The collapse of the former Yugoslavia is reputed to have started in June 1991, when Slovenia and Croatia decided to secede from the country. That is when Yugoslavia, once a prosperous country in the Balkan region of southeastern Europe, began to decline. While the country still consisted of four other states, namely Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia, the government (largely dominated by Serbs) tried to prevent its collapse by sending troops to Slovenia and Croatia. Slovenia managed to keep its independence, while Croatia was stuck in war. The evident explanation for such an unfolding of the events is the proportion of the Serbian population in each place: in Slovenia there were too few Serbs to oppress the Slovenians, but there were enough Serbs to fight against the Croats in Croatian territory. Yet the war in Croatia was only the preamble to a larger war that started as soon as Bosnia attempted to become an independent state. It is worth mentioning that the Bosnians’ decision to secede was based on a logical assumption. In that most multiethnic and multireligious state of Yugoslavia, its Muslim population was afraid of Serbian oppression.1 Eventually it was precisely such oppression that was visited upon them in the ensuing Balkan War—a war that was mainly fought between Serbs (including Bosnian Serbs) on the one side and Bosnian Muslims on the other.
Samantha Power argues that the interethnic conflict was stirred up by Slobodan Milošević, the Serbian president, who promoted “Serb dominance.” While Bosnian Serbs were clearly perceived by Serbs outside Bosnia as friends, and Bosnian Croats could at least rely on military support from Croatia (whose war lasted only seven months), Bosnian Muslims could do nothing but wait for help from outside. The main help eventually provided came from the United Nations. It was aimed at regulating the relations between Serbs and Bosnian Serbs, as well as with Bosnian Muslims, and consisted of imposing an arms embargo in 1991. That left the Muslim population practically without weapons, while the Bosnian Serb Army (consisting of soldiers from the Yugoslav National Army and Bosnian Serbs) took possession of nearly all the arms in Bosnia. There then ensued “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia, actions aimed at eradicating Muslims from the territory of the former Yugoslavia. Power describes the actions of the Serbs: “They forced fathers to castrate their sons or molest their daughters; they humiliated and raped (often impregnating) young women. Theirs was a deliberate policy of destruction and degradation: destruction so this avowed enemy race would have no homes to which to return; degradation so the former inhabitants would not stand tall—and thus would not dare again stand—in Serb-held territory.” Peaceful organizations were involved in the Balkan War practically from the very beginning, and the prospect of military intervention, including U.S. military involvement, was deferred or deemed untenable. Power elucidates that decision by citing the general reluctance of the U.S. to use military force in other countries, especially on “mere humanitarian grounds,” since the end of the Vietnam War. The Vietnam experience had turned into a phobia toward foreign military entanglements that was reinforced when policymakers considered that U.S. military involvement in the Balkan region could turn into the country’s “second Vietnam.”2 Even the success of the First Gulf War could not fully counteract this anxiety about the repeat of a Vietnam-style “quagmire” in the Balkans. Many policymakers and political figures understood the situation in this way. Richard Holbrooke, an “assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs under President Carter” and a “board member of the International Rescue Committee,” who traveled to Bosnia to see the situation with his own eyes, wrote a memorandum to then-candidate Bill Clinton, sharing his anxiety whether “President Clinton [would] carry out what candidate Clinton proposed.”3 Holbrooke underlined his dissatisfaction with Bush’s inactivity with regard to the situation in the Balkans, calling the government’s response “weak” and “inadequate.” He stressed that the U.S. reaction to the war in the former Yugoslavia should not be limited to the “choice between Vietnam and doing nothing, as the Bush Administration has portrayed it.”4 In the end, Clinton authorized a military intervention in the Balkans—although he did so not at the beginning of his presidency but only in July 1995.5
One can argue that the fear of repeating the Vietnam experience is only one part of the explanation for the U.S. adherence to a noninterventionist policy. The American debacle in Southeast Asia, of course, made the country cautious about sending its troops to foreign territories, but what about the huge military effort undertaken in the First Gulf War? Vietnam does not wholly account for American fears about military intervention in the mid-1990s.
Compared to the other wars that are analyzed in this book, I would stress, the Balkan War stands out. Two points make it conspicuous: first, it was a civil war; second, it eventually resulted in crimes against humanity and genocide. Due to the nature of the conflict, UN peacekeepers were its primary boots on the ground at first; neither the U.S. nor any other country that could provide military support was initially supposed to be involved in the war. However, as history demonstrates, numerous conflicts prove that the presence of UN troops is sometimes insufficient to stop war. In such cases, outside military intervention becomes inevitable. The Balkan War was one of those cases when external military involvement was needed. It was eventually carried out by the U.S.
The intervention, as mentioned earlier, came after much waiting and hesitation. According to Dina Iordanova, Yugoslavs thought that “the West would rush to intervene and put an end to the conflict there” and were truly perplexed when it did not.6 The U.S. government did not rush in because, according to Richard N. Haass, Bosnia was exclusively a “humanitarian tragedy with few or no strategic U.S. interests.”7 In the initial phase, the only help provided by the U.S. and the UN was humanitarian aid.8 Although the Bosnian War (the longest and the bloodiest of the Yugoslav wars) started in 1992, UN peacekeepers were sent to Bosnia only in 1993. Ultimately it was the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica (which was supposed to be protected by the UN) in 1995 that provoked a more emphatic reaction from the international community.9 By that time the genocide had already taken the lives of more than 200,000 Bosnians.10 Before late 1995 the Clinton administration “continually fed the hopes of the Bosnian government that the United States would actually do something to defend those values that it kept proclaiming.”11 Matthew Parish contends, “After Somalia, the US was reluctant to send ground troops and only resorted to the use of air power to bomb the Bosnian Serbs to the negotiating table. Military intervention occurred in the context of a series of stop-start attempts to negotiate a peace agreement between the warring sides, hampered by the inability of EU and US governments to agree what peace treaty model to push. . . . The lukewarm support of the US government for the EU-led plans caused the war to drag on far longer than it might otherwise have done.” And although, with regard to its role in resolving the Balkan conflict, the international community was criticized both in the beginning (for not intervening immediately) and later (for not being able to come to an agreement and stop the war), the efforts of the U.S. and its European allies to end the conflict were colossal.12 Gale Stokes writes, “The Western powers . . . stop[ped] the massive killing and ethnic cleansing by imposing military force under the auspices of NATO and the United Nations.”13 The war ended in mid-October 1995, and on November 21 a peace agreement was reached in Dayton, Ohio. Yet in early 1998 war broke out in the province of Kosovo. That conflict was stopped only after NATO military involvement in March 1999.14
The reason for U.S. intervention in the Balkans can be interpreted in various ways. Although some scholars argue that the deferral was caused by the U.S. being unwilling “to sacrifice its own soldiers to save Muslim lives,” the dangers of entering the conflict should not be minimized, nor should what was at stake be reduced to the religious issue. Yugoslavia was a relatively large country in Europe, and stability in the Balkans was vital for the general stability of Europe. Therefore one can argue that late in the twentieth century the U.S. “returned to Europe to save Europe from itself” for the third time that century.15 Shortly after peace was negotiated, Holbrooke stated, “it took some time to realize that we are still part of the balance of power in Europe.”16 And although some scholars doubt that the instability in the Balkans can be compared to the kinds of menace posed by Stalin, Hitler, and Wilhelmine Germany,17 it is reasonable to claim that nobody could have predicted what a destabilized Europe might have caused in the future. The Bosnian genocide should have been a solid enough reason to provoke an intervention. History tells us, however, that the slaughter of thousands of innocent people does not always cause the international community to act.
