The war against Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s was planned by Serbian intellectuals and authorities long before the first Serbian attacks. In the fall of 1986, the Serbian Academy of Science and Art, representing Serbia’s most prominent intellectuals, issued a memorandum demanding that the borders of Serbia be expanded.1 The memorandum argued that the Serbs were the most mistreated and oppressed people in Yugoslavia, in spite of the fact that Serbs were the majority and in key positions in the Communist Party, the military, the police, diplomacy, finance and banking, and the legal and judicial systems. The 1986 memorandum advocated that all Serbs must live in one enlarged Serbia, a concept strikingly reminiscent of Hitler’s own prewar rhetoric that all Germans must live in one country. This manifesto was, in essence, a blueprint for war. In 1987, the memorandum was circulated worldwide to Serbian emigre communities; it mobilized their support for Serbia’s national and territorial goals, which were justified by the Serbs’ alleged victimization in Yugoslavia, while making no mentions of the sufferings of other national groups at Serbian hands. In practical terms, the memorandum helped standardize the rhetoric by which the Serbian emigration would rally to defend Serbia once the war began.
Among the figures behind the 1986 memorandum was a Serbian Academy member with an impressive political pedigree, Vaša čubrilović, then nearly ninety years old. A surviving conspirator in the 1914 assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand—the event that sparked the bloodshed of the World War I—čubrilović reemerged as an advisor to the royal Yugoslav government, from which position he authored the 1937 official government memorandum “The Expulsion of the Albanians,” which began by citing Hitler’s and Stalin’s success in expelling Jews and others as examples for Serbia to emulate. The document proposed that the government render the lives of Albanians so intolerable and terror-filled that they would flee en masse to Albania and Turkey, and it went on to explain in detail how an “emigration psychosis” could be instilled among the Albanians through a government-directed program of relentless persecutions.2 After World War II, čubrilović went on to hold several ministerial posts in Tito’s government (he was, for example, Tito’s first minister of agriculture)—a remarkable testimony to the moral flexibility of the communist regime. Following Tito’s death in 1980, Cubrilović turned his energy toward reviving Serbian nationalism and played an essential role in shaping the 1986 memorandum.3
Also among the principal authors of the memorandum was Dobrica Čosić, whose novels and political essays portrayed Serbs as the superior nation of the Balkans, glorified Serbian militancy, and demanded “all Serbs in one state.”4 Cosić first articulated these views in 1968, when he shocked a Communist Party meeting by proposing that Serbs rise to destroy the multi-national Yugoslav state to fulfill “the old historical goal and national ideal” of a Greater Serbia.5 Cosić later fanned the flames of war in 1991, proclaiming that there was a “wild hatred against the Serbian people,” condemning Croats as “the most destructive force in Yugoslavia,” and declaring that “pacifist rhetoric is senseless.”6 Promoting the idea that Serbs were an eternally suffering people, whose martyrdom was no less than that of the Jews in the Holocaust, Cosic even proposed that “The Serb is the new Jew, the Jew at the end of the twentieth century.”7 In 1992, Cosic became the ceremonial head of the rump federal Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) and added further intellectual imprimatur to the war machine of Serbian president Slobodan Milošević, whom he called “the best Serbian leader” in half a century.8
Serbia’s maneuvering toward war took a decisive turn in March 1989, when the Serbian government amended its constitution to impose control over the two autonomous regions of Serbia: Vojvodina (with a substantial Croatian and Hungarian population) and Kosovo (93 percent Albanian). Under the Yugoslav Federal Constitution of 1974, these provinces, although technically part of the Republic of Serbia, operated in a manner virtually indistinguishable from that of the other Yugoslav republics. Vojvodina and Kosovo participated equally in the eight-member federal presidency, consisting of representatives of the six republics and two autonomous regions. Essentially, Vojvodina and Kosovo functioned as de facto republics. However, following Serbia’s 1989 anschluss of the autonomous regions, Albanian leaders in Kosovo were arrested, and Serbia installed its own police, courts, and government officials. After unilaterally abolishing the autonomy of Vojvodina and Kosovo in explicit violation of the constitution, Serbia retained for itself their votes in the federal presidency. Since Serbia’s ally Montenegro was by this time ruled by handpicked pro-Serbian politicians, and Montenegro characteristically voted in solidarity with Serbia, the Republic of Serbia came to effectively control four out of eight votes in the federal presidency—precisely the kind of imbalance of power that the Yugoslav Federal Constitution of 1974 had been designed to avoid. Months later, on June 28, 1989—the six hundredth anniversary of the Serbs’ defeat by the Turks at Kosovo—Slobodan Milošević delivered a militant speech to the Serbs in Kosovo, reminding the crowd that “the Serbs throughout their history never conquered or exploited anybody else.”9 On the same day, with the encouragement of the Serbian government, the Serbs in the Croatian Krajina demanded their own autonomous province. This occurred nearly a year before Croatia held its first free elections, the event that Serbian propaganda would later claim had instigated the Serbs of Croatia to seek autonomy.
Also on the same day, the Serbian Orthodox Church issued its official national program, which echoed the 1986 memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Science and Art, as well as official documents of the Communist Party and the Yugoslav state apparatus. This manifesto, known as the “Proposed Serbian Church National Program,” praised Serbia’s decision to unilaterally terminate the autonomy of Vojvodina and Kosovo. Restating a central theme of the Academy’s memorandum, the church document portrayed an aggrieved and oppressed Serbia, and it further praised Slobodan Milošević for beginning to right the alleged historical wrongs against Serbia:
Since history and the future should now explain why Serbia had to suffer economic subservience, backwardness, partitions, and political inferiority in socialist Yugoslavia for almost half a century, one should now honestly recognize certain merits and endeavors of the new Serbian leadership [Milošević] in resolving the Serbian question. The new authorities knew how to correctly use the great democratic energy and spiritual potential of the Serbian people, who have again begun to think with their heads and make decisions about their destiny. Therefore, some premises have been created for historical moves by leading men with participation of healthy forces of the nation for overcoming the many-years-long passivity and national neglect.10
The “Proposed Serbian Church National Program,” like the earlier memorandum, demanded “a radical change” of the Federal Constitution of 1974. Replete with internal contradictions, the church document in one place supported the modern concept of the separation of church and state, but elsewhere emphasized that “there is no strong state without a strong church.” The church’s national program further advocated “a truly Christian Europe,” raising the question of the church’s commitment to religious tolerance. Thus, in 1989, the Serbian Orthodox Church positioned its archdioceses—both in Yugoslavia and in emigration—to function as conduits for an agenda primarily political in its substance and, in this sense, almost indistinguishable from that of the Belgrade regime. Moreover, the church contributed considerably to heightening tensions in Yugoslavia, as an American historian observed:
Indeed, in Yugoslavia the Serbian Orthodox church has lately published a series of articles about the Second World War focusing exclusively on Serbian casualties at the hands of Croats and obscuring the fact that violence and intergroup conflict were common in wartime Yugoslavia, with serious casualties also among Croats, Jews, Muslims, Albanians and others. In the eyes of the Serbian Orthodox church, Serbia is the modern Job, and other nationalities are Job’s tormentors.11
In August 1990, the first act of organized violence commenced in Croatia under the leadership of Jovan Raskovic, the head of the recently formed Serbian Democratic Party. After confiscating weapons from a police station in Knin and murdering the Croatian police there, Raskovic’s followers blockaded the roads leading to the Krajina region to everyone except the Serbs. This was undertaken after consultation with Serbian president Slobodan Milošević, who promised that his republic would supply arms. To further reduce Croatia’s defensive capability against military attack, the Yugoslav defense minister threatened to forcibly disarm Croatia’s police and local militia. In January 1991, Croatian authorities acquiesced and disarmed these units themselves.12
In March 1991, Milošević stated that Serbia no longer recognized the power of the federal state, as Serbs crippled the functioning of the federal presidency. In early May 1991, Serbian irregulars in the town of Borovo Selo captured twelve Croatian police and several civilians, tortured them, gouged out their eyes, cut off their limbs and genitalia, and then murdered them.13 In an act of calculated terror, the mutilated body parts were dumped in the middle of the town square. Several of these bodies had no heads. Although this violence had been directly encouraged by the Serbian government in Belgrade, the Serbian-controlled Federal Defense Ministry found this a convenient pretext to demand that it be allowed to intervene to “restore order.” In mid-May, when the Croatian representative Stipe Mešić was due to assume the rotating post of president of the eight-member federal presidency, Serbs prevented him, in violation of constitutional procedure.14 The next day the National Council of the Republic of Serbia, also in violation of the Yugoslav constitution, declared the Krajina region of Croatia an integral part of the territory of Serbia, although, notably, it shared no common border with Serbia.15
All these events occurred before Croatia held its plebiscite, also in May 1991, when the electorate overwhelmingly supported independence and confederation with other republics of Yugoslavia, while specifically guaranteeing “cultural autonomy and all civic rights to Serbs and members of other nationalities in Croatia.”16 Serbian propaganda has cited this independence plebiscite as having caused the Serbs to rise to arms, but the chronology of events shows clearly that covert Serbian preparations for the war against Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina had commenced years earlier, with armed actions against the legitimately constituted Croatian authorities and massacres of Croatian civilians. The June 25, 1991, independence declarations of Croatia and Slovenia did, however, serve as the pretext for the Yugoslav Federal Army’s invasion, which commenced within two days.
