The State Department's Report on Bosnia

By Andrea W. Lorenz

The U.S. State Department's 1992 Human Rights Report on Bosnia and Herzegovina is particularly significant for three reasons. First, it states in no uncertain terms that what the world is witnessing in the former Yugoslavia is genocide against the Bosnian Muslims. Second, it names the perpetrators of the crimes. And, third, the very fact that the report was issued by the U.S. State Department gives its conclusions an authority unmatched by the reports of other human rights organizations, although they may be better documented and more eloquently written.

From the outset, the State Department lays the blame for the human rights abuses squarely on the shoulders of the Serbians. The report states, "The greatest atrocity— the systematic shelling and starvation by siege of large cities—was carried out by Serbian forces, which alone had both the means and the will to carry out such crimes against humanity.'' Although the report says that all sides were guilty of human rights violations, the U. S. government authors conclude that "the atrocities of the Croats and Bosnian Muslims pale in comparison to the sheer scale and calculated cruelty of the killings and other abuses committed by Serbian and Bosnian Serbian forces against Bosnian Muslims."

The report provides a helpful summary of the events that led to the outbreak of war. When elections were held in 1990, three nationalist parties, the Muslim Party of Democratic Action (SDA), the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), and the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) formed a governing partnership under the leadership of President Alija Izetbegovic, a Muslim. The bicameral National Assembly comprised 240 seats, of which 99 were filled by Muslims, 84 by Serbs, 50 by Croats, and seven by others. This composition paralleled the ethnic breakdown of the population of nearly four and a half million: 43.7 percent Muslim, 31.3 percent Serb, 17.3 percent Croat, and 7.7 percent other.

Muslim and Croat assembly representatives wanted independence for Bosnia-Herzegovina, but Bosnian Serbs insisted on remaining within Yugoslavia. In January 1992, Serb leaders declared their own Serbian state within Bosnia and claimed 70 percent of the territory. A month later, however, the government held a referendum in which more than 63 percent of the Bosnian electorate voted for independence.

The Serbian Democratic Party, led by Radovan Karadzic, had boycotted the referendum, and on March 1 armed SDS militants erected barricades in Sarajevo. By the time the international community had recognized the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina in April 1992, Serbian paramilitary forces in the eastern Bosnian town of Bijeljina already had embarked on the campaign of terror that spread rapidly to the rest of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Serbian leaders named the political entity they were trying to create the "Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina." Meanwhile, Croatian nationalists led by Mate Boban proclaimed their own entity, named the "Croatia Community of Herceg-Bosna." Against this background of political maneuvering, the most horrifying war Europe has witnessed since the World War II Nazi takeover has unfolded.

The policy of ''ethnic cleansing" began in the spring of 1992, when Serbian forces seized territory in northern and eastern Bosnia and began to expel the non-Serbian population. The report notes that, "Those who promoted the war encouraged religious hatred to motivate their followers."

By winter, the number of refugees had exceeded 1.5 million and the number of dead and missing had reached the tens of thousands. In Sarajevo alone, 70 percent of the dead were civilians and 10 percent were children.

The report describes a number of Serbrun camps in which physical mutilation of prisoners extended to deliberate disfigurement and excision of body parts. When prisoners were executed, it was often as the culmination of torture and degradation carried out for the amusement of camp guards. In the Viktor Bubanj barracks in Sarajevo, medical assistance was withheld from women prisoners injured by glass shattered by an exploding shell.

By winter, the number of refugees exceeded 1.5 million.

The report also describes events at the settlement of Kozarac, with a population of 25,000, which was virtually destroyed. The Muslim men were imprisoned, while women and children were herded into freight cars and sent eastward. Armed Serbs prevented citizens from trying to bring them food and water along the way. Then Serbian forces destroyed the homes of the absent Muslims.

According to the report, the Serbs have used rape to terrorize Muslim women and girls and demoralize their fathers, husbands and brothers. (This writer recommends that anyone seeking to learn the true scope of the horror being perpetrated against Bosnian women should contact CBS-TV's "Street Stories" for a copy of the documentary aired on Feb. 4. It was made by an American nurse and rape counselor who interviewed not only victims but several of the rapists themselves.)

In November, the U.N. Security Council established the War Crimes Commission to investigate reports of violations of international humanitarian law. The commission's findings are not documented in the report, but the report names several of the men responsible in the eyes of the State Department for some of the worst abuses. One is Colonel Mile Dubajic, who led the assault on the town of Tuzla and commanded his forces to shell the city center where tens of thousands of Muslims from northeastern Bosnia had taken refuge. Another is Zeljko Raznjatovic, a former bank robber, prison escapee, and suspected international hit-man, who goes by the alias "Arkan." He is accused of leading the paramilitary forces, the Tigers, that murdered Muslim civilians in Bijeljina. According to The Washington Post, photographs taken last spring in Bijeljina showed Arkan's men shooting Muslims and kicking their corpses.

A third is Bojislav Seselj, a member of both the Serbian and "Yugoslav" parliaments and the leader of the Serbian Radical Party and its paramilitary wing, and a fourth is Mirko Jovic, leader of the Serbian National Renewal Party whose paramilitary wing, known as the White Eagles, took part in the April assault on Visegrad where they wantonly murdered Muslim civilians. One can only hope that the other perpetrators of the atrocities will not only be named but that their crimes will be thoroughly investigated by the War Crimes Commission.

While the State Department's discussion of the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina is commendable, it suffers from being presented in the same bureaucratic format used for all the other countries in the report.

The standards by which a normal society's human rights record is judged cannot possibly encompass violations on the scale of the Serbian attrocities in Bosnia. Answers under such categories as "The Minimum Age for Employment of Children" and whether citizens have "The Right to Organize and Bargain Collectively" seem irrelevant in the face of such horrors. At least under the section titled "Discrimination Based on Race, Sex, Religion, Language, or Social Status" the authors admit, "All other forms of social tension were eclipsed by the ethnic hatred generated by the war. . . " Unfortunately, after reading through the report, this reader could not help concluding that (to paraphrase the poet Yeats) although "the worst are full of passionate intensity," the best indeed appear to "lack all conviction."

By the very fact that its source is the U.S. State Department, this report will take its place among history books as a primary document recording the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. It remains for the journalists, relief workers, human rights investigators and other eyewitnesses to recount the hellish nightmare of this Balkan civil war in the powerful prose that eventually will move governments to intervene where reasoned argument and peaceful measures have failed.

Andrea W. Lorenz is the features editor of the Washington Report.