THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  The aim is not only to expel the ethnically “unclean” population from the desired territory but also to destroy all possibilities for their return—completely to dismantle the spiritual and material structure of the civilization of the unwanted population… [T]he expelled populations will stay away because they have no homes, mosques, schools, etc.—literally nothing to go back to…. [T]he real guarantee is fear: the knowledge that their neighbors remain in wait, should they try to go back. According to numerous testimonies, special military expeditions from Serbia and Montenegro have sought not only to slaughter and expel but also to inspire or force the indigenous Serbs to do the same….44

  Thus the strategy of ethnic cleansing is hardly a random affair managed by uncoordinated bands of irregulars. General Momcilo Perisic of the JNA has openly acknowledged the commanding role played by his army in the conquest of Bosnia.45 Many facts, including logistical ones, support this finding of coordination, but some of the most telling of these facts are the most humble. International observers were at first puzzled to see rows of shoes neatly lined up on the edge of roadsides or forests where it was later determined that mass executions had taken place. Apparently the victims were instructed to remove their shoes before they were marched off to their execution sites. This small detail suggests a coordinated tactical plan that Serb commanders were instructed to follow, for it is unlikely that this would occur coincidentally at different sites.

  All of this information was of course available to the states of the West—the United States and her European colleagues on the Security Council. What blurred these facts—just as Darley and Latane had predicted—was the introduction of a crucial ambiguity by the Serbs and others. High-ranking officials in the West repeatedly stated that all parties to the conflict were at fault, and implied that Muslims, Serbs, and Croats had all participated in such campaigns of “ethnic cleansing.”

  On May 18, 1993, Secretary Christopher, in preparation for testimony that day before Congress, asked the Balkan desk of the State Department to come up with examples of Muslim atrocities in the war in Bosnia. The desk officers angrily declined: they said that though there had been Muslim atrocities, they paled in comparison with those committed by the Serbs. Later that day, Christopher nevertheless stated in his testimony: “It's easy to analogize [Bosnia] to the Holocaust. But I never heard of any ethnic cleansing by the Jews against the German people.” The acting assistant secretary for human rights later reminded Christopher, in a memo since disclosed, that, of the documented atrocities, only a handful (6 percent) could be attributed to Muslims, and that, in contrast with the Serbian and Croatian campaigns of ethnic cleansing, no evidence linked these isolated incidents to the central Bosnian army command or to the Bosnian government. In fact, the New York Times later reported, the State Department had for more than a year been reporting “complicity by the Milosevic regime and the Government of Croatia in atrocities of both regular and paramilitary forces.”

  Nevertheless, other officials testified before the House National Security Committee as late as November 1995 that all sides in the conflict shared the blame. “There are no white hats there” became something of a cliché among officials.46 Similar sentiments were voiced by the U.N. secretary-general, who lamented that the conflict had “spared no one in its violence.”

  Indeed at the time one often heard, at first sotto voce, from senior officials that there was “evidence” that the Bosnians had shelled themselves on at least one occasion—the deadly mortar attack on the Sarajevo market on February 5, 1994—in an effort to kindle foreign intervention. Owen repeats this in his memoirs, unfortunately citing Tanjug news agency, a Belgrade government source; there is supposedly at least one U.N. report that attempted to make this claim, though later studies have been unable to confirm this. The most experienced and respected diplomats in the United States and the United Kingdom—Lawrence Eagleburger, a former ambassador to Yugoslavia and subsequently U.S. secretary of state, and Lord Carrington, a World War II veteran and former British foreign secretary—both quietly let it be known that to knowledgeable observers of the region all sides had a share in the responsibility for atrocities.

  These perceptions, perhaps more than any other fact, introduced a pervasive ambiguity into the situation and slowed Western response. They are vaguely analogous to the perceptions on the part of the bystanders in Queens that Kitty Genovese was somehow mixed up in something that had led to the attack on her. Those who actually knew her (though slightly) were the very ones who knew that she worked in a bar, often came home late, was vivacious and outgoing.