In Slovenia, the Yugoslav Federal Army met a humiliating defeat by the Slovenian Territorial Defense Forces, partly because the army had underestimated Slovenian resolve and sent too few tanks, crewed primarily by inexperienced draftees, whose supplies of food and fuel were quickly exhausted.17 Within a month, the Serbian leadership in the Yugoslav government conceded Slovenia’s secession from Yugoslavia. Behind this decision were apparently several strategic considerations: Slovenia, 96 percent ethnically homogeneous, contained virtually no Serbian minority to organize a campaign of internal sabotage, as was possible in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Slovenia was also the only republic of Yugoslavia to share no common border with Serbia. Perhaps most significant, Slovenian territory had never been included in the maps of a Greater Serbia, dating back to 1844. To the contrary, Serbian ultranationalists had long viewed the Slovenes not only as parliamentary allies against Croatia, but as potential partners in the dismemberment of Croatia.18 By permitting the secession of Slovenia, Serbia would have been left controlling four of seven votes in the federal presidency, guaranteeing absolute Serbian hegemony.
At the same time that the Yugoslav military was withdrawing from Slovenia, it was clear that Serbs were contemplating an intensified war against Croatia. General Blagoje Adžić, the army chief of staff, coldly assessed military plans for Croatia: “This rebellion must be terminated, even if it is going to generate a thousand deaths. The international community will be agitated a bit, but three days later everything will be forgotten and our objectives will be obtained.”19
Tragically for the victims of Serbian aggression, General Adzic’s assessment was largely correct, as the United States and the European Community continued to support the “integrity of Yugoslavia” for the next several months.20 On July 5, 1991, the European Community, supported by the United States, imposed an arms embargo on Yugoslavia, notwithstanding that Serbia effectively controlled the entire Yugoslav Federal Army arsenal of tanks, ships, fighter planes, and heavy artillery.21 Indeed, by freezing the military imbalance in favor of Serbia, the embargo did little more than abet Serbian aggression. By September 1991, Serbia’s proxy guerrilla forces had seized over 30 percent of Croatia’s territory. In that month, the Yugoslav government—practically, speaking only for Serbia—urged an international weapons embargo on Yugoslavia, transparently intended to preserve Serbian military superiority. On September 25, 1991, the United Nations Security Council unanimously granted the Serbian leadership’s wish, adopting Resolution 713, which banned the sale of weapons to Yugoslavia.22 Throughout the fall of 1991, Serbian forces on the ground executed a blitzkrieg of rape, looting, mutilation, and murder of unarmed civilians. However, in the world of news and information, especially for Western consumption, a barrage of Serbian propaganda cast these events in a heroic light, depicting the Serbs in Croatia rising to their defense, when endangered. In truth, however, fully 75 percent of the Serbian population of Croatia had resided without harassment in Croatian cities and towns outside the seized territory before the war.23
Since the beginning of hostilities in the former Yugoslavia, Serbian attacks have targeted primarily unarmed civilian populations of non-Serbs living in the lands coveted by Serbia.24 Early in the war, there were reports that Croats and Hungarians living in Serbian-captured regions of Croatia were forced to identify themselves with armbands—a practice hauntingly reminiscent of the yellow star worn by Jews during the Holocaust. As early as 1991, there were reports that civilian prisoners of war were being tortured and killed in Serbian “labor” camps.25 Also during 1991, there were extensive reports on the Serbian practice of mass deportation of non-Serbs from their homes and the systematic resettlement with Serbs.26 When Serbian forces introduced the war into Bosnia-Herzegovina, they repeated the identical pattern of aggression and atrocities against non-Serbs, over a larger and more populated territory.27 The goal remained the same: “ethnic cleansing,” a euphemism invoked by the Serbs themselves to describe the process of creating ethnically pure Serbian regions through the methodical murder and expulsion of non-Serbs.28
Belying the hygienic sound of “ethnic cleansing” are the testimonies by survivors of Serbian-run camps such as Omarska in Bosnia-Herzegovina. There, atrocities were invented for the amusement of the Serbs. For example, prisoners were decapitated with chain saws, and one prisoner was forced to bite off the testicles or the penis of another. After the American embassy in Zagreb investigated reports of Serbian atrocities at Omarska, one top embassy official, speaking on condition of anonymity, commented, “The Nazis had nothing on these guys. I’ve seen reports of individual acts of barbarity of a kind that hasn’t come up in State Department cable traffic in 20 years.”29
In December 1992, the U.S. secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger named suspected war criminals, which included the top Serbian leadership in Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (see appendix 1). In early 1993, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the rapporteur for the UN Commission on Human Rights, concluded, “The collected evidence leaves no doubt as to who is responsible for the horror: the Serbian political and military leaders in Bosnia-Herzegovina, supported by the authorities of the Serbian Republic.”30
As of June 1993, the U.S. Department of State had submitted to the United Nations eight reports on atrocities and war crimes in the former Yugoslavia.31 Of the 347 incidents contained in the eight U.S. submissions, 304, or 88 percent, were attributable to Serbs, 7 percent to Bosnian Muslims, and 5 percent to Croats. The asymmetry in the number of victims is even more striking: the victims at the hands of Serbs numbered in the tens of thousands, while there were approximately 500 victims at the hands of Muslims and approximately 150 victims at the hands of Croats.32 The most significant asymmetry, however, is that 100 percent of the acts of genocide, as defined in the UN Convention on Genocide, have been committed by Serbs alone—a finding confirmed by a highly comprehensive and secret CIA report.33 There is little question that Serbia’s policies constitute genocide, as understood in the Convention on Genocide, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 9, 1948 (and entered into force on January 12, 1951). Article 2 of the Convention on Genocide defines genocide as
Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.34
It is noteworthy that the post-World War II Nuremberg trials distinguished between war crimes (something the Allies also did) and crimes against humanity and genocide (something only the Nazis did). In executing a policy of genocide, the Serbs’ methods are a matter of public record: deportations, torture, mutilations, death camps, rape/death camps, and mass executions.35 The pattern of “ethnic cleansing” has been remarkably consistent, as one British journalist described:
If you had to draw up a list of events that lead to killings here, it would go something like this: you get warnings on television and radio that Moslems are arming themselves; then arms being given out to local Serbs; from outside, Serbian paramilitaries arrive—people in uniform with names like White Eagles or the Tigers; you get local Serbs training in secret, outside the town; and, while all this is happening, there is a sudden inexplicable cooling in your relations with people who used to be your friends and neighbors. . . . After that, there is the bombardment from the hills, and the killing starts. . . . “[The Serbs] marched through the town and destroyed houses I saw men lined up and shot with pistols. They . . . called for men, all Moslems, by name. There was a hall in the town; the women and the girls were brought there and raped.”36
Mass rape as a Serbian method of terror has received considerable attention. Abundant documentary evidence demonstrates that Serbian forces engaged in the systematic rape of women, children, and men.37 State-sponsored rape was an integral part of “ethnic cleansing” and was designed to accomplish several goals. Mass rapes destroy the victims’ core social institutions, the family and community. Mass rapes instill terror, so that the victims will never seek to return to their homes and villages. Mass rapes instill interethnic hatred and undermine the possibility of continuing multiethnic community life. At the height of the aggression against Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbian soldiers, as a routine practice, forcibly impregnated non-Serbian women held in rape camps, continued to gang-rape these pregnant women for months, and finally expelled them from Serbian-occupied territories when they were near term. In this way, the rape victims were forced to bear the children of their tormentors, thus compounding their personal suffering. Although severely traumatized, these rape victims often had little or no functioning support network. Other family members were often traumatized, separated, or dead. Mental health care was simply not available on the scale required. Forcibly impregnated rape victims have a tragically high incidence of suicide and infanticide. Mass rape, then, was an integral part of genocide.38 Serbian forces told their rape victims that they were under orders to do so.39
The Serbian program of genocide was also carried out through a deliberate pattern of destruction of cultural monuments, houses of worship, and other institutions that define the collective identity of the targeted community. In areas designated for Serbian conquest, non-Serbian cemeteries and houses of worship are routinely destroyed, in order to erase any memory of the non-Serbian peoples and their culture. As is true for the preponderance of murders, tortures, expulsions, and rapes in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbs are responsible for the overwhelming instances of destruction of cultural and religious monuments. For example, during 1993 in the Serb-occupied area of Banja Luka (the second largest city in Bosnia-Herzegovina after Sarajevo), Serbian authorities and armed forces destroyed 200 out of 202 mosques (99 percent) and destroyed or damaged 96 percent of Catholic churches. Six such mosques had dated to the sixteenth century and seven had dated to the seventeenth century.40 Non-Serbian towns have been systematically renamed, or “Serbianized.” For example, after driving the majority Bosnian Muslim population from the historically Muslim town of Foča in 1992, Serbian authorities renamed it Srbinje, to designate it as a Serbian town.
Within months of the Yugoslav Federal Army’s invasion of Slovenia and Croatia in June 1991, Serbia was recognized and condemned as the clear aggressor by the United States, the European Community, the Helsinki Commission, and the United Nations, as well as the human rights organization Helsinki Watch.41 By mid-1992, Western diplomats pointedly characterized the Serbian regime as “a lying, terrorist criminal organization,” and the New York Times characterized Serbia’s aggression as “a one sided war . . . reminiscent of the Nazis.”42 In April 1993, the International Court of Justice at the Hague ordered Belgrade to halt the genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina.43 The following month, prompted by the allegations against Serbian forces, the United Nations established a war crimes tribunal.44
The UN commission investigating war crimes bears an unwieldy title, the International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of Former Yugoslavia since 1991. This eleven-member commission was preceded by a five-member UN Commission of Experts, whose task it was to obtain preliminary testimony and establish the framework for the ensuing tribunal.
Before we consider the findings of the UN Commission of Experts, it is instructive to consider two known attempts to infiltrate the commission in order to subvert it to Serbian advantage. In the first instance, a Milwaukee attorney named David Erne volunteered his services to the UN commission. In March 1994, he submitted a fifty-nine-page document for the commission’s consideration. It was entitled “Report on the Historical Background of the Civil War in the Former Yugoslavia,” and a representative portion of this inaccurate, biased, and inflammatory document is quoted:
Following Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in June of 1941, the Independent State of Croatia declared war, and sent at least one military division to fight along side the Nazis on the Eastern Front. After Pearl Harbor, Croatia declared war on the United States and on Great Britain
The first organized resistance against the Nazis originated in Serbia, led by DraŽa Mihailoyić, who tried to assemble what was left of the defeated Yugoslav army, which came to be known popularly as the Chetniks (Cheta is a term used historically for irregular Serb resistance fighters.). . .
In any event, a significant portion of the resistance fighters in both [Chetnik and Partisan] movements were Serbs. . . . Later, some Croatians joined both movements, and especially the Partisans, as did some Muslims in Bosnia, although most Muslims, like most Croatians, were part of the fascist Ustashi forces.
The astute observer will recognize the standard fare of Serbian propaganda: the thesis that Serbs during World War II were exclusively resisters and Croats were exclusively collaborators. This obfuscates the fact of significant Serbian collaboration with the Nazis, conceals the paucity of resistance to the Nazis in Serbia, ignores Mihailović’s extensive collaboration with the Axis, and omits the prominent role of the Croats in the Partisan resistance.
This same document furthermore described the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić in honorable and flattering terms as “a physician who trained in New York and practiced medicine in Sarajevo, and has published numerous books of poetry. He was elected primarily because he was a dissident during the communist regime in Yugoslavia.”
This all-too-brief description omitted to mention, among other things, that Radovan Karadžić served prison time for real estate fraud and embezzlement, and for that reason was banned from the Communist Party.45 As a practicing psychiatrist in Sarajevo, he indeed tried to establish himself as a poet, albeit without success. His poetry, however, with its emphasis on blood and destruction, revealed important aspects of his personality. The following excerpt is a typical example:
I’m born to live without a tomb,
this divine body will not die.
