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From: TCRADE%UMSVM.BITNET
Subject: Med. Quarterly
To: Radical.Party@agora.stm.it
MEDITERRANEAN QUARTERLY
Volume 5 Number 3 Summer 1994
p.24-41
Yugoslavia's Wars of Secession and Succession: Media
Manipulation, Historical Amnesia, and Subjective Morality
Carl G. Jacobsen
[Carl G. Jacobsen is director of the Eurasian Security Studies
Organized Research Unit in the Department of Political Science at
Carleton University and a consultant on post-Soviet, Eurasian,
and security issues. He is also director of the Independent
Committee on War Crimes in the Balkans and its archives in
Ottawa, Canada. He has written five and edited six books, including
Strategic Power: USA/USSR and World Security: The New Challenge.]
The Croatian Relief Fund's 1991 television and print
campaign brought searing pictures of Croat victims into Western
homes. These images introduced most viewers and readers to
Yugoslavia's breakup. Then came reports of ethnic cleansing and,
as the war spread to Bosnia, of Serb "concentration camps." These
were followed by charges of systematically organized rape
campaigns against Muslim women; the figure of 40,000 to 50,000
victims was and is generally accepted (some initial reports went
as high as 250,000). Serbs became moral outcasts. Economic sanctions
were imposed, crippling industries and slashing living standards.(l)
A UN war crimes commission was created, with money and
mandate focused on Serb atrocities and Serb perpetrators.
Editorials and op-ed articles in the New York Times, the
Washington Post, and other leading newspapers urged American
intervention to save Bosnia from Serb dismemberment, to "punish
Serbs," bomb Serb forces, and send more and heavier arms to the
Muslims. The Clinton administration agreed in early May 1993,
although action was deferred for lack of consensus. But the
pressure to intervene against Serb forces did not abate; spring
1994 brought joint UN and NATO action to expel Serbs from
designated (Muslim) "safe havens."
Serb leaders, followers, and rogue elements do indeed have
much to answer for. They have clearly been perpetrators, although
they also have been victims--not least of a manipulated media
campaign that in its singleminded obsessiveness has distorted the
evidence and made final judgment more difficult. Convictions
based on false evidence, as detailed below, will taint any
convictions based on more reliable testimony. They mock due
process and any hopes for establishing legal precedents.(2)
The Anti-Serb Media Campaign's Relationship to Reality
The persuasiveness of anti-Serb information and propaganda,
together with German insistence, drove Western support for the
self-determination of Slovenes, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims.
Their secessionist governments were recognized in January 1991.
The right to self-determination was not extended to Croatia's six
hundred thousand Serbs. Little thought was given to the fact that
the Croatia thus recognized was first given "independence" by
Hitler and Mussolini, with an Ustashe Nazi party clone and a
mini-Fuhrer, Ante Pavelic, whose regime was convicted of genocide
against Serbs and Jews by the Nuremberg tribunal. Its borders
also reflected Nazi and later Titoist determination to split the
Serb nation and thus weaken Serb opposition.
Croatia's president, Franjo Tudjman, a police general in the
former Communist regime, minimizes the genocides against Serbs
and Jews alike; the nationalist banner hoisted by his party and
government in 1990 sanctified the insignias, songs, and legends
of the Ustashe and encouraged or allowed army units and others to
flaunt them.(3) To many Croats, these were but symbols of
independence and pride. To Croatia's Serb population, however,
they were starkly ominous, as was the suspension of police and
judicial authority in districts that voted against Tudjman in
1990.(4) Tudjman's promulgation of a draft constitution that
omitted Serbs from its list of recognized minorities (Western
pressure forced amendment, but by then it was too late), the
publication of The Black Book (actually pale blue), which listed
Serb family names in Western Slavonia, and the first ethnic
cleansing, ordered by Croat commanders, sparked and fueled the
ensuing revolt by areas with larger Serb populations, including
the now "independent" state of Krajina.(5)
With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the denial
of self-determination to Croatia's Serbs, a reflection of the
"principle" that established borders must be respected, was a
tragic mistake. To expect Serb populations to accept Croatian
sovereignty was like expecting Warsaw ghetto survivors to accept
a German state with Nazi symbols: it made war inevitable.(6) The
principle" referred to was in any case a principle violated: the
Helsinki Accords of 1975 sanctified European state borders,
including Yugoslavia's, but not internal administrative or other
divisions and ordained that these state borders could be changed
only with the consent of the affected states.
