Making War to Keep Peace (26 page)

Three days later, on August 26–27, Lord Carrington led a conference in London to stimulate action on Bosnia. The London Conference began with a declaration that participants must “reject as inhuman and illegal the expulsion of civilian communities from their homes in order to alter the ethnic character of any area.”
⁴⁵
In his remarks at the conference, Eagleburger said, “[I]t is Serbs who face a spectacularly bleak future unless they manage to change the reckless course their leaders chose for the new nation…. The civilized world cannot afford to allow this cancer in the heart of Europe to flourish, much less spread.”
⁴⁶

Among the urgent tasks for the conference were collaborating in the delivery of humanitarian relief; lifting the sieges around Sarajevo, Tuzla, Bihac, Mostar, Gorazde, and other Bosnian towns; introducing human rights monitors; bringing all forces, including irregulars, under central control; restoring the civil and constitutional rights of the inhabitants of Kosovo and Vojvodina; banning military flights; helping refugees return to their homes; closing detention camps and dismantling concentration camps; securing the release of all detained civilians; and bringing to account those who had committed grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. Those were the necessary dimensions of a general peace in the Balkans, but they were not achieved.

As the Bush campaign pushed on toward the fall elections, three factors were pushing the United States toward action: (1) the threat that violence would spread to Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, and perhaps Bulgaria and Greece; (2) the massive human rights violations; and (3) growing American support for action in response to televised horrors. Bosnian civilians were literally starving and freezing to death in villages that had been under siege for months without food or firewood, and reports of their plight anguished Americans (and others), as did reports of camps in which Bosnian men were starved and beaten to death.

By the fall of 1992, many Americans understood that Bosnians lacked the weapons to defend themselves, because the U.S. government and the UN Security Council had imposed an arms embargo on Bosnia and Croatia. There's no real evidence that the Bush administration's shared responsibility for the Balkan tragedy caused his electoral defeat; most politically alert observers understood that the European Community was at least equally complicit. But Bush's electoral fortunes were not helped by the continued reports of destruction and death in Croatia and Bosnia.

Among the most damning such reports were those from Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the first democratically chosen leader of Poland, who was appointed by the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) as special rapporteur on Bosnia. Mazowiecki's first report, delivered on August 28, 1992, described the pattern of brutality and conquest in half a dozen towns in Bosnia-Herzegovina, including regions of Bihac and Sarajevo; it covered replacement of elected officials, discrimination, dismissal from
work, confiscation of property, expulsions and forced population transfers, destruction of mosques, the use of sieges to cut off food supplies, and beatings, torture, and summary executions.
⁴⁷

This ethnic cleansing was also the subject of Mazowiecki's second and third reports, which described its deliberate and methodical character. All non-Serbs were potential targets. Serbs who sought to protect or help their Muslim or Croat neighbors were themselves attacked and harshly punished. Neighborhoods and towns in which Serbs, Muslims, and Croats had lived together peaceably for years were swiftly “cleansed” of Muslims. The reports described people being told to leave or die, or stuffed into airless trucks and cattle cars for unknown destinations. Mosques and Catholic churches were burned and bombed. Hospitals were repeatedly attacked. Humanitarian workers and convoys were harassed, attacked, and blocked. Journalists were attacked.

The year 1992 had seen summary executions become commonplace in areas occupied by Serb forces. In March, all the men in the village of Jelec were rounded up and machine-gunned. In April, the first round of organized killing began in Srebrenica, with young and distinguished males as preferred victims. Elsewhere, women and girls were raped; men and boys were strangled, shot, or drowned. In May, carloads of Serbs drove through Zaklopaca, murdering at least one hundred Muslims. Three-quarters of the forty-five hundred inhabitants of six small mountain villages were killed when Serbs captured the villages. In Mostar, there were reports of mass graves, of victims shot at close range with automatic weapons. From village after village came reports of Serbs making house-to-house searches in each new town they entered, rounding up men and boys, and frequently shooting them in cold blood.

