CHAPTER 13
Bosnia
1995–1996
“Columbo Meets Indiana Jones”
Up until now, the pattern of Gersony’s travels in recent years had not been dictated by the end of the Cold War. Exactly as he had sensed upon returning home from the Horn of Africa just as the Berlin Wall was about to fall, the world simply continued with its crises and upheavals no matter what was going on in Europe. Since the autumn of 1989, which the media had defined as a new era, Gersony had worked in Nicaragua, Liberia, Rwanda, and the occupied Palestinian territories: dealing with state failure, rule-of-law breakdowns, genocide, and long-standing ethno-nationalist conflict. Indeed, the world through his eyes at ground level was unchanged from the 1970s and 1980s. After all, there had been little qualitative difference between the pre-1989 reality and the one afterward in Central America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East. Democracy, capitalism, and the other themes championed by the Washington elite were distinctly second-tier issues in Bob Gersony’s world—the world of much of humanity, in fact—compared to the far more basic issue of the absence of legitimate authority itself. The problem wasn’t authoritarianism, but the dearth of governance in its most basic form. The world was quite real to him; it was the ongoing debate in Washington that was unreal.
Bosnia, though, marked a bit of a turning point for Gersony. In Bosnia the issues still were ethno-national conflict, mass murder, and the absence of legitimate authority. But now such issues were relevant inside Europe itself, as a direct aftershock of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The carapace of communist rule along with the Cold War security structure had crumbled, and the result in the sprawling multiethnic federation of Yugoslavia was secession and institutional breakup. Rather than the United States and Europe having conquered the Third World with Western democracy, the Third World had arrived inside Europe itself. Indeed, throughout its existence, USAID never had a geographical division dedicated to Europe, since it hadn’t needed one. But with the outbreak of the Yugoslav war in 1991, it suddenly did.
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As with Uganda, Mozambique, and Rwanda, not to mention other places, Bob Gersony had no particular wish or intention to go to Bosnia, or much advance notice either. And as in those places, he had no idea what he was getting into, believing that Bosnia would be a mere reconstruction assignment similar to the Palestinian territories.
Keep in mind that Gersony never sought or got caught up in causes. His suit was math and business, not the humanities. And with that came his methodology, which meant listening in isolation to dozens and hundreds of people in every place he visited, collating their stories and attitudes—all the while believing in the innate wisdom of the common person—and letting the reality of the situation emanate from the ground up. In his mind, ideas, no matter how grand, were not always valuable in their own right; they had first to emerge from facts discovered in the field. In this, though a generalist, he was spiritually akin to the area experts: the Arabists, the China hands, and so forth, who worshipped the granularity of cultures and situations, and whose knowledge and wisdom were often ignored.
Rushing home from Israel, Bob and Cindy spent well over a thousand dollars on winter clothes at Eddie Bauer on Broadway in Manhattan. They had never worked in a cold climate before, and Cindy was going with him to Bosnia. She herself had become well known in the humanitarian community for her longtime work in the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA), and for backing up disaster assistance response teams (DARTs) around the globe from her office in the State Department. A graduate of Wellesley College, Cindy is a detail person happiest doing research in the library, who reads several books at a time. She first worked with Bob on his Mozambique and Somalia projects, applying her computer skills to analyze his hundreds of interviews in those places. She overcame her shyness doing fieldwork in Central America, talking to ordinary people. They just liked her, sensing her vulnerability, and this made her an effective interviewer. She felt she had been granted an unusual privilege: the privilege of listening to people in their huts or under a tree, rather than remaining deskbound in Washington the rest of her life. She first blossomed in the southern Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, distributing seeds and packing bags.
From New York, Gersony headed next to Washington to meet with Brian Atwood, the administrator of USAID. Atwood was a tall, imposing Bill Clinton–style moderate-liberal Democrat who was a polished political operator, someone who knew how to speak to all sides in any intense philosophical debate and how to get buy-in. He quickly went through the usual with Gersony: in the immediate aftermath of the Dayton Accords, Gersony needed to find out how to expedite the return of war refugees, how to get job creation going, how to build and reconstruct housing and infrastructure. Then, leaning back in his chair, Atwood said:
Brian Atwood, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Clinton administration, who used Gersony to investigate crises in Rwanda, Bosnia, and so on.
“Well, you know, under Dayton, we’re going to have this policy of conditionality and cross-ethnic return. While you’re out in the field, you just might want to look into how all of this is going to work,” particularly in the Muslim and Croat areas under U.S. military control.
It was a subtle way of suggesting that the Dayton Accords that had stopped the war in the former Yugoslavia might be difficult to implement, and thus he wanted Gersony’s own, outside opinion on this matter, despite all the heavy hitters and other experts that Atwood already had at his disposal within the USAID bureaucracy. After all, this was Europe, not Africa or Central America. And European affairs especially in the State Department had always attracted the most ambitious, intimidating sorts of people. Gersony really had no idea what he was being parachuted into, not to mention his having absolutely no idea what the “conditionality” that Atwood was referring to actually meant.