The recognition of Bosnia, whose borders reflected the
politics and will of former Communist dictator Tito and of
Bosnia's current Muslim-led government as the inheritor of power,
was equally incendiary. It also contravened Bosnia's
constitution, which stipulated that constitutional change must be
approved by each of its three constituent components.(7) Bosnia
was historically Serb, as recognized by Nazi Germany when it
annexed Bosnia to Croatia and by American presidents Woodrow
Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, both of whom also assigned
united Serbia considerably more territory than that now said to
be conquest-won. Even after their wartime decimation, Orthodox
Christian Serbs remained the largest ethnic group until the
1960s, when Tito granted Muslims ethnically distinct status and
relocated some Serbs to Serbia. Yet today's non-Muslim Serb
population, if one adds Montenegrins and those who classify
themselves as Yugoslavs, still rivals Muslim numbers and
dominates rural regions.(8)
Furthermore, the Muslim-led government that claimed
legitimacy rested on a temporal and highly uncertain alliance
with Bosnia's third minority, the Croats. Croat support for Alija
Izetbegovic's government was tactical, anti-Serb rather than
pro-Muslim. By early 1993, as both Western support for the
Muslims and pressure on Bosnia's breakaway Serb state grew, and
notwithstanding Serb-Croat clashes in and around Krajina, there
were a number of instances of Serb-Croat military cooperation in
the Fojnica-Kiseljak-Kresevo region of central Bosnia; when Serb
forces took (retook) Sarajevo's suburbs to the west and northwest
of the city, they handed one, Stup, to the Croats.(9) In May
1993, as fierce Croat-Muslim fighting flared in Mostar and else-
where, Serb-Croat forces signed a formal cease-fire agreement.
Western media rarely reported such complexities or their
implications. The media generally accepted the Croat and later
Muslim campaigns' assertion that rebellions by Croatian or
Bosnian Serbs were at the behest of the government of Slobodan
Milosevic in Belgrade. There was little appreciation of the fact
that many of the Serb rebels were opponents of that government
too, or that many Croats, especially in the northeast, also voted
overwhelmingly against Tudjman and supported the secessionists
and/or union with Yugoslavia. Few reported on the Serbs who
supported Bosnia's Izetbegovic government in the early days,
until it reneged on the equally underreported 18 March 1992
Lisbon agreement, which reaffirmed constitutional protection for
Bosnia's tripartite essence.
This about-face was one of a number of occasions when the
West's historical myopia and partisan morality encouraged
maximalist Muslim expectations that ultimately served only to
fuel and perpetuate war. One of today's more startling ironies is
that the government subsequently elected in secessionist Serb
Bosnia is arguably more representative and protective of ethnic
diversity than is Sarajevo's.(10)
There is a "Greater Serbia" specter that sees the Serb
populations of other republics/states as the outposts of imperial
ambition, with the corollary that their aspirations are
extensions of Belgrade's and/or that it is just to expect them to
relocate to Serbia proper. Croats, indeed, remember that inter-
war Yugoslavia became a fig leaf for Serb domination partly in
response to the legacy of the First World War. Yet, the Serb
population constituted the majority of what is now Krajina long
before Yugoslavia, and even longer before Croatia, first became a
state. And Serb population pockets elsewhere in Croatia and
Slovenia often had equally deep or deeper roots. Non-Muslim Serbs
held title to about 65 percent of Bosnia before the current
conflict; Muslims were always more concentrated in urban areas.
The Vance-Owen UN-European Community peace plan, far from
rewarding Serb aggression, in fact gave land to Bosnian Muslims
and/or Croats that had never been theirs. One might also ask, as
Serbs do, why Greater (or united) Serbia is less legitimate than
Greater Croatia and Greater Muslim Bosnia.
Serb paramilitary and private armies are assumed to reflect
Belgrade's will, and their actions have at times been coordinated
with those of the Yugoslav army, as in the final days of the
siege of Vukovar. But there is ample evidence that many such
units, now proliferating on all sides, are in fact more like
German Freikorps some with passionate nationalist agendas that
would sustain them even if their supposed masters pulled back,
while others are little more than bandit gangs. The infusion of
mercenaries, from Iranian Revolutionary Guards to veterans of
France's Foreign Legion and British, German, Australian, and
other soldiers of fortune, is another wild card that sows the
seeds of anarchy.
The myopia and bias of the press are manifest. The
Washington Post, France's L'Observateur, and other leading
newspapers have published pictures of paramilitary troops and
forces with captions describing them as Serb, although their
insignia identify them as Ustashe or Muslim.(11) A February 1993
L'Express cover story titled "Yougoslavie Crimes sans chatiment"
depicted one of Arkan's Tigers militia standing over "Croat"
bodies after the fall of Vukovar, yet most were Serbs certified
dead by the city's former Croat administrators!(12) Such examples
abound. The emaciated body featured as a "Serb concentration camp
victim" by Time and others proved to be a Serb tuberculosis
victim. There was no retraction. In early March, the world media
presented headlines and feature stories on Serb massacres fol-
lowing the capture of Muslim enclaves in eastern Bosnia, yet
neutral on-the-ground observers disputed the claim.(13) In April,
outrage focused on the Serb attack on Srebrenica, with no mention
of the scarcely covered Muslim offensive that first took Srebrenica
in April 1992, cleansed Serb villages in eastern Bosnia, and struck
into Serbia proper before the tides of battle turned.
