In Bosnia, U.S. Can Turn "Never Again" Into Reality

by Richard H. Curtiss

"Not everyone in Bosnia engaged in ethnic cleansing, at least not to the extent and not with the barbarity that...Serbs did. But a great many Serbs...desperately want to believe that the crimes committed in their name were somehow ordinary and therefore forgivable. Just as with the Germans after World War II, it will take determined efforts by outsiders to persuade them otherwise."--Correspondent Chris Hedges, New York Times, Jan. 14, 1995.

Fourteen months after the beginning of the war in Bosnia, the writer declared in the June 1993 issue of this magazine: "As in World War I and World War II, unless the shooting, shelling, bombing, burning, looting, raping and killing stop, the Yanks--in their own sweet time and at their own unpredictable pace--almost certainly are coming." In fact, none of those horrors stopped for another 26 months until after U.S.-led NATO aircraft began two weeks of continuous bombing of Serb military targets in August 1995.

By the end of January 1996, 20,000 American troops were encamped on Bosnian soil as part of a 60,000-person NATO force enforcing a tri-partite Bosnian peace agreement hammered out in Dayton, Ohio. At this point, therefore, there is only one answer to Americans still asking, "Why are we there?" That is, "Where have you been?"

Americans arrived in Bosnia with orders from one unit commander to think before they fire, but to answer every hostile bullet with "900 aimed rounds." The universal first reaction of U.S. military units on the spot has been shock at seeing war damage on a scale reminiscent of World War II. The second reaction is surprise that while they expected to have to disarm besotted, belligerent barbarians, the soldiers they have separated from each other have been cautiously friendly and generally cooperative.

American forces were particulary gratified that the Serbs, who were being bombed by American planes less than half a year earlier, have vacated military positions when ordered to, and in fact have been helpful in pointing out and in most cases removing mines, as they are required to do under the Dayton agreement. The impression that all of the negative stereotypes of the Serbs were wrong, except possibly for the habitual drunkeness, is gratifying but also potentially misleading.

In fact, the Serbs and all of the other former belligerents are well aware that American commanders on the spot don't need authority from higher echelons to return hostile fire, and that they have at their disposal heavy Abrams tanks and Apache gunships that can pulverize or blow away other military equipment in Bosnia. All of the parties in Bosnia are war-weary, and none wish to be the first to test the validity of those American orders.

But if American-led forces seem hesitant or indecisive, the test will come. At that point American commanders should remember that what kept Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Slavonia, Montenegro and Macedonia peaceful between the end of World War II and the breakup of the former Yugoslavia was a ruthless strongman, Marshall Josip Broz Tito, who would not tolerate ethnic or sectarian outbreaks of the kind that followed that breakup.

A Lesson Forgotten

It was a lesson forgotten by a number of the United Nations commanders in Bosnia. Tough-talking British Lt. Gen. Michael Rose arrived determined to end the siege of Sarajevo, and for a time he did. But in his anxiety to keep the Serbs from renewing it he began overlooking their transgressions. When he left Bosnia a year later, the Serbs were raining shells and bullets on Sarajevo again, and the British general was making excuses for them. U.N. civilian director Yashusi Akashi and military commander Gen. Bernard Janvier were just Japanese and French variations on the same theme. Akashi's endless excuse-making for the Serbs can only be ascribed to "Stockholm syndrome." It was Janvier's unwillingness to authorize the airstrikes desperately called for by the Dutch military commander at the U.N.-protected city of Srebrenica that led to the fall of that city to Serb forces, and the subsequent Serb massacre of virtually its entire Muslim male population.

The NATO IFOR forces are expected to be neutral like their UNPROFOR predecessors, but already the signs of excessive concern for maintaining good relations with the Serbs, and their blatantly partisan Russian protectors within the peacekeeping force, are manifesting themselves. It is unfortunately true that the Russians, like the former Yugoslavs, have a history of tyranny. The U.S. learned the hard way in the immediate aftermath of World War II that appeasement didn't halt Stalin's expansionism. Standing up to the Russians in Greece in 1947, Berlin in 1948, and Korea in 1950, and then the creation of NATO did.

In Bosnia the Croats, who have profited in many ways from the war there, will be a trial for IFOR peacekeepers. So will the Bosnian government led by the Muslims, with their deep, and justified, sense of being the aggrieved party. But the war was started by the Serbs, probably 90 percent of the atrocities were committed by Serbs, and the test for IFOR forces, if it comes, will be from the Serbs.

Presumably it was this knowledge that motivated the U.S. commander of the NATO-led mission, Adm. Leighton W. Smith Jr., and also British Lt. Col. Benjamin Barry to rebuff initial requests for assistance by Justice Richard Goldstone, chief prosecutor of the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. Intent on getting their forces in place in time to enforce the Jan. 19 deadline for the pullback of the belligerents from the zone of separation, each made it clear that discovery and protection of the evidence of mass killings by the Serbs was not high on their lists of priorities. Admiral Smith took this reluctance to a ridiculous degree, however, when he declined the request of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights John C. Shattuck for an IFOR escort to the mass graves near Srebrenica that are within the zone being patrolled by U.S. forces.