Discussing the problem of U.S. security and its dependence on the situation in the Balkans, Wayne Bert claims that when the Cold War was over, “the strategic significance of the area [the Balkans] diminished sharply.” Therefore the U.S. felt no urge to get involved in the Balkan region, especially when intervention was considered merely on national security grounds. Bert pinpoints two reasons for the delay in intervening. First, the U.S. preferred that Europe deal with the crisis, since the U.S. was “sensitive to charges of impinging on European turf, weary from the recent Desert Storm initiative to eject Iraq from Kuwait, and lacking ready-made solutions.” Second, the country’s involvement in the Balkan War did not have much support from U.S. citizens or from U.S. foreign policy elites, which the scholar explains via the nation’s still fresh memories of Vietnam as well as “the difficulties in Somalia,” where eighteen U.S. soldiers had been killed in the widely publicized “Black Hawk Down” incident in Mogadishu in 1993, when the corpses of U.S. servicemen had been dragged through the streets.18 Thus, although the U.S. was concerned about the escalating war, it did not send military troops for a long time, being unwilling to risk the lives of Americans. Bert aptly elucidates why the U.S. eventually fought in the Balkans: although the U.S. initially accentuated “humanitarian” but not “security interests,” “there was a US security interest at stake in Bosnia, since any major threat to the values that underline a US-inspired world order does affect security.” In addition, the military inaction of the West (specifically the U.S. and NATO) “would have contributed to the disorientation and weakening of the United States, Russia, the European Community, NATO, and the UN, and would have done considerable harm to the American reputation for maintaining a world order in line with its values.”19
The Balkan War differed immensely from the other wars the U.S. had fought in its history, chiefly because the enemy was not clearly identified. As Nicholas Morris claims, “all sides in Bosnia saw the humanitarian operation as directly helping their opponents.”20 Nevertheless, Bert states, “what is not in dispute is that each of the main protagonists in the war in Bosnia was involved in ethnic cleansing, each was involved in violence against civilians, each broke its share of agreements and cease-fires, each had paramilitary groups assisting the more standard military units, and each had detention camps.” This difficulty notwithstanding, U.S. involvement “was quickly successful and with no loss of American life.”21
The 1990s is replete with various civil wars around the world, some of which included genocide. The most significant conflicts for the U.S., for various reasons, were those that escalated in Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. The war in Somalia ended for the U.S. relatively soon; after the eighteen American deaths mentioned earlier, the U.S. withdrew its forces. The intervention in Somalia was a purely humanitarian mission, yet it failed to put an immediate stop to the conflict, and American soldiers were killed and wounded. Rwanda was an even more complicated case: the U.S. did not provide any support to stop the genocide of Tutsi and moderate Hutu in 1994. The unsuccessful U.S. involvement in Somalia likely influenced the country’s hesitation in the cases of Rwanda and later Bosnia. The U.S. did not want to intervene in Rwanda because it understood that it might not be easy to restore peace in another African country. When asked about Rwanda and the lack of will to intervene there, President Clinton remarked, “Lesson number one is, don’t go into one of those things and say, as the U.S. said when we started in Somalia, ‘Maybe we’ll be done in a month because it’s a humanitarian crisis.’ . . . Because there are almost always political problems and sometimes military conflicts, which bring about these crises.”22 The U.S. failure to immediately intervene in the Balkan War was also considerably influenced by the country’s involvement in Somalia. Power claims that “one way the administration deflected attention away from Bosnia was to focus on another humanitarian crisis, in Somalia.” She concludes that “even though U.S. troops would not deploy to Africa for several months, the Somalia famine had already begun drawing attention away from the Balkans”; the extensive coverage of the humanitarian catastrophe in Somalia, as in a zero-sum game, resulted in fading interest in the Bosnian case.23
The Balkan conflict eventually did draw the attention of the West. The war became one of the major military U.S. involvements in the 1990s, aimed at stopping the genocide of Bosnian Muslims and restoring peace in the conflict-ridden area. The focus of this treatment of the Balkan War and the neglect of the two conflicts in Africa is to explain the political and military nature of the war as well as deal with the relatively large involvement of the U.S. in the Balkans. Works of (docu-)fictional film and literature provide a much broader overview of U.S. intervention in the Balkan War as compared to the country’s brief involvement in Somalia and its neglect of the Rwandan genocide.
Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog (1997) seems to implicitly tackle the problem of the unrest in the Balkan region, placing at its heart the story of an invented war in Albania that is supposed to draw attention away from a sex scandal involving the U.S. president. Quite obviously referring to the scandal of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, and making it the movie’s central theme, the film manages to reflect a rather complicated political situation in the 1990s. Obviously Albania was never a part of Yugoslavia, but given the large population of Albanians in Kosovo and the confrontation between Serbs and Albanians in 1998, the reference to Albania in the film hints at the 1990s conflicts in the Balkans. Easily selling the American people the sham story about the war in Albania, the film’s main characters, who work for the president, point up the fact that the vast majority of Americans know little about the Balkan region and the situation there. Yet the choice of the place where the actual war should be—Albania—is rather symbolic, as it reveals how unstable the Balkan region was in the 1990s.
That Wag the Dog figuratively raises the issue of the Balkan War is only a speculation. There are a few films that overtly deal with U.S. intervention in the Balkans. John Moore’s Behind Enemy Lines (2001), Predrag Antonijević’s Savior (1998), and Mimi Leder’s The Peacemaker (1997) will be analyzed in detail. Another interesting example of a cinematic representation of the Balkan War is Boris Malagurski’s The Weight of Chains (2010), a documentary account that narrates the history of the conflict and attempts to assess the role the West played in the war. The documentary openly argues that the Balkan War was indirectly provoked by the West. In the film, Malagurski explains that the strategy of “privatization through liquidation” imposed on Yugoslavia by its own economists, who were influenced by the West, caused a decline in the country’s standard of living that, in turn, provoked tension between representatives of the different ethnic groups. It is interesting that the documentary fully blames the West, completely neglecting the fact that the West could not have imposed ethnic hatred—the grounds for the Balkan War. The ethnic and religious tensions that inflamed the population were the result of social instability in the Balkan region. One cannot therefore blame the West for the massacres organized and carried out by Serbs as well as other ethnic groups. In this context, the words of Iordanova seem very apt: “In the 1990s, it no longer takes aloof foreigners to problematise the Balkans, as the Region is willingly problematised by insiders.”24
Yet relevant works of film and literature provide a somewhat different interpretation of the role the U.S. played in the Balkan War. While the literature—Douglas Cavanaugh’s Into Hell’s Fire (2007) and Tom Foley’s This Way to Heaven (2000), which I will take up shortly—tends to criticize the deferral and nonintervention, the films treating the conflict offer a multilateral perspective on U.S. involvement in the Balkans. Moore’s Behind Enemy Lines primarily censures the American military intervention and demonstrates that the soldiers did not comprehend their role in the war; Antonijević’s Savior narrates the U.S. war experience from the viewpoint of a vengeful soldier who is morally reborn and becomes a rescue soldier over the course of the war; and Leder’s The Peacemaker presents the United States as an exceptional country that should intervene in international affairs and solve global problems. Despite the differences in perspective, all the films approach the problem of U.S. intervention in the Balkan War seriously, attempting to narrate the history of U.S. involvement but also to display the nation’s humanitarian side.
Behind Enemy Lines can be divided into two parts. The first concerns the definition of the Balkan War and the role of U.S. soldiers in it, while the second deals with the active U.S. participation in the war. Both are important to analyze in order to define the war as a 1990s (or a post-Vietnam) conflict.
At the beginning of Behind Enemy Lines, the director introduces the audience to the protagonist, Lt. Chris Burnett (Owen Wilson), a U.S. Navy pilot who works with a partner, Jeremy Stackhouse (Gabriel Macht). Burnett is an elite pilot, and the chief purpose of his being in the military, as he himself articulates it, is to take part in combat action. However, his commander, Adm. Leslie McMahon Reigart (Gene Hackman), thinks he is not ready for real war; more than that, no combat is expected in the near future, so Burnett mostly spends time observing training. The audience witnesses him making bets and playing with a baseball or speculating about the Balkan War, ridiculing the role of U.S. soldiers in it. An important scene that vividly illustrates this takes place in the canteen. “Don’t you forget what you’re doing here,” says one of the soldiers to Burnett, and Burnett responds, “What we’re doing here? Are you kidding me? Oh, I am eating Jell-O and he [Stackhouse] is wiping his hands.” The soldier does not understand Burnett’s frustration, for he believes that in the military “everybody has a role to play”: his role as a marine is to “take care of the serious business,” while the role of a naval pilot is to “eat Jell-O.” The difference between the attitudes of the two men is pivotal. While Burnett is annoyed and irritated, seeing his comrades just waiting and doing nothing but pretending to take part in war, the other soldier accepts the rules dictated by the existing chain of military command and thus follows orders, whether they are to fight or to wait. Burnett is portrayed as a potential hero, unwilling to wait but ready to fight and demonstrating a preparedness to destroy the enemy.
In the scene that follows this bit of dialogue, the viewer witnesses two marines in another corner of the canteen, competing to see who can do more push-ups, surrounded by a crowd who is feverishly pulling for them. Burnett makes a comment: “See, that’s exactly what I am talking about. Everybody thinks they’re gonna get a chance to punch some Nazi in the face at Normandy. And those days are over. They are long gone. I used to think I was gonna get a chance to do it. Now I realize I’m gonna be eating Jell-O.” Cynthia Weber argues that Burnett’s remark signifies the decisive distinction between a “moral grammar” used for World War II and a different “moral grammar” of the wars in the 1990s; in World War II it was clear who the enemy was, but in the 1990s the uncertainty about the enemy was both “logically and morally” hard for soldiers to grasp.25 Nevertheless one can speculate that this difference can also be observed in all the other wars that had taken place in the intervening decades, including the Korean War and the Vietnam War, where the enemy was defined as a representative of communism. Thus the wars in the 1990s overtly signify a change in U.S. interventionism. Weber stresses that in the 1990s, there can be no clear evil because “the enemy keeps changing.”26 Burnett’s words vividly illustrate this predicament: “Well, today is Tuesday—I think we’re helping these people. No, no, now it’s switched around. Now we’re helping . . .” Barnett’s indignation, however, also aptly underscores the complex nature of the Balkan War itself, a conflict that made it absolutely impossible to understand who were the “bad guys,” who the “good guys.” The absence of such a clear moral differentiation apparently caused any external intervention to be postponed and eventually made the mission very difficult to carry out, for commanders and soldiers alike.
In the next scene Barnett confesses to Admiral Reigart his dissatisfaction with their idleness: “If we’re at war, why doesn’t somebody act like we’re at war. Cause as far as I can tell, we go out, we fly around, and we come back. Now, maybe we’re pretending we’re in the middle of the fight, but that’s all we’re doing is pretending cause we’re not fighting. We’re watching.” The situation echoes the action, or rather its lack, in Jarhead, when Swofford, narrating the marines’ daily routine, singles out the soldiers’ main task: to wait. After the First Gulf War, an American soldier, now stationed in an Eastern European conflict zone, faces the same problem experienced by his comrades at war not long ago in the Middle East: first, he does not understand why one would need military forces if there is “no war,” and second, he cannot comprehend the purpose of the sort of intervention he is involved in, when omission is the only choice given. Yet the scene also unambiguously reflects the hesitation of the United States to intervene in the Balkan region to help stop the fighting and the country’s preference for waiting during the war years of the 1990s.