When the devastating charge of systematic rape of Muslim
women hit the headlines, there was no mention of the fact that it
preempted earlier Serb accusations. Muslim charges were accepted
at face value, with no mention of the gynecological evidence and
psychiatric follow-up on the Serb victims, whose trauma, anger,
shame, and response closely resembled Western rape reaction
patterns.(14) When the Belgian government denied visas to all but
one of the female Serb medical and other caseworkers who sought
to attend a conference on Balkan rape in Brussels in February
1993, there was no media outcry.(15) When one of the Muslim women
who had testified to Serb rape gave birth to a black baby in
Geneva, it did not make the news.(16)
When the first "witness" to Muslim rapes, a young Serb
captured and interrogated by Muslim troops, told of his unit's
rape "orders," it was splashed on every front page and featured
in every newsmagazine. Yet he also accused Canada's General Lewis
Mackenzie of repeated rapes.(17) Editors cut this as blatantly
false, yet headlined the rest as fact. None asked whether the
charge against Mackenzie, who secured Sarajevo's airfield for the
UN, also owed anything to his evenhanded reports of witnessed and
alleged Muslim atrocities. None asked whether the charge against
the Serbs might be similarly biased.
Ethnic cleansing has been described as an exclusively Serb
preserve. This is myopia at its most extreme. All sides in Bosnia
have ethnically cleansed, as has the rest of the world in similar
circumstances. England ethnically cleansed Acadian French from
Nova Scotia; the United States ethnically cleansed Native
American nations; Stalin did it to Tartars and others; the
victors in the Second World War condoned it on a mass scale in
east-central Europe; and Israel ethnically cleansed some seven
hundred thousand Palestinians in 1948-49. China prefers a
variant, ethnic swamping, but it has the same effect.
Although disconcerting to some and unrealized by most, by
early to mid1993 there were more Croat and Muslim refugees in
Serbia than in Croatia and Bosnia, most quartered with private
families. There were also, of course, Serb refugees, 170,000 from
western Slavonia alone. As a result of sanctions and discriminatory
bilateral aid policies, these refugees receive only 5 percent of the
foreign aid given to refugees in Croatia and Bosnia; the children
and sick suffer disproportionately from shortages of medicines,
diapers, dialysis machines, and a host of other essential articles.(18)
This has been ignored by the Western press.
Partly as a consequence of reports from some of its own
officials, UN agencies (and most responsible media sources)
eventually acknowledged that atrocities were also committed by
non-Serbs, yet Serbs continued to be singled out as those most
responsible. Such judgment is largely a matter of what is counted
and what is not and why. The detailed identification of Croat-
and Muslim-controlled prison camps prepared by the anti-Milosevic
opposition Serbian Council Information Center in Belgrade, with
accompanying documentation of rape and other war crimes committed
against Serbs, is excluded from UN reports and media coverage.(19)
Some have not been visited by the UN because access is denied by
Bosnian authorities who insist that they lie in "war zones," even
though they often are free from combat; some, now controlled by
Bosnian Serb forces, have not been visited because of UN mandate
restrictions, although safe passage has been assured.
In February 1993, the New York Times Magazine printed a
typical article on Milosevic's "stealing" of the January 1993
Serb presidential election; it was written by the American
campaign manager of Yugoslavia's moderate Serb-American prime
minister, Milan Panic, who lost the election. Western diplomats
and other observers already had concluded that, despite manifest
irregularities, the election result and the surprising
second-place showing of a right-wing nationalist party did
reflect public opinion.(20) The article ignored this and the real
reasons for Panic's defeat. One was Western sanctions.
These sanctions did not seriously constrict the now more
homogeneous Serb army of remaining Yugoslavia, for its military
industry is self-sufficient, but they devastated the lives of
poorer Serbs, the old, the young, and refugees. This caused a
backlash of sharp resentment that clearly benefited Milosevic.
The second reason for Panic's defeat lay in his exchange of
prisoners, many of whom had been tried and convicted of Vukovar
killings, for Croatian Serb prisoners, many of whom were too
young or old to have been combatants.(21)
Newsweek's feature story on the Clinton administration's May
1993 decision to launch air strikes against Serb positions and
permit arms deliveries to Muslim forces, if Washington's allies
would agree, was a classic example of jingoistic
misinformation.(22) The bloodied boy on the front cover had
fallen victim to the final Serb artillery shelling of Srebrenica.
But he should have left that city four days earlier, when 150 UN
trucks were dispatched to evacuate children and refugees in
accordance with a UN-brokered agreement, signed by Izetbegovic.
The local Muslim commanders sent the trucks back empty,
preferring to retain "human shields." Newsweek made no note of
this, nor of the resultant moral conundrum. Three and a half of
the four pages of gruesome pictures that introduced the text
depicted victims of Croat-Muslim battles in central Bosnia the
week before. Newsweek's captions did not note this, leaving
readers to assume Serbs were to blame.
