The Bosnian Genocide: Historical Dilemmas

This section is intended to introduce students and researchers to one of the key historical questions regarding the Bosnian genocide, offering different perspectives on how the issue might be tackled. It shows readers not only how scholars utilize evidence to present their respective arguments, but how certain topics in the study of genocide continue to be debated.

QUESTION:
Was the international community justified in not initially taking military action to prevent ethnic cleansing in Bosnia?

Introduction

Despite the knowledge of genocidal incidents in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s, the international community’s response did not quell Serbian and Bosnian Serbian actions immediately. The United States, the European Union (EU), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the United Nations (UN) responded cautiously to events in Bosnia, leading Bosniaks to suffer displacement, massacres, and war crimes while the Bosnian War raged.

However, as Bosnian Serb violence against Muslims became more severe, international actions, in the form of sending UN peacekeepers, NATO bombings of key positions, and international sanctions and condemnations, became more frequent. Nonetheless, these actions were arguably a case of “too little, too late,” as the ethnic cleansing campaign enacted by Serb and Serb-affiliated forces in Bosnia had achieved many of its objectives by the time peace came in 1995.

The international community’s initial lukewarm response to events in Bosnia was indicative of its own interests in the region. As it became apparent that Serbian ethnic cleansing campaigns were aimed at the potential removal of an entire group, the international community, led by the United States and the EU, finally acted. Given the foreign policy interests of the major world powers, there was little incentive to act. Direct intervention finally came when Serb ethnic cleansing policies became far too extreme to overlook. However, it raises the following question: Was the international community justified in not initially taking military action to prevent ethnic cleansing in Bosnia?

In her Perspective essay, Mary Hampton argues that the international response to the breakup of Yugoslavia was “slow but unsure.” Hampton explains that as the post–Cold War world began to take form, the major powers were reluctant to engage in Europe’s Balkan region. Assumptions about the role of other powers or the United Nations, as well as a lack of national interests in the region, led to hesitation on the part of the United States and the EU. Involvement came later as things rapidly escalated to the point of genocide.

By way of contrast, Brian G. Smith’s Perspective essay argues that the international community’s involvement in Bosnia was limited. Complex questions over military intervention tied the hands of the major powers and the UN. While a more timely response could have halted the worst of the violence, caution and hesitancy held back the United States, the EU, and NATO from acting in a timely fashion. By the time military intervention took place, ethnic cleansing policies had already taken a significant toll on the Bosniak population.

Lastly, in his Perspective essay, Henry Carey discusses how, despite the United States being able and willing to become more involved in the Bosnian situation, domestic politics had a significant impact on the Clinton administration’s reluctance to be more proactive amid the crisis. While President Clinton and others considered more concerted U.S. action in the region, political considerations at home ultimately took precedence and led to a delayed response.

Perspective 1: Justifying Delayed Western Military Intervention in Bosnia

The international response to the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s was slow but unsure. The ongoing Yugoslav wars that started in 1991 represented one of the first international crises of the emerging post–Cold War world, and the first to occur in Europe. It is therefore no surprise that immediate military action was not taken by the international community. Samantha Power and many others have argued that the international community, especially the United States and Europe, “stood by” while approximately 200,000 Bosnians were killed and another 2 million were displaced. A number of factors contributed to the delayed decision by the international community to employ military force to halt ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, where the process of Serb-targeted violence against and displacement of Croats, but especially against Bosnian Muslims, began in late 1991. The reasons for the delayed response were hard to justify morally, but politically and strategically justifiable based on the realities of a radically altered international security environment that were as of yet underdefined for the United States, Europe, and Russia.