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Bosnia, the most rugged and war-torn of the former Yugoslav republics, at this moment in time was a place littered with vacant villages: bony mazes of walls and foundations without roofs, since the lumber structures had been firebombed and the clay tiles had collapsed inward. There were giant empty shells of houses. Water systems and schools had been destroyed. People had recently experienced all manner of inter-ethnic atrocities. Outside observers, especially the international humanitarian community, were obsessed with learning not only how but why all this had happened.
I had begun covering Yugoslavia in late 1981 and went back there frequently throughout the 1980s, as I was based in nearby Greece. On my first visit as a reporter there, I noticed how the cut in subsidized fuel from the Soviet Union had led to electricity blackouts and other hardships, which set the various ethnic republics within the Yugoslav federation against each other, so that long-standing historical grievances merged with more recent political and economic ones. Generally, the further south one traveled in Yugoslavia, from Slovenia, once a part of the Habsburg Austrian empire, to Kosovo and Macedonia, once parts of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, the poorer it became. This was a federation that in the early 1980s began undergoing enormous economic and political strains. To make matters worse, Yugoslavia stretched across several imperial and developmental legacies, making unity always a tenuous affair. The federation’s ruler for decades, Josip Broz Tito, a half Croat, half Slovene, kept Yugoslavia at peace through a combination of benevolent dictatorship and a low-calorie version of communism. After he died in 1980, Yugoslavia suffered a revolving door of dull and forgettable leaders, mired in collective constraints and bureaucratic formulas, who essentially kicked the proverbial can down the road. The economy kept deteriorating, and ethnic and religious strains among the various groups and republics worsened.
They were further inflamed by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which, while encouraging democracy in all the other, more cohesive communist states of Eastern Europ
e, only quickened the federation’s breakup along ethnic and national lines by serving to undermine the legitimacy of the Marxist central government in the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade. Whereas the fissures following the fall of the Berlin Wall in the other countries were vertical, dealing with the nature of central government itself, in Yugoslavia they were horizontal—dealing with the relationship of one ethnic and national federation with the other.
Then there was the matter of individuals. The leaders of the various ethnically based republics, foremost among them Slobodan Milošević in Serbia, cynically migrated from communism to nationalism in order to preserve their power bases and perks—their villas, hunting lodges, and so on. The wars of the Yugoslav succession began in late June 1991 when Milošević’s Serbia violently tried to prevent the secession of Slovenia from the federation. When Slovenia bolted, being the richest and most philosophically influential of the republics throughout the twentieth-century history of Yugoslavia, the whole house of cards began to fall apart. War would spread south throughout much of the country. And war meant a civil war of mass atrocities in which the civilians of one ethnic group became the victims of the army of another ethnic group. Precisely because Bosnia was home to several of the ethnic groups—Serbs, Croats, and Muslims—war there was particularly intense and barbaric. And the killing of men, women, and children often happened en masse, in a planned, methodical manner.
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Yugoslavia was the first hot war in Europe since World War II. Moreover, it erupted soon after the conclusion of the Cold War and constituted its greatest individual reverberation. It was a time when many intellectuals and journalists, feeling suddenly free of the burden of great-power politics, assumed foreign policy would henceforth be dedicated to the achievement of universal human rights. Yugoslavia violated this sensibility with its unspeakable ethnic violence and civilian atrocities—the mass murder and expulsion of Muslims at the hands of the Serbs, to say nothing of the violence by and against Croats. Indeed, “ethnic cleansing” was coined by the media as a new-old phrase, both chillingly modern and antique at the same time. The world at the conclusion of the Cold War, which itself was but a tailpiece of World War II, was not supposed to be like this. For this to happen on the same continent as the Nazi Holocaust, so soon after the conclusion of the Long European War (1914–1989), was, to say the least, unacceptable.
Because this war was unacceptable, it was a matter of taking moral action, that is, a matter of “human agency” in the parlance of the intellectuals and committed journalists. As the saying went, evil only triumphs when good men do nothing. For it was evil men, primarily the Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević and his band of war criminals, who had caused this mini-Holocaust in the first place. Truly, as these intellectuals and journalists argued, evil does not happen on its own, it is not a matter of dull and inexorable historical processes: rather, it must be a matter of the actions of individuals, who had thus to be defeated and punished.
Of course, there was also the issue of ethnic animosities tied to history, geography, and economics. While there were a substantial number of intermarriages in Bosnia, and people there were not weaned from birth to hate, ethnic groups in Yugoslavia and the Balkans could often recall an era of historical greatness when their own kingdoms had spread across southeastern Europe and dominated others, so that territorial claims, real and imagined, overlapped and contradicted one another. After all, hadn’t Yugoslavia experienced an ethnic civil war between Serbs and Croats in the midst of World War II? And communism, even Tito’s diluted version of it, was enough to keep a preponderance of rural Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in a relative state of freeze-frame poverty throughout the Cold War decades, so that, rather than be assuaged by middle-class prosperity, those ethnic animosities had been allowed to fester.
There assuredly were evil men, responsible for great crimes, but they arose out of a context of already inflamed ethnic divides. Yet for many in the intellectual, journalistic, and relief communities, one had to emphasize the former over the latter. For to do the opposite, to put too much emphasis on the ethnic and historical divides, was to submit to determinism and essentialism, academic buzzwords for fatalism and the acceptance of ethnic stereotypes.