Time magazine provided similar coverage. The firing soldier
in its cover photo of "Serb murders wounded man" in Brcko wears a
uniform unlike any worn by Bosnian or Serb forces; the
architecture is foreign to Brcko; and a sign (Donn Zela)
identifies the location as Slovenian. In fact, the picture was
taken by a Reuters photographer in early May 1992!(23)
The New York Times also demonstrated the same susceptibility
to ignorance, sloppiness, and bias most typically, perhaps, in
its headline for Radovan Karadzic's factual and, if anything,
understated reporting of the results of the Bosnian Serb
referendum. The Times headline stated that the referendum was a
case of the Serbs "flaunting" their independence before the
United States.(24) Its earlier reporting of the resignation of a
State Department officer protesting inaction against Serbs, and
of the letter signed by UN ambassador Madeleine Albright and
twelve State Department officials that apparently persuaded
Clinton, suggested that these individuals embodied the considered
opinion of Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav specialists; in fact, only
two had any area expertise at all.
A New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning Bosnia correspondent
wrote of Bosnia's one thousand years of interethnic and religious
peace, betraying a historical ignorance so profound as to make
flat-earth believers appear omniscient. The Times's coverage was
in fact wondrously consistent. It rightly blamed Serbs when the
evidence so warranted; it also blamed Serbs when UN ground
commanders found reason to believe Serb accusations that jihad
fanatics had perpetrated massacres on their own to "prove" Serb
perfidy.
Media manipulation as a prelude to intervention is nothing
new. Outrage at reports of babies thrown out of incubators
propelled the march to war in the Persian Gulf. Only after the
war did it become clear that the tale was Kuwaiti propaganda. The
supposed nurse witness who testified so eloquently to Congress
was later identified as the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter; the
tale was false. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which had authorized
escalation of the Vietnam War, the armless Belgian baby pictures
that drove public support for British and American entry into the
First World War, and the Hearst newspaper chain's depiction of
the sinking of the battleship Maine that led to the
Spanish-American War were equally false. So also have been other
countries' public relations campaigns on the threshold of war. In
all these cases, however, it could be argued that the propaganda
efforts, whether or not carried out directly by governments, did
serve their purpose. Whether this campaign, funded largely by
Croats and money that left Croatia after the Second World War,
may be similarly described is more uncertain. History may instead
judge it a classic instance of foreign purpose successfully
manipulating other governments to serve its goal.
Serbia's "Truth" and Paranoia
The Genocide against the Serbs exhibition at Belgrade's
Museum of Applied Arts presents photographs of slaughter at the
hands of Croat units of the Austro-Hungarian army during the
First World War and at the hands of the Ustashe during the Second
World War. Then come today's pictures: once again, eyeless and
axed heads, Ustashe trademarks (with captured axes and
two-pronged "forks" designed to gouge out pupils), and headless
corpses floating down the Danube with signs saying "To the meat
markets of Belgrade."(25)
There is an old man in Vukovar today's Stalingrad in the
midst of houses missing walls or roofs, legacy of the fiercest
house-to-house combat since the Second World War. He has a
two-inch-deep bullet hole in the back of his neck and an empty
hollow where his right eye had been. Left for dead with his
executed wife (they were taken from their cellar, as were other
Serbs on their block before Vukovar's fall), he is the sole
survivor among his neighbors. He identified his "killer," who was
tried and convicted, then exchanged by Panic. There are many,
many such stories.(26)
Some, such as the frequently heard story of Serb children
pinned to Vukovar lampposts with Ustashe knives through their
bodies, are apocryphal, although Serb children were indeed found
dead after Vukovar fell. The horrific "truth" now accepted is
testimony to the incendiary potential of escalatory telling and
second- and third-hand reporting and to the mind-set that finds
it easy to believe.
Serbs see a manipulation of hatreds, a third holocaust in
the making, an extermination of the Serbs masked by a conspiracy
of silence.(27) They ask: Who started the war? Their answer: The
Slovenes, when they attacked and took over Yugoslav customs
posts. Who started ethnic cleansing? The Serbs assert that it was
the Croats in October 1991, when Croat commanders first ordered
the clearing of civilians from Serb villages not in the combat
zones. Who started the war in Bosnia? They pinpoint the Bosnian
Muslim attack on a Serb wedding in Sarajevo, which killed the
groom's father and the priest. For whose purpose? Serbs see a
German conspiracy to extend Germany's influence through Austria
and Croatia to the Mediterranean (German firms are enlarging the
port in Split, on the Adriatic, and need road access through
eastern Bosnia). Serbs also see an America willing to sacrifice
an old ally to regain Arab favor, offering a Christian sacrifice
to balance the scales after Baghdad. They see Turkey scheming to
establish the Islamic Spear or Arrow, connecting itself through
southern Bulgaria to Muslim brethren in Macedonia, Kosovo, and
Albania, cutting Greece off from Europe, and reestablishing
Ottoman dominion and ambition.(28)
"Abandonment" by Second World War allies there are British
and French cemeteries in Belgrade sparks bitter comment.