In the early moments of the post–Cold War era, the parameters of great power interest and the boundaries of their spheres of influence were not known and were in flux in 1991 when Slovenia and then Croatia declared independence. There was no consensus in Europe concerning the political and security roles of the newly emerging European Union, whose restated mission included political and security policy coordination. The lack of international consensus regarding the post–Cold War security role of the UN, and the concomitant absence of a clearly defined post–Cold War mission for NATO, were key elements in the less-than-successful initial international response to the unfolding nightmare of ethnic cleansing and brutality in Bosnia. In short, Yugoslavia’s eruption into civil and then transnational war was an early and severe aftershock of the Cold War’s collapse. The international community had no blueprints, guidelines, or courses of action (COA) prepared for responding to the wars and accompanying brutal practices of ethnic cleansing with military force.

The first factor that contributed to the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia and the delayed international response to abuses in Bosnia was the collapse of the bipolar Cold War international order. The Soviet Union and the United States had managed a world divided into two blocs for a half century. By the end of the 1950s, the United States and the West basically ceded Eastern and Central Europe to Soviet dominance. Although Yugoslavia remained somewhat of an outlier because of the uncanny capability of its national leader, Tito, to maintain Yugoslav interests largely independent of Soviet penetration, it was still considered within the Soviet sphere of influence. Further, Russia and then the Soviet Union long considered itself the guardian of Slav identity and interests, a phenomenon that underscored Soviet interest and influence especially in Serbia. Partly for these reasons, the George H. W. Bush administration was not interested in intervening in what it determined to be a domestic political situation as Yugoslavia began imploding in 1991 with war breaking out between the Serbs and Croats, and Bosnian strife looming. Secretary of State James Baker famously opined that the United States had “no dog in this fight,” a colloquialism broadcasting that American interests were not in play.

The Bush administration also kept its distance from the emerging crisis in Yugoslavia because the end of the Cold War witnessed the formal emergence of the EU in 1992 and a wide-eyed optimistic belief by many that Europe could now handle events in its own backyard. For advocates in Europe, the demise of the Cold War opened new opportunities for managing European affairs independently of U.S. heavy influence. The breakup of Yugoslavia seemed to offer Europe the chance to take responsibility for events on the continent. Jacques Poos, then foreign minister of Luxembourg and an activist for European unity, stated: “This is the hour of Europe.” Further: “It is not the hour of the Americans.” The fact was, however, that there actually was no European consensus on how to respond to the situation in the dissolving Yugoslavia. There was no EU military force, and no EU concerted policy emerged. Yet, because of claims such as that of Poos, Power observes: “The United States happily stepped aside.” A leadership vacuum therefore prevailed in the West.

The other two institutions that could have responded with military force to halt ethnic cleansing were the UN and NATO. The UN did in fact act, but it acted by sending peacekeepers, the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR), into a situation that required a different response. While UN peacekeepers, backed by the European states, attempted to protect “safe areas” that were declared, and to protect humanitarian aid being sent to Bosnians from abroad, they often found themselves standing helpless while violence continued, and at one point in 1994, were themselves taken hostage by the Serbs.

In the face of ineffective UN protection and nonexistent U.S. and EU military intervention, the institution that might have made a real difference in halting Serb aggression was NATO. But the fact was that NATO members were the very same states that could not bring themselves to intervene militarily. During 1994 and early in 1995, NATO air strikes were used in a limited capacity to try and deter Serb behavior, but they did not stop Serb aggression. Not until August of 1995, in the aftermath of the massacre of between 6,000 and 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebenica by Serb forces, the worst in Europe since World War II, and the fact that Croat and Bosnian ground forces were actually beginning to have some success in repelling Serb forces, did the Bill Clinton administration decide the time had come to put NATO’s reputation on the line. The administration advocated successfully for a NATO military campaign of bombing Serb targets. The campaign was named Operation DELIBERATE FORCE and was instrumental in halting the war and leading to the Dayton Peace talks of December 1995.

