The Serb attacks on the parts of Croatia that Milosevic orchestrated and the early successes were simply the first round in what was to become a brutal fratricidal war. Milosevic had never coveted Croatia that much; certainly it was nice to have the Krajina, but what he really wanted was a large slice of Bosnia and perhaps, eventually, the capacity to dominate Kosovo, place it under Serb, not Yugoslav, hegemony, and eventually resettle it with Serbs. But Bosnia at first had a higher priority. With Croatia and Slovenia having left the federation, the Bosnians now wanted their turn. In late February 1992, as the federation broke down, a referendum was held in Bosnia about whether to seek independence. The resident Serbs, who represented about 30 percent of the population, boycotted the election, but roughly 99 percent of those who voted wanted to become a new nation.
A few weeks later, on April 6, the European Community recognized Bosnia as an independent nation. The Serbs celebrated the occasion by shelling Sarajevo, the beautiful multiethnic city that was the capital of Bosnia. Eleven people were killed in the first day’s fighting. A day later, on April 7, 1992, the United States also recognized Bosnia. Thus Bosnia as a crisis point, a nation that would undergo some of the worst genocidal crimes seen in Europe since World War II and would therefore challenge the West’s view of its morality, came into existence. What was happening there would only slowly penetrate the American political consciousness. At the time it all began, George Bush was still feeling some glow from his past successes. Even the Republican Party’s own pollsters, with their increasingly negative reports, had not yet shaken the existing White House optimism. In the other party, Bill Clinton was just beginning to pull away from his competitors in the Democratic primaries. Sarajevo, surrounded by Serb forces and under a relentless heavy-weapons attack, seemed a world apart.
To many in the West, Sarajevo was the showplace of the country, a symbol of the Yugoslavia that might have been. In this sophisticated urban venue, the educational level was higher than in the rest of the country, pluralism seemed to work, and ethnic tensions were largely dormant. More than a quarter of the marriages in Bosnia were ethnically mixed. Of the Bosnian population, 44 percent was Muslim, 31 percent Serb, and 17 percent Croatian. It had in the past been something of an advertisement for the pluralism of the larger nation, and Sarajevo had been greatly admired by foreigners during the 1984 Winter Olympics. Rarely had the citizens of an Olympic city so favorably impressed visitors from other countries. Sarajevo represented, as Edward Vulliamy noted, the exact opposite of the Milosevic and Tudjman vision of a nation, theirs, of course, conceived in racial separatism and ethnic hatred.
If the Croatians had been ill-prepared for the Serb onslaught against them, then the Bosnians were in even worse shape. The Croats had a long coastline through which it would be relatively easy to smuggle in arms, and they had a great many protector nations in Europe, particularly the Germans and the Austrians. Bosnia was landlocked and, as an essentially Muslim nation in Europe, relatively devoid of friends in the immediate region. The Bosnian leadership had behaved curiously without guile, seeking independence without making any military preparations for it. Both Serbs and Croats were hostile to Bosnian independence, and both had a deep-seated hatred for the Bosnians far greater than the feelings of Serb about Croat and vice versa, even though both were then fighting each other. When a reporter asked the deputy president, Ejup Ganic, what Bosnia’s preparations were for defending itself, he answered, “We are just talking, talking, talking. When you are face-to-face with a wolf, the only option is to work with it, until it becomes a pet.”1 The Serbs, needless to say, did not make good pets.
If the Bosnians had not been ready for the assault upon their territorial integrity, the Serbs were more than ready. In early 1992, with the fighting over on the Croatian front and the entire Krajina under Serb control, the Yugoslav National Army began to move its forces, particularly its armored and artillery units, from Croatia to Bosnia. As part of the charade being played out, Milosevic had created a Bosnian Serb army, with Serb officers serving elsewhere in the JNA quickly transferred to it. It was in all ways a de facto part of the JNA, and at the beginning of hostilities, the so-called Bosnian Serbs had a well-equipped armed force of ninety thousand men at their disposal, in addition to a number of exceptionally violent paramilitary units ready to undertake what would be unspeakable and systematic human cruelties.