Pro-Americanism has turned to virulent anti-Americanism in many
quarters. A Massada--or Branch Davidian--type psychology is
emerging: Serbia will fight as long as Serbs remain alive and as
long as foreigners invade its soil. Belgrade reminds those who
will listen of missiles able to reach all its former enemies in
the Second World War Germany, Italy, and Hungary although not its
former allies. It notes that weapons once developed against a
feared Soviet invasion go beyond the conventional.
The imposition of sanctions against Serbia was supported by
some American policymakers on the grounds that it would level the
playing field and restrain a militarily and industrially
preponderant Serbia. Yet Serbia was never as dominant in military
terms as it appeared, since Yugoslavia had been prepared for a
national people's war against superior Warsaw Pact armies and had
dispersed arms depots to sustain local efforts. Hence, there was
no shortage of any but the heaviest arms for Croat, Serb, and
Muslim separatists. At the time of Yugoslavia's dismemberment,
the federal army was also crippled by the very fact of its
interethnicity. A large number of its Communist-era generals,
including its intelligence and security leaders, were Croat. They
transferred their allegiance and now constitute the leadership of
Croatia's army, police, intelligence, and security apparatuses.
Ironically, the successor Serb/Yugoslav army today is in
many ways more potent, because it is more cohesive. Yesterday's
Serb colonels are today's generals; the army is more homogeneous,
more united. Sanctions have only made it more so. Yugoslavia's
and Serbia's military industries were designed to be autarchic,
self-reliant. As noted, it is civilian industries that have suf-
fered, as have civilians more generally in particular the poor,
the sick, the young, the old, and refugees. This phenomenon has
in turn galvanized cries for national cohesion against foreign
perfidy and rallied the population to Milosevic, the army, and
the chauvinist right wing.
Escalation or Resolution? Three Scenarios for the Future
The most dangerous tinderbox is the southern Serb province
of Kosovo. Its previous autonomous status a status Tito granted
to non-Serb minorities in Serbia but not to Serb minorities in
Croatia or elsewhere has been rescinded, because Serbs fear the
perceived separatist ambitions of Kosovo's Muslim majority.
This case is particularly complex. Serbs see Kosovo as the cradle of
their culture, site of their nation-defining battle against the
Ottoman Turks, and symbol of Serbia's historical role as the
gatekeeper and defender of Europe and Christianity. It also had a
Serb majority population until the Second World War, when Nazi
troops imported three hundred thousand Muslims from Albania and
expelled two hundred thousand Serbs. Yugoslavia's Croat but non-
nationalist dictator, Tito, forbade postwar recrimination,
restitution, or indeed discussion, as he also did with regard to
Croatia's wartime concentration camps and massacres. Topics that
might incite or perpetuate ethnic hatreds were banned. Later,
refugees from Albania and higher Muslim birthrates solidified the
Muslim majority.
Yet, Kosovo remains the Serbs' Alamo. This is the one area
above all others that the Yugoslav army could not afford to
concede. President George Bush's 1992 warning to Milosevic that a
Serb crackdown there would not be tolerated makes it a gas can
waiting for a match. Serb irregulars accused of ethnic cleansing
elsewhere are heroes to Kosovo's Serbs (and increasingly to Serb
youth in general), many of whom would clearly like to emulate the
strategy. Serb leaders themselves talk of an acceptance of Serbia
by a majority of Kosovo's Muslims. They also speak of the poten-
tial for separatist triggering and manipulating of incidents that
would bring outside intervention.
The worst specter for Serbs, nurtured by history, is not of
American intervention but of Turkish and fundamentalist
expansionist Islam. Government, army, hard-liners, and former
liberals speak of the Islamic Spear and Turkey's assumed ambition
to reestablish dominion from the Adriatic to Sinkiang. However
far-fetched this may seem to most Western minds, it is clearly a
specter that also exercises Greeks and has led to increased
Greek-Serb cooperation.
A variant of this specter proceeds from the fact that
today's Macedonian leadership appears to be seeking a Bulgarian
alliance, an alternative that Greece sees as threatening in and
of itself and also as a potential triggering of the primeval
Turkish-Islamic threat. The point is, if the Kosovo gas can
explodes, by whomever's match, or if Macedonia ignites through
Turk or Bulgar ambition or power play, then Greece and others
will likely be drawn into the conflagration. A larger Balkan war
is not inconceivable.
A second scenario, perhaps the most likely if U.S.-Western
policies do not encourage maximalist Croat-Muslim expectations,
is a Croat-Serb deal in Bosnia, complementing and allowing a
Krajina compromise. Under such circumstances, Serbian and Bosnian
Serb authorities might prevail on Krajina to allow portions of
Krajina's western part to be transferred to Croatia in return for
the transfer of Croatia's northeastern and southeastern tips to
Serbia. This would effectively give Croatia part of Krajina's
central territory and a more compact and defensible national
shape and borders. Serbia-Yugoslavia would absorb the
Serb-dominated northeastern tip and gain a minimum of additional
coastline.
