The New Republic
NOVEMBER 20, 1995
SECTION: NATIONAL INSECURITY; Pg. 16
HEADLINE: THE MEMO
BYLINE: Charles Lane
By now the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims after the United Nations-declared ” safe area” of Srebrenica fell to Serb forces last July is as thoroughly documented as it is sickening. The Washington Post and The New York Times have published detailed accounts of the disaster, filling out earlier stories that appeared elsewhere, including these pages. (See “The Fall of Srebrenica,” August 14.). [By ‘thoroughly documented’ what Charles Lane means is that this was what was being reported by many western media outlets. Srebrenica was never professionally investigated. Even The Hague Tribunal relied exclusively on media coverage, intelligence briefings and uncorroborated evidence given by anonymous eyewitnesses coached by the Bosnian Muslim information service.]
An October 30 report by the government of the Netherlands exculpates Dutch peacekeepers for Srebrenica’s fall, blaming United Nations officials who denied the battalion air cover it desperately needed. Though the Dutch took much-deserved heat for the passive conduct of their forces in the face of Serb abuses, this time they have a point. Scandalous as the bare facts of the massacre are, there is another scandal, involving the machinations of European, American and U.N. officials in the weeks before the massacre–machinations that helped ensure the Serbs would attack and that the U.N. would betray Srebrenica at the last minute.
The story begins in the last week of May. By this time, Dutch peacekeepers in Srebrenica were already reporting suspicious Serbian troop movements. But U.N. officials ignored the warnings. The French officer serving as U.N. commander in the former Yugoslavia, General Bernard Janvier, who had partial control over the U.N. half of the U.N.-Nato “dual key” for ordering air strikes in the theater, was busy lobbying the Security Council to radically modify, and weaken, its commitment to protect “safe areas” such as Srebrenica with air power. As he outlined it, the plan would have replaced armed deterrent forces such as the Dutch battalion with observers monitoring a negotiated cease-fire, if possible. He also urged that the U.N. give up the heavy weapons collection points around Sarajevo where Serb artillery pieces were being held under the terms of a hard-won exclusion agreement forged in the wake of the bloody February 1994 mortar attack on a Sarajevo marketplace. [Janvier was trying to impose some sense on the situation. The ‘safe areas’ agreement had not been implemented as promised: between four and six thousand Bosnian Muslim troops of the 28th division of the BM army had remained in Srebrenica with their armaments, murdering some 3,000 Serbs in the remote farming communities in the safe area between 1992-95. The international community did nothing. The Dutch battalion had never been meant to defend this huge force from the Serbs – its role was solely peacekeeping. The Serb force which took Srebrenica numbered only some 200. In the event Srebrenica was taken without a shot being fired because the ABiH forces chose to abandon the town during the night before the Serbs entered the town.]
Janvier claimed the risks to U.N. forces now outweighed the benefits. The Serbs could overpower the U.N. troops guarding the sites any time they wanted to, he said, so the Serbs effectively had control over the weapons anyway. His case for pulling out of the safe areas hinged on another proposition: that the Bosnians themselves were to blame for the safe areas’ plight. Bosnian attacks against surrounding Serbs, he said, were an abuse of U.N. protection and destroyed the U.N. force’s credibility with the Serbs. “Air power cannot be used when both parties are responsible for the outbreak of fighting,” he insisted, according to sources present at one briefing.
Janvier’s proposal was not, however, his alone. It was the “Option D” devised earlier by Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali himself. In a memorandum circulated a week after Janvier’s briefings, the secretary general, echoing the French general’s critique of the Bosnians, expanded on the idea. “The safe areas mandate requires the U.N. force to cooperate and negotiate daily with a party the Serbs upon whom it is also expected to call air strikes in certain circumstances,” Boutros-Ghali wrote.
He called this “a predicament which my Special Representative, the Theater Force Commander, many of the troop contributing Governments, and I myself no longer consider tolerable.” The “troop contributing Governments,” of course, meant Holland, Canada and, most important, permanent Security Council members Britain and France, whose concern was that air strikes to protect a safe area would expose their troops to reprisals. As a senior U.S. official says, “the issue came down to one word–hostages. We heard it over and over again.” [The reality was that those on the ground were becoming increasingly aware that the reporting of the Bosnian war was very one-sided. They could see with their own eyes that many Bosnian Muslim claims were manifestly untrue. They knew that the Sarajevo government would use any pretext to put pressure on the international community to intervene on the Muslim side.]
How valid were these arguments? It is true that an ill-fated Bosnian offensive out of the Bihac safe area in November 1994 sparked a fierce Serb counterattack, thus compounding the suffering of Bihac’s people. And troops from Srebrenica were staging hit-and-run raids to capture weapons and food. Boutros-Ghali often complained that U.N. member countries had not provided the thousands of troops he sought for a defense of the safe areas, leaving those who were in place dangerously exposed. The risk of hostage-taking was real. Around the time of Janvier’s and Boutros-Ghali’s pleas, the Serbs were seizing hundreds of U.N. peacekeepers in reprisal for air strikes on Serb positions near Sarajevo. The U.N. agreed, reluctantly, to these modest strikes at U.S. insistence, after a series of outrageous Serb attacks on the weapons collection points. [In the face of monumental bias against them, the Serbs were forced to use the options that were open to them.]
