THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  In the end it was the sheer weight of horror, coupled with the unique and recent history of the European Holocaust, that persuaded states that action must be taken. The secretary-general of the United Nations never understood this. When asked why he did not return to New York when Mazowiecki resigned over the Srebrenica massacres, Boutros Boutros-Ghali replied, “Because if I do, all the African countries will tell the world that while there is ethnic cleansing in Africa—a million people have died in Rwanda—the Secretary General pays attention only to a village in Europe.” This obtuse yet odious observation also in its way contributed to a stifling of action: after all, if there are genocidal campaigns underway all over the world, how can we act in all of them? Rather the secretary-general ought to have mobilized what public opinion there was for action, instead of lamenting that it was geographically misplaced, as, for example, in his famous harangue of the Security Council for its overattention to Yugoslavia (“a war of the rich,” in Boutros Boutros-Ghali's much-reported outburst). Queens is not a dangerous place, and I imagine that at 3 a.m. there were more horrors underway in other districts of New York besides Kitty Genovese's stabbing.

  When Lawrence Eagleburger met Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and chronicler of the Holocaust, in December 1992 the latter pressed him to take some action in the former Yugoslavia where crimes were being committed that he called ethnic cleansing. Eagleburger claimed that the State Department's lawyers* were strongly opposed to characterizing such actions as “ethnic cleansing.” According to Eagleburger:

  Wiesel said: “Fine. Call them crimes against humanity then, but whatever you do, America can no longer remain silent about the atrocities being committed”… I relented. [Wiesel] made me look in the mirror and decide… [that we couldn't] stay silent.53

  Four days later, Eagleburger spoke to a meeting of European foreign ministers in Geneva and urged a “second Nuremberg” to prosecute crimes committed in former Yugoslavia. “The fact of the matter is [the Serbs] were doing some things that were pretty… awful,” Eagleburger later said. “And we ought to have been saying something about it. And we probably should have been saying something about it a lot sooner. [But] I also knew it wasn't going to produce anything.”54

  Because once states had decided to act, it still remained for them to determine who should act and what should be done.

  DETERMINATION: ASSIGNING SOMEONE TO ACT

  Once these states had been brought to believe that something had to be done, opinion within the leading Western members of the society of states coalesced around four options as to who should act: it was either up to the parties to the conflict themselves, or a matter for the European powers, or for the U.N, or for the United States. As Darley and Latane might have predicted, each state's evaluation of these options depended upon its factual assessment of the situation. Thus those that believed the conflict was the result of ancient and implacable hatreds tended to conclude that there was little that outsiders could do, whereas those that believed that concerted multilateral diplomacy could effectively mediate the situation and then help monitor whatever settlement emerged, tended to emphasize a role for the U.N. (or the E.U.) unhindered by unilateral initiatives, in contrast to states that believed that decisive action depended upon the use of force. States in this last group were more likely to assign a leading role to the world's largest military power and the leader of NATO, the United States. It took some time, however, before a consensus formed around one of these options, if indeed it ever really did. In the meantime, as in the emergency situations studied by Darley and Latane, the sheer presence of so many potential intervenors tended to ensure that no one would act effectively.

  A MATTER FOR THE PARTIES TO THE CONFLICT

  Perhaps no characterization of the conflict was more widespread than that describing it as one going back centuries, reviving “ancient hatreds.” In fact, the history of this struggle begins, as noted above, in 1917. The Corfu Declaration on July 20 of that year proposed a new nation-state that was to consist of Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Macedonia, that is, the six provinces that ultimately became the state of Yugoslavia (which would have included the various religious groups of the region, Catholics, Muslims, and Eastern Orthodox).

  At this time Croats and Slovenes wished to join Serbia in order to become part of the winning side of World War I. The new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, as it was called, was not simply an artificial creation of the Versailles Conference, as is sometimes erroneously said; it actually embodied the national aspirations of the South Slavs. Like so many model marriages it began to fall apart almost as soon as it was consummated. The ensuing struggles were in sharp contrast to the historic cooperation between the various groups of southern Slavs against their imperial oppressors. Far from being an ancient ethnic conflict, the wars in Yugoslavia are very much a twentieth century nation-state affair.