President Bill Clinton, desperately afraid of alienating his military commanders in an election year, was delphic in his statement concerning war crimes investigation, saying that "we have to be supporting it, but not implementing it." Far more forthcoming was Secretary of Defense William J. Perry who said, "If the War Crimes Tribunal wants to go to Srebrenica and dig up some graves, we'll provide the security that allows them to do that. I don't consider that mission creep." Perry also has offered the War Crimes Tribunal not only satellite photographs of suspected mass grave sites, but also electronic intercepts that may include pertinent conversations between Serb commanders.

Incredibly, because of Smith's refusal to provide an IFOR escort, Shattuck and his State Department security guards ended up traveling with two Serb security details, one from Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic, who has been indicted by the War Crimes Tribunal, and the other from Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who may some day be indicted as well. When they arrived at their destination, Shattuck and the reporters accompanying him saw human remains protruding from some of the reported six mass grave sites in the Srebrenica area, and toured the agricultural building near one of the grave sites where survivors report that 2,000 of the men buried there were killed with machine guns and grenades.

In fact, American journalists have played a leading role in uncovering the evidence of the war crimes. Armed with photographs from U.S. spy satellites, last summer Christian Science Monitor reporter David Rohde was the first American to visit mass graves near Srebrenica. On a second visit he was arrested by Serbs and detained for several days, probably at great risk to his life. There is little doubt that the exhumations of those six grave sites will turn up remains of the estimated 3,500 to 5,500 missing men of Srebrenica

On Jan. 11 New York Times reporter Chris Hedges and another journalist visited another rumored site at Ljubija, near Banja Luka, containing bodies not only from the initial wave of Serb "ethnic cleansing" in the spring and summer of 1992, but also of victims of subsequent mass murders as recently as last September. When they approached the site on foot, the U.S. journalists were detained for a day by Serbs. After their release they alleged that the Bosnian Serbs currently are engaged in an effort to dispose of the evidence of those murders by collecting the bodies at a single site within a vast open pit iron mine, "mangling" them in the ore-reduction machinery, covering the remains under layers of lime and then burying the evidence under tons of rock and debris.

Hedges' report also delved into the manner in which the victims at the mine site died: "Those who live in the area, all of whom insisted that they not be identified, said that the main pit used to bury bodies is near the village of Stara Rijeka, about five miles south of the center of Ljubija," Hedges wrote.

"Residents in the town report that during the summer of 1992 busloads of Muslims and Croats, including women and children, went through the gates of the mine. But unlike the Muslims and Croats delivered to the three main concentration camps in the (Prijedor) area--Omarska, the Keraterm tile factory, and the railway station in the village of Trnopolje--no one ever returned from the Ljubija mine. The mine, townspeople said, was never used as a detention camp, but only as an execution and burial site.

"'The buses would go in day and night,' said one resident of the town. 'They were filled with people. They always came back from the mine empty. We heard shooting day and night. At first we heard single shots, then we began to hear lots of automatic fire. This went on for over two months.'"

Hedges cited a number of other statements from residents still living in the area confirming the 1992 killings. He also cited evidence of more recent murders: "Senior British commanders, stationed in the mining town with the NATO force, say that British patrols sometimes find corpses, usually badly decomposed, only to have the bodies whisked away by the Bosnian Serbs....They speculate that some of these bodies are from executions carried out this fall by paramilitary forces led by Zeliko Raznatovic, known as Arkan...

"'Everyone seems to be in a hurry to cover their killings,' said one senior British commander, who asked to remain unidentified. 'There are bodies all over this place. We go into houses and find floorboards ripped up and holes in the basement. They are working very hard."

Such reports explain the urgency of Justice Goldstone's request to IFOR to protect the areas from further attempts to hide the evidence of Serb "ethnic cleansing." The investigators note that it is obvious that crimes have been committed, but it is the physical evidence that will help them eventually to link specific incidents of mass murder to specific perpetrators.

To date the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal has issued only 52 indictments, including those of Karadzic and Bosnian Serb military commander Gen. Ratko Mladic. Of the accused, 45 are Serbs, one of whom has been arrested in Germany and turned over to the tribunal, and 7 are Croats. The absence of any Muslim indictments does not indicate that there were no Muslim war criminals.

It reflects the fact that neither the Belgrade government nor the Bosnian Serbs have allowed Tribunal investigators to interview Serb witnesses to alleged crimes by Muslims and Croats--apparently in hopes of hampering the work of Goldstone, whose investigations undoubtedly will take him higher and higher in the Serb chain of command. For example, the Belgrade gangster known as Arkan is an almost mythic figure in Serbia, and few would doubt that the atrocities his men committed in Bosnia had the approval of Milosevic's commanders, if not of the Serbian president himself.

