A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (42 page)

Serb gunmen knew that their violent deportation and killing campaign would not be enough to ensure the lasting achievement of ethnic purity. The armed marauders sought to sever permanently the bond between citizens and land. Thus, they forced fathers to castrate their sons or molest their daughters; they humiliated and raped (often impregnating) young women. Theirs was a deliberate policy of destruction and degradation: destruction so this avowed enemy race would have no homes to which to return; degradation so the former inhabitants would not stand tall-and thus would not dare again stand-in Serb-held territory.

Senior officials within the Bush and later the Clinton administrations understood the dire human consequences of Serb aggression.This was Europe and not a crisis that could be shoved on to the desks of midlevel officials. More than ever before, Lemkinian voices for action were heard within the State Department, on Capitol Hill, and on America's editorial pages. A swarm of Western journalists in Bosnia supplied regular, graphic coverage.Yet despite unprecedented public outcry about foreign brutality, for the next three and a half years the United States, Europe, and the United Nations stood by while some 200,000 Bosnians were killed, more than 2 million were displaced, and the territory of a multiethnic European republic was sliced into three ethnically pure statelets.

The international community did not do nothing during the vicious war. With the Cold War behind it, the United Nations became the forum for much collective activity. The UN Security Council pointed fingers at the main aggressors, imposed economic sanctions, deployed peacekeepers, and helped deliver humanitarian aid. Eventually it even set up a war crimes tribunal to punish the plotters and perpetrators of mass murder. What the United States and its allies did not do until it was too late, however, was intervene with armed force to stop genocide. So although the European location of the crime scene generated widespread press coverage, a far more vocal elite lobby for intervention, and the most bitter cleft within the U.S. government since the Vietnam War, these factors did not combine to make either President Bush or President Clinton intervene in time to save the country of Bosnia or its citizens from destruction.

Warning

"Bloody as Hell"

Serb brutality in Bosnia came with plenty of warning. Intelligence officials are severely scolded and embarrassed if they fail to anticipate a crisis, but they face less opprobrium if they offer a "false positive" by predicting a crisis that does not unfold.The intelligence community is thus more prone to raise too many flags than too few. U.S. intelligence had already failed to forecast Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union. When it came to the Balkan wars, U.S. analysts were therefore especially careful to position themselves well out in front of the carnage. The brief war in Slovenia and the longer and more bloody one in Croatia in 1991 led officials in the U.S. government to predict that Bosnia's ethnic diversity and the Muslim plurality's defenselessness would make the next war the deadliest of all. Although reporters spoke later of the Bosnian conflict's "erupting," it would be more apt to say the Bosnian conflict arrived. Indeed, many felt it was a war that arrived virtually on schedule. The war's viciousness had been forecast so regularly and so vividly as to desensitize U.S. officials. By the time the bloodshed began, U.S. officials were almost too prepared: They had been reading warning cables for so long that nothing could surprise them.

Jim Hooper, a fastidious U.S. foreign service veteran, worked as the deputy director of the Office of East Europe and Yugoslav Affairs in the State Department's European Bureau from 1989 to 1991. He had joined the U.S. government in 1971 and spent the late 1980s consumed with the right kind of turbulence and upheaval-the historic roundtable negotiations that helped bring about the end of communism in Poland, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the velvet passage to democracy in Czechoslovakia. But ever since he read an article in the Economist in early 1989 that predicted the violent breakup ofYugoslavia, Hooper had been worried. In 1991, with Balkan leaders sounding ever more belligerent and nationalist militias sprouting, Hooper urged Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger to travel to the region. Eagleburger had served as U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1977 to 1981 and consulted on business there throughout the 1980s in partnership with Henry Kissinger. He spoke Serbo-Croatian and was enamored of the verdant landscape. In February 1991 Eagleburger paid a trip to the region and warned Milosevic against violence. When he returned, he said to Hooper, "I thought you were exaggerating, that you were giving me the usual bureaucratic hype. But now that I've been there, I think you were much too optimistic. It is going to be bloody as hell." Eagleburger thought there was nothing the United States could do, that it was Europe's problem, and that any attempt to get involved would fail and harm the United States in the process.