  Nevertheless, diplomats and politicians in the 1990s repeatedly referred to the wars in Yugoslavia as arising from primeval struggles. One French foreign ministry official declared, “They need to fight. They want to fight. They have hated each other for centuries.”55 When the Senate Armed Services Committee held hearings on Bosnia, a representative of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff was asked by a member of the committee, “Why is it that they fall upon themselves periodically, and have done this for a thousand years?” The reply, even discounting for the obliging nature of such answers when questions are put to military personnel by senators, was remarkably inane: “Sir,” the officer replied, “I wish I had the answer to your question… but there is certainly a history, going back, at least in my study of the problem, as far back as the 13th century, of constant ethnic and religious fighting among and between these groups.”56

  This description of the nature of the conflict was not merely an historical observation, however erroneous; rather, for many it became a highly purposeful characterization that compelled the inference that there was little that bystanders could do. As Charles Lane put it in the Washington Monthly:

  The most durable canard about the wars in the Balkans is that they are the consequence of ancient ethnic hatred, too complex and too deeply rooted to be fathomed, much less countered, by outside powers. This “analysis,” which sounds sophisticated but is in fact intellectually lazy, became conventional wisdom—a kind of intellectual trump card—among all those who sought to forestall United States military intervention to stop the Serb drive in Bosnia.57

  Not only officials but the public also made this link. Thus in a poll conducted by the Boston Globe, 58 a majority of persons were of the opinion that the United States should not be involved. A typical response: “The people in the Balkans have been killing each other for hundreds and hundreds of years. Putting our troops in there is not going to teach them how to get along with each other. If they are determined to kill each other, they're going to go right on doing it whether we're there or not. I don't want one American kid to die trying to teach them how to get along.”59

  Seeing the emergency as arising from intractable, atavistic behavior led almost inescapably to the conclusion that action would have to come from the parties themselves before anything else could be done. “Ultimately,” the U.S. president said in 1994, “this conflict still must be settled by the parties themselves. They must choose peace.”* And he asked rhetorically, in June 1995: “Do we have the capacity to impose a settlement on people who want to continue fighting? We cannot do that there.”60 Even in July, after some of the worst shelling of Sarajevo and the other “safe areas,” indeed after the fall of Srebrenica, President Clinton's remark that the Bosnian conflict “has roots in the 11th century,” was quoted by a reporter who suggested that such an account of the conflict was designed to ward off pressure for the United States to intervene.61

  This linkage was not hard to detect. As deputy assistant secretary of state Ralph Johnson put it:

  Many Americans are asking why we haven't done even more to resolve this crisi
s. That's an understandable question. It goes against all our instincts to see Yugoslavia descend into violence without stepping in to stop this tragic process. The bottom line in this crisis, however, is that the world community cannot stop Yugoslavs from killing one another so long as they are determined to do so…. [W]e cannot stop the violence or resolve this conflict. Only the peoples of Yugoslavia and their leaders can do that.62

  Or, as Darley and Latane might have observed, even when bystanders notice a crisis and define it as such, and are persuaded some action must be taken, they will nevertheless assign that action to the parties involved depending on how those parties and their relationship are assessed. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in a passage that makes one wince, wrote at the time, “I don't give two cents about Bosnia. Not two cents. The people there have brought on their own troubles.” The “ancient hatreds” argument implied that the relationship between the parties was one of feuding clans, rather than perpetrator and victim. No one would suggest that a rapist and his victim should be sequestered until they “work things out among themselves.” The “ancient hatreds” gloss on the facts tended to denature the victims, making them more like co-dependents, to use a fashionable word, who could stop the ongoing antisocial behavior that was in crisis if only they would stop abetting it. These false assertions are similar to the ones made about Kitty Genovese. Like the facts about her—that she worked as the manager of a bar, that she was coming home at 3 a.m.—some of these facts about Bosnia were true. Like the implication that she was in part responsible for the attack on her, or at least might have been quarreling with a lover, the conclusions drawn were highly persuasive and prejudicial, though factually false. To the question “Who should act?” this approach implied: the parties themselves. Possibly someone on Austin Street in Queens said something like “I don't give two cents for that girl. She brought it on herself.”

  A MATTER FOR EUROPE

  States, once they noticed that something was happening, and once they had interpreted that event as a true emergency for the international system, then had to decide what each state's responsibility was. Darley and Latane showed that the more persons who witness an emergency the less likely it becomes that any particular person will intervene. This seems at first paradoxical—isn't there safety in numbers? In fact, it is the diffusion of responsibility that paralyzes everyone. The person who comes upon a crowd standing around a fallen victim thinks, “Surely someone has called an ambulance.” No previous crisis has been so flooded by helpful agencies: the European Union* appointed mediators, offered peace plans, convened conferences; the CSCE deployed its array of dispute resolution institutions; the U.N. was present to a degree that has, I believe, permanently damaged that institution; NATO was involved; and finally there was, of course, the Contact Group of the Great Powers. Rarely have so many institutions collaborated to produce so few satisfactory results, yet as Darley and Latane show, this should not surprise us. When Warren Christopher went to Europe for consultations in 1993, the very sincerity of his mission—that he genuinely sought consultations with our allies rather than trying to press them into line—doomed any conceivable effective action, because such consultations effectively paralyzed leadership by the United States.