It’s not only born to smell flowers,
but also to set fire, kill and
reduce everything to dust.46
A closer look at Karadžić’s background shows that he is the son of a convicted war criminal responsible for the massacre of Muslims during World War II.47 His admiration for his friend and colleague Jovan Raskovic is also informative, since Karadžić considered Rašković his main role model and philosophical inspiration.48
Jovan Rašković headed the psychiatry department at the Neuropsychiatry Clinic in Šibenik, Croatia, where he enjoyed the reputation of taking pleasure in administering electroshock therapy to Croats, especially Croatian women.49 He developed his own psychoanalytic theory explaining the inferiority of Croats and Muslims and the superiority of Serbs, by which Serbs were destined to dominate and rule over the others. In 1990, Rašković advanced these theories in his book Luda zemlja (A mad country), which he began by reminding his readers of the Serbs’ victimization by Croats during World War II:
The Croats, feminized by the Catholic religion, suffer from a castration complex. That makes them totally incapable of exercising authority over others. They compensate their humiliation by their great culture. As to the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina and neighboring regions, they are the victims, as Freud might have said, of anal frustrations, which incite them to amass wealth and to seek refuge in fanatic attitudes. Finally, the Serbs, the Orthodox, an Oedipal people, tend to liberate themselves from the authority of the father. From this spirit of resistance, they draw the courage of the warriors, who are the only ones capable of exerting real authority over the other peoples of Yugoslavia. It is no wonder that the situation of complete hatred and paranoia develops in this country.50
Thus, according to Raskovic, Croats could not exercise authority or leadership, because they had a deep-seated fear of castration, were afraid of everything, and had to be led. Muslims were anal-erotic with a compulsion for acquiring money and property. Serbs, in contrast, were the only people qualified to exercise authority and dominate other peoples in Yugoslavia, because only the Serbs had overcome the Oedipus complex by symbolically “killing” the father. Upon its release, he promoted his book in newspapers and on television, gaining a substantial following among the Serbs of Croatia. Raskovic also founded the Serbian Democratic Party in Croatia. The party’s three leaders (Milan Martić, Jovan Opačić, and Suzana Zelenbaba) were his own psychiatric patients from the clinic in Šibenik. During 1990, Raskovic organized many public meetings for Serbian audiences in Croatia, where he spoke of impending war.
In August, 1990, Rašković’s followers (that is, members of the Serbian Democratic Party) attacked a police station in the town of Knin and confiscated the weapons, which were distributed to the local Serbian population. When the Croatian government responded by sending a troop of police officers to restore order, Raskovic’s followers killed them all and blockaded the roads to the region, forbidding all except Serbs to enter. Such incidents were repeated village by village and became the standard method of the Serbian leadership to incite local populations to violence. Observers of warfare will quickly recognize this method as a
standard technique which could be found in textbooks on guerrilla warfare: the technique of “compromising the villages,” as employed by the French Resistance, the Viet-Cong, and innumerable other guerrilla movements. This technique involves staging an incident—for example, shooting a carload of Croatian policemen outside a particular village—to invite a crackdown or reprisal, and then distributing arms to the villagers, telling them that the police are planning to attack them. When armed police do arrive, it is easy to spark off a gun battle; and suddenly a whole village, previously uncommitted, is now on the side of the insurgents.51
At each step of these actions, Raskovic and his Serbian Democratic Party leaders closely consulted with Serbian president Slobodan Milošević. During early 1991, Raskovic visited Bosnia-Herzegovina, where he created a Serbian Democratic Party there as well and placed Radovan Karadžić at its head. Together, Rašković and Karadžić held lectures throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina, where they incited the Serbian crowds to hatred and militancy.52 In early 1992, Raskovic made the following remarkably apologetic statement on Belgrade television:
I feel responsible because I made the preparations for this war, even if not the military preparations. If I hadn’t created this emotional strain in the Serbian people, nothing would have happened.
My party and I lit the fuse of Serbian nationalism not only in Croatia but everywhere else in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It’s impossible to imagine an SDP (Serbian Democratic Party) in Bosnia-Herzegovina or a Mr. Karadžić in power without our influence. We have driven this people and we have given it an identity. I have repeated again and again to this people that it comes from heaven, not earth.53
Shortly after this television appearance, Rašković died of a heart attack in Belgrade. Karadžić has carried on his mentor’s work ever since. There is also a striking parallel between these war-promoting psychiatrists: Rašković’s patients instigated the war from inside Croatia, while Karadžić’s close friend and alleged former patient, Slobodan Milošević, orchestrated the war from Belgrade. Thus, David Erne’s report to the UN Commission of Experts, describing Karadžić as simply a physician, dissident, and poet, was replete with deceptions by omission. In a similar vein, Adolf Hitler could be described as simply an artist, which, among other things, he was.
The UN Commission of Experts quickly recognized Erne’s document as unreliable and of dubious value, or, more bluntly, as propaganda. For all practical purposes, it became a “dead letter” within the commission, since all submitted reports were confidential, and their disposition was solely in its hands. However, without the knowledge of the commission, and in direct violation of its protocols, this propaganda piece was quietly distributed to foreign officials and the press. It was misrepresented as an official UN document; its title page was typed on United Nations stationery. Moreover, the commission chairman’s name was placed prominently on the cover, implying official imprimatur and adding the unmistakable dimension of fraud. What Erne neglected to reveal when he volunteered his legal services was that he happened to be a vice president of the Serbian Unity Congress, a Serbian American organization that has stalwartly supported the goals (and means) of the Belgrade regime.54
A second example relates to a lawyer named Tanja Petovar, who volunteered her services to the UN Commission of Experts and found herself engaged in the highly delicate task of taking testimony from Muslim women who had survived Serbian rape and death camps. The commission’s protocol specifically required the presence of a witness when testimony was obtained, but Petovar often dispensed with that “detail.” Her recorded testimonies, when double-checked, were significant for their rather consistent lack of fidelity. On at least one occasion, Petovar brought to the interview, without authorization, a man and woman, both recognizable as Serbs by their names and accents. Predictably, the Muslim survivor of rape found their presence intimidating and inhibiting. During an official commission briefing session held in Zagreb, Petovar identified herself as a human rights lawyer from Sarajevo, although her law practice was actually in Ljubljana and Belgrade. She also misrepresented her country of citizenship: from the outset, Petovar implied she was a citizen of Slovenia (her father was a Slovene), but the passport she carried at the time was from Yugoslavia. Perhaps most interesting of all, Petovar also neglected to reveal that in 1991 she helped organize a political rally in Belgrade for Vojislav Šešelj’s militantly nationalist and racist Serbian Radical Party.
Fortunately, the work of the UN Commission of Experts was relatively unhampered by the activities described, and its report was issued in May 1994. Of 407 camps in Bosnia-Herzegovina investigated by the commission, nearly two-thirds were run by Serbs. While no policy or pattern of wrongdoing could be identified in the detention camps operated by Croats or Bosnian Muslims, the commission found that Serbian camps were instruments of state policy of “ethnic purification” through terror and genocide.55
Reminiscent of the Nazi camps a half-century earlier, the Serbian camps operated in clusters and networks and often specialized in rape, other torture, and murder. Characteristically, after a village or town was conquered, the local population was rounded up en masse, a process that entailed rape, other torture, and slaughter. Involved in the rounding up process were local civil servants, political leaders, and police. Prisoners (civilians) were forced to surrender their money and valuables, and they were interrogated about their political and religious beliefs and about the personal wealth and family connections of other prisoners. These interrogations almost always were accompanied by brutality and often by torture and murder. Prisoners were transported to camps in tightly packed buses and freight or cattle trains, in which they were often killed at random and denied food, water, and access to toilet facilities. When prisoners were unloaded at their destination, a few were often killed on the spot. Men between the ages of sixteen (or younger) and sixty were separated from older men, women, and children. These men, considered of military age, were transferred to larger, more heavily guarded camps, where tortures and murders were the rule. Within the camps, the selection of victims for atrocities appeared to follow a pattern, as Serbian guards consulted lists on their clipboards, and selected for torture those people who were wealthy, educated, and influential.