Some of the loudest early-warning sirens and moral sermons came from Capitol Hill. Some, like Republican senator Bob Dole, brought a prior interest in the region. During World War II, the young Kansan had led an attack on a German machine-gun nest in Po Valley, Italy. When Dole saw his radioman go down, he crawled out of his foxhole to retrieve him. As he did, a shell exploded nearby, shattering his shoulder and his vertebrae. Shipped from Italy to Russell, Kansas, in a full-body cast, the young war hero earned press coverage that caught the eye of Dr. Hampar Kelikian, a Chicago reconstructive surgeon. Kelikian wrote to Dole and told him that if the young veteran could find the train fare, he would perform the necessary surgery at no cost. Dole's neighbors chipped in, filling an empty cigar box propped up in the window of the local drug store where Dole had served as a soda jerk. Kelikian not only operated on Dole in Chicago but also kept him company in the long recovery period by regaling him with stories about the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians. Kelikian had escaped to America as a boy after three of his sisters were massacred in the geno- cide.5 Dole, who had never before heard of these crimes, was shocked. When he joined the Senate, he kept an eye trained on the Balkans.

Dole began denouncing Yugoslavia's human rights record in 1986. He introduced Senate resolutions expressing special concern about the state's systematic persecution of Albanians, who made up 90 percent of the population in Kosovo, Serbia. Each year Serb forces stepped up their violence against the Albanians, and Dole in turn amplified his denunciations. By 1990, with the rest of Eastern Europe liberalizing, Dole was describing the Yugoslav government as a "symbol of tyranny and repression" that was "murdering, maiming and imprisoning" its citizens.'

But none of the Kansas senator's rhetorical litanies had prepared him for the official visit he paid to Kosovo in August 1990. At first the Serb authorities tried to keep Dole and six Senate colleagues from entering Serbia's southern province, prompting Dole to storm out of a Belgrade meeting. They next tried to supply the group with a Serbian watchdog who would prevent them from speaking freely to Albanians. In the end the Belgrade regime supplied a Serb driver who roared into Kosovo's capital at breakneck speed in order to block the American lawmakers from viewing the grins police state. As the bus entered Pristina, thousands of ethnic Albanians lined the streets and began chanting, "USA, USA." Dole later recalled "appalling and unforgettable" scenes of hundreds of people running across the fields to wave to the speeding bus, while police with guns and clubs mauled them.' After returning, Dole told the Washington Post of "tanks and troops everywhere, hundreds of demonstrators fleeing in all directions, trying to avoid the club-wielding security forces, and tear gas rising over the confusion and carnage." Scores were injured and hundreds arrested.' On the Senate floor Dole declared, "The United States cannot sit this out on the sidelines, we have a moral obligation to take a strong stand in defense of the individual rights of Albanians and all of the people ofYugoslavia."9 Dole's act of "witnessing" conditioned his response to future reports of atrocity. As his chief foreign policy adviser, Mira Baratta, notes, "It is one thing to have a natural inclination to care about human rights, but it is another thing entirely when you see people who only want to wave at Americans getting pummeled before your own eyes. Once you have seen that, you just can't look away."

Congressman Frank McCloskey, a Democrat from Indiana, also dates his awakening to a weeklong trip he took to the Balkans during the war in Croatia in December 1991. The congressman had four experiences on the trip that, in hindsight, ably illustrate the nature of the entire Yugoslav mess and prepared him for Milosevic's double-dealings in Bosnia. They also altered the course of his political career and life. First, he was shelled by Serb forces while visiting the Croatian city of Osijek, a university town that reminded him of his own Bloomington. Second, he came upon the remains of a massacre that had been committed around the Croatian town of Vocin, some seventy miles southeast of the capital of Zagreb. Forty Croatian victims, most over the age of sixty, had been dismembered with chain saws, and McCloskey, who was one of the first to arrive on the scene, was revolted by the piles of mutilated body parts. Third, when he personally traveled to Belgrade to confront the Serbian authorities, President Milosevic told McCloskey solemnly that no matter what he had seen or thought he had seen, Osijek had not been shelled and no massacre had been committed in Vocin. "He was very smooth and polished, and described himself as a peaceloving man," McCloskey remembers. Milosevic told him that the corpses were "part of a show" put on by the Croatian government. And fourth, a U.S. embassy official in Belgrade had warned him that although the ongoing war in Croatia was bad, the conflict in Bosnia would produce a "real slaughter."The war would rarely deviate from this text: shelling, massacre, straight-faced lies, and plenty of early warning of worse to come.