Bosnian Serb leaders in particular appear willing to go
quite far in considering territorial compromise, including
disproportionate swaps, if they might lead to more cohesive
successor territories and peace. Krajina authorities and some
military groups are likely to resist. Yet if the compromise is
part of a comprehensive deal that satisfies both sides' primary
security imperatives, then it can probably be enforced.
The logic underlying this scenario is the logic that drives
the otherwise illogical cooperation between Croats and Serbs in
parts of Bosnia today. It is that while Croats may fear or
despise Serbs, they are more fearful of a Muslim front on their
doorstep, especially if wrought at the expense of Serbia, their
traditional buffer against Islam. Such a deal would obviously be
at the expense of Bosnian Muslims, whether they were left an
artificial ministate in central Bosnia (which would require
permanent UN protection) or not. It would also constitute a fait
accompli that the West or the UN probably could not deny. This
solution might not be "politically correct," but it would be more
likely to bring relative peace, soon, than any other alternative.
The only other scenario, even tighter sanctions against
Serbia that promise even greater deprivation for Serbia's poor
and sick, is likely only to inflame Serbia's Massada complex and
ultimately force escalation to outright war against Belgrade
and/or more massive intervention in Bosnia. Even if successful,
this will require prolonged and massive presence and the impo-
sition of a Titoist lid on the pressure cooker, with the same
prospect of explosion once the lid is finally removed.
The bomb-the-Serbs and arms-to-Muslims scenario advocated by
Senator Joseph Biden and others, which received President
Clinton's apparent endorsement in May 1993 and considerable
Senate support a year later, is myopic.(29) The ostensible
targets, Serbian artillery, are both less exposed than believed
and less relevant. All sides rely primarily on mortars, fired
from reinforced ambulance floors (and therefore immediately
mobile) and/or from locations protected by human shields. (The
previously described Srebrenica event reflects the policy of all
protagonists.) The arms-to-Muslims advocacy ignores UN and other
testimony that there is no weapons shortage; that land and/or air
deliveries are likely to lead to well over 50 percent seepage to
Croat or Serb forces; and that any lifting of the embargo on
outside supplies, even if officially limited to just one side, is
in fact likely to lead to an infusion of arms to all sides.
The wild card threatening all scenarios is that of
paramilitary groups and "private" armies not accepting the diktat
of properly constituted governments. Such Freikorps have, as
mentioned, proliferated. Even where allegiance to authority is
professed, which is by no means true in every case, authority's
hold is tenuous. There is a real danger of Lebanonization, of
Beirut writ large. The danger increases the longer the solution
is delayed.
War Crimes and a War Crimes Tribunal
Sanctions against Serbia have failed to deter the strong but
have crippled the weak and poor; they have strengthened support
for hard-line policies. As noted, the tightening of sanctions, a
response to quick judgment and political correctness, promises
only to increase the pain of the weak and further strengthen
xenophobic will and purpose. The naming of Serb leaders as pos-
sible war criminals is similarly unfortunate and
counterproductive, although it answers the call of political
correctness. Naming national leaders undermines prospects for
negotiations. In not naming leaders of other "states and ethnic
factions whose followers have committed atrocities, it flags a
partisanship that bodes ill for peace and lawful behavior.
Nuremberg affirmed the answerability of leaders, but it was
a victor's court. There are a number of problems associated with
a more general affirmation of this otherwise laudable principle.
First, the victors in the Second World War never accepted its
extension to themselves (one thinks of French police torture
teams in Algeria, of My Lai, and of other examples); in no case
was higher authority deemed culpable. Second, the selective
naming of Serb leaders appears doubly partisan in view of the
fact that other contemporary political leaders, from
Afghanistan's Hekhmatyar to Saddam Hussein, from Burma's military
putschists to Guatemalan death squad generals, may be shown to be
far more personally culpable with a far clearer and less sub-
jectively determined chain of evidence.
There is a real danger that action against Belgrade and
Bosnian Serb leaders will do little to affirm legal principle. If
action is taken in isolation, historians will most likely judge
its forum a kangaroo court, a testament only to the vagaries of
political fashion and to the abiding old-world-order dictum that
international law is the law of the strong, the law of the victor.
If international law as an abstract is to be served and
other parties, perhaps more guilty, are to be prosecuted in the
future, it is absolutely essential that such prosecutions be seen
as impartial. In the Yugoslav context, this means that if Serb
leaders are charged, then Tudjman and Izetbegovic must also be
charged, for there is clear and incontestable evidence that some
who fight under their banners have committed war crimes. So also
in the case of rape and other more specific allegations. It will
not suffice to pursue only the partisan claims of one side; that
would be a mockery of law and of justice.
The "new world order" got off on the wrong foot in the
Persian Gulf when denial of Kuwait to Iraq was not extended into
a more general principle of denial of conquest. Although laws
cannot always be applied equally in practice, they must apply
equally in theory. If that mistake is now compounded by selective
and partisan prosecution, we will reaffirm the old world order.