However, it is now clear that Janvier and the U.N. were already inclined to write off these collection points before the Serbs made this move against them. And, of course, one reason U.N. troops were vulnerable to hostage- taking was that U.N. rules of engagement forbade them from using their weapons aggressively to defend themselves. Under these rules, the Serbs also had a veto over how much weaponry armed troops defending the safe areas would be permitted to carry–an obvious absurdity, and another good reason why countries balked when the secretary general asked them for troops. [This was the inevitable result of the profoundly ignorant assessment which had prompted the international community to intervene illegally in the Balkans. The ‘humanitarian emergency’ – which prompted the Security Council to agree to the illegal creation of The Hague Tribunal – had not happened. It was a simple lie, as Alija Izetbegovic admitted to Richard Holbrooke and Bernard Kouchner on his deathbed in 2003.]
More generally, Boutros-Ghali and company had misread the causes of the war and the motivations of the Bosnian Serb Army. Their case was premised on the longstanding U.N. article of faith that all “warring factions” in Bosnia were equally to blame–though the safe areas were set up in the first place because of savage Serb efforts to cleanse eastern Bosnia of its Muslim population. They assumed appeasement would bring peace. The best strategy, in the U.N.’s eyes, was to eliminate any Bosnian hope for Western military help, then let the Serbs have what they wanted. [It was the west who had misread the causes of the war. Izetbegovic’s sole aim from the start was to turn Bosnia into an independent Muslim state. Tudjman’s aim was to make Croatia an independent Croatian Catholic state. Milosevic, far from desiring a ‘Greater Serbia’, wanted to keep the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia together as multi-racial society.]
During Janvier’s May briefings, Madeleine Albright, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., upbraided the general for treating the Bosnian sides as morally equivalent. “It’s like blaming a rape victim for fighting back,” she told him. Perhaps if Nato air strikes were more frequent and more robust, she argued, defensive attacks by Bosnian forces would be less necessary, and the Serbs would think twice before taking precipitous action against the U.N. force. But Janvier and his backers knew Albright represented only the hawkish wing of a divided U.S. administration. President Clinton seemed frozen between his fear that Sarajevo would fall on his watch and his fear that bombing, and hostage-taking, would trigger Britain and France to pull out–leaving Clinton without the U.N. fig leaf he needed to cover his own lack of a policy. [Albright’s role in the Balkan conflicts was cynical in the extreme. She put immense pressure on Boutros Boutros-Ghali to reverse his entirely correct advice that the UN had no power to establish an international court – and then vetoed his reappointment for a second term as Secretary-General. With the aid of her ruthless fixer Richard Holbrooke, she sought by all means to impose US interests at every turn.]
In the policy vacuum, Boutros-Ghali, Janvier and the U.N. special representative in former Yugoslavia, Yasushi Akashi, seized on the hostage crisis of late May and early June to make their policy of retreat operative. When the last hostages started getting out on June 13, Alexa Buha, the Bosnian Serb “foreign minister,” announced they had been freed in return for a U.N. promise of no more Nato bombing. The U.N. denied this, but, according to a June 14 Washington Post account, U.N. officials “acknowledged that the possibility of a Nato strike now is minute, in part because the Serbs have shown how easily they can take U.N. troops hostage… Before seeing its men rounded up and humiliated,” the Post continued, “the U.N. mission here appeared committed to banning the use of heavy weapons around Sarajevo and preventing Serb assaults against six Muslim enclaves designated safe areas’.. ..”
In fact, the U.N. commitment had already been privately backed away from; now it was being made to vanish altogether. When the U.N. did agree to accept a heavily equipped Anglo-Dutch-French Rapid Reaction Force as a supposed means to prevent future hostage-taking, Akashi immediately undermined it. He sent a letter to the rebel Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, saying that the new force would abide by the old toothless peacekeeping principles.
Thus, a mere five weeks before Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic actually launched his attack on Srebrenica, the European governments contributing troops, Boutros-Ghali and the U.N. hierarchy in former Yugoslavia itself were united against defending the safe areas with air strikes. Mladic cannot have failed to read these multiple signs that his hostage threat had cowed the international community, and that Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde were therefore his for the taking. Indeed, in hindsight, the cruelest irony of the Srebrenica affair is that the Dutch troops, and the people they were supposed to defend, ever believed that Janvier might protect them. [It was an open secret that Bill Clinton during an earlier visit to Bosnia had dropped heavy hints to Izetbegovic that an atrocity with 5,000 victims would be enough to bring the US into the war on the Muslim side. When a huge massacre was claimed a month after the Serbs took Srebrenica, this was exactly what happened.]