When the Serbs surrounded Sarajevo with their artillery, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. The first full day of heavy, lethal bombardment aimed at Sarajevo was April 21, 1992. It became in the weeks and months that followed a civilized European city under siege, where people tried to live normal lives while constantly dodging Serb artillery fire. Slowly and quite systematically, the Serbs squeezed out every aspect of life in what began to seem like a doomed city. It was a stunning sight: an army inflicting so much damage on a much-loved city largely without defenses. For every round fired by the badly underarmed Bosnians in their own defense, Edward Vulliamy noted, 180 were fired into the city by the Serbs. By the end of June of 1992, the Bosnian government reported that seventy-two hundred people were known dead and some thirty thousand more were missing.2
Food and water disappeared, people slept in their cellars for protection. There were so many dead that the local cemeteries soon ran out of space and many bodies were buried in gardens. The hospital was at least as much a morgue as a medical center, and international doctors working there soon had to warn the local doctors to start burning the remains of the dead. The problem of sewage grew more desperate all the time. The Serbs soon cut the gas lines. As the mordant local joke went, “What is the difference between Sarajevo and Auschwitz?” The answer: “In Auschwitz at least they had gas.” Two Serb attacks in particular were memorable. During one of them, on May 27, 1992, artillerymen hit a large number of Bosnians waiting in a breadline in the city center. Twenty people were killed and an estimated 160 were wounded. A month later the Serbs hit another line, this time of people waiting to take money out of one of the city’s banks. Twenty-one people were killed and 135 wounded.
The world watched Sarajevo with great fascination and in horror. Yet in some ways the Serbs were not unhappy to have attention fastened on Sarajevo, where they had the city completely bottled up and could squeeze the population or ease the pressure when the West and the United Nations complained particularly loudly. But the real campaign was taking place elsewhere in small villages in Bosnia where, largely unscrutinized by Western journalists, a well-organized campaign of ethnic cleansing was under way. The Serb irregulars were driving the Bosnians out of their villages, taking their property, and transporting the men to camps from which they were often never seen again. While the West focused on the siege of Sarajevo, Bosnia was disappearing off the map.
Long after the campaign was over, one of its architects, Mikola Koljevic, an intellectual leader of the Bosnian Serbs, told Ed Vulliamy that Sarajevo had been nothing but theater designed to take the West’s eyes off the real campaign, which was the disappearance of Muslims, particularly Muslim men, from countless villages. He chided Vulliamy and all other Westerners for their innocence about what was happening: “It amazes me that you all took so long to get the point. Poor Sarajevo! That was all you could think about. The crossroads of Europe! None of you had ever been on holiday in Trnopoljie [a small town brutally cleansed].” Then Vulliamy remembered that Koljevic began to laugh, pleased that they had so deftly snookered the press corps and the world.
Some American witnesses were just beginning to sense that Sarajevo, for all its horrors, was the equivalent of what in football is called the draw play, a fake to draw attention away from the real purpose of the play. In the summer of 1992, even as the presidential campaign was just beginning to gear up, one of the aspiring candidates for the Democratic Party’s foreign policy team, Richard Holbrooke, made a trip to Yugoslavia and, in time, to Bosnia. He became the first member of the putative Democratic national security team to have a personal stake in the terrible crisis unfolding there. Holbrooke went at the suggestion of Winston Lord, an old friend who earlier had struggled with the country’s Asian policies. Lord was now the vice chairman of the International Rescue Committee, and he had suggested that Holbrooke go on a fact-finding mission for the IRC, which was one of the most influential of the various refugee organizations. A few weeks later, Holbrooke left for Yugoslavia in the company of Bob deVecchi, the IRC’s president, and Sheppie Abramowitz, a forceful and effective person who had been drawn into refugee work when her husband was the American ambassador to Thailand and a flood of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees had found their way to what was effectively her neighborhood.
