Events, George Ball wrote in one of his dove papers on Vietnam just before the fateful commitment of American combat troops, quoting from Emerson, are in the saddle and ride mankind. So it was in the Balkans in 1990, as events began to move swiftly to a head. Slobodan Milosevic was driven by an irresistible impulse for the creation of a Greater Serbia. The cover story, and the cover story was always important, would be the necessity of holding together the old Yugoslavia. In the coming months Milosevic would make the JNA, already a Serb-dominated force, an essentially Serbian army and upgrade Serb control of other critical institutions. His state-controlled media would escalate its reporting on atrocities inflicted by other ethnic groups on Serbs. There was a historical precedent: Hitler had done exactly this before invading Poland a little more than fifty years earlier.
In December 1990, the Croats, increasingly the principal targets of Belgrade’s nationalistic propaganda, sensing the likelihood of coming violence and aware of Belgrade’s superiority of men and arms, contacted Mike Einek, the American consul general in Zagreb, to ask for what they called “technical assistance in police improvements.” That translated into a request for arms shipments. Warren Zimmermann recommended that Washington turn it down because it would be, among other things, one more way for the Croats to suppress the Serb minority in Croatia. The request was quickly denied; Washington felt little connection with the Croats, and most American officials actively disliked Tudjman. It was, in effect, part of a larger embargo that would penalize Milosevic’s enemies. He had all the arms he needed because of the rich stocks of the JNA, while his adversaries would start out with a considerable shortfall.
In 1991 and 1992, he and his forces began to inflict, particularly on the Muslims of Bosnia, the worst ethnic crimes in Europe since the rise of Hitler. As he made his various military moves and his forces shelled essentially defenseless cities, the West issued warnings, which he shrewdly understood to be essentially toothless. What he was listening for was a sign or sound that force might be used against him, and what he heard, despite all the bluster from a series of European and American officials over the next four years, was that it would not. Diplomacy without force would not work with someone like Milosevic.
One of the ironies of the tragedy that unfolded in Yugoslavia was that there had been no lack of American diplomatic, military, and intelligence talent dispatched to the region over the previous forty years. Because of Yugoslavia’s critical position in the Cold War, it had been an unusually good listening post. Through skillful use of occasionally dissident JNA officers, American military and intelligence experts could learn a good deal about the Warsaw Pact military, and we had regularly sent our best people there. Not by chance had the young Larry Eagleburger and the young Brent Scowcroft first gone and made their mark in Belgrade. The reporting from Yugoslavia, a high-priority station, was often very good. In the fall of 1990, for example, the CIA did a full-scale analysis that was largely accurate. It predicted that in one year Yugoslavia would no longer function and in two years it would begin to dissolve. It saw the dangers of armed conflict between the different ethnic groups throughout the country. Neither the United States nor the European nations could do anything to stop the breakup, the agency reported.
But as with many of the views we had held during the Cold War, there was considerable illusion in the way we saw Yugoslavia. We had, one old Yugoslavian hand said later, seen only what we wanted to see, as happens in cases like this, and we had not seen what we did not want to see. The American view of the country at the end of the Cold War was romanticized. We significantly underestimated the rage on the part of the Croats and the Slovenes to be free of the shadow of Belgrade, and the fear on the part of the Muslims generated by the Serbs. The Croats and the Slovenes tended to be seen by the American embassy and in high circles in Washington as pesky constituencies who were acting a little big for their britches and ought to know what was good for them, which was a unified Yugoslavia.
The Serbs and the Croats, in particular, nursed a deep-seated hatred for each other. Their history was gnarled and mutually ugly, a legacy of the great cruelty of a distant, brutal past. In many areas the wounds were not ancient but fresh, still open, remembrances of World War II, where under the guise of fighting either alongside the Allies or the Axis, the Serbs and Croats had waged a de facto civil war. Terrible Croat crimes had been committed against Serbs in World War II, and equally terrible Serb crimes against Croats. Lord Owen, assigned to be a peacemaker in 1992, checking into the violent recent past while trying to create a passable modern peace, estimated that of the 1.7 million Yugoslavs killed during the war, more than half had died at the hands of fellow countrymen, a most enlightening statistic.1 To this day Serbs and Croats argue over exactly how many people—Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, Muslims, but mostly Serbs—were killed by the Croat Ustashe (fascist police) at a death camp called Jasenovac, a name that in Yugoslavia has the same resonance as Auschwitz has for the world’s Jewry. Was it perhaps one million, or merely, as some believed, around one hundred thousand to half a million? The Ustashe who ran Jasenovac were not nearly as meticulous in keeping records as their German counterparts.