In the film’s second half, Burnett gets the chance to directly participate in war after Serbs bring down his plane when it enters a no-fly zone. The Serbs are trying to avoid having any Western soldiers in their territory, for they would see that the Serbs were violating the peace agreement. Stackhouse is eventually executed by one of the Serbs, whereas Burnett—who tries to hide—is discovered. For the rest of the film, Burnett is running from a group of Serbs who are hunting him. He manages to contact headquarters in the U.S., and Admiral Reigart informs him that an American rescue plane will be sent for him and gives him the rendezvous location. However, Burnett has changed uniforms with a dead local soldier in order to disguise himself from his pursuers. This leads to a fatal misunderstanding on the part of headquarters: the rescue plane is commanded to return, as Burnett is reported to be dead. Burnett manages to send another signal to headquarters, and Reigart organizes another rescue mission. The audience watches a scene in which U.S. soldiers and their commanders prepare to set off, to serve their country, to help their comrade, to “get [their] boy back.” The mission proves successful: Burnett is saved. Admiral Reigart is eventually dismissed from his post.
The film’s ending is what reveals the actions of Americans in the war to be humanitarian. Burnett manages to photograph mass graves of Bosnian Muslims (civilians) as evidence of the peace agreement’s violation, and the pictures are eventually made public. The intervention is justified because, as Weber puts it, “all [U.S. soldiers] need to do is ensure that they fight on the side of right. What is right is to defend humanity by preventing genocide: this was part of what justified US actions in Europe in WWII, and it is what justifies many 1990s US military interventions.”27 Burnett proves to be a “real” soldier, even if this only happens toward the end of the narrative. Indeed the viewer witnesses Burnett’s transformation from the man who has questioned the U.S. military to the man who serves in that military to fight for the just cause, to protect the innocent, and to be proudly referred to as a soldier. In this respect, Burnett turns into a rather conventional, idealized image of a U.S. soldier from the past, specifically from World War II—the warrior who fights for a better life for future generations without sparing his own life.
Savior applies a different approach to define the role of an American soldier in the Balkan War and, consequently, to characterize U.S. intervention. The film is a unique example among those analyzed in this project because it is the only one to show an American soldier, in this case the mercenary Guy (Dennis Quaid), fighting on the Serbian side. Some scholars have argued that in the Balkan War, the Serbs were the most violent, whereas Bosnian Muslims were the “least guilty”; such claims have no clear proof, and the accusation of greater Serb brutality can be explained by their “more visible” actions being documented by various media.28 Hence, while it is somewhat inaccurate to display Bosnian Muslims as the “good guys,” this tendency is evident in film representations, where the Serbs are most often depicted as the enemy. Unlike in the actual conflict, the films about it do not seem to pull any punches about who the enemy is, although they raise this question. For example, in Behind Enemy Lines, Burnett’s attitude concerning the soldiers’ lack of awareness of who the enemy is seems to be correct: the soldiers never know which side they will be fighting on or supporting the next day. Savior takes a similar stance, presenting an American who fights for the Serbs, thus questioning the view that the Serbs were the only ethnic group who were murdering innocent people and violating the peace (and other) agreements.
Savior provides a clear explanation for why Guy is fighting against the Bosnians: he is figuratively taking revenge on Muslims (whom he considers terrorists). At the beginning of the film, the audience sees Guy’s wife and son killed in an explosion planned by Islamic terrorists. Hence his mission in the Balkans turns into a struggle against Bosnians that is grounded in religious hatred. He fights his personal war—a war against Muslims. In one scene he shoots a Bosnian boy who is only trying to get a goat over a fence and poses no danger at all, then inhales, takes out a massive cross that he wears on his chest, and looks at it. This impulse characterizes his actions as a struggle against non-Christians, specifically Muslims. The scene is very provocative and disturbing. Guy obviously believes that his actions are just because he is fighting against terrorists. Yet his mistake is to equate terrorism with Islam: he considers every Muslim, including the boy he killed, a terrorist.
Later, the viewer notices significant changes in Guy’s attitude toward the war as he realizes that the extermination of Bosnian Muslims will not bring back his wife and son. He starts to understand that innocent Muslims are also suffering and dying in this merciless war. His transformation is vividly illustrated in the scene where he and the Serbian soldier Goran (Sergej Trifunović) get into the house of an old Muslim woman, who sits on the bed, delusional, twirling an apple in her hands, and mumbling something in Bosnian. Next to her, on the floor, Guy finds an executed man and a woman (obviously one of them is the woman’s son or daughter), and there is a crying baby hidden in the wardrobe. Realizing that Goran will not let the baby live if discovered, Guy puts a pacifier into its mouth and closes the wardrobe. Goran makes some nasty jokes about the old woman and Guy; Goran adds that he himself likes younger women, pointing at the dead woman on the floor. The Serbian soldier expresses his regret that the woman is already dead, implying that had she been alive, he would have raped her. Next, Goran chops off a finger of the old woman so as to steal her ring. “She’s just an old Muslim bitch. Let her bleed to death,” says Goran. At this moment Guy starts to doubt whether he has joined the “right” side. He realizes that it is simply wrong to kill children, old women, and all those people whom Goran mercilessly murders for the same reason that Guy used to: because they are Muslims.
Later Guy and Goran drive the pregnant and formerly imprisoned Serbian woman Vera (Nataša Ninković), who has just been freed in exchange for a captured Muslim, back home. The audience finds out that the woman became pregnant in a Bosnian camp, which implies that she was raped by the enemy. The child she bears has clearly been fathered by a Bosnian Muslim. Guy saves Vera from Goran—who punches her stomach multiple times before aiming his rifle between her legs to kill “the Muslim bastard”—and he later protects her from her own family, who cannot put up with the shame and disgrace Vera and her newborn girl personify for them. Guy tries to bring Vera and the baby to a safe zone in Croatia, but Vera is killed by Croatian soldiers. Upon reaching the safe zone, Guy leaves the baby in a Red Cross car. After he throws his weapons into the sea, a woman comes to him with the deserted baby, asking if she is Guy’s, and he says that the girl is his. He takes responsibility for the life of this infant child of a Bosnian Muslim father; she is his redemption for all the Bosnian Muslims he has killed and the realization that his mission to take revenge on Muslims is unfair, unjust, and simply wrong.
While Savior does not display U.S. intervention in the Balkan War per se since the only American soldier shown in the film is a mercenary, it does reveal a new perspective on the intervention, a viewpoint that was also represented by single soldiers who chose to fight for various purposes, including financial gain. The film thus shows another type of Western and U.S. intervention in the war. It also comments on the fact that chaos and murder reigned in the country and the world did not bother to prevent the carnage and suffering. The viewer does not see any international military troops, even though detention camps existed in former Yugoslavian territory; women were brutally raped; men, women, children, and old people were executed. Savior focuses on the deterioration in the Balkan region to implicitly censure the inaction of the world. And whereas the film somewhat fails to provide an overview of U.S. intervention in the Balkan War, it does implicitly comment on American involvement through its representation of Guy. Guy’s participation in the war—although very provocative in the beginning—eventually becomes a humanitarian mission, as he helps the civilian and her baby to stay alive. It is very symbolic that the film is called Savior, which is an unequivocal reference to Guy, who indeed has saved the innocent baby. The portrayal of the American as a savior (which obscures his actions directed against innocent Muslims at the beginning of the film) rehabilitates the main character, turning him into a hero; it also imposes a view of the Western—specifically American—soldier as a savior, claiming that the Balkan region needed a whole army of such saviors to stop the war and the genocide. This portrays the (potential) actions of American soldiers as good, humanitarian efforts.
The last film in this analysis of the representation of U.S. intervention in the Balkan War deals with the issue from a different perspective. The Peacemaker stands out for two reasons. First, it both promotes and criticizes the idea that a serious conflict can be solved only if the United States interferes. The main plot follows the theft of nine nuclear warheads stolen from a train traveling through Russia. The U.S. government decides to step in to investigate. Its aim is to find the warheads and those who are privy to the theft. In the end, the U.S. succeeds: eight warheads are found, and the explosion of the ninth in New York is prevented.
Second, the film is conspicuous for its Bosnian subplot, which does not directly focus on U.S. intervention in the Balkans but, on the contrary, envisions an intervention in the U.S. undertaken by a vengeful Bosnian. Dusan Gavrich (Marcel Iureş), the Bosnian, possesses the ninth warhead and arrives in the U.S. to take revenge for Western intervention in the Balkan region. In the guise of a Bosnian diplomat, he intends to bomb UN headquarters. In a flashback, the viewer witnesses Gavrich looking for his wife and daughter amid sniper fire in Sarajevo; he finds both of them dead. Gavrich takes his daughter in his arms and starts to scream in English, “Help me! Help me! Help my child!” but nobody responds.