One of the reasons for the deep sectarian hatreds that have manifested themselves in Bosnia are the unrequited crimes of past periods of disorder. Serbs believe that under the orders of the Croat puppet government established during the World War II occupation by Nazi Germany, Croats killed a million Serbs in genocidal operations not unlike the "ethnic cleansing" practiced by the Serbs in Croatia in 1991 and in Bosnia since April 1992. Most Croats deny that such atrocities occurred, and instead cite killings of Croats and Muslims carried out by the royalist "Chetniks" fighting the Nazis on behalf of the Serb dynasty that ruled Yugoslavia prior to World War II.

In 1996 it is not hard for journalists to find Serbs who actually participated in the mass slaughter of Muslims in Srebrenica and of Muslims and Croats in the Prijedor-Banja Luka area. The knowledge of these atrocities, and the brutality of the Serb sieges of Sarajevo, Tuzla, Gorazde and other towns explains why inhabitants of many of the Serb-held suburbs of Sarajevo are leaving, sometimes taking the bodies from their graveyards with them. They expect vicious retaliation, even though many of them have Serb relatives who have remained unharmed in Sarajevo throughout the war or who have served in the Muslim-led Bosnian government army.

But in Serbia itself, few are aware of the Serb atrocities. In Belgrade, Serbian government spokesmen eagerly press pamphlets on journalists claiming that Bosnian Muslims committed the killings of other Muslims in order to blame the Serbs.

Both to set the record straight and to halt an exodus of Serbs from Sarajevo and government-held parts of Bosnia, the Muslim-led Bosnian government is listening carefully to suggestions for an amnesty for Serbs who served in the rebel Serb army, so long as they did not participate in war crimes. The entire rationale for the existence of the multi-sectarian Bosnian government and its armed forces would be destroyed if the Muslims of Bosnia now lashed out blindly against innocent Serbs instead of leaving it to the authorities to punish those Serbs actually guilty of the crimes. Even many Bosnian Serbs will support such prosecution for documented crimes. Many want nothing more than to have the criminals punished and their own records cleared so that they can return to the homes they left in multi-sectarian, multi-ethnic Sarajevo, whose residents were almost unique in the Balkans for their tolerant lifestyle

All this adds urgency to the task of dealing with the war crimes swiftly. Says Ivan Zvonimir Cicak, head of the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, who believes there may be as many as 8,000 bodies in the Ljubija mine: "We look at the mine as the key to saving Bosnia. We must show that there was a systematic campaign of genocide and to do that we must get to Ljubija and Srebrenica."

As with the effort to bring peace to Bosnia, however, the effort to assign responsibility for the atrocities will only be successful if American military authorities accord protection to and facilitate the work of the war crimes investigators.

The Croatian government is prepared, reluctantly, to extradite the seven Croats under indictment. Says Croatian deputy foreign minister Ivan Simonovic: "Legally there is no question under the peace agreement that every country is bound to cooperate with the Tribunal. [But] we think it's unjust toward Croatia and the federation that we have to cooperate first. First we expect more pressure on the other side by the international community." Here, again, as leader of the IFOR force, the U.S. will have to play a leading role.

There is a precedent, and it was eloquently described by reporter Hedges in a Jan. 14 New York Times article entitled, "After the Peace, the War Against Memory." He writes:

"A half-century ago the Germans were not allowed to deny their Holocaust. Even before the final collapse of Hitler's Reich, the victorious and infuriated Allied armies rounded up prisoners of war, those who lived near the death camps, and Nazi and community officials, and paraded them past the stacks of bodies and crematoriums. The novelist Günter Grass, a young soldier then, credits such an experience with opening his eyes to the nature of the society he had fought to defend and would afterward spend his life exploring.

"Allied film crews recorded grisly scenes of the newly liberated camps so that the footage could forever prove there had been a Holocaust. Nazi documents were collected into Allied-administered archives in Berlin. In the end, that helped allow Germany to rise above its past and rejoin Europe, by forcing it to confront, acknowledge and thus move beyond the Nazi record...

"NATO's position is that its forces are obligated to arrest only those war criminals they stumble upon, and that war crimes investigation is for civilians, not soldiers. Perhaps that understanding was needed to obtain the Dayton agreement, which gave NATO safe entry to Bosnia's killing fields in the first place. But the nuanced aloofness that it has produced still contrasts strikingly to the experience of 50 years ago, when British and American armies forced crowds of cowed Germans to see the death camps for themselves."

American election-year politics, isolationism, and reluctance to become further embroiled in another foreign "quagmire" are understandable. But Hedges' point is irrefutable. If Americans don't want to march off every generation to lance another genocidal eruption, the place to reaffirm the Nuremberg precedent is in Bosnia, and the time is now.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.