The Croats had their grievances as well. For them the most resonant name, the one that inspired the greatest hatred for the injustices inflicted upon them, was Bleiburg, that of a town just across the border in Austria. As the war was winding down and the Red Army was driving eastward, Croatian soldiers who had served alongside the Germans fled west to escape the Russians. A large number, perhaps fifty thousand or perhaps one hundred thousand—the numbers were always vague, subject to exaggeration by the Croats or to stonewalling by the Serbs—gathered at Bleiburg and surrendered to British Allied authorities. The British, in turn, handed them over to the Yugoslav partisans under Tito, and almost all of them were subsequently murdered. Bleiburg is a name that has little importance in the West, but in Croatia it has great significance. It stands as Katyn Wood does for Poles, where the cream of the Polish officer corps, desperately trying to escape from the advancing Germans in order to fight another day, were rounded up by officers of the Red Army and, on Stalin’s orders, executed on the spot, thousands of men buried in mass graves. Bleiburg was a part of recent history of which the West was largely unaware, but it meant a great deal to the Croats, who perceived the executioners to be essentially communist and Serbian. “We Croats don’t drink wine, rather we drink the blood of Serbs from Knin” went a slogan that began to appear all over Croatia as the Yugoslav federation broke up.2
Yet if the Serbs and the Croats loathed each other, they quite possibly felt an even greater hatred for the Muslims in Bosnia. On March 25, 1991, as the Serbs were escalating their propaganda and their preparations for war, Milosevic and Tudjman met secretly at one of Tito’s favorite hunting lodges. There they tried to make a mutually advantageous deal to carve up Bosnia, the multiethnic, exceptionally vulnerable state that lay between them. Tudjman, not nearly as shrewd or cunning as Milosevic, and not as well armed either, seemed to be lulled by the meeting. Eventually as the Croats belatedly started to arm themselves, smuggling some forty thousand Kalashnikovs in from Hungary and Austria, the Serbs were aware of it and filmed it instead of stopping it. They used the film clip on Belgrade television to heighten anti-Croat feelings among the general Serb population about what the nation’s enemies were about to do.3
Tudjman, playing a fast game with a tough operator, came to the table with far fewer chips. He apparently did not realize that. Milosevic was way ahead of him and led Tudjman to believe that the Serbs would not attack Croatia; Bosnia was the only object of their aggression. Their meeting was brief, amicable, and a number of their deputies followed it up with a series of meetings designed to draw maps from which Bosnia essentially disappeared. Lord Carrington, brought in by the Europeans to negotiate some kind of settlement, was appalled by the consequences of the meeting, the carving up of a sister state, the Serb areas going to Serbia, the Croat areas to Croatia, “and they weren’t worried too much, either of them, about what was going to happen to the Muslims.”4 Slowly and steadily the country was moving to the brink of civil war.
It would all begin as a border skirmish between Serbs and Croats over disputed territory, provocations planned in Belgrade, for which Zagreb was woefully ill-prepared. The symbolic incident that was later remembered as the sign that Yugoslavia was disintegrating took place on May 1, 1991, in the eastern Croatian village of Borovo Selo. The occasion was May Day, still a major workers’ holiday in a part of the world where the governments had for so long been communist. Four Croatian policeman from the city of Osijek, the third-largest city in Croatia, hearing that Borovo Selo had been left unguarded, drove over there that night. Local Serb villagers had hoisted the old Yugoslav flag with the communist star on a number of buildings. That, the policemen decided, was an act of rebellion, and they intended to replace them with red-and-white checkerboard Croatian flags. But the Serbs, who were still guarding the town, fired on the policemen and wounded two, capturing the two and holding them prisoner.
The two policemen who escaped returned to Osijek, where they told their story to colleagues. Soon a busload of Croatian policemen set out from Osijek to rescue the two captured men. But the local Serbs were more than ready. The village was now on red alert. All the intersections were guarded by heavily armed men. On the rooftops covering them with unobstructed fields of fire were more armed men. What happened that morning was nothing less than a massacre. Twelve Croatian policemen were killed and about twenty more were wounded. It caused, in the words of Laura Silber and Allan Little, “a sea change in Croatian public opinion.” Where there had been wariness, now there was open Serbo-phobia. Zagreb television reported that the dead had been tortured and mutilated. Even worse, Serbian authorities seemed to boast about what they had done.