Before coming to the U.S., Gavrich records a video for Americans, explaining why he is planning to commit a terrorist attack:
You will look at what I have done and say, “Of course, why not? They are all animals. They have slaughtered each other for centuries.” But the truth is, I am not the monster. I’m a human man. I’m just like you, whether you like it or not. For years, we have tried to live together until a war was waged on us. On all of us. A war waged by our own leaders. And who supplied the Serb cluster bombs, the Croatian tanks, the Muslim artillery shells that killed our sons and daughters? It was the governments of the West who drew the boundaries of our countries. Sometimes in ink, sometimes in blood. The blood of our people. And now, you dispatch your peacekeepers to write our destiny again. We can never accept this peace that leaves us with nothing but pain. Pain the peacemakers must be made to feel. Their wives, their children, their houses, and churches. So now you know. Now you must understand. Leave us to find our own destiny. May God have mercy on us all.
Gavrich blames the West for its involvement that, he believes, consisted supplying arms for a peace that it tried to impose, which eventually led to the death of his family as well as many other innocent civilians. The film sees the Western intervention not as a form of humanitarian aid but rather as a humanitarian tragedy. While Gavrich’s speech is primarily addressed to the UN and makes no clear reference to the U.S. and its role in the Balkan War, it is significant that the Bosnian has chosen the U.S. as the place to mount his attack. He is taking aim at the status of the U.S. as a superpower, which presupposes the country’s inevitable involvement in the resolution of the Balkan War. This involvement—which Gavrich sees as purely negative—makes the U.S. privy to the military operations in the Balkans. Yet the man’s mission is to make the UN—but not exactly the United States—experience the same pain and emptiness he went through during the sniper attack in Sarajevo. This is an important turn because, at this point, the film judges the failure of the peace-seeking world body to maintain peace in former Yugoslavian territories, avoiding the problem of U.S. intervention and, ultimately, focusing on the role of the West in general. The Peacemaker offers the view that Western involvement exerted a negative influence, which stimulated rather than prevented the war. It reverses course, as it were: Gavrich is now, as the title suggests, the peacemaker who will bring the sort of “peace” visited upon the former Yugoslavia by Western governments and organizations—a “peace” that killed thousands of civilians.
Gavrich is shot and wounded by Lt. Col. Thomas Devoe (George Clooney); unable to continue running, he enters the nearest church that he comes across. Lying in pain on the floor, he is found by Devoe and the nuclear expert Dr. Julia Kelly (Nicole Kidman), who try to find out more about the bomb’s mechanism so that the explosion can be averted. Gavrich is unwilling to reveal any information, as he does not want people to be saved—just as his daughter and his wife were not rescued. He explains that he wants everything “to be like it was,” whereas Devoe remarks, “Sir, it’s not our war.” “It is now,” replies Gavrich, and shoots himself in the head. Devoe’s response explicitly reveals that American civilians, who did not carry out war actions in the Balkans, cannot be held responsible for the deaths caused by the war. Despite the largely negative focus on the Western role in the Balkan War, the film’s ending, in which the bomb is successfully disarmed, portrays the U.S. in a positive light, as the country that is capable of saving people in such “war situations.” The film contends that if the United States had intervened in the Balkan region to stop the war, its mission would have been successful from the very beginning. And whereas The Peacemaker criticizes the inaction of the U.S. in the former Yugoslavia, it somewhat rehabilitates the image of the country as a strong military power that does stick to the ideals of humanitarianism, as the main characters save millions of New Yorkers, thus performing a humanitarian mission. And although this mission takes place on American soil, it nonetheless helps construct the image of American humanitarianism in the Balkan War because the danger of an explosion in New York is explicitly revealed as part (or perhaps the result) of the Balkan War.
Although the analysis of the UN’s role in the Balkan War is not a primary purpose of this book, I would like to briefly address this issue and investigate the way it is reflected in film, because some of my cinematic examples articulate the problem of Western intervention, which involves not only U.S. forces but also UN peacekeepers.
Humanitarian aid provided during the Balkan War was substantial. For example, during the winter of 1992–93, it helped stave off famine and death by starvation in Sarajevo.29 Apart from that, U.S. aircraft delivered medicine to Sarajevo.30 The UN’s humanitarian help was the result of the unwillingness of the U.S. to send military forces into the territory. Since the UN financially depends on the U.S. and depends on the Security Council and on member states for peacekeepers,31 its strategy had to follow that of the United States. While the humanitarian aid provided by the UN was indeed helpful, films about the conflict tend to criticize the UN presence in the Balkans, displaying negative aspects of that involvement: the organization’s inability to perform its mission and even its complicity in organized sex trafficking, as represented in Danis Tanović’s No Man’s Land (2001) and Larysa Kondracki’s The Whistleblower (2010), respectively.
No Man’s Land raises two important issues: the absurdity of the Balkan conflict, and UN corruption. The war’s essential absurdity is revealed in the clash of ethnic groups who had lived together for centuries. Tanović intentionally builds the film’s plot on the confrontation between two Bosnians and one Serb, which would not be unique if it were not for the conditions the men find themselves in. The soldiers are trapped in a trench in a neutral zone. One is Bosnian, another is Serbian, and there is one more—a Bosnian who is lying on a mine. A tragicomic dialogue between the Bosnian Ciki (Branko Ðurić) and the Serbian Nino (Rene Bitorajac) reveals that the soldiers themselves are not sure who started the war, or why. When Ciki asks Nino why the Serbians decided to destroy such a great country as Yugoslavia, Nino explains that it was the fault of Bosnians because they decided to separate, whereas Ciki replies that it was their only choice, since the Serbs had started the war. Shifting the responsibility from one to the other, they argue in vain because each is both right and wrong at the same time (which only underscores the complexity of the Balkan War as an ethnic conflict). To put an end to their wrangling, Ciki aims his rifle at Nino and makes him say that the Serbs started the war. But when Nino grabs the rifle, he addresses the same question to Ciki, who now has to admit that the Bosnians began the war.
When UN troops appear, No Man’s Land “reaches a new level of absurdity.”32 Two important questions arise during the second half of the film, namely what the UN will do with the “human time bomb” and how international journalists will interpret and report the situation.33 The film overtly demonstrates the helplessness of the UN and the failure of peacekeeping troops to perform their main task, which is to establish peace. The only man willing to help the Bosnian lying on a mine is a French peacekeeper. Yet he fails to influence the situation because his commander, Colonel Soft (Simon Callow), prefers to play chess with his young secretary instead of taking any measures to address the situation. The only solution the French peacekeeper sees is to cooperate with the journalist, Jane Livingstone (Katrin Cartlidge), who threatens Soft that she will file a report within half an hour and tell the whole world that the UN force is not doing its job. This, of course, prompts Soft to take action.
The ending of the film is dramatic not only because a German sapper is not able to defuse the mine and thus the Bosnian soldier remains lying on it, but also because the journalists and the UN leave the place as if their mission has been accomplished. Colonel Soft even makes the comment that he is satisfied with the work and hints that it may help procure promotions for the UN soldiers who took part in the operation. The journalist, happy to have her scoop, does not even want to check the trench because it does not interest her. As she leaves she is unaware that the Bosnian soldier is still lying on the mine. Interestingly, the journalist’s departure seems to be more important to the UN than the fulfillment of their direct responsibilities; the prospect that her unflattering story would be revealed to the world and the UN’s reputation would be sullied is more worrying than the plight of a human being left to die alone.
The Whistleblower occupies its own distinct niche in the cinema of war crimes, as its plot is fully devoted to the problem of criminal offenses committed during the Balkan War. Police officer Kathryn Bolkovac (Rachel Weisz) arrives in Bosnia in search of those who are implicated in sex trafficking. The audience sees Bosnia right after the war. The country has been plunged into chaos. Once she has found Raya (Roxana Condurache), a beaten-up Ukrainian girl who has just finished school, Kathryn becomes aware of the existence of the Florida Bar, where young girls waitress and work as prostitutes. Kathryn realizes that the Bosnian police are involved in the illicit business. She is even more shocked to discover that her colleagues from the UN also have a hand in these activities. The spectator is immersed in the criminal world of postwar Bosnia, where nobody can be trusted and nearly everybody is guilty of some offense.
When the information Kathryn possesses becomes a threat to the UN’s very existence, the executive tries to get immunity, explaining that “the UN is too fragile, too important.” His words are sarcastically corrected by Madeleine Rees (Vanessa Redgrave), who underlines that he is asking not for “immunity” but for “impunity.” Both implicitly and explicitly, the film criticizes the importance of the UN, some of whose representatives rape and sell people instead of protecting them. The same problem is briefly addressed in Isabel Coixet’s The Secret Life of Words (2005), another film that narrates the tragedy of the Balkan War. Telling about her experience during the war, the heroine, Hanna (Sarah Polley), mentions that once UN troops arrived in the women’s camp where she was being held, she and the other women thought that the soldiers would free them. However, the women remained prisoners. More than that, some UN soldiers participated in rape themselves: “I remember that one of them apologized all the time. He would apologize while smiling. If you can imagine that they rape you time and again, and they whisper in your ears, so that only you can hear, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Forgive me.’”