In conclusion, the use of military force is not decided upon and employed lightly by democracies. The pooled resources and collective decision making necessary for international organizations to employ military force is even more difficult. While the norm of intervention into the affairs of sovereign states on behalf of human rights has been gaining in credibility and acceptance since the horrible abuses of the Holocaust began coming to light in 1945, there was certainly no Western consensus in 1992 concerning when to use military force and how to stop ethnic cleansing. The fact that it took the West until 1995 to construct an effective military response to the cleansing being carried out by the Serbs was morally shameful, but understandable and even justified given the complexities created by the conflict in the wider context of the undefined post–Cold War international order.

Mary Hampton

Perspective 2: Limited Intervention by the International Community

The international community’s response to the Bosnian War and the Yugoslav wars in general was one of limited intervention. Not until the fall of 1995 did the intervention escalate to large-scale bombing. Large numbers of new ground forces were put in place only after the Dayton Accords. Would an early overwhelming military intervention been more legal, moral, and wise than limited intervention? On each point, the international community was justified in not taking early overwhelming military action against the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.

Among scholars of international law, there is an ongoing debate concerning the legality of humanitarian military intervention in the face of genocidal acts and human rights atrocities. The legal debate is murky, at best. There are many contradictory elements of the UN charter concerning when force may be used, the inviolability of sovereignty, and a requirement to promote human rights. Much of the debate boils down to the requirements to respect the sovereignty of states enshrined in much of the UN Charter versus the human rights elements of the Charter and the requirements to prevent and punish genocide through proper UN channels under the 1948 Genocide Convention. Since the genocides of the 1990s, the UN and human rights organizations have attempted to put in place the “Responsibility to Protect” as a suggested change to international conventions that would eliminate the legal questions, allowing for intervention when a sovereign state fails to protect its own citizens from avoidable atrocities like mass murder, rape, and orchestrated starvation. Without such an additional treaty being agreed to, even limited military intervention can be seen as pushing the bounds of what is legally justified, let alone overwhelming military intervention on behalf of one side in a conflict.

Setting aside questions of international law, was the delay in using heavy NATO air power to intervene in the Bosnian civil war justified from the standpoint of morality? Most war-related theories of morality are based on some version of Just War Doctrine, which describes when countries are morally justified in going to war. Most modern Just War Doctrine focuses on self-defense as the only morally justifiable cause of war. Humanitarian military intervention rests on the assumption that the morality of self-defense can be extended to the citizens of other countries when their own governments cannot provide protection or are themselves supporting or committing genocide. That assumption sets aside the critical ethical question of interventions undermining the international order, which is designed to prevent war. This is further complicated by the lack of universal agreement as to the principles under which states would have the moral duty to intervene. Finally, some have moral reservations about the financial cost of constant military intervention compared to the greater amount of death and suffering that could be avoided by using the same financial investment to combat chronic health and hunger problems.

The moral desire to protect civilians during extreme situations is clear. The goal of any intervention would be to reduce civilian deaths and atrocities. Many organizations and states are attempting to create a moral norm mandating the duty to intervene in a way that does not undermine overall global peace and security. This approach assumes that no response at all would be morally unjustifiable given current capacities to intervene and the modern potential for timely information gathering that can alert the international community to ongoing mass atrocities. However, the use of overwhelming military power in response to a multisided civil war that included ethnic cleansing of both city neighborhoods and entire regions could not guarantee fewer casualties or atrocities. Simply put, an unrestrained military invasion by hundreds of thousands of NATO troops moving to secure every location at the same time within a country with indefinite occupation by ground forces attempting to keep the peace through violence would not necessarily have produced a more moral outcome judged by death and suffering to civilians.