In Mazowiecki's reports, Serbs were most often the aggressors and Muslims the victims. But Croats and parts of Croatia under Serb control were also major targets, and Muslims and Croats were also occasionally guilty of brutal mistreatment. The UNHCR and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) sought to determine the number and location of prisoners. By the end of December, more than 10,800 detainees had been registered in fifty places of detention in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Many more were undeclared. Most of these people were not prison
ers of war but civilians who had been seized and detained for possible exchange.

By the end of 1992, Mazowiecki estimated, 810,000 people had been driven from their homes and become internal refugees; another 700,000 had become refugees in other countries that had been part of Yugoslavia. Conditions in the camps, prisons, and other places of detention were inhuman, the treatment of prisoners often ghastly. Starvation, thirst, beatings, torture, and rape were commonplace in towns and camps alike.

After losing the election, Bush joined British prime minister John Major in calling for enforcement of the ban on military flights over Bosnia and threatening drastic action unless Serbs made a “rapid and radical change of policy.” The joint U.S.-U.K. statement was triggered by the deterioration of the humanitarian situation and concern about the spread of fighting to Kosovo and Macedonia, a concern that had already prompted the UN to send seven hundred peacekeeping troops to Macedonia and more observers to Kosovo. Major and the United Kingdom were reluctant to use airpower against Serbs, and the British and the UN qualified their threats.
⁴⁸
Retaliation would not be automatic; it would not involve extreme measures, such as shooting down Serb aircraft, but rather a warning period of fifteen days.
⁴⁹

The American response was not much more helpful to the victims of Serb violence. The State Department announced that, in addition to recalling its ambassador, the United States would join in diplomatic efforts and economic sanctions. The United States, Russia, and three EC members—Britain, France, and Belgium—cosponsored Security Council Resolution 787, which threatened more economic sanctions against Serbia. Instead of following the special rapporteur's recommendation and establishing safe areas for the burgeoning refugee population, however, 787 merely “invited” the secretary-general and the UN High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) to “study the possibilities of and the requirements for the promotion of safe areas for humanitarian purposes.”
⁵⁰
These and other toothless resolutions and measures hardly qualified as serious attempts to deal with the murder and mayhem under way in Yugoslavia.

Bush also began to push for the establishment of UN observer
missions to monitor the southern regions of Kosovo and Macedonia, and for more serious commitments to enforce action. In a December 1992 letter, he warned MiloÅ¡ević and JNA chief Zivotr Panic that “In the event of conflict in Kosovo caused by Serbian action, the United States will be prepared to employ military force against the Serbs in Kosovo and Serbia.” 51

George H. W. Bush had provided effective world leadership to cope with Iraq's aggression in Kuwait and with starvation in Somalia. He had announced his intention to help usher in a new world order. Why, then, did he avert his eyes from the destruction of Vucovar and Dubrovnik, from the sieges of Sarajevo, Gorazde, and a dozen other Muslim towns and villages? Perhaps because he was preoccupied with the presidential election. Perhaps also because he was frustrated with the decisions of France and Germany to create a military force outside NATO and take an independent role in policy. Bush preferred that the United States be the leader in international actions, as it was in imposing sanctions.

If Bush took no effective action, neither did John Major, François Mitterrand, or the French foreign minister, Roland Dumas. Mitterrand's Sarajevo visit became the center of a public controversy after a French documentary film reported that President Izetbegovíc had personally briefed Mitterrand on Serb massacres of civilians and on the ghastly atrocities at the concentration camps, where thousands had been deported. Mitterrand never mentioned any of this until he was publicly criticized for his silence. Major and British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd also steadfastly resisted participating in an international response to Serbian aggression. Britain's reluctance to mount air attacks was based on the fear that “they might bring Serb reprisals against the twenty-seven hundred troops it had on the ground helping to deliver humanitarian supplies.”
⁵²
To at least one informed observer—historian Brendan Simms, who has made an exhaustive study of British biases in favor of Serbs and against Bosnian Muslims, against robust resistance to Serb aggression, and against an air war—Hurd and British defense secretary Malcolm Rifkind were “the two men who bear the greatest responsibility for Britain's disastrous Bosnian policy.”
⁵³