Although Kathryn manages to get on TV with the story about sex trafficking in Bosnia, she is dismissed. The other UN officers (those privy to the trafficking and those who are not) are sent back to their respective countries, but nobody is put on trial. The Whistleblower and the other two films briefly discussed here obviously do not label all UN peacekeepers criminals and rapists. Yet they make an important claim by discussing the corruption within the UN and its operations, thus arguing that the Western intervention in the Balkans had its drawbacks and tragic ramifications. The Balkan War, according to No Man’s Land, The Whistleblower, and The Secret Life of Words, was the war where the Bosnian and Croatian peoples could rely only on the help of the international community—but this community apparently included, along with the people who tried to stop the war and help the locals, individuals who preferred to profit from the Balkan tragedy. Those people constituted yet another menace to the unprotected peoples of the former Yugoslavia. Thus, while the films do not fully undermine the humanitarianism of the Western intervention, they demonstrate that those who provided humanitarian aid and were eager to help stop the war and chaos in the country (consider the French peacekeeper from No Man’s Land or Kathryn from The Whistleblower) were joined by those who saw the war as a chance to exploit the situation.
There are very few literary works that deal with U.S. intervention in the Balkan War. This lack can be explained by the initial unwillingness of the U.S. to get involved, which created a misconception that the U.S. fought no real war in the Balkans. Additionally—one can presume—the war’s rather complex nature has made it difficult for literary authors to create plots that would help explain or at least provide a portrayal of the American role. The U.S. participation in the Balkan War cannot be compared to the country’s participation in either the wars analyzed in this work or its earlier major wars, including World War II and the Vietnam War. Its hesitation to intervene in the Balkan region explains why there is little exploration of the role of the U.S. in most of the Balkan War novels. As a rule, these novels tend to narrate the war as, first and foremost, a regional tragedy that consisted of a civil war, ethnic hatred, and genocide. To my knowledge, the only novels that focus specifically on the role of the United States are Douglas Cavanaugh’s Into Hell’s Fire (2007) and Tom Foley’s This Way to Heaven (2000). This section provides an analysis of these novels and claims that the main truth about the Balkan War that these texts overtly present is the hesitation of the United States to get involved in the conflict and prevent the genocide. Both narratives explicitly deal with the issue of murder, vividly portraying the sufferings of women (most of whom were raped multiple times), children, and elderly people. The novels censure the inaction of the West, arguing, just like the films did, that the Balkan War lasted so long because the West did nothing to stop the conflict at the very beginning.
Cavanaugh’s novel does not deal with the direct intervention of U.S. troops in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, yet its focus on the events that preceded U.S. involvement and somewhat help explain that involvement allows its classification as a novel about U.S. interventionism. The use of a third-person omniscient narrator only underlines the intention of the novel to elucidate the reasons for the intervention, making the narrative more reliable and unbiased. The events that unfold in Into Hell’s Fire can be considered a preamble to U.S. involvement: at the book’s core is the story of Lucas Martin, a Vietnam War veteran and a retired agent of the U.S. government, who is sent by his former colleagues into the heart of the escalating Balkan War, to Sarajevo, to collect information about atrocities and prove the existence of detention camps. Confirmation of these offenses would allow the West, and in particular the U.S., the justification to immediately intervene and stop the genocide. Lucas is sent to Bosnia as “a freelance photographer for various news agencies,” which places this novel in the genre of surveillance or spy fiction.34 Yet Into Hell’s Fire can be analyzed as a war novel, and a novel about American interventionism, for two reasons. First, the war veteran status of the main character and his involvement with the government brings his sole intervention close to a regular military intervention that is orchestrated by politicians and decision makers and conducted by soldiers. Second, Lucas’s mission can be characterized as representing an initial phase of U.S. intervention in the Balkan War; as in any other war, the U.S. needs a solid basis for military involvement—in this case, crimes against humanity.
Although the novel focuses on the war in the Balkans that eventually led to the collapse of Yugoslavia, it also meditates on the history of the region, going as far back as the rule of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. It swiftly moves forward to the World War I era, mentioning the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian assassin, which led to the First World War. The main story, however, starts during World War II, when the Croatian boy Luka Martinović, having saved an injured American pilot, is guaranteed safety and eventual immigration to the United States for his mother and himself. Later, the boy’s name is Americanized as Lucas Martin. As an adult, Lucas returns to the Balkans several times. During one of his visits in the 1980s, he is disappointed not to find evidence of the death of his father, who had disappeared and was then imprisoned during World War II. Lucas then “vowed never to return” (247) but nonetheless comes back in the 1990s.
In this respect, one should examine the relevance of Lucas’s nationality to the analysis of his actions, which in themselves constitute an intervention. Lucas is always referred to as an American or a Croatian American, although he is obviously an immigrated Croat. Therefore his arrival in the Balkans can, at first sight, be erroneously considered not as a form of international involvement but as a result of his interest and willingness to help due to his ethnic belonging. Yet his long life in the U.S., his service in Vietnam as an American soldier, and his relationship with the U.S. government obviously allow one to claim that his participation in a U.S. spying operation is not only relevant to U.S. intervention but, in fact, is an intervention undertaken by an American in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, aimed at collecting information for the United States that will eventually define the extent of American military help in the Balkans. But no less important is the fact that Lucas is being very well paid by the U.S. government for his work, and were it not for the money, he would probably not involve himself in the war. This, in turn, corroborates the idea that the reader should not consider Lucas’s participation to be motivated exclusively by his patriotic Croatian feelings. However, the novel makes it clear that Lucas wants the U.S. government to carefully examine the situation and eventually help resolve the conflict because this war is “a direct crisis within his culture of birth” (33). Lucas may be portrayed as a cold-hearted spy, but his personal national interest in seeing the war stop is not negligible.
The absence of American intervention for a considerable time after the outbreak of the war is as ambiguous in the novel as the actual political situation in the Balkans at the beginning of the 1990s. The novel skillfully reflects the American hesitation to use military force in the region without sufficient proof that external involvement is needed. The facts that should be proved, according to the novel: “ethnic cleansing, mass graves, and the forced relocation of civilians from areas in Slavonia and in northern Bosnia. In addition . . . the existence of concentration camps throughout the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina” (67). Just as the United States had been reluctant, for various reasons, to send troops to the Balkans, in the novel the accent on Western uncertainty is very strong. Committing unimaginable atrocities, the Serbian government is sure that “Western intervention would be slow to come” (9). The U.S. government understands that due to the significant role of the U.S. in the world arena, the country will inevitably have to mount some response to the war. To fully justify a military intervention, the U.S. government needs to be certain that atrocities are taking place. Thus one of its representatives, Morton Riggs, calls Lucas to ask him to perform this mission: “It seems as though all hell has broken loose in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the administration is more than a little perplexed about how best to proceed. Public outcry is mounting and the U.N. Security Council is breathing down our necks. The Croatian and Slovenian-American populations are pushing hard for U.S. intervention. Those populations represent millions of voters and the president wants this bag of shit to appear as being under control before the election gets any closer” (19). Describing growing dissatisfaction in its domestic arena, the novel later turns to speculations about the role of the U.S. in the international arena. The dialogue between Lucas and Morton accentuates the complex nature of the conflict and the upcoming intervention, stating that the war emerged “in a country where the United States has few ‘special interests’” (21). This statement unambiguously characterizes the interventionist policy of the U.S. as one aimed at the countries that, to various degrees, concern specific national interests of the United States; Bosnia is obviously not one of them. Perhaps that is why the U.S. tried to place the burden of that war on the European Union; at least geographically, the EU seems to bear greater responsibility for helping resolve the conflict. Yet Europe is not willing to act either: “It is unbelievable how they [Europe] turn to us [the U.S.] and piss and moan about how something should be done about a tragedy occurring in their own backyard” (22). The novel, however, seems to blame neither Europe nor the U.S. for their lack of military support, referring instead to the region’s complexity and its rather bloody history, which seems to suggest that peace is only a temporary state and that military action is the more natural atmosphere of the Balkans. Still, the narrative intensely focuses on the political situation in the 1990s, when Yugoslavia became a ball that the U.S. and Europe kept batting back to each other, neither being willing to deal with the war, its ramifications, or its ethnic hatreds.
In the novel the U.S. eventually decides to analyze the situation in greater depth to see if there is indeed a humanitarian crisis in Bosnia. Morton says, “What we now need most of all is concrete information about what is really happening on the ground. We are being bombarded with conflicting reports on a daily basis. We are never sure who is fighting whom, which side is committing atrocities, which side deserves the West’s full support, and most important, which side we would like to have as the dominating power in the region when the fighting ends” (25). Morton vividly demonstrates that the United States is willing to make its involvement as transparent as possible, which would display the eventual intervention as a necessity, an action that had to be taken in order to save lives. Yet he also discloses the imperialist attitude of the U.S. toward the situation: the country is willing to help, but it needs guarantees that the war’s winner will become a U.S. ally. The postwar countries from the former Yugoslavia would scarcely be able to become superpowers, so the quote can be understood as showing the U.S. desire to be sure that the political elite in the Balkans will cause no trouble for the U.S. but will become submissive agents in the world arena.