Even if we assume nonintervention is morally unjustifiable, limited intervention cannot be considered morally unjustified. Limited ground forces from the UN mission in Croatia moved into Bosnia before the fighting even started. An arms embargo was put into place as an attempt to avoid escalation. Numerous cease-fires were brokered through constant and active diplomacy. As early as May 1992, the UN imposed broad economic, travel, and financial sanctions on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which was supporting the actions of the Serbs in Bosnia as leverage to reach a negotiated end to the war. Five major safe haven cities were established in 1993 with limited air power in support of the vulnerable UN troops on the ground. Military force was used to create safe corridors for civilians fleeing active areas of the war. Aid convoys and airlifts were ongoing throughout the civil war, along with aid workers on the ground, protecting the lives of millions of people directly affected by the war and ethnic cleansing. In May 1993, a special international criminal tribunal was created as pressure to minimize atrocities by holding individuals responsible for any war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the war. Some of these efforts had perverse effects, such as possibly aiding the process of ethnic cleansing. Others can be considered clear failures in execution or concept. None of them can be considered a morally unjustified failure to act.

Finally, was the decision by the international community to avoid early overwhelming military intervention a wise one? A consideration of efficacy of military action requires consideration of the political ends to which the military action is seen as the means. In early 1992, overwhelming military intervention would have required an enormous commitment of ground forces, created intense hostility from Russia and China, and involved peace enforcement over a resisting population. The intervention would have come at a time when the international community was intensely concerned over instability in the recently collapsed Soviet Union and had doubts about expanding the role of NATO. The wisdom of such an approach is at least in doubt, a different choice being at least justifiable.

When NATO applied overwhelming air power in 1995, the situation was quite different. The international community had brokered an alliance between the Bosnian government and the Croatians. The Croatian military had obtained equipment and had received training in NATO tactical doctrine through the hiring of retired U.S. officers working for an American private consulting firm. Economic sanctions on Serbia had destabilized President Slobodan Milosevic’s regime, pressuring him to cut off aid to the Bosnian Serbs and creating a willingness to reach a negotiated peace agreement. The Bosnian Serb forces fractured after the Croatian army quickly overran Serbian-held Krajina in Croatia in early August 1995, ethnically cleansing 200,000 Serbs from Croatia in the process. The effectiveness of the increased intervention did not rest simply on newfound political will.

The international community was justified in not initially taking overwhelming military action as a means to put an end to the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. This does not mean that delay is always justified. There is a tendency to move to extreme positions concerning the efficacy of humanitarian military intervention. At one extreme, there can be too much of an assumption that military interventions can provide a quick and moral conclusion to atrocities. At the other extreme, there is a tendency to support never intervening anywhere due to the inability to intervene everywhere in the world every time there is a crisis. Humanitarian military intervention can only be judged as legal, moral, and wise on a case-by-case basis that does not ignore the individual realities of an emergent conflict.

Brian G. Smith

Perspective 3: Understandable, Predictable, and Unjustified

While understandable, the international community’s failure to prevent the Bosnian genocide is not morally or legally justified, given the importance of the United Nations (UN) Genocide Convention’s requirement that genocide be halted, and given the some 200,000 dead civilians and 2 million displaced by the intention to destroy in whole or in part the Bosnian Muslim population. However, it was entirely predictable. Various decisions from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (such as the Krstic, and Popovic et al. cases) established that criminal acts of genocide occurred. The judgment of the International Court of Justice (Bosnia v. Serbia, 2007) also established that genocide occurred in Bosnia, with Serbia guilty of failing to prevent the genocide (though not guilty of direct collaboration).

The four-year delay in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and U.S. interventions is understandable, consistent with the principle of political realism that states only intervene militarily in their national interest. No state, including the United States in particular, had ever before intervened to stop genocide. The UN, NATO, and the United States all faced a much more difficult challenge in Bosnia than in the 1994 humanitarian intervention that did occur in Haiti and could have, but did not, occur in Rwanda. If the international community was reluctant in Rwanda, then it would only be more reluctant to face a more ferocious opponent on the ground in Bosnia, even if the latter held more strategic value to the West, which dominates the so-called international community. Still, it can be demonstrated that halting genocide, and the war that facilitated it, in the heart of Europe was in the self-interest of NATO and the United States. However, fear of casualties and the “CNN effect,” following the October 1993 “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia, which led to the deaths of nearly two dozen U.S. helicopter pilots and the subsequent U.S. withdrawal from Somalia, made intervention a difficult prospect. The consequent, increased perceived political risks to the United States from humanitarian intervention were realized only one week later, which led to the aborted U.S. Canadian peacekeeping mission in Haiti that had been sanctioned by the UN as part of the UN-mediated, Governor’s Island peace plan of July 1993. It was only the political embarrassment resulting from these two failures in Somalia and Haiti that President Bill Clinton decided to intervene in Haiti in 1994 and in Bosnia in a small way at about the same time, before undertaking decisive action—though with no U.S. troops on the ground in Bosnia a year later.

