THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (80 page)

HUMANITARIAN AID

There was some shock in August 1992 when the former diplomat and columnist Leslie H. Gelb wrote in the
New York Times
that Western officials had told him their policy was to feed the Bosnian Muslims while “prompting them to surrender.” “Let me be chillingly blunt about what Western officials told me regarding the Balkan crisis,” he wrote. “They said that nothing they are doing or plan to do is at all likely to compel the Serbs to stop killing Muslims.” Prior to this time it was not widely appreciated that the humanitarian mission to Bosnian Muslims was consistent with Serbian political objectives. In retrospect we can see that it couldn't have been any other way.

The supply of humanitarian assistance was made necessary in the first place by the Serb interdiction of utilities, water, medicine, and food to cities swollen with refugees fleeing Serbian attacks. These surrounded cities could not be resupplied by the U.N. without Serbian cooperation, which would be jeopardized by any Serb/U.N. confrontation. U.N. and
U.S. analysts have concluded that in any case only about one-quarter of the needed humanitarian supplies were reaching the target populations.
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What did get through, however, depended upon negotiations with the Serbs who controlled access to the Muslim enclaves. This had the effect of pitting the officials of the humanitarian mission against any use of force against the Serbs, lest their relief routes be cut entirely. A senior U.N. officer in Sarajevo was quoted by the
New York Times
as acknowledging that a newly proposed U.N. humanitarian relief plan for Sarajevo was not appreciably different than previous plans, all of which had failed. “But we felt we had to do something,” said the officer with a
Bridge on the River Kwai
sort of logic, “or there would be no alternative to air strikes.” Thus, despite a Security Council ban on all Serbian and other military flights in order to ensure “the safety of the delivery of humanitarian assistance,” the U.N. actually resisted enforcement of the ban and limited itself to stationing monitors to observe infractions.
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Humanitarian aid provided a kind of camouflage to disguise inaction on other fronts. In 1992, the secretary-general stated, “I know that international public opinion is frustrated, they want to see quick results. But we believe it's important to avoid an escalation…. [The situation in former Yugoslavia] is not as difficult as it appears,” he was reported as saying, pointing to the distribution of humanitarian aid.
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By January 1994, Warren Zimmermann, the former U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia who was running the refugee relief effort for the United States, quit in protest. “I had reached the conclusion,” he said candidly, “that the humanitarian element for which I was responsible was being used as a cover for the lack of a real policy toward Bosnia.”
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POLITICAL SETTLEMENT

Because the Serbs had been so successful in the Third Yugoslav War, any political settlement had to come to terms with their occupation of more than two-thirds of Bosnia, despite the fact that they constituted less than one-third of the population. This fact led to a series of proposed redivi-sions of the Bosnian state. Lord Carrington had initially suggested “cantonization” on the Swiss model. This was succeeded by the Vance-Owen Plan, which divided Bosnia into seven to ten largely autonomous regions with a limited central government. Owen himself worked hard to win acceptance of a Muslim mini-state on about a third of the territory of
Bosnia. The Contact Group map, which was similar to the Dayton Agreement, provided for a Bosnia divided between Serbs and a Muslim-Croat federation.
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The difficulty with these various plans was that they violated the Statement of Principles agreed to by all parties at the London Conference in August 1992, which explicitly provided for the nonrecognition of territorial gains achieved by force and the restoration of the rights of persons driven from their homes. It may be, of course, that such objectives were simply unachievable in the face of a successful military conquest such as that by the Serbs, and that the authors of these plans were merely trying to put the best face on an unpleasant fact. But these proposed settlements, such as the Vance-Owen Plan, also were the product of the haunting notion that the Bosnian Serbs have some right, other than that earned by violence, to their own self-determination. If Bosnia had been allowed to secede from Yugoslavia with the consequence that its borders became the subject of international recognition and protection, then why wasn't this right also accorded to the Serbs within Bosnia, who had never wished to secede in the first place?