The critical fact is that Serbian war crimes and atrocities were systematized and centrally orchestrated, and they served as an instrument of state policy. According to a former prison guard from a Serbian camp in Bosnia, where about three thousand Muslims were murdered (Vlasenica), the confinement of the town’s Muslim population was initiated by a unit of the Yugoslav Federal Army, based in Novi Sad, Serbia. Throughout the existence of this camp, the commander was an active-duty Yugoslav Federal Army major, which suggests the extent to which Belgrade authorities and the Yugoslav Federal Army centrally coordinated the “ethnic cleansing” campaigns in Bosnia-Herzegovina and, before that, in Croatia.56
The Serbian war crimes are genocidal in intent. In contrast, the crimes infrequently committed by the recently established Croatian and Bosnian forces have been sporadic and spontaneous, rather than the result of a political program of genocide. The UN Commission of Experts concluded emphatically that there is no “moral equivalency” between the Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, and Croats as perpetrators of war crimes. Nevertheless, many Serbian intellectuals in Serbia and in emigration and other apologists for the Belgrade regime have repeatedly invoked this argument of “moral equivalency” to obfuscate the Serbs’ responsibility for the overwhelming preponderance of war crimes.57
From the outset, the goal of the war in Bosnia was the creation of Greater Serbia. This has been true of all of Serbia’s wars for more than a century. For years before the onset of war, the Belgrade regime covertly supplied arms, funds, and personnel for the Serbian irregulars (Chetniks), who were training to fight a guerrilla war in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Six months before the war “officially” began with the June 1991 invasion of Slovenia and Croatia, barbed wire and posts were already erected in some sites that would become Serbian concentration camps.58 When the war began, Chetnik militias initiated their campaign of massacres, terror, torture, and rape, proceeding systematically from village to village. The Chetniks’ victims were consistently unarmed non-Serbian civilians, as well as the occasional antiterrorist Serb who would have been made into a public example. Not infrequently, the Chetniks’ victims were neighbors and acquaintances, even friends. To ensure their success, the Serbian-dominated regular army actively assisted in the Chetnik attacks, when needed.59 In official posturing, however, the Chetniks maintained the thinly veiled pretext of operating independently of Belgrade, while the army maintained the pretext of neutrality.60 This well-established strategy of using Serbian irregulars, covertly supported by the state, to execute a state policy of genocide may be termed the “Chetnik subterfuge.” Indeed, the thinly veiled subterfuge was reported in the Washington Post in the very first month of the war in Croatia:
There is ample evidence that Serbian fighters are receiving clandestine support and equipment from Serbian officers in the Yugoslav Federal Army. The officers corps in the Yugoslav Federal Army are [sic] dominated by Serbs. At camp headquarters, the commander reads positions from detailed, Yugoslav Army topographical maps. Soldiers wear crisp, new camouflage uniforms . . . identical to those worn by the special forces of the federal army. Local officials say they were provided by federal army officers.61
Thus, the “Chetnik subterfuge” has reemerged as an important component in a war as yet unnamed, but which may be accurately termed the Greater Serbian War. Since 1991, Serbia’s war effort primarily targeted unarmed civilians in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, although brutal repression of Albanians, which began in 1989, has never remitted, and a quiet campaign of ethnic purification has been undertaken in Vojvodina as well. Characteristically, the victims have been non-Serbs living in areas designated for Serbian ethnic purity or annexation to Serbia or both.
What has been especially disturbing is that the Serbian intellectuals, especially since the mid-1980s, have resurrected the attitudes, plans, and methods responsible for their forebears’ genocidal behavior for over a century. Dobrica Ćosić, as a principal ideologist of the 1986 memorandum, was not alone among politically active intellectuals who worked to advance Serbia’s war agenda. For example, psychiatrist Jovan Raskovic, who advanced his racial theory of the superiority of Serbs over Croats and Muslims in Luda zemlja, also played an important behind-the-scenes role in forging the 1986 memorandum. During its drafting, Dobrica Cosic consulted extensively with Raŝković at his home in Croatia.62 Although Raskovic was not a member of the Serbian Academy of Science and Art at the time of the drafting of the memorandum, he was later inducted into this body of Serbia’s leading intellectuals in 1990, the year he organized and led the Serbian Democratic Party in Croatia, which was responsible for the first of many Serbian guerrilla attacks against Croatia.
The coauthors of the memorandum included the internationally regarded Serbian philosophers Svetozar Stojanović and Mihailo Marković, both prominent in the Belgrade political establishment as defenders and promoters of Serbian war policy (ironically, both have remained members in good standing of the Academy of Humanism, based in Buffalo, New York).63 Stojanović, a former copresident of the International Humanist and Ethical Union and a professor of philosophy at the Universities of Belgrade and Kansas, served in 1992 as the chief advisor to Dobrica Ćosić, president of rump Yugoslavia. Similarly, Mihailo Markovic, for years a member of the American Philosophical Association, was the vice president of the Serbian Socialist Party of Slobodan Milošević and one of its principal ideologists. In 1990, Markovic declared the Serbian Socialist Party’s “extreme resoluteness in defending all threatened parts of the Serbian people in the other republics,” a signal for war.64 In February 1991, Marković, interviewed on Radio Belgrade during the Persian Gulf War, condemned the role of the United States and described the American political system as “totalitarianism.”65 More recently, a similar, distinctly uncritical view of Milošević was offered by Marković’s philosophy student Zoran Đinđić, the president of the Democratic Party in Serbia at the time of this writing. A former “liaison officer” to the notorious Baader Meinhoff terrorist group in Germany during the 1970s, Đinđić described Slobodan Milošević in May 1994, as “a skillful, realistic, self-confident politician who knows what he wants. He is not a direct competitor to us. We are not unreal, we are not megalomaniacs. Our competitors are at much lower levels.”66 Comment on Milošević’s policy of genocide was of no interest to this student of philosophy.
Further evidence of the complicity of intellectuals in genocide and their foreknowledge of events emerges in the testimony of Predrag Finci, a professor of philosophy from the University of Sarajevo, who happened to be of Jewish origin. From London, he wrote of the strange disappearance of his Serbian colleagues from Sarajevo, immediately preceding the Serbian attacks on the Bosnian capital:
I was a witness in Sarajevo (where I spent the first 6 months of the war) how many of my colleagues of Serb origin left Sarajevo silently few days before the war broke out. They all found jobs in Serbia, where, like all polite guests, [they] silently approve of every deed of their hosts. One of them, an expert on Kant, is a minister in the Serb Republic. . . I am pleased to say that my Sarajevo colleagues were not caught in the web of daily politics, even in the most difficult of times. They did not become (at least a majority of them) the propagandists of the war ideology, they remained the advocates of freedom and fighters for a multicultural and multiethnic society, instead.67
As they did in World War II, a critical mass of Serbian intellectuals have willingly embraced and promoted Nazi-like ideology, exerted political leadership, and mobilized the masses to a genocidal campaign. With the backing of Serbia’s intelligentsia—among whom there is precious little dissent—the Belgrade regime has fostered the “emigration psychosis” advocated by Vaša Čubrilović in the 1930s.68 Tragically, five decades after the Holocaust and Nazism, Ćubrilović’s ideas have remained alive in Belgrade.