On February 8, 1993, after the Clinton administration had assumed control of Yugoslav policy, Bush's last secretary of state, Lawrence Eagleburger, issued his own epitaph for the Bush policy in Bosnia. “[W]e
failed, from beginning to end,” he said. As for the ongoing violence, he said, “I don't know any way to stop it except with massive use of military force.”
⁵⁴

THE VANCE-OWEN PLAN

As the guard prepared to change in Washington, there was plenty of blame going around. Even before meeting with Clinton's choice for secretary of state, Warren Christopher, EC negotiator Lord David Owen said it was probably the fault of the United States that war still raged in Bosnia.
⁵⁵
During the presidential campaign, Clinton had delivered strong activist speeches that Owen believed gave hope to beleaguered Bosnian Muslims, encouraging them to resist any peace plan that gave an advantage to the Serbs (as all of them did). But Bosnia's government needed no encouragement to resist these plans. Foreign minister Haris Silajdzic vowed that the Muslims would not negotiate under “continuing genocide”—that is, until the Serbs stopped shelling Sarajevo, Gorazde, and other villages.

In late 1992, Owen and Cyrus Vance unveiled what became known as the Vance-Owen peace plan, 56 which proposed to divide Bosnia into ten ethnically distinct, autonomous provinces. Three provinces would be dominated by Croats (who made up 17 percent of the population); three by Muslims (who constituted 44 percent of the population before the ethnic cleansing drove them from their homes); and three by Serbs (who made up 31 percent of the population).57 Sarajevo, the capital, would be jointly administered. Under the Vance-Owen plan, the elected government of Bosnia, then headed by President Alija Izetbegovíc, would resign and be replaced by a nine-person interim commission whose members would be equally drawn from each of the ethnic groups.

The Croats quickly accepted the plan, but they were the only ones. The Bosnian Serbs were equivocal; they wanted a corridor connecting Serbian enclaves to Serbia, but on January 20, 1993, the Bosnian Serb Assembly reluctantly accepted the plan in principle. The Bosnian Muslims—the principal victims of Serbian aggression—would be the big losers in the Vance-Owen settlement. Early in his tenure as EC negotiator, Owen had told the London
Financial Times
that “what has happened in the former Yugoslavia must be reversed…we are not going
to have the Muslims treated like the Jews once were in Europe.”
⁵⁸
But to the Bosnians and most of their supporters and sympathizers, it seemed clear that the Vance-Owen plan
did
reward ethnic cleansing, by legitimizing Serb control of land from which Muslims had been driven. It also rewarded Croats, who were already moving to consolidate military control over lands assigned to them under the plan, on the grounds that Muslim “extremists” and “fundamentalists” would threaten the national identity of the Croatian community in Bosnia. At the same time, the Croats, who had managed to procure some weapons and training, were fighting successfully to reclaim Serbian enclaves in Croatia.

None of these events caused Vance or Owen to doubt that their plan could end the fighting if it were imposed by the Security Council and enforced by the major powers. Owen believed that President Clinton “should stop all of this loose talk about using force, make it clear to Izetbegovíc that he's got no real alternative to these negotiations…then provide American troops as part of a NATO force.”
⁵⁹
To his credit, Clinton had no stomach for forcing Bosnia to accept a solution that was fundamentally unacceptable. Madeleine Albright, newly appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, had promised that the United States would “try to make a peace settlement which does not punish the victims and does not reward the aggressors.”
⁶⁰

The Vance-Owen plan not only awarded the Serbs most of the areas from which Muslims had been driven, it also gave them political representation far beyond their numbers. The Bosnian government was dismantled, Bosnia's constitution scrapped. Silajdzic spoke for the Bosnian government when he said, “We, as a member of the United Nations, will never accept the abolition of our constitution, our legality, which are based on free and democratic elections.”