  This perception that “all sides are implicated” also fed the strict neutrality observed by the U.N. peacekeeping force. Observance of this neutrality had the perverse effect of making the Bosnians a constant irritant to the U.N. officials. Owen observes that the “prevailing view” of U.N. commanders was that “Unprofor's [United Nations Protection Force] worst problems were with the Muslims.” When food convoys came to deliver humanitarian supplies to the enclaves, desperate crowds of Muslims would gather and try to keep the U.N. trucks from leaving. The British foreign secretary complained that the Bosnian Muslims were using Unprofor forces as a shield, as when Bosnian government forces would fire out from one of the “protected” but surrounded enclaves. General Rose repeatedly told observers that his governing rule was not to cross “the Mogadishu Line”—a phrase alluding to the U.N. experience in Somalia, when a mission that began as neutral peacekeeping led to involvement in a factional war, including a punitive search for a particular Somali warlord. The U.N. representative of the secretary-general, Yasushi Akashi, resolutely refused to authorize NATO air support when he believed this would amount to a partisan contribution to one side, exceeding the “mandate” provided by resolutions of the Security Council.*

  Why did such experienced and distinguished diplomats as Eagleburger and Carrington, Owen and Douglas Hurd contribute so thoroughly to muddying the waters, and clouding the otherwise clear perceptions of emergency and the necessity to act? And why did not the Muslims succumb to the sort of tactics that worked so effectively for the Croats and Serbs? Why didn't “all sides do it”? I think the answer to both questions is the same, and I hope it justifies the time spent on the description of ethnic cleansing in a book about the history and future of the modern State.

  As we have seen, “ethnic cleansing” is more than simply the aggregate of countless individual atrocities. It encompasses a set of military tactics carefully designed to exploit the deep weaknesses in the nation-state. When Eagleburger and Carrington spoke about Yugoslavia, they spoke from broad experience and knowledge about the Serb-Croat nationalist struggles that, since the early part of this century, were saturated in the very sort of ethnic fanaticism that led to policies of “cleansing” territory of other ethnic groups. When these policies were deployed by former communist leaders like Tudjman and Milosevic to consolidate their own power in the aftermath of the collapse of communism, they led inevitably to the atrocities of the Bosnian theatre; the very intermixture of groups there insured that. Thus the war seemed merely like a continuation of the Serb-Croat struggle, which was the focus of their experience and insight. But it was also a brutal assault on Bosnian Muslims, and the media, which these statesmen so distrusted and despised, were making this assault into a defining hour for the society of nation-states. Could that society set legal standards for admission and defend those states that met those standards? Or was the conundrum of self-determination—when does an ethnic minority get its own state, thereby creating a new minority from the now-detached remnants of the formerly majority group—somehow bound up with the nation-state? Could tumors of nationalism grow and attack a modern state with a strategy, ethnic cleansing, that specifically arose from this conundrum, thus paralyzing the rest of the members of the society of states? To see the conflict as one that necessarily implicated “all sides” was to miss what was unique and defining—and yet seeing the parties in this way reflected how t
rapped these statesmen were in the paradigms of the nation-state. Experienced statesmen were slow to appreciate that action needed to be taken because they did not understand that the policy of ethnic cleansing posed a mortal, moral threat to the society of nation-states. Thus when these men were discredited by the horrors they did not prevent, the society of nation-states that they represented (as appointees of the U.N., the E.U., the OSCE*) was discredited also.

  The Muslims were emphatically not the architects or perpetrators of ethnic cleansing because they did not see themselves as a separate national entity (rather more as a religious one) and few initially wished to have a state whose legitimacy depended upon its championing a particular national or cultural group. This was dramatically demonstrated when an attempt by some Muslim elements to sequester Sarajevo Serbs in a football stadium was swiftly halted and roundly denounced. Bosnia was a multicultural state. Thus the helpful efforts of outside diplomats to partition the state (as was done in Ireland, India, and Cyprus) were perceived by the Bosnian government as an effort to destroy the fabric of their state, not simply take away territory. As Gow noted:

  The E.C. effort was essentially based on the adoption of an idea—ethnic territories or “cantons”—propounded by the Serbian camp. Understood by the E.C. negotiators as a means to propitiate the Serbs and avoid war, it was in reality a charter for “ethnic cleansing”: ethnically designated cantons created the basis for ethnically pure territories.47

  It is estimated that about a third of the marriages in Sarajevo are “mixed” —that is, multiethnic. Approximately one-third of the Bosnian government army is Serb. While there can be no doubt that Muslims have perpetrated atrocities (indeed, have been indicted by the War Crimes Tribunal48), the strategy of ethnic cleansing would have been antithetical to the constitutional ethos of their state when war broke out, though this ethos was sorely tested by events in the war, and there is at present a strong Muslim nationalist party.