Law must apply equally, with equal and rigorous rules of
evidence, examination, and cross-examination. And that will not
be easy in former Yugoslav lands, even without suggestion or
evidence of prior bias. There are also practical problems.
Crucial rape evidence, for example, is highly time-dependent.
Prosecutors need access to hospital and medical records,
gynecological examinations, and psychiatric testimony and
monitoring.
Another problem is evident in the Arkan case. This most
famous/infamous of Serb irregulars is accused by the Bosnian
Muslim government and some Western agencies of the massacre and
ethnic cleansing of Muslims in the city of Bijeljina, in the
northwestern province of the Bosnian Serb state. The city has a
large Muslim population. Yet local Serb leaders, backed by the
testimony of local Muslims, tell a very different story. In their
version, the Izetbegovic government made a preemptive strike at
the city at the start of the conflict with two thousand
"mercenaries," assuming local support, with the intention of
cutting the bulk of Bosnian Serb lands off from Serbia. They were
observed by locals. Arkan, whose main training camp is just
across the border in Krajina, was called in. He and his men
struck first, successfully. Local Muslims confirm the story. They
also point to a locally raised Muslim battalion fighting for the
Bosnian Serb state on the northern front against Croats and to
Muslim managers of the city's three largest enterprises (an
example of interethnic peace that is said to have no parallel in
Izetbegovic's state) as evidence of their loyalty and
integration.(30)
Thus, the prime case against Arkan may not stand close
scrutiny. Even if it did, it most certainly would not be easy to
tie this to Milosevic or the Belgrade government. Arkan has
expressed contempt for both Milosevic and the Yugoslav army:
there has been tactical coordination, as noted above, yet his
overall record rebuts assertions that he could be or is
controlled by either. Certainly, the contrary case will not be
easy to make in a court that is remotely neutral in its
deliberations.
This is not to say that Arkan's Tigers and other groups,
like the Serb Chetniks, Krajina's Wolves, and Croatia's Ustashe,
are not guilty of crimes. Civil wars are not for the squeamish.
They spawn hatred, and hatred begets hatred. But well-documented
cases, such as that against the Ustashe in Vukovar, are rare.
Others are going to be far more difficult to prosecute. A proper
war crimes commission will certainly need far more resources, in
investigative personnel and money, than are presently envisaged.
If not done properly, its legacy will itself be a prescription
for war, not for peace, and certainly not for justice. If it
cannot be done properly, it had best be aborted, now.
If a solution is to be lasting, it must rectify the
precipitating tragedy of Western recognition of borders that
originally reflected Nazi and Titoist diktat and not natural or
any other kind of justice. The mistake was to recognize the right
of one nation to independence within Croat and Bosnian borders
without taking into account the presence of others. To expect
Croat Serbs to accept Croatian authority was indeed akin to
asking Jewish survivors to embrace a nation that flew the
swastika; it guaranteed conflagration. So also in Bosnia. This
was ancestral Serb land. Even after their decimation in the
Second World War and as late as the 1971 census, Serbs remained
Bosnia's largest ethnic group. Titoist relocations and Muslim
birthrates subsequently made Muslims the larger group, with
Croats in third place with about 17 percent of the population.
Nevertheless, as noted, the remaining Serb population retained
title to about 65 percent of the land, reflecting Muslim urban
concentration.
If "peace" disinherits too many and/or leaves them in
unconnected cantons likely to breed insecurity and paranoia, then
it will not last. Terms perceived as punitive and unjust will not
last. Sooner or later they will provide the banner for the next war.
*****************************************************************
Notes:
(1) The pro forma rationale, to end Yugoslav army aid to
Bosnia's Serbs, ignored a UN report completed the previous week
that confirmed the army's departure from Bosnia (its official
release was delayed until after the Security Council vote); it
was a portent for the future.
(2) Contrast John Zametica, "Squeezed off the Map,"
Guardian, 11 May 1993, to Vesna Pesic, "A Country by Any Other
Name: Transition and Stability in Croatia and Yugoslavia," East
European Politics and Societies (Fall 1992).
3. Regarding early war crimes allegations and evidence, see
Helsinki Watch Letter to Franjo Tudjman, President of the
Republic of Croatia (New York and Washington, D.C., 13 February
1992).
(4) Data collected by and now in the archives of the
Independent Committee on War Crimes in the Balkans (hereafter
cited as Independent Committee), Ottawa, Canada, indicate that 80
percent of the Croat minority in Vukovar and Croatia's
northeastern districts, bordering on Serbia, voted against
Tudjman in the 1990 elections that brought him to power.
(5) Tko Je Tko U Daruvaru (The Black Book) (Zagreb: Tiskara
"Ognjen Prica" Daruvar, January 1992); see also Mila Lusic,
L'Extermination des Serbs '91 (Novi Sad: Musee Historique de
Voivodine, 1991).