1. The memorandum by the Serbian Academy of Science and Art (known by its Serbian acronym, SANU) was issued on September 29, 1986, and distributed to the Serbian emigration in 1987. See Serbian Academy of Science and Art, Nacrt memoranduma Srpske akademije nauka u Beogradu (Framework for the memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Science and Art in Belgrade) (Srpske narodne odbrane [Serbian National Defense], 1987). For a version in the Latin alphabet, see “‘Memorandum’ SANU (grupa akademika Srpske akademije nauka i umetnosti o aktuelnim društvenim pitanjima u našoj zemlji),” in Izvori velikosrpske agresije (The roots of Greater Serbian aggression), ed. Bože Čovic (Zagreb: August Cesarec and Školska knjiga, 1991), 256–300. A typewritten English translation is available from the Library of Congress, “Suppressed Memorandum of Members of Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences SANU September, 1986,” published by the Serbian Literary Association. See also “The SANU ‘Memorandum’ (a Group of Members of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences on Topical Social Issues of Yugoslavia),” in Roots of Serbian Aggression, ed. Bože Čović (Zagreb: Centar za strane jezike, 1993), 289–337.
2. For the full Serbian text, see Vasa Čubrilović, “Iseljavanje Arnauta” (The expulsion of the Albanians), in Izvori velikosrpske agresije, ed. Čović, 106–24, which cites as its source the Military-Historical Institute (Belgrade), Archive of the Royal Yugoslav Army, file 2, document 4, box 69. For an English translation, see Vasa Cubrilovic, “Deportation of Albanians,” in Roots of Serbian Aggression, ed. Čović, 114–34.
3. See Zvonko Ivanković-Vonta, Hebrang (Zagreb: Bibliotheca Scientia Yugoslavia, 1988), 25; Čović, Roots of Serbian Aggression, 21 n.18; Mark Almond, Europe’s Backyard War: The War in the Balkans (London: Heinemann, 1994), 194–95.
4. See Roy Gutman, “Serb Author Lit Balkan Powder Keg,” Newsday, June 28, 1992, 1.
5. Ibid. It is notable that Ćosić was not censured for his ultranationalist remarks. To place this in perspective, even mild expressions of “nationalism” among non-Serbs was severely punished by the Yugoslav regime. For example, the mere possession of a “Croatian” dictionary—rather than a “Serbo-Croatian” dictionary—was reason for imprisonment in Yugoslavia.
6. Ibid.
7. Almond, op. cit., 206.
8. Ibid.
9. Foreign Broadcast Information Service, “Celebrations Highlight Kosovo Battle Anniversary,” Eastern European Daily Report, July 3, 1989, 83. See also Almond, op. cit., 197.
10. “Vidovdanska poruka Glasa Crkve: Predlog srpskog crkvenonacionalnog programa” (The St. Vitus Day message of The Voice of the Church: The proposed Serbian Church National Program), Glas crkve (The voice of the church) (Valjevo, Serbia) 17, no. 3 (1989): 5–6 (entire document spans pp. 3–11). For excerpts in English, see Foreign Broadcast Information Service, “Commentary on Serbian Church Reform Document,” Eastern European Daily Report, August 4, 1989, 42–44.
11. Sabrina Petra Ramet, “Priests and Rebels: The Contributions of the Christian Churches to the Revolutions in Eastern Europe,” Mediterranean Quarterly: A Journal of Global Issues 2, no. 4 (fall 1991): 108.
12. Blaine Harden, “Croatia Charges Army Shadows Its Officials: Police Arming for Showdown with Serbia,” Washington Post, January 19, 1991, A10; idem, “Croatia Agrees to Demobilize Police: Showdown with Yugoslav Army Averted by Compromise,” Washington Post, January 27, 1991, A14.
13. An understated and dispassionate account of this and numerous other massacres during 1991–92 appears in a useful and rather comprehensive volume of testimony and documentation prepared by the Croatian government. See Ivan Kostović and Miloš Judaš, eds., Mass Killing and Genocide in Croatia 1991–92: A Book of Evidence (Zagreb: Hrvatska sveućilišna naklada, 1992), 225.
14. Jim Fish, “Serbia Keeps Croatian from Top Post: Deadlock of Collective Presidency Adds to Yugoslav Turmoil,” Washington Post, May 16, 1991, A27; Celestine Bohlen, “Rotation of Yugoslav Leaders Blocked by Dominant Region,” New York Times, May 17, 1991, Al.
15. The Krajina is a sparsely populated rural region containing 4 percent of the population of Croatia, according to the Yugoslav census of March 1991. Seventy-five percent of the Krajina population (roughly 193,000) was Serbian, and 75 percent of the Serbs of Croatia lived outside the Krajina. For the official 1991 Yugoslav census figures, see Jasna Crkvenčić-Bojić, ed., Popis stanovništva, domaćinstava, stanova i poljoprivrednih gospodarstava 31. ožujak 1991 [Census of Population, Households, Apartments, and Farms, March 31, 1991] (Zagreb: Republicki zavod za statistiku Republike Hrvatske, 1992).
16. During the Croatian plebiscite of May 19, 1991, 86 percent of eligible voters participated and 94 percent decided that Croatia “as a sovereign and independent country which guarantees cultural autonomy and all civic rights to Serbs and members of other nationalities in Croatia, may with other republics join a confederation of sovereign states.” See Chuck Sudetic, “Croatia Votes for Sovereignty and Confederation,” New York Times, May 20, 1991, A3.
17. Jim Fish, “Yugoslav Army Upended in Slovenia: Takeover Begun Leisurely Becomes Albatross for Privileged Force,” Washington Post, July 2, 1991, Al; Blaine Harden, “Slovenia Nears Independence as Croatia Faces Civil War: Slovenes See Army Pullout as Key Step to Freedom,” Washington Post, July 20, 1991, Al.
18. The ideology of an ethnically homogeneous Greater Serbia was codified in 1844 by Ilija Garašanin (1812–1874), an influential minister in the Principality of Serbia under the crown of Prince Aleksandar Karadjordjević. His official memorandum, Načertanije (Outline), was a blueprint for the creation of Greater Serbia through the conquest of lands inhabited by Bulgarians, Macedonians, Albanians, Montenegrins, Bosnians, Hungarians, and Croats. Načertanije first appeared in unabridged published form in M. Vučković, “Program spoljne politike Ilije Garašanina na koncu 1844 godine” (Foreign policy program of Ilija Garašanin at the end of 1844), Delo (Work) (Belgrade) 38 (1906): 321–36. See Paul N. Hehn, “The Origins of Modern Pan-Serbism: The 1844 Načertanije of Ilija Garašanin: An Analysis and Translation,” East European Quarterly 9, no. 2 (1975): 153–71. In June 1941, Stevan Moljević, an advisor to Chetnik leader Draža Mihailović, issued a plan for an ethnically homogeneous Greater Serbia, with an expanded Slovenia, rewarded with Croatian territory. See Stevan Moljević, “Homogena Srbja” (Homogeneous Serbia), in Izvori velikosrpske agresije, ed. Čović, 141–47, esp. Moljević’s original map reproduced on 146. For an English translation, see Stevan Moljević, “Homogeneous Serbia,” in Roots of Serbian Aggression, ed. Čović, 151–58, esp. map on 157.
19. Gian Paolo Rossetti and Gigi Zazzeri, “Here Are the New Warlords” (in Italian), Europeo (Italy), no. 29 (July 19, 1991): 22.
20. Chuck Sudetic, “Yugoslav Battles Rage on Eve of Talks,” New York Times, November 5, 1991, A3; Laura Silber, “Serbs, Croats Press War of Words, Guns,” Washington Post, November 6, 1991, A26; David Binder, “Unified Yugoslavia Goal of U.S. Policy,” New York Times, July 1, 1991, A6; idem, “U.S. Voices Regret on Yugoslav Crisis: Plans to Ignore the Secession Attempts by Croatian and Slovenian Republics,” New York Times, June 27, 1991, A10.