And fatalism led to doing nothing to stop this war while it was happening.
Action was needed, therefore, according to the intellectuals and committed journalists, including military action. And that meant—went this logic train—to downplay the historical backdrop of ethnic rivalry, even if the Yugoslav war was a matter of both things, evil men and difficult historical processes.
I myself ran afoul of this dialectic when I published a book in 1993, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, excerpted in The Atlantic beginning in 1989, four months before the Berlin Wall fell. It was a product of my own reporting on the ground almost everywhere in southeastern Europe throughout the 1980s, where I recorded interviews with many scores of people—as I had been doing on the Ethiopia-Somalia border—detailing their tendency to think in terms of religious and national identities, as well as individual ones. In July 1989, I wrote in The Atlantic: “In the 1970s and 1980s the world witnessed the limits of superpower influence in places like Vietnam and Afghanistan. In the 1990s those limits may well become visible in a Third World region within Europe itself. The Balkans could shape the end of the century, just as they did the beginning.”1 On November 30, 1989, less than three weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, I wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “Two concepts are emerging out of the ruins of communist Europe. One, ‘Central Europe,’ the media is now beating to death. The other, ‘the Balkans,’ the media has yet to discover….” Thus, I devoted the article to considering the ethnic fissuring of Yugoslavia.2 War broke out there nineteen months later.
Gersony stepped unknowing into this heated argument, armed only with his methodology: conducting random, one-on-one interviews in isolation, without asking leading questions, and making sure to include a large, representative cross-section of people. Let the facts of the situation emerge by themselves, and speak for themselves, he believed.
Unknowing as he was, one of the first things he did was to read the Dayton Accords, in particular the critical Annex 7, signed in November 1995:
All refugees and displaced persons have the right to freely return to their homes of origin.3 They shall have the right to have restored to them property of which they were deprived in the course of hostilities since 1991 and to be compensated for any property that cannot be restored to them. The early return of refugees and displaced persons is an important objective of the settlement of the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Parties confirm that they will accept the return of such persons who have left their territory, including those who have been accorded temporary protection by third countries.
The Parties shall ensure that refugees and displaced persons are permitted to return in safety, without risk of harassment, intimidation, persecution, or discrimination, particularly on account of their ethnic origin, religious belief, or political opinion. [Italics mine]
In other words, despite the worst mass atrocities with an ethnic and religious basis in Europe since the Holocaust, people—Serbs, Croats, and Muslims—were expected to set aside what they felt in their hearts—and what had happened, really—and move back to the places where they had lived before the war: for example, with a Muslim family or two mixed in among Croats, with a Croat family or two mixed in among Serbs, and so on. After all, an international elite, led by Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs Richard C. Holbrooke—a force of nature at once inspiring, dominating, intimidating, and infuriating—had decided it was the right thing to do.
And it was the right thing to do.
The question was, Could it be done?
As for that so-called conditionality, it meant that in every case no funds for reconstruction would be dispersed unless moves were ma
de to ensure the safe return of refugees and displaced persons as outlined in Annex 7. Thus, if you wanted a new health facility in your village, you had to let the minority families return to their homes. Conditionality codified a rejection of ethnic cleansing. And because ethnic cleansing was inherently evil, to question the logic or even the practicality of conditionality was self-evidently immoral. In this way, conditionality ran the risk of becoming an intellectual trap. “The likelihood of Annex 7 working completely was not much more than zero,” says Ambassador Brunson McKinley, who came out to Bosnia as a humanitarian coordinator after a long career in the State Department working on refugee affairs.
Of course, Gersony himself knew too little at this point to form an opinion on the text of Dayton after reading it. As elsewhere, he would be driven by what the dozens and hundreds of ordinary people he was to interview would tell him.
Timothy R. Knight with a Bosnian woman (name unknown) who was a recipient of assistance from the housing program Bob Gersony designed.
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Bob and Cindy flew first to the Croatian capital of Zagreb. Tim Knight, who ran USAID’s disaster assistance response team inside the U.S. Embassy and worked closely with UNHCR, was their initial point of contact. Tim Knight was charismatic, good-looking, and supremely plugged in. He was someone perennially reassuring and who spoke with authority. It was a July 9, 1993, unclassified cable that Knight had written from Zagreb, after a field trip to Sarajevo about the dire situation in Bosnia—he had described Sarajevo as a veritable concentration camp run by the United Nations—that was passed on to President Clinton, who then issued an ultimatum to the Serbs, getting them to restore gas in the city.4 Most crucially, Knight had the ear of the powerful, extraordinarily accomplished U.S. ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith, a friend and ally of Holbrooke.5 Though Galbraith and Knight were rough opposites—the former was the product of a prominent liberal family and elite schools from the North; the latter was a moderate conservative and the product of state schools in the South—they got along famously, mainly because Knight’s frequent trips to Bosnia from Croatia gave Galbraith informational access to what was occurring in the war zone. Galbraith wanted little more than for Knight to continue his adventurous forays.6
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