No one was more appalled by the ugliness than an American reporter named Roy Gutman, who was in Yugoslavia at the time and who was just starting to write what was to be a series of unusually prophetic dispatches for Newsday, the New York suburban daily. Because this was his second tour in Yugoslavia, Gutman was already undergoing what he later called a mandatory reeducation, taking apart the old construct of Yugoslavia—what was good and what was bad about it, and how valid it was as a nation—and creating a new one, piece by piece. He had to unlearn everything he had once believed in, the romantic Western view of this unusual, complicated country where the people who had seemed so admirable, brave, and generous could become so difficult, headstrong, and intolerant—indeed even savage.
If there was a turning point in Gutman’s reappraisal, it came in May 1991 when he visited Borovo Selo. He had heard about it first from a small news service the Tudjman people were operating in Zagreb. Not only had there been a massacre, it was said, but the bodies had been mutilated, a reference that added an additional degree of horror to the story. Gutman immediately went to Borovo Selo, but by the time he arrived, things were already being tidied up. Serb paramilitary forces were running the town and no one was eager to talk about what had happened. But Gutman was struck from the beginning by the brutality of the massacre, that it had been so carefully orchestrated—a small provocation that had been turned into a deliberate, murderous, big-time ambush. For Gutman, the incident did not stem from a local ethnic antagonism that had simmered for a long time before finally erupting into violence. Rather it had been arranged and triggered by forces in Belgrade and bore the unofficial stamp of Belgrade’s approval—its new direction and purpose. Serb officialdom, unconcerned about such raw ethnic divisions, seemed to be gloating about the incident.
For Gutman it was more like an execution than a mere ambush, and the architect was a notorious figure named Vojislav Seselj, an ultranationalist Serb who had once been jailed by Tito for his ethnic views and was known, even in the harsh world of the Balkans, for his personal cruelty. At one point, before the two of them eventually broke, Slobodan Milosevic liked to say that Seselj was his favorite policeman. It was obvious to Gutman that Seselj had been in Borovo Selo, and that the massacre was his handiwork. Seselj personified the worst of the violent new nationalism now being orchestrated by Belgrade—the belief that it was not enough to vote against those who were ethnically different; it was better to kill them. What Seselj represented, the advent of well-organized, well-armed Serb paramilitary units, which assaulted ill-prepared Croatian (and in time Muslim) officials in small towns, was to be a critical ingredient in the kind of ethnic cleansing soon to come. Nor was Seselj alone. There were others, most notably a man known as Arkan, Zeljko Raznatovic, with his infamous Tigers, who on occasion made Seselj look like something of an amateur. (As happens with men like Seselj and Arkan, their feelings for each other were not always benign and collegial. Seselj once turned to Arkan during a debate on state television and told him, “I bet you’ve put a black sock on your face more than on your foot.”)
To Gutman, what had happened at Borovo Selo was appalling, but what made it worse was how blatant it was. He was quite sure that the mutilation—the policeman’s eyes had been gouged out—had taken place, but by the time he was ready to do the story, the Croats were putting a lid on that part, fearful that news of this kind would enrage their own people and lead to even more violent incidents. That was precisely what the Serbs wanted—localized Croatian assaults upon Serb neighbors in small villages and towns, which would become the justification for bringing in the JNA. But the role of Seselj unnerved Gutman. He had already heard a good deal about this man who operated like an outlaw, but an outlaw armed with the imprimatur of the sitting government who liked to go around boasting of the violent end he had in store for non-Serb Yugoslavs.
Gutman decided to do a story on Seselj himself, went looking for him in Belgrade, but found to his surprise that he was not there because he was running for the parliament. He finally caught up with him in northern Serbia in a town called Vojvodina. To Gutman, Seselj was quite open about what had happened at Borovo Selo. Yes, he had been there and had been in charge. Moreover, if elected, he promised to assault many other villages. Borovo Selo would be but a beginning. The men under his command, Seselj said, were his own Chetniks, Chetnik being a hateful word to non-Serb Yugoslavs, recalling memories of soldiers of the old Orthodox Serb empire, monarchists who marched—and killed—under the banner of the Orthodox Church and could do what they wanted to any non-Serbs; men who saw the non-Serb world as one vast free-fire zone. Then Seselj spoke quite candidly about how he planned to break up the existing Yugoslavia—he even had a map. A city located on the Slavonian-Hungarian border might go to the Hungarians. Split on the Adriatic Coast might go to the Italians. Most of the rest of the country would be Serbian. To Gutman, this brief discourse was both chilling and hypnotic, a war criminal speaking openly about his deeds past and his hopes for deeds future. At the end of the interview, expecting they might talk again, Gutman gave Seselj his card. (“You did what!” his wife, Betsy, later said. “You gave him your card with our address on it!”)
