Making War to Keep Peace (24 page)

Baker and President Bush made trips to the region, where they made
strong statements discouraging secession. Baker urged Yugoslav leaders to accept two basic realities: (1) that they needed to negotiate their differences, not act unilaterally, and (2) that under no circumstances would the international community tolerate the use of force.
¹¹
His message to MiloÅ¡ević went further: “[W]e regard your policies as the main cause of Yugoslavia's present crisis…. If you persist in promoting the breakup of Yugoslavia, Serbia will stand alone. The United States and the rest of the international community will reject Serbian claims to territory beyond its borders.”
¹²

Bush's top advisers were united in the belief that the United States should avoid becoming bogged down in a protracted civil war; they feared that a Yugoslav breakup might encourage present and former republics of the Soviet Union to consider secession. This concern inspired Bush's famous “Chicken Kiev speech,” in which he declared that “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.”
¹³
General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, argued that the United States had “no clear military goals in Bosnia” and stressed that “the solution must ultimately be a political one.”
¹⁴
Bush, Baker, and Powell expressed no sympathy for the aspirations of the Croatians, Slovenes, or Bosnians or their desire for independence. Nor did they speak of self-determination. Scowcroft, Bush's national security advisor and good friend, wrote,

Both the American and the EC governments were shocked when the Serb-controlled central government used savage force to crush rebellions against the authority it claimed. The U.S. State Department was only
slightly behind the British, the French, and the rest of the EC in realizing that this had become the principal problem.

On June 25, 1991, Slovenia declared independence; Croatia followed suit. The next day, national army tanks rumbled into Slovenian towns, but the Slovenes were ready. Forty-four JNA soldiers were killed and 187 wounded. Slovenia's secession was recognized. Yet the alliance between Slovenia and Croatia soon collapsed, and the JNA began shelling Croatia, including the historic, defenseless cities of Vucovar and Dubrovnik. Three months of heavy shelling and siege reduced Vucovar to shambles, its inhabitants to hunger and to hiding in basements. The Croats surrendered on November 20, 1991. Many were killed; others were stuffed into overcrowded prisons.

Tapes of telephone calls between Milošević and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic in July 1991 provide clear evidence that Belgrade was making regular secret deliveries of arms to Bosnian Serbs.
¹⁶
The tapes also make it clear that Milošević, who was collecting weapons from the republics of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, was simultaneously directing the JNA to deliver weapons to the Bosnian Serbs in an attempt to build a Bosnian Serb military force and link Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia with those in Serbia. Vojislav Seselj, a political ally of Milošević, told
Der Spiegel
that Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and much of Croatia should be transferred to Serbia.
¹⁷

On September 21, 1991, a number of European and American publications reported the invasion of Croatia by the JNA. Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia had designated four “Serb autonomous regions,” which then requested protection from the JNA, by then wholly under Serb control. On September 25, at the request of Yugoslavia, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 713, which imposed an arms embargo that froze in place Serbia's huge advantage in weapons and left the newly independent states nearly defenseless at a time when massacres of their populations were already under way.
¹⁸

At the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), President Bush said that the world must stop Serbian terrorism “no matter what it takes.” But he later added that the United States would not act without European engagement. The result was that two U.S. warships
waited off the Adriatic coast for a European naval force that was incredibly slow in arriving to begin monitoring the embargo.

The arms embargo, enforced by the United States (among others), remained in effect until 1995, when Resolution 1021 recalled previous resolutions, 19 in spite of the fact that the people of Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia had voted in favor of independence, and the countries had been admitted to the UN on May 22, 1992. As UN member states, these nations were entitled to all the rights, privileges, and protections in the UN Charter, including “the inherent right to self-defense.” The legal interpretation underlying the decision rested on a recommendation of former president Carter's secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, the UN secretary-general's appointed mediator and personal envoy to Yugoslavia.
²⁰
But Vance, the secretary-general, and the Security Council had not considered the full implications of imposing an arms embargo in the context of Serb aggression against the people of Croatia and Bosnia, who lacked the means of self-defense. And the resolution did not take into account the clear contradiction between denying Bosnia and Croatia arms to defend themselves and various other Security Council resolutions that dealt with violations of Bosnia's territorial integrity.

Because the embargo rendered Croatia and Bosnia virtually defenseless, it became the center of a heated and long-lasting debate in the U.S. Congress between those who wanted to provide arms to the Croatians and Muslims so they could defend themselves, and those who believed that such measures would only further inflame the fighting. An intense debate developed in the UN between the United States (which repeatedly threatened to revoke the embargo unilaterally) and its allies, especially the British and French, who had historic ties with the Serbs and eventually had troops in the UN Protection Force for Croatia (UNPROFOR), who they feared would be endangered if arms were provided to the Bosnians. Denying arms to the Croatians and Bosnians laid the foundation for mass slaughter.

Newsday
correspondent Roy Gutman provided the first descriptions in English of Serb concentration camps. Later, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book
A Witness to Genocide
, he noted that the Bosnian Serb army—the old Yugoslav army—began to oversee the burgeoning horror
of ethnic cleansing, which featured “arbitrary executions and wholesale deportations.”
²¹

In November 1991, Serb troops surrounding Dubrovnik broke a multiple cease-fire, negotiated weeks before, and began shelling the beautiful medieval city. On December 6, Dubrovnik was shelled for ten hours; the attack would leave its inhabitants without electricity or water for a month. All of its citizens (including Serbs) were engaged in the defense of the city.
²²

Accounts of brutality filtered out of Croatia. Gutman told the world what he had learned of the ghastly conditions in the Omarska prison camp. He interviewed survivors, who described the unbelievable tragedy. One man said:

Gutman found eyewitnesses and former detainees who described death camps where “emaciated men with their heads shaved in an open field” were routinely slaughtered.
²⁴
The first British television photos of Omarska appeared, deeply shocking Europe.

