.N. outside Serb territory. This explains the peculiar demographics of the refugee population, in which only the very old and the very young appear to be surviving when these are in fact the most vulnerable populations among refugees.
Ethnic cleansing is thus not merely a political goal. It is a coordinated set of tactics in service of a well-thought-out military strategy. Its success depended in part upon the nonenforcement of the U.N. Security Council resolutions that established the no-fly zone and banned JNA logistical support, upon the luring of refugees into the “saf
e areas” declared by the U.N. Security Council and upon the U.N. arms embargo that kept the Bosnians from effectively returning the fire that rained down upon them from artillery positions around their towns. Which is to say that “ethnic cleansing” depended upon the tacit cooperation of the U.N. Security Council, which studiedly and repeatedly confirmed all three of those supporting elements.
According to a Pentagon official, “[w]hen the Serbs began to move [against Sarajevo], we saw them executing the same strategy they had employed against other enclaves. They do not conduct a direct assault but surround the area and create an increasingly dire humanitarian situation.” By using their control over access to the surrounded enclave, the Serbs could negotiate with the U.N., allowing humanitarian aid only to the extent that such negotiations enhanced the Serbian military position and compelled the U.N. forces (Unprofor) to become voluntary hostages. David Owen reflects this role as unwitting accomplice in his autobiographical memoir. “Living with the arms embargo,” he writes, “for all its inconsistencies and evasions, was never an immoral position for it ensured the continuation of Unprofor's humanitarian mandate for the first few years, when it saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”43 He has a point, of course—but that point is enfolded within the Serbian tactics of ethnic cleansing, which carefully manipulated the “humanitarian mandate” to achieve its military goals.
One final element of this strategy must be touched upon.
THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Page 63