The belated interventions by NATO in June–August 1995 and by Croatia in retaking the Western Krajina region of Bosnia, induced the Dayton Peace Agreement of November 1995, which ended the war and the genocide. The intervention was motivated as much by security concerns as humanitarian ones. Neither the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), nor the United States under President Clinton, nor NATO, led by the United States, were willing and able to take significant military action until 1995 and only minimal military action until 1994, years after the genocide began.

Part of this delay was attributable to what turned out to be unsuccessful peace negotiations which could have also halted the genocide, but they, primarily the U.S.-British Vance-Owen initiative, were also not undertaken in earnest until 1993. There were also economic and military sanctions imposed to induce negotiations, but these were applied to the entire former Yugoslavia and thus froze a military advantage to Serbia that was not conducive to a “mutually hurting stalemate” that might have induced negotiations. What ended the genocide was military victory, UN-sanctioned airpower combined with the U.S. covert operations to sponsor the Croatian invasion of the Western Krajina region of Bosnia, which had been conquered early in the war by the Bosnian Serb military and paramilitary supported by Belgrade. Another factor in the delayed reaction was the early development of what has come to be viewed in recent years as the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, which would legally permit UN Security Council authorizations for the use of force inside countries, such as Bosnia, that did not present any clear “threat to international peace” and before all peaceful alternatives had been clearly attempted and exhausted first.

However, U.S. domestic politics played a key role. Public opinion bears directly on decisions to intervene because presidents weigh its effects on their own political fortunes in upcoming elections. Presidential approval ratings are the best predictors of presidential reelection, even more than the perceived state of the economy, and hence strongly influence presidential decision making. In 1994, Clinton’s approval ratings declined to the lowest level of any U.S. president at that time. While domestically he was secure, the situations in Haiti and Bosnia, with the constant images of starving refugees, killings, and U.S. inaction, contributed heavily to low public perceptions of his performance as president. This motivated Clinton to change policy. Less than two months before the 1994 Congressional midterm elections, Clinton made the decision to invade Haiti. Bosnia’s Dayton talks took place during the Democratic primary, less than a year before the 1996 presidential election. Clinton’s approval rating specifically in foreign affairs also reached a nadir for 1994 at only 40 percent positive and 55 percent negative for the September 1994 poll. Clinton’s stance on the use of force in Bosnia largely mirrored the ups and downs of U.S. public opinion polls. In May 1992, 55 percent of those polled opposed U.S. air strikes against the Serbs, and 61 percent of women—the base of swing votes that had brought Clinton victory in 1992—opposed them. Even Clinton’s own putative base of Democratic voters opposed U.S. armed intervention by 55 percent to 36 percent. By July 1992, only 35 percent favored the “US taking the lead with air strikes against the Serbs.”

Thus, the U.S.-led response, legally sanctioned by the UNSC in 1995 and implemented by NATO in Bosnia, reflected political calculations by President Clinton that were politically motivated and not based on either international legal mandates or moral responsibilities. The European Union was so divided that the newly instituted effort to create a military branch of the EU was doomed to failure. The United States, as the only leading power after the Cold War, was the only entity capable of leading a military intervention against an armed assault that was vastly more horrific and powerful than the armed insurgencies and counterinsurgences, as well as other forms of asymmetric warfare, experienced in the previous decade’s military conflicts in Africa and Central America.

Henry Carey