The novel seems to be very strongly concerned with U.S. policy with regard to interventionism as well as the country’s general position in the world as a decision maker. Into Hell’s Fire takes a very firm stance, censuring the methods the U.S. has always applied when dealing with international crises, chiefly the imposition of its own views while largely neglecting the cultural and national interests of the affected territory:
Instead, Lucas felt, U.S. policy was in line with the current American culture, applying timid, politically correct guidelines in an area of the world where political correctness could doom thousands of innocent people. Lucas had seen it countless times in the past. He had almost learned to expect it. It seemed to him to be ingrained in U.S. diplomatic policy. The refusal to understand that people in other parts of the world think, act, and desire to be different than America had led to countless poor decisions and generated substantial ill will with foreign nations. . . . He was continually amazed at the stance his adopted government endorsed, regardless of the cultures these policies would affect. . . . The political faces were always changing, but the misguided rhetoric remained the same. (33)
On the one hand, the main character believes that the U.S. should use more resolute methods when dealing with the Balkan crisis, claiming that adhering to political correctness and attempting to solve the problem in a democratic way will not work in this case. Lucas seems to blame the United States for being too soft with those countries where force should be applied to guarantee eventual peace. On the other hand, Lucas tends to make equivalent all U.S. interventions and thus compares the Balkan War to all the other wars involving the U.S., which is rather superficial. The Balkan War was undoubtedly one of the strategically most complex wars the United States has ever been involved in due to the nature of the conflict. The novel raises the question “So, exactly who is fighting whom today?” (124), echoing the problem that Behind Enemy Lines has already explicitly raised. Ethnic hatred made it impossible to determine who was enemy and who was friend, as works of film and literature, as well as examples drawn from the actual events, reveal. Even Morton exclaims, “In all my years, I’ve never encountered such a goddamn mess as this” (25). Into Hell’s Fire seems to suggest that the nature of every war the U.S. has fought is the same, which is largely inaccurate. Yet the long passage quoted above very aptly underlines the cultural differences between the East and the West, which would eventually complicate the decision making and the intervention in the Balkans. All these issues notwithstanding, Lucas concludes, “Military intervention is very likely the only solution if this thing worsens” (69), and as history proved, that “thing” indeed “worsen[ed].”
Into Hell’s Fire ponders why UN soldiers were not armed well enough, which eventually caused the loss of any degree of control and order in the Balkans and freed the hands of the criminals. At the same time, the novel creates suspense by implying that as soon as the atrocities are documented, help will be sent right away. Lucas is supposed to provide the impatient Americans with “evidence that could give his superiors a justifiable reason to intervene,” yet it is also made clear that, “for the moment, there was none” (180). Despite not intervening, the United States is not considered out of the game. Its opinion remains as important as that of Europe, and the reader is informed about “the pressure the Americans are applying” (217), even without having U.S. military troops on the ground, which hints at the multiple solutions to the peace negotiations that the United States and the European Community were trying, vainly, to impose on the former Yugoslavia. Morton’s lament earlier in the novel that “things aren’t going the way we want them” (69) underscores the large amount of political work done by the U.S. to stop the war. At the same time, the book unequivocally foregrounds the U.S. desire to have the situation in the Balkan region under control, thus preventing it from undermining the position of the U.S. as a superpower.
Lucas’s mission ends well, and he provides enough evidence for the U.S. to act and “allow NATO military intervention in order to stop the fighting in Bosnia” (312). The intervention is carried out too late to save thousands of innocent lives, although, as the novel claims, military involvement was inevitable: “Everyone knows that the West will intervene eventually” (277). Nevertheless one should analyze Lucas’s actions in the territory, which I define as a solo intervention. Lucas’s status as a spy undermines, to a certain degree, the whole project of pre-intervention simply because it makes such action illegal. Lucas himself thinks over what might happen if he is murdered during his mission: “If I had been killed, what would have been the position of the U.S. government after having been implicated in the conspiracy?” (280). He understands that military intervention will be postponed, which will lead to the continuation of violence and murder in the Balkans. Yet he—and, first and foremost, the U.S. government—takes that risk and professionally accomplishes the mission that, importantly, is meant to be a humanitarian effort. All of Lucas’s killings over the course of the novel are justified, and the reader obviously takes Lucas’s side; in contrast to the evil, corrupt, and avid Serbs, Lucas is the good guy. During his stay in Bosnia he meets his old Bosnian friend Edis, who eventually joins him on his mission. Lucas himself evaluates their actions: “Besides, he thought to himself, we’re the good guys here. Right is on our side” (284). The illegality of Lucas’s presence in the Balkans is obscured and his presence is justified by his mission to disclose the atrocities and to save innocent people from violence and death.
However, the humanitarian mission of the United States moves to the background at the end of the novel, when Lucas is again contacted by Morton. This time Morton offers him work on “an extremely important project with a very lucrative contract” connected to missile defense (313). Enthusiastic about the project, Morton feverishly tries to convince Lucas to accept: “Listen, if what I’ve learnt is true, once this technology has been mastered, the United States will dominate the world . . . or at least those segments that it doesn’t already control” (315). Does the ending hint at the imperialist desire of the United States? Absolutely. Does it undermine the humanitarianism of U.S. intervention in the Balkans? Perhaps not, because, first, it is not connected to the intervention in the Balkans and, second, Lucas ultimately rejects the offer, which allows him to remain a positive character to the book’s very end. He refuses out of a belief that the project might lead to an environmental catastrophe; the political reasons are not discussed (although they are slightly touched upon). One can speculate that by ending with this scene, the novel is not refuting the humanitarianism of U.S. intervention in the Balkans. Nonetheless it overtly declares that while the U.S. does accomplish humanitarian missions, the country does not exclude those policies that would support its master plan of being the dominant power.
Foley’s novel focuses on the story of an American soldier, Robert Jackson, who joins UN peacekeeping troops in the former Yugoslavia. As an eyewitness to unfolding events—the initial stage of the genocide—Jackson realizes that the peacekeeping force is not capable of regulating the conflict. Serbs clearly have more arms than Muslim Bosnians, and the arms embargo eventually leaves the Muslims defenseless before their nationalistic Serb foes. In this respect, the novel questions the actions of the West: “Why does the West blockade us [Bosnians] and prevent us from obtaining guns and tanks and rockets so that we can defend ourselves?” The answer: “There are people in America who think that if we [Americans] arm the Muslims, it’ll lead to more killing.”35 The conflict seems to be largely neglected by a world that appears sure that the UN will be able to put an end to it. Jackson, however, realizes that the conflict is just beginning. Slaughter is unavoidable unless the oppressed have at least the same chance to protect themselves as their opponents have to do harm, and this logic compels him to supply arms to Bosnian Muslims. Doing so immediately makes a war criminal out of Jackson, who understands that as soon as he returns to the United States, he will be tried and ultimately imprisoned because there “it’s a serious crime to help Bosnia” (67). That is why, to escape this fate, he decides to stay in Bosnia and help his friends in that unjust fight. The plot eventually conveys the story of the adventurous fight of Jackson and his local friends against the Serbs.
As is clear from the plot, This Way to Heaven is not primarily a novel about U.S. intervention in the Balkans. In fact it does not focus on any actions of American troops in the territory. Nonetheless This Way to Heaven can be considered a novel about interventionism; introducing a character who figuratively represents the United States, the book is a unique literary example that deals with the problem of (non)intervention, indirectly discussing the role of the U.S. in the Balkan War. The use of a third-person omniscient narrator can stand for the author’s intention to present the story as unbiased and allow readers to draw their own conclusions concerning U.S. participation in the war.
This Way to Heaven harshly criticizes the inaction of the West while the war (including the genocide) was unfolding at top speed. Notably, the novel makes a reference to the First Gulf War, when the Bosnian Emir says, “How terrible of Hussein to try to take over a peace-loving nation. It was right of the United States to help Kuwait get their country back” (143). The issue of U.S. intervention in the Middle East during the First Gulf War is mentioned on purpose: it serves to compare Bosnia to Kuwait, suggesting that both Muslim countries eventually shared a similar fate, that of being oppressed by their neighboring countries; revealing similarities between the two wars, the line also censures U.S. inaction in the Balkans, questioning the motives behind the interventionist policy of the U.S. It comes as no surprise that during the dialogue between Emir and Jackson, the Bosnian says, “When you get back to America, you tell your people that we have oil here” (144; my italics). Emir succinctly underlines the fact that only national interest would prompt the U.S. to help the Bosnians. In other words, the Bosnians have to offer something to the Americans in return for military help. Unlike Kuwait, however, Bosnia had nothing to offer. That, according to Emir, was the reason the U.S. was unwilling to send military troops or, at least, to arm the Bosnians.
Earlier in the novel, when Jackson catches a Bosnian man stealing medical supplies from Jackson’s convoy, the thief exclaims with bitter anger, “Maybe they taught you other things to say in our language, too? [Jackson has said to the man ‘You’re under arrest’ in Serbo-Croatian.] Did they teach you how to say, ‘Yes, we know you’re defenseless, but we will give you no guns’? And did they teach you how to say, ‘Yes, we know you’re starving, but we will give you no food’? Or did they teach you to say, ‘We know you’re sick, but we can give you no medicine’?” (14). Jackson eventually follows the Bosnian, Alexandar, to meet a large group of Muslim refugees—women and children—who have lost their homes. Their situation is neglected by the UN: “The UN wouldn’t protect them. The UN wouldn’t restore them to their homes. Now they have no village to live in, no village for your UN trucks and your life-saving supplies to be delivered to” (15). The American obviously hears bitter sarcasm in the words of the Bosnian, who realizes that neither the West nor the UN is going to help them fight the Serbs’ oppression. And although UN troops are deployed to the Balkan region, their presence does not guarantee stability or safety: thousands of people continue to be harassed, beaten, raped, humiliated, and brutally murdered.