(6) See The Uprooting: A Dossier of the Croatian Genocide
Policy against the Serbs (Belgrade: Valauto International &
Beograf, 1992).
(7) On Alija Izetbegovic's fundamentalist equation of
identity and religion, not initially shared by most Bosnian
Muslims, who traditionally were the most secular of Bosnia's
three communities, see Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional
Warfare, Iran's European Springboard, House Republican Research
Committee, Washington D.C., 1 September 1992; Izetbegovic, The
Islamic Declaration (1970; reprint, Sarajevo: Muslim samizdat,
1990); and Dragoljub R. Zivojinovic', "Islam in the Balkans:
Origins and Contemporary Implications," Mediterranean Quarterly 3
(Fall 1992): 51-65.
(8) Karta Nashchick Pobedela/Maps of Our Dividings:
Political Atlas of Yugoslav Countries in the XXCentury (Belgrade:
BMG, 1991), provides historical population-distribution maps of
all former Yugoslav lands. With reference to Bosnia specifically,
see also University of Belgrade Faculty of Geography, Territorial
Distribution of Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Belgrade, 1992).
(9) Serb-Croat radio intercepts, monitored by the UN and
other agencies. The Independent Committee archives in Ottawa
contain some transcripts. Larger-scale Croat-Muslim fighting
erupted in late April 1993. For antecedents, see New York Times,
25 October 1992.
(10) Preliminary finding of the Independent Committee, based
on interviews with Serbska (the Bosnian Serb state) government
officials, Muslims, and opposition groups and citizens on
location, March 1993. Transcripts in Independent Committee
archives.
(11) Ibid.
(12) Documents and certification available from the
opposition Serbian Council Information Center in Belgrade; and
the archives of the Independent Committee.
(13) Reuters, 6 March 1993.
(14) Serbian Council Information Center, Rape and Sexual
Abuse of Serb Women, Men and Children in Areas Controlled by
Croatian and Moslem Formations in Bosnia and Herzegovina and
Croatia, 19911993; and Documentation on the Violation of Human
Rights, Ethnic Cleansing and Violence by Croatian and Moslem
Armed Formations against the Serb Population in Bosnia-
Herzegovina (Belgrade, 1993). The archives of the Independent
Committee include two directives signed by a Bosnian Muslim
commander, each authorizing seizure of two Serb women. To our
knowledge, no other such directives are available. When the
Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights visited Croatian and
Bosnian hospitals following the Muslim rape assertions, they
found 119 pregnant women.
(15) They admitted the psychologist Ljubica Toholj, who
personally documented more than two thousand cases of abuse in
former Bosnia. Her documentation, that of the other caseworkers
who were denied visas, and gynecological reports are available
from the Serbian Council Information Center in Belgrade and the
archives of the Independent Committee.
(16) Geneva-based UN sources interviewed by Independent
Committee members, May-June 1993. Transcripts can be found in the
Independent Committee archives.
(17) "Istraga Protiv Kanadskog General: Cetiri logora sicera
Mackenzija" and "Tesko Optuzen General Mackenzie," Vjesnik, 23
November 1992; and other files in Independent Committee archives.
(18) For documentation, see the archives of the Independent
Committee; also Commissariat for Refugees, Refugees in Serbia
(Belgrade, February 1993). See also Joan McQueeney Mitric,
"Reflections on Yugoslavia," Mediterranean Quarterly 5 (Spring
1994): 102-14.
(19) "Map of Settlements and Camps in Bosnia-Herzegovina and
Croatia in Which Systematic Rape and Sexual Harassment of Ethnic
Serb omen, Men and Children was Performed," Documentation on the
Violation of Human Rights, 6. This identifies and locates
"Croat-run camps," "Muslim-run camps," and "settlements in which
systematic ethnic cleansing was performed."
(20) This conclusion was shared by Western diplomats in
Belgrade and opposition politicians; interviews in the archives
of the International Committee.
(21) Testimony found in the archives of the International
Committee.
(22) Newsweek, 10 May 1993.
(23) Time, 17 May 1993.
(24) New York Times, 16 May 1993.
(25) Genocide against the Serbs, 2 vols. (Belgrade: Museum
of Applied Arts, 1992); and archives of the Independent
Committee.
(26) Archives of the Independent Committee.
(27) Slobodan Kljakic, A Conspiracy of Silence (Belgrade:
Ministry of Information of the Republic of Serbia, 1991); and
Vesna Hadzivukovic et al., Chronicle of an Announced Death
(Belgrade: Milici, 1993).
(28) Interviews with General Panic, chief of staff of the
Yugoslav army, and other Yugoslav (Serb and Montenegrin)
generals, Belgrade, 1 March 1993, to be found in the archives of
the Independent Committee.
(29) For elaboration of these points, see Kai
Brand-Jacobsen, "The Bosnian War," an interview with General
Lewis Mackenzie, 8 May 1993. The tape and transcript are
available from the archives of the Independent Committee.
(30) Bijeljina interviews in the archives of the Independent
Committee.
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