  ARBITRARY BORDERS

  One other muddying characterization was offered up by Western statesmen. Whether or not they were able to persuade their publics that all parties to the conflict were equally culpable, there remained the idea that Bosnia's borders were essentially arbitrary (“set up by Tito… and based neither on history nor on current demography”) and thus that the terrible events in Bosnia were part of a necessary adjustment: an event worth noticing, of course, an emergency even, but not an event that required any action by others. Thus, as U.S. Ambassador John Scanlan put it, “Two thousand years of imperial invasion and subjugation of the indigenous populations have imposed artificial borders which have left three million Serbs outside Serbia, two million Albanians outside of Albania, three million Hungarians outside of Hungary.”49 This makes any violation of Bosnian borders seem understandable and less reprehensible. It implies that certain adjustments ought to be made to correct territorial oversights on the political cartographer's map. In fact, the borders of Bosnia-Herzegovina have been virtually unchanged for almost five centuries.

  The “stranded” Albanians, and Hungarians, and Serbs, and others have been in the provinces they currently inhabit for similar periods of time, much longer, it must be observed, than the Poles in what was once Germany, or the Russians in what was once Poland, borders that are perhaps better denominated as “artificial,” but that few American ambassadors, I think, would suggest need adjustment.

  In his memoir, Owen denigrates the “internal borders” of Yugoslavia that formed the state of Bosnia. “The unwarranted insistence on ruling out changes to what had been internal administrative borders within a sovereign state was a fatal flaw.”50 These borders were “arbitrary,” conceived by Tito's commanders “during a march” at the end of World War II. If Croatia and Bosnia had the right to secede, Owen argues, then surely the same right to self-determination should be extended to the Serb minorities living in those countries, and the borders adjusted accordingly.

  There is some reason to doubt the factual basis for this argument. Historians generally agree that Bosnia was considered a distinct entity that maintained its identity throughout long periods in the Middle Ages until its conquest by the Ottoman Turks in 1463; the border between Croatia and Bosnia roughly corresponds with the extent of Ottoman penetration into Europe, and the border between Serbia and Bosnia, the Drina River, has not been breached since 1919. For our purposes, however, the greater significance of Owen's argument lies in his invocation of the paradox of self-determination. Why indeed should not the Serbs in Bosnia be allowed to secede? And then why not the majority Muslim populations in border towns along the Drina like Visegrad and Zvornik, whose peoples were slaughtered or made refugees? Why should not these have been allowed to remain and simply secede from the seceding Serbs? If, as Owen suggests, borders are arbitrary that do not correspond to the ethnic demographics of the local community, what precisely qualifies as the defining community? The IRA has long argued, for example, that the referendum to which the United Kingdom has agreed for the determination of the future of Northern Ireland must be based on an island-wide, rather than six-county, franchise. If they are wrong because Northern Ireland is in some way demographically distinct (“Protestant,” for example), then what of the minority Catholics in the six counties? Shouldn't they be allowed to have a referendum limited to themselves on the same theory that allowed the Northern Irish to confine their referendum and exclude the Southern Irish?