21. Alan Riding, “European Community Freezes Arms Sales and Aid,” New York Times, July 6, 1991, L4.
22. John M. Goshko, “UN Imposes Arms Embargo on Yugoslavia,” Washington Post, September 26, 1991, Al; Marian Houk, “UN Backs Yugoslav Call for Embargo,” Christian Science Monitor, September 27, 1991, 4.
23. See John Tagliabue, “Serbs in Croatian Cities Are Quiet and Invisible,” New York Times, September 6, 1991, A14. For the official 1991 Yugoslav census figures for the Republic of Croatia, see Crkvenčić-Bojić, op. cit.
24. The first hostilities were initiated by Serbian authorities in 1989 in the Albanian-populated province of Kosovo. Overlooking these events, however, some observers date the war to the 1991 invasion of Slovenia and Croatia by the Serbian-led Yugoslav National Army. For a chronology of Serbia’s preparations for war in the 1990s, see Patrick Moore, “Former Yugoslavia: Prospects and Problems,” RFE/RL Research Report, 1, no. 50 (December 18, 1992): 32–37.
25. Amnesty International, Yugoslavia: Torture and Deliberate and Arbitrary Killings in War Zones (New York, 1991); idem, Yugoslavia: Further Reports of Torture and Deliberate and Arbitrary Killings in War Zones (New York, 1992).
26. Stephen Engelberg, “Serbs Settle In Where Croats Decided to Retreat,” New York Times, November 30, 1991, A4; Blaine Harden, “Observers Accuse Yugoslav Army: Report Charges Campaign of Violence Designed to Drive Out Croats,” Washington Post, January 17, 1992; idem, “Serbia Plans Resettlement of Croatian Region,” Washington Post, November 25, 1991, A14; John F. Burns, “The Demographics of Exile: Victorious Serbs Repopulate Croatian Villages,” New York Times, May 10, 1992, A3.
27. Amnesty International, Bosnia-Herzegovina: Gross Abuses of Basic Human Rights (New York, 1992); idem, Bosnia-Herzegovina: “Rana u duši”: A Wound to the Soul (New York, 1993); idem, Bosnia-Herzegovina: Rape and Sexual Abuse by Armed Forces (New York, 1993); Helsinki Watch, War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina, 2 vols. (New York, 1992–93).
28. “The Situation of Human Rights in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia Submitted by Mr. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights,” UN Security Council document S/25341, February 26, 1993, 7; Stephen Engelberg, “Muslims Tell of Serbs’ ‘Ethnic Cleansing,’” New York Times, July 31, 1992, A3.
29. Roy Gutman, A Witness to Genocide: The 1993 Pulitzer Prize-Winning Dispatches on the “Ethnic Cleansing” of Bosnia (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 93.
30. Tadeuz [sic] Mazowiecki, “Witness to Horror: ‘Ethnic cleansing’ Threatens the Concept of Human Rights Everywhere,” Washington Post, November 29, 1992, C7.
31. Each of eight submissions is a Security Council document entitled “Former Yugoslavia: Grave Breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention . . . in Accordance with Paragraph 5 of Resolution 771 (1992) and Paragraph 1 of Resolution 780 (1992).” The U.S. submissions are dated September 23, 1992; October 22, 1992; November 5, 1992; December 7, 1992; January 26, 1993; March 1, 1993; April 9, 1993; and June 17, 1993. Under the Geneva Conventions, the prosecution of “grave breaches” is mandatory.
32. Data analyzed by Henry L. de Zeng IV, historical researcher, Orlando, Florida. See also Gutman, Witness to Genocide, 169.
33. Roger Cohen, “CIA Report on Bosnia Blames Serbs for 90% of the War Crimes,” New York Times, March 9, 1995, Al.
34. The UN Convention on Genocide was adopted as UN General Assembly Resolution 260A (III), December 9, 1948. See Lawrence J. LeBlanc, The United States and the Genocide Convention (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 245–49. For a text of the definition of genocide, see appendix 1 in this volume.
35. Peter W. Galbraith and Michelle Maynard, “The Ethnic Cleansing of Bosnia-Hercegovina,” Staff Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC, August 1992; “‘Ethnic Cleansing’—And a Cry for Help from Bosnia,” Newsweek, August 17, 1992, 16–27; Tom Post et al., “A Pattern of Rape: A Torrent of Wrenching First-person Testimonies Tells of a New Serb Atrocity: Systematic Sexual Abuse,” Newsweek, January 11, 1993, 32–36; idem, “Bosnia: Getting Tough at Last,” Newsweek, May 10, 1993, 18–31; “Shame in Our Time, in Bosnia” (editorial), New York Times, May 21, 1992, A28; John F. Burns, “Bosnian Survivors Tell of Mass Ethnic Killings . . . Comparisons with Nazis Are Drawn as Attacks Rage in the Republic,” New York Times, June 21, 1992, Al; idem, “Bosnian Strife Cuts Old Bridges of Trust: Ancient Ties of Coexistence Are Broken by ‘Ethnic Purification,’” New York Times, May 22, 1992, Al; Laura Silber, “The Street Was a River of Blood’: Twenty Die in Sarajevo Shelling: EC Votes Yugoslavia Sanctions,” Washington Post, May 28, 1992, Al; Gutman, “Serb Author”; idem, “‘Ethnic Cleansing’ Yugoslavs Try to Deport 1,800 Muslims to Hungary,” Newsday, July 3, 1992, 5; idem, “Prisoners of Serbia’s War: Tales of Hunger, Torture at Camp in North Bosnia,” Newsday, July 19, 1992, 7; idem, “Croats Deported in Freight Cars: Witnesses Report Some Deaths,” Newsday, July 21, 1992, 4; idem, “If Only They Could Flee: Muslims, Croats Held in City,” Newsday, July 26, 1992, 4; idem, “Death Camps: Serbs Imprison Thousands for Slaughter, Starvation,” Newsday, August 2, 1992, 5; idem, “Gulag: The War against Muslim and Croat Civilians: Former Inmates of Serbian Forces Describe Atrocities,” Newsday, August 3, 1992, 4; idem, “Serbs’ Death Camps: How the Guards Chose the Victims,” Newsday, August 5, 1992, 4; idem, “Bosnia Rape Horror,” Newsday, August 9, 1992, 4; idem, “Mass Rape: Muslims Recall Serb Attacks,” Newsday, August 23, 1992, 5; idem, “Deadly Transfer: Many Reported Killed, Missing in Move from Serb Camp,” Newsday, August 26, 1992, 3; Roger Cohen, “Ex-Guard for Serbs Tells of Grisly ‘Cleansing’ Camp,” New York Times, August 1, 1994, Al; idem, “Bosnian Camp Survivors Describe Random Death,” New York Times, August 2, 1994, Al; Steve Coll, “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” Washington Post Magazine, September 25, 1994, 8. See also Gutman, Witness to Genocide.
36. Quoted from Melanie McDonagh, “My Last Drink with Condemned Men,” Evening Standard (London), February 23, 1993. See also Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 217.
37. Amnesty International, Bosnia-Herzegovina: Rape and Sexual Abuse; Gutman, Witness to Genocide; idem, “Mass Rape”; idem, “Bosnia Rape Horror”; Post et al., op. cit., 26–30.