During the trip deVecchi took Holbrooke from Zagreb to Banja Luka in Bosnia. It had been an eerie day. The IRC team had arrived to the accompaniment of constant Serb machine-gun fire, and their driver politely asked Holbrooke to stop videotaping local scenes in order to make them less of a target for the Serb militia. That night they had drinks at the local hotel bar and overheard a Serb woman say in the most casual way that Muslims made good lampshades. They spent the night at the hotel, and the next morning they were intrigued by an odd sight. Outside a very ordinary building near their hotel, deVecchi noticed a long line of people standing with their suitcases.
These people, many of whom were obviously tired and dejected, and some of whom were actually crying, were waiting their allotted turn. In time, they entered the building for a few minutes, then came out and got on a bus. DeVecchi made sure that Holbrooke witnessed the scene. They checked out what was happening and found they were watching nothing less than what was now being called ethnic cleansing. Muslims who had lived in this town all their life were going into Serb headquarters and signing away their property in exchange for what was alleged to be a guarantee of safe passage to Croatia. The building even had a name: Office for Population Resettlement and Property Exchange. The property the Muslims signed away would be given to Serbs, either Serbs who lived there or were imported from other parts of the country into the region specifically for Serbianization. It was all strictly legal.
Holbrooke learned that this procedure had been expedited by Serb irregulars who had already worked the town, killing some Muslims, abducting others, threatening the lives of those remaining if they did not sign over their property and leave. Some of the Bosnian Muslims were stoic about it. Others were less so. All were leaving the land where their families had lived for centuries to undergo a passage, unwanted, without real guarantees of safety, to another country where they might not be welcome. DeVecchi, watching Holbrooke, thought he was overwhelmed by the spectacle. It would be hard not to be. On his return to America, Holbrooke had not only written op-ed pieces about the mounting crisis but he had called his old friend Strobe Talbott, then a senior Time foreign affairs writer and a close friend of the Democratic candidate Bill Clinton, to tell him that Bosnia was on its way to becoming a horrendous tragedy. It might be “George Bush and Larry Eagleburger’s revenge if Clinton wins,” Holbrooke said.3
Not since Vietnam, Holbrooke later wrote, had he seen a problem so difficult or compelling. His first op-ed piece on Bosnia for Newsweek was unusually prophetic. “By its inadequate reaction so far, the United States and, to an even greater extent, the European Community may be undermining not only the dreams of a post–Cold War ‘common European House’ but also laying the seeds for another era of tragedy.” He urged the end to an arms embargo that punished the Bosnians but not the Serbs and wrote that every day the killing went on, the chances of preventing a long-term tragedy decreased. What would the West be doing now, he asked, if the religious convictions of the combatants were reversed and a Muslim force was trying to destroy 2 million beleaguered Christians and Jews? In addition to his op-ed piece, Holbrooke began to push the idea of a proactive policy with friends of his who were close to candidate Bill Clinton.
In fact, the rest of the world was not sitting by idly. It tried to stop the hostilities, but from the start it moved weakly and inadequately. Under United Nations security resolutions, it first sent troops to monitor the Croat-Serb cease-fire, and then in 1992, as the violence moved to Bosnia, it dispatched even more troops as a humanitarian peacekeeping force to stop the fighting and suffering there. What it did was probably well intentioned but surely inadequate, and it represented a tragic underestimation of the violence in the hearts of the aggressors.
For, given the sheer brutality of what was taking place in Bosnia, given the countless areas now under assault, and given the weak mandate of the UN troops, known as UNPROFOR, United Nations Protection Force, the United Nations ended up being more in the fig-leaf business than the security business. It was supposed, as one diplomat said, to keep the peace where there was no peace and where one side, exceptionally well-armed, had no intention of keeping the peace. It was supposed to be impartial in a conflict between violent aggressors and obvious victims. Its soldiers, some of whom behaved with considerable dignity and courage, and many of whom did not, were almost always outnumbered and underarmed, and they never knew whether they should return fire. If they did, they might move from being impartial peacekeepers to armed participants, and not only would the mighty Serbs turn on them, but their superiors at UN headquarters in New York would be furious. Again and again, they were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t. In all, UNPROFOR turned out to be a horror, representing not so much the weakness of the United Nations, though the UN command had little to be proud of in the Balkans, but the weaknesses and indecisiveness of the member nations. The Europeans who had thought they could deal with the problem were now overwhelmed by the sheer fury and cruelty of the Serb assault, while the Americans still resisted military intervention.