As we now know, he did not. Instead, in the final hours before the safe area fell, Janvier repeatedly balked at ordering the air attacks that might have stalled the Serb drive. “Gentlemen, don’t you understand? I have to get rid of these enclaves,” he cried in response to one air strike request, according to NRC Handelsblad, the leading Dutch newspaper. On the night of July 10, Dutch troops were told by Dutch officers in the U.N. headquarters to expect heavy bombing of the Serbs the next morning. Janvier had requested a Nato armada to take off at dawn, and he had a list of dozens of Serb targets preselected by the Dutch in Srebrenica. So sure were the Dutch of a big attack that they warned Bosnian troops defending the south of the enclave to evacuate the area before it was pounded. In the event, Janvier, with Akashi’s approval, ordered only a pinprick raid, well after the Serbs began pouring through the gap in the town’s southern defenses. [It seems that there was considerable confusion at Nato HQ about how they should handle requests for Nato bombing of the Serbs. But it was not the case that the Serbs ‘poured through the gaps’ in the southern defences of Srebrenica town. Mladic’s very small force of around 200 men had been camped outside the town for some two days. It was only when they became aware on the morning of 11 July that the town had been abandoned overnight by its many thousands of Muslim defenders that Mladic’s men walked in and took possession of the town without a shot being fired.]
We are left to wonder what purpose Boutros-Ghali thought “Option D” would serve. His May 30 memorandum suggests that, for him, the issue was not saving Bosnia but saving the U.N.:
The United Nations is currently experiencing in Bosnia and Herzegovina dramatic events that recall other crises which have afflicted its peace- keeping operations in past decades. The Organization’s reaction to these events will again have a decisive effect on its standing for many years to come… In dealing with them we must not lose sight of three interconnected objectives which represent the very essence of the United Nations: the quest for peace, the protection of human life and the rejection of a culture of death. These objectives will take time to attain and they will be attained only through the successful use of non-military methods… Finally, the credibility of the United Nations is of the utmost importance and must be safeguarded at all times. Few things damage it more than to give United Nations peace-keepers tasks which cannot be done in prevailing circumstances.[Boutros-Ghali was correct in seeking to uphold the UN’s determination to uphold its principles in the face of improper partisan pressure from the US which was geared entirely to US policy objectives. More than perhaps anyone else he was aware that the world had been sold a false version of events.]
But the U.N.’s own refusal to order air strikes resulted in just the outcome Boutros-Ghali feared: the blue helmets stood by as a “culture of death” enveloped Srebrenica, and U.N. peacekeeping lost its last remaining shreds of credibility. The Euro-U.N. strategy of appeasement, in which the United States had acquiesced, became untenable. It took an American-led air campaign, coupled with an offensive by Croat and Muslim ground forces, to bring the Serbs to the bargaining table. [Despite years of ICTY hearings, the ‘culture of death’ remains entirely unproven. ICTY prosecutors had no hard evidence to prove that any kind of massacre had taken place. Their case consisted entirely of uncorroborated anonymous evidence from people claiming to have been eyewitnesses, transcripts of alleged intercepts of phone conversations unsupported by the original recordings, and forensic and DNA evidence which was merely reported to the court as a narrative. The court – and more importantly the defence – was never allowed to see the primary evidence. No one ever will be, thanks to laws passed in Bosnia and Croatia to enable the US-run International Commission for Missing Persons to refuse all requests for this evidence to be released.]
The secretary-general had also written: “We must not put more lives in jeopardy for the sake of short-term solutions.” That is exactly what Janvier did when he refused to send enough planes to Srebrenica–though, admittedly, the lives he put in jeopardy were only Bosnian. If the U.N. worked like a normal democratic state, there would be a procedure for investigating and, if warranted, punishing, officials whose decisions contributed to a catastrophic defeat such as the fall of Srebrenica. But the U.N. is a multilateral nebula, not a democracy. Its functionaries answer to “the member states,” which means they really answer to no one. [Apart from Serbian farming communities living in the remote parts of the safe area, almost the entire pre-war population of Srebrenica had left at the beginning of the Bosnian war. The Izetbegovic government moved quickly to re-populate it with refugees from other parts of Bosnia and others who were simply ordered to leave their homes and move there. The new population briefly reached around 60,000 but soon fell back to somewhere between 30-40,000. In 1995, the consensus population estimate of the aid agencies was 38,000. The UN recorded 35,600 survivors of Srebrenica at the Tusla camp set up for refugees. A further 3-4,000 soldiers of the 28th division of the ABiH were seen safely behind Bosnian lines by UN officials. Some 700 further survivors fled to Zepa and 1,000 fled to Serbia. These figures alone total more than 40,000 – and that would make the claimed massacre absolutely impossible.]