38. That the rape conducted by Serbian forces is genocidal has been eloquently argued; see Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights,” Harvard Women’s Law Journal 17 (spring 1994): 5–16; and Gutman, Witness to Genocide, 68. As the experience of women during the Holocaust provides insight into the genocidal rape of the 1990s, the reader is referred to the thoughtful, pioneering work of Joan Ringelheim, cited in Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 373–107.
39. See Gutman, Witness to Genocide, 68; Post et al., op. cit., 32–36.
40. András Riedlmayer, “The War on People and the War on Culture,” New Combat: A Journal of Reason and Resistance 3 (autumn 1994): 16–19; idem, “Erasing the Past: The Destruction of Libraries and Archives in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 29, no. 1 (July 1995): 7–11; Helsinki Watch, “War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina: UN Cease-Fire Won’t Help Banja Luka,” Human Rights Watch/Helsinki 6, no. 8 (June 1994): 15–16; Council of Europe, Parliamentary Assembly, “Information Report on the Destruction by War of the Cultural Heritage in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina,” reports 1–5 (February 2, 1993–April 12, 1994) available as Assembly Documents, nos. 6756, 6869, 6904, and 7070, from the Secretary, Committee on Culture and Education, Conseil d’Europe, B.P. 431, Strasbourg Cedex F-67006, France. For an earlier report of the Serbs’ systematic destruction of non-Serbian religious monuments, see Roy Gutman, “Unholy War: Serbs Target Culture, Heritage of Bosnia’s Muslims,” Newsday, September 2, 1992, 3. See also Robert Fisk, Waging War on History: In Former Yugoslavia, Whole Cultures Are Being Obliterated,” Independent (London), June 20 1994, 18.
41. Chuck Sudetic, “Observers Blame Serb-Led Army for Escalating War in Croatia,” New York Times, December 3, 1991, A8; Blaine Harden, “EC Withdraws Ambassadors from Belgrade: Serbia Rebuked Again on Bosnian War,” Washington Post, May 12, 1992, A14; idem, “U.S. Joins EC in Recalling Envoy from Belgrade: Serbian Aggression in Bosnia Cited as International Countermea-sures Take Shape,” Washington Post, May 13, 1992, A25; Jeri Laber and Ivana Nizich [of Helsinki Watch], “Milošević’s Land Grab,” Washington Post, May 25, 1992, A25.
42. Blaine Harden, “The Enemy around Us: A Serb View: State Media, Age-Old Traditions Fuel Sense of Victimization,” Washington Post, May 7, 1992, A33; “The World Watches Murder” (editorial), New York Times, June 24, 1992, A20.
43. Order of the International Court of Justice, April 8, 1993, concerning “Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Yugoslavia [Serbia and Montenegro]),” Security Council document S/25686, dated April 29, 1993; Stephen Kinzer, “Belgrade Is Urged to Control Serbs: World Court Asks Yugoslavia to Work against Genocide by Its Allies in Bosnia,” New York Times, April 9, 1993, A5; Eugene Robinson, “World Court Orders Belgrade to Prevent ‘Genocide’ in Bosnia,” Washington Post, April 9, 1993, A19.
44. The legal basis for the establishment of the tribunal, its jurisdiction, and its organization is defined in UN document S/25704, dated May 3, 1993, entitled “Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to Paragraph 2 of Security Council Resolution 808 (1993).” By Resolution 808 of February 22, 1993, the Security Council decided that “an international [war crimes] tribunal shall be established for the prosecution of persons responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia since 1991.”
45. See Roger Cohen, “Tribunal to Cite Bosnia Serb Chief as War Criminal,” New York Times, April 24, 1995, Al.
46. As cited in Patricia Forestier, “Genocide! How the Barbarities of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ Were Spawned by Psychiatry,” Freedom, May 1993, 11.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Mirko Grmek, Marc Gjidara, and Neven Šimac, Le nettoyage ethnique: Documents historiques sur une idéologic serbe (Paris: Fayard, 1993), 312.
51. Malcolm, op. cit., 217.
52. Forestier, op. cit., 11.
53. Ibid., 6, 11,34.
54. See the chapter by Brad Blitz in this volume.
55. “Final Report of the Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 (1992),” UN Security Council document S/674, May 27, 1994,51–55.
56. The testimony of Pero Popović, a former guard of the Sušica camp in Vlasenica, is of particular value for establishing the chain of command to the Belgrade leadership. He has been granted political asylum in the United States and given immunity to prosecution in exchange for testimony to the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. See Cohen, “Ex-Guard for Serbs”; idem, “Bosnian Camp Survivors.”
57. Two apologists for the Belgrade regime deserve special mention: former UNPROFOR General Lewis MacKenzie and European Community “peace talks” negotiator Lord David Owen. For their own respective reasons, both have emphasized the moral equivalency of victim and aggressor. MacKenzie, after leaving his post in Sarajevo, emerged on a speaking tour in the United States and Canada paid for by the Serbian lobbying organization SerbNet. See the chapter by Brad Blitz in this volume. Owen actually instructed Cherif Bassiouni, the chairman of the UN Commission of Experts, to “go easy” on the Serbian leadership and to find all sides equally guilty, so that the “peace negotiations” could go forward. See R. C. Longworth, “Peace vs. Justice: DePaul Professor Fears UN Sabotaged his Inquiry into Yugoslav War Crimes,” Chicago Tribune, September 2, 1994, 1. Bassiouni’s testimony of April 4, 1995, before the CSCE (Helsinki Commission) makes clear that UN authorities systematically attempted to sabotage his investigations.
58. Testimony of Serbian death camp survivors, as given to the Rape/Genocide Law Project, Hamden, CT.
59. Norman Cigar, “The Serbo-Croatian War, 1991: Political and Military Dimensions,” Journal of Strategic Studies (London) 16, no. 3 (1993): 297–338.
60. Mary Battiata, “Serbian Guerrilla Camps Operate inside Croatia: Serbs Train inside Croatia for Civil War,” Washington Post, July 22, 1991, Al; Stephen Engelberg, “Serbia Sending Supplies to Compatriots in Croatia,” New York Times, July 27, 1991, A3; John Kifner, “Yugoslav Army Reported Fighting in Bosnia to Help Serbian Forces,” New York Times, January 27, 1994, Al.
61. Battiata, op. cit.
62. Forestier, op. cit., 8.
63. Free Inquiry (quarterly journal of the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism) 13, no. 2 (spring 1993): 2, 67.
64. Radovan Čolević, “Socijalisti: Akademik Mihailo Marković: Angažman je danas etički imperativ” (The socialists: The academician Mihailo Marković: Engagement is an ethical imperative today), Stav (Attitude) (Novi Sad, Serbia), November 16, 1990, 9.
65. Mihailo Marković and Nikola Milošević, “Mogu li zajedno slobodna i jednakost” (Can freedom and equality exist together), Nedeljna borba (Sunday struggle) (Belgrade), February 23–24, 1991, 6.
66. Ljiljana Habjanović-Đurović, “Revolucionar u ruralnoj kontrarevoluciji: Zoran-Dindić, jedna beogradska prica” ([A revolutionary in a rural counterrevolution: Zoran Đinđić, a Belgrade story), Duga (Belgrade), May 28-June 10, 1994, 17.
67. Predrag Finci, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 68, no. 2 (November 1994): 84–85.
68. Čubrilović, “Iseljavanje Arnauta,” 106–24; idem, “Deportation of Albanians,” 114–34.