Poor Bosnia. On the geopolitical Richter scale, the inevitable conflicts and internal battles of the Balkans had not at first seemed to be sufficient cause for the use of American troops and the risk of American lives. Only when the genocidal actions became so obvious, and the issue changed from geopolitical to moral and geopolitical, did the attention of America become engaged. “My favorite quote is from Hegel,” said a distinguished professor of international relations at Princeton, Dick Ullman, who later served as a consultant to the State Department in Policy Planning and wrote about these events, “and it is, ‘Minerva’s owl flies at dusk.’ That is, the most important signs that will warn you of important issues still to come happen too late—by the time we know enough to act, it’s often likely to be very late.”4
The Serb assault against Bosnia had been very deliberately planned and organized. In no way was it random. Milosevic and the Serbs were well prepared for the assault. In June 1991, six months before Yugoslavia disintegrated, Milosevic had lunched with the ambassadors from the European Community and had warned them that if the country broke up, he would carve out a new Serbia. Slovenia meant nothing to him, he said, and it could go, and perhaps Macedonia, too. But the Serb-populated regions of Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro would become part of this new country, “a fatherland of all Serbs,” as he had put it.
Regrettably, the UNPROFOR troops played right into Milosevic’s hands, involuntarily helping legitimize (at least momentarily) his territorial gains. They were like manna from heaven for him, giving him extra protection against his greatest vulnerability, the possibility that the West, choosing a low-cost use of maximum force, would strike out against him with NATO airpower. Instead they had become potential hostages, completely exposed, whom Milosevic could easily take prisoner as he kept moving toward his goal of a Greater Serbia. They were always there, ready to be plucked in case the Americans threatened the use of airpower, a gift chip made of platinum for him. The alliance against him had a fatal flaw. The European nations, however inadequately, had placed troops on the ground, while the Americans, with far greater technological weaponry at their disposal, were unwilling to send any ground troops. The West’s policy was thus bastardized from the start, a signal of the tensions between the Americans and the Europeans, and the uncertainty of the Americans about playing a full internationalist role now that the easy enemy of communism had disappeared off the map. The question that events in Bosnia raised again and again was how internationalist America really was. It was a monopoly superpower, but was it truly internationalist? That was not an easy question to answer.
No one had a better sense of how to play the divisions between his enemies than Milosevic. Brilliant, visionary, and farsighted he might not be, but he had an unerring ability to spot the weaknesses of his enemies. He knew how to probe for their frailties and how to exploit any vulnerability he discovered. He knew how to disassociate himself from many of his odious deeds. Ugly genocidal incidents? Violations of agreed-upon safe areas? That was the Bosnian Serbs, he would say, and he had little control over them; they were a separate nation. So a cruel and prolonged charade began in which the Serbs initiated assaults upon the Muslims, and the West reacted always a little too late and always a little too weakly.
It became, for a time, a wonderful war for the Serbs. The people they were fighting were always underarmed. The UNPROFOR forces had proved to be an almost perfect instrument for the Serbs, too weak to resist them, but a valuable asset because they offered an inviting opportunity for hostages, thus negating the dreaded potential of U.S. (or NATO) airpower. The UN command was notoriously weak, and because of all the divisions among the great powers, there were simply too many voices and too many internal political differences to stop the Serbs. The early months of Serb aggression took place largely without resistance.
There was an animal shrewdness to all the Serb moves. They were able to push just hard enough to get what they wanted without pushing too hard and thereby enraging the more powerful NATO nations. When a momentary crisis of conscience occurred in the West, they would sense it and pull back, waiting for the right moment to push again. Even their military tactics had that same animal cunning. They would encircle a town, bring up their artillery, and pound away, exhausting and terrifying the Muslims inside the besieged spot. Then they would make a probe, a little tentative for fear that the UNPROFOR forces might actually retaliate this time or someone might call in a NATO air strike. If there was no Western response, then more emboldened than ever, with more swagger than ever, they would attack again. In the beginning it was a wonderful war.