Gutman’s interview with Seselj left him with no doubt about Serb intentions. He filed his story on Seselj but felt that what he had written was somehow hopelessly inadequate. The calm, understated nature of professional journalism had not been equal to the sheer horror of the deed and the threat. Something sinister was beginning to happen, with no restraints to limit the brutality. The kind of paramilitary units Seselj employed represented the dregs of society, and their behavior startled even old-line, traditionalist JNA officers. “They were the types who would kill a man of ninety for a lamb,” said General Slavko Lisica, who commanded JNA soldiers on the Dalmatian coast. “My men in the front lines come to me and say, ‘The paramilitaries rob, they rape, they steal. Why are we fighting and what are we fighting for?’ ”5
Gutman was an experienced reporter who, when he arrived the second time in Yugoslavia, flattered himself that he knew the region well because of an earlier, happy tour there. He had grown up in West Hartford, Connecticut, gone to Haverford College and the London School of Economics, and worked for a time for the United Press before joining Reuters in Europe. As a Reuters correspondent he had been stationed in Belgrade from 1973 to 1975, and like many Western reporters he loved the country—“the golden age of Tito,” he later called it. The Serbo-centrism that tempered the vision of many Western diplomats was something he knew well because he had unconsciously indulged in it himself. The Yugoslavia he knew back then had basked in the glow of being more independent than the other Eastern European countries. Its citizens had more personal freedom than the Poles or the Hungarians. The economy seemed to be developing at a much faster rate with more material benefits than those in other communist countries—more meat, better clothes, possibilities of travel in the West, even the chance to own a car. The people he met were attractive, independent, feisty, and talented. Moreover, the different ethnic groups seemed to get on reasonably well with each other, and there was little sense of the tragedy to come.
Like many an American who went to Belgrade in those years, Gutman had found the entire ambience seductive. But by the time he returned in 1989, everything was beginning to change. He was then in midcareer, based in Bonn for Newsday, the affluent suburban Long Island paper that was then making an effort to create a Manhattan constituency. He had been away from Yugoslavia for some fifteen years, and he now saw many signs that it was becoming a very different country. Serb officials felt free to make inflammatory statements about other nationalities. Political extremism was the new virus; ultranationalism on the part of one group soon bred it in another. Milosevic had not only come to power, he appeared determined to crush fledgling democratic forces in the country, most particularly university students who were calling for more, rather than less, freedom.
As far as Gutman could tell, the symbol of how quickly the country was changing from the old to the new reality was the growing division between Western journalists and diplomats. The journalists were lined up on one side in their view of how bad things were, and a great many of the diplomats were on the other, still holding on to their traditional view of the country. Gutman had some sympathy for the diplomats. Journalists, he decided, were luckier than diplomats because they were always out working the story, involuntarily on the cutting edge, meeting people from all walks of life, and the more they worked the story, the more evidence they found that what they had once believed in no longer existed. Gutman doubted that any high-level diplomat had ever had an enlightening interview with Seselj. Journalists could also change directions much more easily; they were tied to events rather than to policies.
Gutman’s early stories were, in terms of the human tragedy he was soon to report, rather prosaic. “Yugoslavs Need West’s Intervention” was the headline on an early one that ran in Newsday on November 21, 1991, and it suggested that the United States was the one country that might stop Serb aggression. The story quoted an expert on the Balkans at a London think tank who said that American policy needed a degree of brinkmanship there, and if the United States was willing to make a show of force, the Serbs would quickly back off. It also recounted a series of gestures of appeasement made by the European nations as Serb aggression had mounted. A month later, on December 22, 1991, Gutman followed up with a story of considerable significance, forecasting that the decision by European nations to recognize Croatian independence would trigger an explosion of catastrophic proportions in Bosnia, and implying as well that this was precisely what the Serbs wanted. He quoted the Bosnian foreign minister as saying, “There could be two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand people slaughtered within a few months.” The likely epicenter for the slaughter, he reported, was Banja Luka, a city in northern Bosnia. Gutman would with great sadness discover in the months to come just how prophetic he had been.