Wishful Thinking

American policyniakers have often fallen prey to wishful thinking in the face of what they later recognized to be genocide. But history has shown that this phenomenon is more human than American. Before the war began in Bosnia, many of its citizens, too, dismissed omnipresent omens. They were convinced that bloodshed could not happen there, that it could not happen then, or that it could not happen to them. In order to maintain this faith amid mounting evidence of horror, Bosnians found ways to link the widespread tales of terror to circumstances that did not apply to them. When Serb forces began targeting Croatian civilians in 1991, many Muslims in Bosnia told themselves that it was Croatian president Franjo Tudjman who was the nationalist and the obstructionist making it impossible to resolve the conflict peacefully. Bosnia's leaders would be more sensible and moderate. Besides, even if the Serb response to Croatia's declaration of independence was unduly violent, their beloved Yugoslavia would never turn on Bosnia, an ethnically jumbled microcosm of Yugoslav leader Marshal Tito's larger dream. Even once it was clear that war was consuming Bosnia and the radio brimmed with gruesome reports of summary executions and rapes, Muslims continued to console themselves that the war could never infect their neighborhoods. "That's a long way off," they would say." We have been living together for years."

In retrospect, when Serb radio began broadcasting reports that Bosnian towns had been attacked by "Muslim extremists," non-Serbs might have checked their history books.The extremists tended to be those who made such announcements, justifying preemptive assaults. But Bosnians were not prepared for either the crackle of evening gunfire or the suddenly stern, familiar radio voice telling them, "Citizens are requested to remain in their homes and apartments for the sake of their own security."

Most Bosnians did as they were told. Under Tito's forty-five-year Communist rule, they had grown accustomed to listening to strongmen. In many the muscle that twitches in defiance, or at least in apprehension, of state authority had atrophied for lack of use. Some might have questioned the source, but few dared to challenge it. The instructions made sense: danger outside; safety inside. Unfortunately, they made sense to those who issued them as well. Because the Muslims stayed indoors, they could be found playing cards, folding linen, or simply sleeping when the Serb police or militia arrived.

Bosnians were not especially naive or gullible. They erected what Primo Levi likened to a cordon sanitaire to shield them from murderous events they felt powerless to stop or avoid. They were confronted with a choice that for most was too awful to contemplate: fight or flight. Bosnia's Muslims were militarily unprepared to make war, but, like the Kurds who remained in Saddam Hussein's prohibited zones, they stared out at the fields they had tilled or the hills they had roamed for generations and could not bring themselves to take leave. In the primarily rural country, many clung to the cold walls that they or their ancestors had assembled brick by brick. They claimed even the patch of sky overhead. Every Bosnian seemed to have a river of his or her own-the Sava, the Una, the Sana, the Miljacka, the Drina-in which they had bathed as children, by which they had nestled romantically for the first time as teenagers.There was, they said, "a special bond between heart and grass"

Because the national story in Tito's era was one of "brotherhood and unity" in which ethnic identity was discounted and even disparaged, and because the communities had lived intermingled or in neighboring villages for so many years, many found it even harder to take seriously the threat from their neighbors. They maintained a faith in the power of familiarity, charm, and reason.They believed that individual destiny and personality would count for something.

As remarkable as the existence of this faith is its durability. In Cambodia even those subjected daily to the rigors and horrors of Khmer Rouge rule persisted in hoping that those who were hauled away were only being reeducated. In Bosnia, even two years into the war, when more than 100,000 of their neighbors had been killed and the bloodiest of displacements had taken place, thousands of Muslims and Croats stubbornly refused to leave Serb-held territory. Some had no money, and by then the Serbs had begun charging an "exit tax" of nearly $1,000. But most who remained found the fear of death preferable to the reality of abandoning their homes. Foreign visitors would plead with them, remind them of the lunacy (patently obvious to our transient, cosmopolitan eyes) of their perseverance. Those who tested the neighborhood thugs inevitably lost their homes and many, eventually, their lives. One month foreign visitors would meet an elderly family that would dip into its emergency stock of bread, cheese, and Turkish coffee and produce photos of missing family members. Several months later the visitors could return to find the quaint cul-de-sac reduced to blackened rubble. Or they might discover the Muslims' bungalow intact but occupied by Serbs who hung a Serb flag from the window, as protective lamb's blood had once been splashed above doorways.The Muslim occupants had vanished.