By this time, reports of savage fighting in the former Yugoslavia were appearing in the Western media. The
Washington Post
, the
New York Times
, and other major newspapers published accounts of the destruction of Vucovar, and of tens of thousands of Croats and Bosnians driven from their homes and stripped of their possessions. In Europe, reports in
Le Monde
and the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
estimated that five hundred thousand persons had become refugees in Croatia alone in the weeks after the fighting broke out, and that the Serbs were using rape as a weapon.

As Ambassador Warren Zimmerman later wrote, “The pattern of Serb atrocities that continued throughout the war was set in these first few days. Typically, the Serbian paramilitaries would storm a town,
killing civilians in the assault, would expel the Muslim population, and would turn the town over to Serbs, who, protected by the JNA, could destroy mosques and other Muslim symbols at leisure. Military-age Muslims were sent to concentration camps or executed.”
²⁵
Beatings, rapes, and murder were ubiquitous.
²⁶

The pressure to act against these atrocities mounted, and blame began to rub off on the Western powers. Some observers believed that Milošević could not have launched the attacks without the acquiescence of the United States and Western Europe, or at least that their passivity could easily be interpreted as acquiescence.

On December 17, 1991—in its first significant unilateral move in foreign affairs since the end of World War II—Germany announced that it would recognize Slovenia and Croatia on January 1, 1992. It was a bold move that reflected foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher's determination to do something for Croatia and Slovenia. But it was a sharp disappointment to Lord Carrington and the U.S. diplomats, who believed that the chances of containing the violence would be far better if no government granted diplomatic recognition to any republics that unilaterally declared independence. Repelled by the Serb offensive, the EC and the Vatican soon followed Germany in recognizing Croatia and Slovenia.

On February 21, the Security Council passed Resolution 743, establishing a small peacekeeping force for Croatia (UNPROFOR), pending a solution of the Yugoslav crisis. The resolution authorized a force of 45,000 troops, but reached a maximum strength of only 39,922. The force was to serve as a buffer—separating the Krajina Serbs and the Croatians, monitoring cease-fires, and facilitating the return of refugees. In Bosnia, the force was also to escort humanitarian convoys and deter attacks on safe areas. Its cost over four years was approximately $4.6 billion.
²⁷
UNPROFOR's size and mandate were repeatedly enlarged as the situation deteriorated throughout 1992. Although Bosnia-Herzegovina had also become a major target of Serb aggression, Boutros-Ghali rejected the appeals of France, Germany, and Poland to deploy a peacekeeping force there. Violence spread in Bosnia, as regular and irregular Serb forces moved with impunity from village to village, pillaging and driving out the inhabitants.

On the last day of February 1992, a referendum in Bosnia produced a Bosnian Serb boycott and a strong Muslim-Croat vote in favor of independence. On April 21, the shooting started in Sarajevo, Bosnia's multiethnic capital city. Heavy shelling continued throughout April; but no action was taken to defend the unarmed Bosnians. In late May, James Baker announced that the United States had joined in discussions on adopting Chapter VII sanctions (authorizing the use of force). Still, the ever-cautious Baker added a caveat: “[B]efore we consider force, we ought to exhaust all of the political, diplomatic and economic remedies that might be at hand.”
²⁸

Almost all the parties to this increasingly violent situation were slow to realize that they were truly at war. Nowhere was this clearer than in the extraordinary events surrounding the kidnapping on May 2 of Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovíc, who was returning to Sarajevo after a day of fruitless negotiations in Lisbon. No one realized that the JNA had taken over the airport. Minutes after Izetbegovíc's plane landed, he was a prisoner of the Serbs. In the negotiations that followed, he sought to save himself, his daughter, his party, and his position as president, while the JNA sought to secure its control of the airport, Izetbegovíc, and the Bosnian government by imposing a coup d'etat. UN commander general Lewis MacKenzie described it as “the worst day of my life.”
²⁹
In extremely complex conversations, President Izetbegovíc managed to secure his freedom and that of his daughter, while Bosnia's military commanders ambushed the JNA forces at the airport. By the end of the day, it was clear that the Serbs and Bosnians were engaged in a fight to the death.

In the weeks that followed, the situation worsened. Cease-fires were negotiated and violated. Pledges were made and broken. The Sarajevo airport remained closed. The “safe routes” created for delivery of humanitarian supplies remained tightly shut. Serb mortars pounded Sarajevo's neighborhoods. On May 27, 1992, as the inhabitants of Sarajevo stood in a long line waiting to buy bread, Serbs shelled the bread line, killing twenty-two people and wounding many others.

In the spring and summer of 1992, the UN Security Council passed a series of resolutions calling for the reopening of the Sarajevo airport,
which had been closed since early spring. On May 15, 1992, the Security Council passed Resolution 752, demanding that all parties cease efforts to change the ethnic composition of any part of the former Yugoslavia, that Croatians and Serbs who had not lived in Bosnia withdraw from Bosnia, and that all parties cooperate to ensure access to Bosnia's airports and the delivery of humanitarian assistance. The United States joined in Resolution 757, which passed on May 30, 1992, imposing a trade embargo on Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) and freezing Yugoslav assets abroad and in the United States. Resolutions 758 and 761 banned all military flights over Bosnia-Herzegovina and demanded that the UN and humanitarian organizations be given open access to camps, prisons, and detention centers. But none of these good things happened. Finally, in June 1992, the Security Council passed Resolution 762, belatedly authorizing the deployment of peacekeeping forces to Sarajevo.