The answer to this is a complicated one. “Peoples” are entitled to self-determination, which is not the same thing as an entitlement to a state. Where there are adequate protections for minorities and fair and free electoral processes, a “people” has no right to secede absent the consent of the people with whom they share the right of citizenship. Bosnia was driven from a federation it wished to preserve by the violent transformation of that state into a Greater Serbia. There is no evidence that a similar fate awaited the Bosnian Serbs at the hands of the Sarajevo government.

Nevertheless, the recognition of Bosnian secession from Yugoslavia— pressed by Germany in the hope that recognition would provide some protection for Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia from Serbia—was unwelcome to most European states (and to the United States). In light of the breakup of the Soviet Union and secessionist movements in Spain, Northern Ireland, Italy, and elsewhere it is not hard to see why. Once the society of states accepted secession as a viable means of self-determination, something like “cantonization” became inevitable. Ironically, it was the military situation, which was presumed to have dictated this solution, that rendered the “solution” so objectionable. Whatever the advertising, most observers came to recognize that there would be no return for the displaced Muslims and that the Serbs had achieved by violence essentially what they sought.

The point isn't simply that deciding what action to take in Bosnia posed some hard questions. Security decisions that put lives at risk involve difficult choices. Rather it is that the difficulties arising from the Bosnian emergency are deep and problematic because their source lies in the origin of the nation-state in violence and ethnicity, and because the arrival of a
new form, the market-state, with its universal media presence, exposes these deep conflicts to great and novel stress. Notice that the option of a military response was intimately connected to the provision of humanitarian assistance, which was also connected to institutional neutrality, which dictated the nature of both the economic sanctions imposed and the political solutions proposed.

In summary, as with the Darley-Latane description of bystander behavior in emergencies, it is the ambiguity of assessment that paralyzes action. Why didn't the great powers, and the United States, which purports to lead them, do more to stop the horrors in Bosnia? In Yugoslavia it was some time before the world noticed that something awful was happening; long before the massacres at Vukovar and Mostar the Serbian Communist leadership had embarked on a constitutional transformation of Yugoslavia that was accompanied by police terrorism and violent ethnic rhetoric. Once the world did notice, it wasn't altogether clear that the event was an emergency. There were many ambiguous interpretations that could be placed on events. Once the media had persuaded us that a true emergency was underway, it was very difficult to decide what to do as a consequence.
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These ambiguities went directly to the legitimacy of the nation-state. For example, is the war in Yugoslavia a civil war between a central government in Belgrade and breakaway secessionist states with capitals in Ljubljana, Zagreb, and Sarajevo? Or is it a series of civil wars between the Bosnian state and its Serbian and Croatian minorities and the Croatian state and its Serbian minority? Or is the entire affair simply the latest eruption of an intractable ancient conflict that was temporarily kept in check by the authoritarian regime that collapsed along with the other Communist states of Europe? Is what happened in Bosnia an example of ethnic cleansing or something else— a forced migration of the kind we have seen countless times before when new states are born?

Of course the murder of Kitty Genovese under her blood-stained stairway in Queens is not the same, legally or strategically, as the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from the blood-soaked villages of Bosnia. If it were, then armed intervention (a strategic act) to protect the Muslims would be like police work (a law-governed act): that is, there would be no debate as to whether the benefit of enforcing the rules justifies the cost of their enforcement. Some international lawyers and diplomats behave as though there is a world order of nation-states that is analogous to the civil order of a
society, and they argue that the international community must respond in the way that a domestic government responds to criminal behavior. This makes armed intervention into a kind of police work. If anyone still believed in this vision of world order in 1992, I don't see how that person could maintain such a view after Yugoslavia. One might say that the lifespan of the “New World Order” can be dated from its beginning in Kuwait City to its demise in Srebrenica. It would be more accurate to say that the society of nation-states that was forged in the Long War acted swiftly and with assuredness in Kuwait, where it offered a classic nation-state answer to a classic state problem of aggression to acquire resources; and that this sure-footedness vanished when that same society was faced with a more puzzling conundrum arising from its own identity: when does a “nation” get a state? What made this failure so significant—for it is hardly the first time this question has arisen—is that it occurred in the context of the emergence of the new market-states.