  This result was not, however, wholly unwelcome in Washington. Like the witnesses to Kitty Genovese's murder who said simply, “I didn't want to get involved,” there were ample reasons for U.S. administrations from 1991 to 1995 to wish not to become parties to the conflict. Foremost among these were the political risks of introducing American ground forces into a shooting war in which American interests were highly attenuated in an election year (1992) and thereafter in a highly partisan atmosphere. Just what vital interest of the bystander is served when he intervenes—especially when there is some other bystander more proximate to the emergency?

  Both President Bush63 and President Clinton64 referred to the situation in Bosnia as “a European problem.” Deputy assistant secretary of state Johnson stated, “Why are we supporting the EC's efforts rather than taking the lead ourselves? [B]ecause we believe that Europe has the most at stake in this crisis.” In a radio address on February 19, 1994, nearly two and a half years later, President Clinton said: “I want to be clear. Europe must bear most of the responsibility for solving this problem…” The interesting aspect for our study, however, is the way in which assigning the Bosnian emergency to Europe not only tended to remove the United States from taking action, but also diffused responsibility among Europeans so that thwarting intervention from any quarter ultimately became the effective policy of the society of states.

  The European position, led by Britain and France, was anchored by three points: the European states would provide personnel for the U.N. force to protect U.N. humanitarian assistance (and in the event the majority of forces under U.N. command were actually European); they would not provide armed ground forces to enforce peace unless the warriing parties agreed to a peace plan65 and the United States also provided ground elements; finally, a diplomatic, rather than a military, solution was required. All of these points followed naturally from the premise that Bosnia was a “European” problem: Europe was responsible for providing forces to resolve the problem, and therefore could set the conditions under which these forces would operate, and the ultimate objectives for which they would fight.

  In fact, however, these three points cannot be understood in isolation from the interplay with the various American proposals regarding Bosnia. The European position was artfully crafted, and withstood four years of assault in the press and by the Americans in NATO, precisely because it had been so carefully designed to fit with American diplomacy and presidential politics. By contributing small numbers of lightly armed troops to the U.N. peacekeeping mission the Europeans could veto any proposals for the use of NATO air power against the Serbs on the rationale that such attacks jeopardized European soldiers. By requiring advance agreement by the parties in Yugoslavia to a peace plan before being willing to commit ground forces, the Europeans effectively scotched any use of American ground forces to win such an agreement—because what U.S. president could justify sending American troops to a battleground in Europe from which European forces were conspicuously absent? Most interestingly, by stymieing any American initiatives, the Europeans thus took pressure off themselves from their publics: they were doing all they could, they said, in the face of vacillating and indecisive American leadership.

  For so it did appear as the Americans made proposals that were rejected by the Europeans, which rejection was then made the excuse for withdrawing the proposals (which the Americans had only halfheartedly suggested in the first place). The characterization of the conflict as a “European problem” effectively meant that the least demanding course of action, essentially simply monitoring the war and waiting for a Serb victory to bring partition, became the de facto policy of the West. This also had the virtue, from the European point of view, of insulating European leaders from American criticism for inaction. On several occasions, European leaders made thinly veiled remarks about the right of those states with no forces at risk to criticize those states whose young men were actually in harm's way in Bosnia.

  A case study in this exercise is the experience of the “Lift and Strike” policy. In early April 1993, the United States sent Reginald Bartholomew, one of its most experienced and capable diplomats, and Army Lieutenant General Barry McCaffrey, to London to suggest lifting the U.N. arms embargo that had throttled the grossly overmatched Bosnian government. The British rejected the idea, characterizing it as “pouring petrol on the fire”; but they countered with a proposal to launch NATO air strikes on the Serbs' largest artillery emplacements around Sarajevo. In Washington, the Joint Chiefs now balked: what was the “exit strategy”? How were we to know when the bombing should be stopped? More importantly, what if the Serbs retaliated by marching into Sarajevo? National security adviser Anthony Lake then offered a compromise plan, soon called “Lift and Strike.
” Lake countered that the arms embargo be lifted and air strikes be launched to hold the Serbs in check until the arms flow to the Bosnian army allowed it to defend its capital. This would provide the exit point and a prospect for relieving the siege.