The heavy censure of U.S. nonintervention notwithstanding, the novel persistently attempts to rehabilitate the image of the United States from a country that does not want to get involved in the affairs of the former Yugoslavia to one that heroically rescues oppressed people. This transformation is effected through the presence and eventual juxtaposition of the only two American characters in the novel: Robert Jackson and Samuel West.
Jackson, as mentioned, chooses to act while the whole world turns a blind eye to the peoples of the former Yugoslavia. Whereas “nobody in America seemed to understand what was happening in Bosnia” (194), Jackson tries to change the situation. His desire to be useful and perhaps facilitate an end to the war and the people’s suffering earns him the title of exceptional American and eventually hero (87). Zarko, frequently called a Gypsy (although eventually the reader finds out that he is a Serb who, ashamed of the actions committed by his nation, prefers to keep his nationality secret), says to Jackson, “I am a false Gypsy, and you are a false Amerikanac . . . because you are here” (18; italics in original). He continues, “Alexandar once said you were not like other Amerikanacs. Most Amerikanacs, he said, always do whatever is in their own best interests. But Alexandar says that it is not so with you. He says you’re a rare Amerikanac” (18; italics in original). Jackson’s exceptionalism is later pinpointed by a Bosnian woman named Zinna: “[Alexandar] says you’re the only American he’s ever met who he couldn’t figure out. He says that most Americans—” Jackson interrupts her: “That most Americans always do what’s in their own self-interest” (51). Over the course of the novel, one can observe Jackson develop into an overwhelmingly positive character; he is a good American soldier who, at the cost of his own well-being, stays in the Balkans: “I know what’s happening here and I want to change it” (33). He loses his good reputation and becomes a criminal; he is deprived of the opportunity to go back to the U.S. and reunite with his family and partner; he sacrifices his own (successful and happy) life to fight in the war for those who are being exterminated. His help is appreciated: “He was just beginning to become one of them—the Amerikanac arms merchant who came to help fight the Serbs—and everywhere he went the people of the city waved to him or clapped him on the back and called him friend, or even better, simpatican—a man of quality. He was like an adopted brother” (31; italics in original). It is interesting that when criticizing the U.S. for its inaction, the Bosnian Muslim Emir mentions Lafayette and his participation in the American War of Independence. The Frenchman played a significant role in that war; as Lloyd S. Kramer writes, he was “a European nobleman who left family and fortune, suffered hardships at his own expense, and joined the American forces, motivated by love of a virtuous people and a righteous cause.”36 The appearance of Lafayette in the novel serves two purposes. First, it demonstrates that during such an important war, the U.S. received outside help that, eventually, allowed it to win its war against Great Britain and become an independent state. That war parallels the situation in the former Yugoslavia in the way that Bosnia was desperately trying to become an independent state but obviously could not win without external support. Second, Jackson himself parallels Lafayette: just as the Frenchman came to America to fight for its independence, so Jackson has come to Bosnia, at exactly the same cost.
Yet Jackson’s role is eventually determined to be something other than that of a soldier. He becomes friends with the Bosnians he meets on his way; he feels he needs to protect them, not because this is his responsibility as a soldier but because he cares about them as a friend. This peculiarity is shrewdly pinpointed in the novel: “You can’t worry about Aleks, he told himself. You have responsibilities; you have to think coldly, without emotion, the way they taught you in the army” (59; italics in original). Although he desperately tries to be a soldier in wartime, Jackson takes his place with Bosnian civilians (particularly those who could defend themselves).
Another American, Samuel West, arrives in the Balkans on a special mission, left unrevealed for a long time, apart from being characterized as one that “could end the war” (19). I would argue that West is a personification of the United States. Making this contention, I rely on the character’s name and on his actions. Without taking up actual politics and policies, Foley skillfully displays the image of the West in the character of Samuel West. More than that, Zarko’s reference to the character as “uncle Sam” (26) allows one to conclude that West embodies the United States. Thus it is symbolic that his mission in the Balkans can put an end to the war. Here the novel refers to the power of the U.S. and implicitly claims that if the U.S. intervenes, the war will soon be over.
Beyond his name, West’s attitudes toward the Balkan War strongly parallel the actual attitudes of the U.S. government toward the war. As Jackson and Zarko help West reach his final destination, overcoming multiple obstacles, West makes a telling observation: “West looked toward Dubrovnik, taken aback at the ferocity of the attack. It was much more than he had expected from what he had mistakenly considered a small conflict amongst equally ill-equipped guerilla factions. ‘We’re not going anywhere near there,’ he insisted” (27–28; my italics). His stance echoes that taken by the U.S. government to not intervene, and it hints at the erroneous American characterization of the Balkan War as a local conflict that will easily resolve itself on its own over time. Later, observing the murder of a Muslim boy, West thinks, “If he had come close enough, I might have thrown him my gun. . . . Imagine what that little Muslim could do if he were armed?” (137). West’s idea suggests how different the situation would have been had the U.S. not supported the embargo but had instead armed the Bosnian Muslims. “Little Muslim” extends to the Bosnian people, whose inability to defend themselves made them look like helpless children, easily intimidated by the Serbs. It is worth mentioning in this regard an incident from later in the novel, when West awakes in a detention camp after being beaten by Serbian guards and says, “My God! I can’t see a damn thing!” (255). The character cannot see anything because he was severely beaten and his physical condition is bad. However, taken figuratively, these words suggest that while innocent people are held in special camps where they are systematically beaten up, raped, and killed, no one, including the United States, actually sees it.
West is described as a cold-hearted man, a mercenary paid by the Israeli diplomat Katz to come to the Balkans and assassinate the key military and political figures who have unleashed the war. That, according to West, would help end the war. He obviously would not have come were he not being paid for his services, as becomes evident from his talk with Jackson, whom he asks, “If you’re not doing it for money, why would you agree to help?” (42). An even more representative scene takes place soon after this talk: a shot rings out, then the screams of a woman and a child are heard, but when Jackson rushes to help, West stops him:
“It’s none of our business,” West told him.
“Are you kidding me? I heard a woman and a child.”
“Guerrillas,” West said.
“I’m going out there.”
“What do you think you can do about it?” West challenged him. (43; italics in original)
The scene overtly demonstrates the difference between the two men, the “good” and “bad” Americans. Whereas Jackson tries to help in every situation, West prefers to stay indifferent to what is going on. One can speculate that West’s unconcern stands for the way the U.S. ignored the war. As the dialogue continues, West announces his attitude several times, saying, “What do I care what these savages do to each other?” and “What the hell do I care if these goddamned savages slaughter themselves.” Jackson counters, “I can’t believe Katz would send you! You don’t even care about what’s happening here!” (44; italics in original). This persistent reference to the act of caring and its obvious absence allows one to conclude that the reaction of the international community to the Balkan War was strikingly peculiar; namely, the pervasive global indifference left the peoples of the former Yugoslavia trapped within the borders of their own collapsing country to experience the brutality of the war and to overcome it as best they could on their own.
The novel reflects the desperate desire of the locals to be saved by the U.S.: “Many nights,” says the Bosnian girl Sabina, “I have prayed for America to come and save my people” (277). It also displays the U.S. neglect of the Balkan War; for instance, when Zarko brings an injured Bosnian boy to a local imam, he is surprised to see that the latter is burning a huge pile of teddy bears to warm himself and the other people who are hiding in the mosque. When Zarko asks where the toys are from, the imam answers, “They were a gift from the people of America for the poor children of Bosnia” (387). Zarko hopes that the Americans have also sent antibiotics, yet he finds out that those toys were the only aid given to Bosnia by the U.S.
This Way to Heaven touches upon an even more shocking issue, the UN’s awareness of the existence of mass graves: “Spy satellites pinpointed these graves. We’ve known about them for months, but it wasn’t until recently that we could get some men out here to investigate” (391–92). The novel deals with the problem accurately, pointing to the difficulty of identifying and defining the murderers; without evidence, the crimes must go unpunished.
Despite the novel’s focus on the steadfast indifference of Samuel West toward the conflict (and, through him, the indifference of the U.S.), This Way to Heaven seems to justify international inaction, wisely accepting the view that perhaps the conflict was not so easily stopped, even with the help of external involvement: “But then Jackson realized that what had happened was over now, and West had been right. There was nothing he could do” (45). Although the quote refers specifically to the case of the woman and the child described earlier, it may well characterize the general situation. Was it possible to easily stop this war without any rules, a war predominantly based on national and ethnic hatreds?
It is important to mention that West is a Vietnam War veteran; moreover he took part in the slaughter at My Lai, one of the biggest war crimes committed by the U.S. in that conflict. The author makes the man a war criminal of such a notorious event to intensify his status as a bad character and, consequently, to blacken the reputation of the U.S., given that his character is a personification of the country. One can interpret the significance of West’s status in two ways. On the one hand, because of that massacre (and other war crimes) in Vietnam, the U.S. did not want to repeat the same mistake, and perhaps was even afraid of that happening. Therefore its policy of nonintervention should be understood not as the country’s cowardice or carelessness but rather as a cautionary strategy not to make the same mistakes. To ensure this could not happen, the peoples of the former Yugoslavia would be left to handle the situation on their own. That explains West’s overt indifference or unwillingness to get involved in the Balkan War. On the other hand, by not intervening, the U.S. has allowed the war in the Balkans (clearly no less brutal in its atrocities than what happened at My Lai) to continue. In this way, the novel criticizes the noninterventionist policy, implying that by not getting involved, the U.S. has allowed more My Lais to take place, this time in Europe. The novel also compares the wars in Vietnam and the Balkans, accentuating the difficulty that Americans face with regard to the latter. The salient problem is the enemy: While “killing Vietnamese, who to a racist like West, were better dead than alive because they were an inferior race that he [West] considered barely human” was somewhat easy, it was an absolutely different story with Bosnians and Serbs, “who looked European, if not American” (118–19). The “normal-looking” and “civilized-looking” (119; italics in original) peoples of the former Yugoslavia were an unusual, perhaps even culturally uncomfortable enemy to fight.