  This paradox of self-determination bedevils the nation-state. It is the original sin of this constitutional order, present at the creation of the American nation-state in 1861 and the German nation-state in 1871, the two first models of this archetypal form. The nation-state's “sin,” if that is the way to put it, is that it promises to deploy a state on behalf of a nation when nations as such (cultural and ethnic groups) are a distinct categorical entity from states (legal and strategic structures). “All nations are entitled to their own states” is really a way of saying “all states must define and locate their nations,” a lesson that Slobodan Milosevic, among others, clearly learned in his post-communist phase. The society of nation-states has no more significant responsibility than to manage this paradox. If every nation gets its own state, then who decides the territorial extent of the state when a national group is unevenly spread over many countries, dwelling within other national groups and encompassing other groups that dwell within it? Each nation-state develops its form of the State for strategic purposes—that is, it selects a legitimate form of the State that will serve as an effective military instrument to resist coercion; but if every nation gets its own state, then the strategic imperative of the State turns inward, to civil war, as each ethnic and cultural group attempts to assert itself, and the State endlessly divides and redivides along smaller and smaller sociological lines—or the strategic imperative of the State turns outward, to conquest, as each State collects its nationals and those territories important to their welfare, adding new members, subsuming them and then asserting their right to exist within a single state. This is more than a problem, it is a paradox because every nation-state also defines its “nation” for constitutional purposes—that is, it determines which cultural group on behalf of whose welfare the resources of the state will be deployed. But how can every nation get its own state when every state must choose its nation? Because of this paradox, the society of nation-states, rather than the single nation-state itself, sets limits on how a state may define its nation (representative democracy and human rights) and how the nation may define its state (the inviolability of borders).

  The society of nation-states decides, either in peace conferences like those at Versailles and San Francisco, or in the ongoing institutions set up by these peace congresses—like the U.N.—what elements are required for self-determination. This could not have been clearer than in the example of Bosnia because the E.U. set up a special tribunal—the Badinter Commission—to set the criteria for international recognition of the new states being formed from the former communis
t countries of Eastern and Central Europe. Bosnia was recognized by the E.U. only after it had specifically satisfied the Badinter criteria, which included respect for the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations and the Charter of Paris, especially with regard to the rule of law, representative democracy, and human rights; guarantees for the rights of minorities; and respect for the inviolability of frontiers.51

  By contrast, recognition of statehood on the basis of the criterion of nationality alone puts the ball in the court of the State itself. Nationality is very much a creation of culture and demographics, and therefore it is to some degree manipulable by the State, as Hitler showed. Thus to permit the transgression of Bosnia's borders by charging that they were merely “administrative” rather than sufficiently ethnic forfeits the society of states' ability to do anything other than partition—which plays into the paradox of self-determination rather than manages it. Such a step invites ethnic cleansing.*

  The effect in the third Balkan war was to smudge the clarity of the situation, to make it far less clear that anything had to be done other than to recognize the ultimate demographic outcome of the war. Not only did this give a greater incentive to Serbian and Croatian aggression—and effectively doom the very “cantonizations” it was meant to support—it largely removed the society of states from the action. Doubtless for some statesmen, that is what it was designed to do. (This is perhaps why Gow characterized British policy as “pusillanimous realism.”) 52

  Once we are clear of self-serving rationalizations, the true constitutional and political history of Bosnia and the former states of Yugoslavia has some troubling implications for this period in the history of the State, and the national idea of giving civil and political rights to minority groups as such. The coincidence of rights-based claims and ethnic identity is a policy born of the basic elements of the nation-state, and laden with peril for that constitutional form. Like an infection that uses the body's own nuclear material to attack the host, ethnic rights can be wasting, even fatal, to the nation-state. The wars in the Balkans represent the pathological endgame of the nation-state in which the constitution of a state is put into play whenever ethnic groups get on each other's nerves. Perhaps that is the real lesson of Yugoslavia. This conflict did not begin in 1350. It began in 1917 and took its crucial contemporary turn with the constitutional changes in 1974. In an effort to pacify one set of minorities—the Albanians and Hungarians—the 1974 Constitution created a new set of minorities: the Serbs within the Albanian and Hungarian enclaves. This peculiar political topology, the necessary creation of a new threatened group through the constitutional protection of an old one, propelled Milosevic out of the anteroom of Communist party hacks and onto the stadium stage of late twentieth century world political figures. Milosevic was able to capitalize on the techniques of modern media in order to mobilize around a twentieth century idea: because every “people” gets a state, the Serbian state should rightfully rule everywhere there were Serbs. By this means he was able to crush the constitutional position of Albanians within his state because there was a Serb minority within the Albanian minority and at the same time reach into other states like Croatia and Bosnia to aggrandize the Serbian state. The Serbian slogan was: “Why should I be a minority in your state when you can be a minority in mine? Why should I leave to join Serbia, when you can simply leave and Greater Serbia will be the result?” The paradoxes of this topology fractured the confidence of the society of nation-states in a way that even its most senior and respected officials could neither repair nor quite keep from making worse.