West’s military service in Vietnam is crucial to the analysis of This Way to Heaven as a novel about U.S. interventionism. The Vietnam War was America’s most infamous war experience, transforming its military and interventionist policies. The novel reflects this:
He [West] still got angry when he thought about the shame of being told he could no longer serve his own country, that he could no longer do what he knew he was born to do. He was put on earth to be a soldier, and he was a damned good one, he thought. Anyone who knew anything about soldiering would know that. It was the bureaucrats in Washington, the liberals from those watchdog groups who ended it for him. Sure, he was at My Lai, and sure, he was alongside the lieutenant [Lt. William Calley, convicted of the murder of twenty-two civilians in the massacre] when they went in with their guns blazing and finished off everyone in the village.
But hell, we were told they were Viet Cong. The lieutenant was just following orders, like every good soldier does. He was a good man, and a damned fine officer. He knew you couldn’t fuck around with the Viet Cong. He did what any good soldier would do, but when they needed a scapegoat, they pinned it all on the lieutenant. The poor bastard’s life was ruined. He was court-martialed.
The lieutenant was a patriot, West thought. He deserved a medal—and so did I. When they came to me and wanted me to rat him out, I wouldn’t do it. When they offered to let me stay in the army if I admitted I made a mistake, if I admitted that I followed illegal orders to massacre everyone in that village, I refused. It was a question of honor. I am a patriot.
He sat in the church eating the bread and wine, certain that he had done the right thing in Vietnam. (159–60; italics in original)
The novel meditates upon the issue of U.S. involvement in Vietnam through the example of a particular military man, revealing his personal experience both during the war and in its aftermath, but it also attempts to interpret the burden of the Vietnam War on the United States. This is most evident when considering West to be the personification of the U.S. His experience stands for the experience of the United States in Southeast Asia. Just as West, not suspecting anything bad, became a war criminal while following orders (which were derived from the principle that the U.S. was freeing Vietnam from communist oppressors), so did the United States endure a terrible transformation: no longer the potential savior, it became the enemy. The novel by no means tries to justify the criminal actions of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam; rather it attempts to tackle the problems raised by Vietnam from a different perspective, and instead of blaming the U.S. for getting involved in the war, it interprets its experience as the one that, first and foremost, made the American people feel ashamed of their country’s actions, which eventually led to its cautious attitude toward war and military intervention in general. Having said that, the novel uses the Vietnam War experience as an excuse for delayed intervention in the Balkans, implicitly claiming that the U.S. was not willing to repeat a failure it had made once before.
Building his novel on the contrast between Jackson and West, Foley deals with the hesitation of the United States to get involved in the Balkan War. On the one hand, the country had to get involved—just as Jackson did. On the other hand, history had obviously taught the U.S. to be cautious in such serious matters as war and intervention. Presenting these two perspectives on the issue, the novel does not seem to be taking either side. It does not fully support West, presenting him as a rather negative character, yet it does not fully support Jackson either (although the reader most probably identifies with Jackson, since he is presented as a more positive character). At one point, West thinks of Jackson this way: “[West] knew plenty of men like Jackson. They would back any cause and could even sound sincere, as if they truly cared. But they were such hypocrites. When things got tough, when it was time to fight, to pay with blood and the lives of young men, they were gone. America was filled with men like Jackson. I am a man of honor, Samuel West thought. He placed himself well above Jackson and his phony ideals” (196; italics in original). Whereas one might claim that this quote underscores West’s selfish nature, I would argue that the passage also adequately describes Jackson. Specifically, despite Jackson’s help and his devotion to the Bosnian people, it is striking that he is the only character in the novel who cannot kill anyone (even though he is the only real soldier, excluding West). On the other hand, the fact that he does not kill can stand in this case not for U.S. inaction but for the idealism of that intervention, especially when compared to the intervention in Vietnam (epitomized by the infamous slaughter in My Lai). This only illustrates the fact mentioned earlier, that the actual U.S. involvement in the Balkans “was quickly successful and with no loss of American life.”37
It is crucial that West eventually dies in the novel, whereas Jackson stays alive: symbolically the reputation of the United States is restored. The country’s past experiences thus remain in the past, while the present opens up a new trajectory. By keeping Jackson alive, the novel reveals a positive perspective on the future of the United States. It is also significant that the character’s name coincides with that of a celebrated U.S. Supreme Court justice who was also the chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials. This coincidence is noticed in the novel by a UN officer. Thus Jackson’s role in This Way to Heaven is symbolically determined as one that brings justice to the Balkans by finding the criminals and punishing them. Introducing the man who played a crucial role in the aftermath of World War II, the novel makes an implicit comparison between the Balkan War and that larger, historical conflict. This Way to Heaven not only refers to the Bosnian genocide, comparing it with the actions committed by the Nazis (the UN officer’s words, “I guess we all need a history refresher course now and again, don’t we?” [398], as he explains to Jackson who the prosecutor Robert Jackson was, are perhaps the most evident hint of that), but it also underlines that U.S. intervention in the Balkans would be as important, at least in moral terms, as the country’s intervention in World War II.
Given this positive depiction of U.S. intervention, the murder of West does not seem problematic. As Jackson tries to escape the camp with Sabina, he understands he will not be able to take West with him because the man is too weak. He wants to suffocate West with a pillow, but cannot; instead Sabina commits the murder. One can speculate that while the U.S. has not forgotten its past failures (metaphorically expressed through Jackson’s inability to kill West), the country’s image is restored in the minds of those who do not think of U.S. interventionism only in terms of its debacle in Vietnam. (Sabina kills West and thus, symbolically, erases the disgrace of Vietnam.)
The positive image of Jackson is also supported by his multiple acts of communication with and prayers to God. As he observes the war in the Balkans firsthand, he seems to turn away from God, blaming Him for allowing the suffering of the innocent and for not stopping the injustice and endless killing. However, when the war is over and Jackson must remain in the Balkans (as he is considered a criminal in the U.S.), he turns back to God. He comes to a special place where people claim to see the Virgin Mary and prays for the well-being of his friends and, most important, his partner. Her name, Maria, is also significant, as the relationship with her figuratively brings Jackson closer to God, especially considering the novel’s last scene, when Jackson, waiting for the appearance of the Virgin Mary, sees his Maria coming to him; she gave up her life in the U.S. to come to the Balkans to be with him. Finally, Jackson’s role as a soldier and missionary seems very obscure throughout the novel, especially because of his multiple rejections of faith; still, the frequent references to God along with the final description of Jackson rather overtly position Jackson in the role of a pilgrim, a missionary of God, who came to the Balkans to fulfill a significant task—a role that is obviously derived from the ideology of American exceptionalism: “[The religious pilgrims] always assumed he was like them—a true believer who had made the long pilgrimage to pray at the spot where Virgin Mary had appeared” (418).
The final important issue to address in the analysis of the novel is its depiction of Muslims. As Serbs terrorize the Muslim population, a Bosnian Muslim joins a group of Muslims who have come from the Middle East—from Iran, Libya, and Syria—to “carry on the jihad in Bosnia” (363). While Bosnian Muslims are considered Europeans and their religion is not treated as a threat, the emergence of these men from the Middle East provokes the opposite reaction. Jackson, for example, asks them, “You’re real Muslims?” (363), which suggests that “real” Muslims are only those who come from the Middle East. In the novel they are obviously considered to be more dangerous than European Muslims. Jackson calls the Muslims who came to support the Bosnians “mujahideen” (364), which in fact they are, and their brutality is vividly illustrated when they kill a baby elephant being transported to Italy. These men openly call themselves “America’s enemy,” and they justify their mission by saying, “The Bosnian people have turned to us because the Western world to which they were seduced for decades has turned its back on them. But we come. We will liberate Bosnia, or we will die trying” (363–64). In the end, the Bosnian who joined the mujahideen turns out not to be a religious fanatic, and thus his example illustrates Jackson’s belief that European Muslims differ from those who live in the Middle East.
The American decision not to send military troops to Bosnia is explained by the country’s unwillingness to help Muslims. “How can the president send American boys to die for Muslims in a place called Bosnia, a place they never knew existed?” asks Jackson, to which a Bosnian responds, “It’s hard for Americans to look at Muslims as the good guys, because they don’t understand the situation here. But when the people of America and Europe find out the true story, they’ll demand that we do something” (401). Although the novel was published in 2000, and so one cannot connect the U.S. attitude toward Muslims it portrays to 9/11 and argue that the novel belongs to the era of the War on Terror (although it does read like such a novel), it is still possible to claim that This Way to Heaven vividly illustrates the situation in the Middle East, specifically the aggressive attitude of particular groups toward Western countries, especially toward the U.S., that eventually led to 9/11. This issue will be examined in greater detail in the next chapter.