An old priest may be forgiven a bit of hyperbole. The Serbs aren’t Nazis; “ethnic cleansing” can’t approach the scale of the Holocaust. But after the shame of watching two Bosnian enclaves fall, and hearing the tales of terrified refugees, the Western allies decided to stand up to aggression. At a one-day conference in London, they warned the Serbs that if they attacked the “safe area” of Gorazde (map), NATO would respond with a “substantial and decisive” air campaign, involving U.S. F-15Es, F-16Cs and French Mirages, as well as British and French Jaguars. “No more pin-prick strikes,” vowed Secretary of State Warren Christopher. The campaign, says Defense Secretary William Perry, would be graduated, escalating from striking Serb air defenses, to artillery around Gorazde, to broader targets (ammunition depots and fuel dumps) in Bosnian Serb-held territory. After three years of bickering and dithering, the allies also agreed that they would soon send about 2,000 French and British soldiers from the Rapid Reaction Force-10,500 armored troops–to punch through a land supply route to the encircled Sarajevo.
The forceful decision came at a critical turn in the war. In the absence of a firm Western policy, Congress threatened to challenge President Clinton by lifting the arms embargo on the Muslims. The Europeans repeatedly warned they would pull out of Bosnia–which would trigger the deployment of up to 25,000 U.S. troops to help with the withdrawal. “It’s hard to gear up for yet another ultimatum,” says one U.S. official of the latest threat. “But this time it will be different.”
There were skeptics, even within the alliance. “There are no guarantees,” says a senior U.S. official. “This is Bosnia.” Even the man who chaired the meeting, British Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind, was concerned that “the United Nations must not go to war.” Russia, a conferee, publicly opposed the accord. “There is no consensus on air-strikes,” insisted Moscow’s Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, at a separate news conference. “We are strongly against [them].”
The Muslims doubted that a threat so specific would accomplish much–except invite the Serbs to besiege safe areas other than Gorazde. “Another half-measure, another consensus, another collective fig leaf,” complained Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic. The Serb leadership had no immediate comment. They were busy shelling Bihac and Sarajevo.
The London conference, in fact, resolved very little. Planes are no substitute for a policy. The powwow addressed a deliberately modest agenda: deterring the Serbs in Gorazde. After years of haggling, the participants didn’t even try to resolve the differences between Washington and its allies–and between NATO and Russia–over a long-term plan for Bosnia. In fact, the participants may never agree on one of the remaining options, which boil down to:
Imposing a political settlement, codifying Serb gains and offering economic inducements to the Muslims to rebuild.
Maintaining the status quo by beefing up U.N. peacekeepers already in place.
Withdrawing U.N. troops, arming the Bosnians and bombing the Serbs.
Why can’t the West shut down the horror show? Many of the same participants met in London in August 1992; they heard British Prime Minister John Major tell them, “The people in this room have the power to stop the war.” To this day, the allies can’t even agree on the causes of the conflict, much less settle on a long-term strategy for ending it. No Western leader has been willing to take charge or to spend what it would take to end the war–in terms of military costs, casualties or political capital at home. Early miscalculations by the allies helped spur the conflict and set up the contradictory tactics that still haunt the West.
It’s now clear that the allies’ fundamental mistake was in prematurely recognizing an independent state without giving it the Tuzla, Dutch soldiers means to survive–or offer protections to its Serb minority. After a brutal six-month Serbo-Croat war in 1991, Germany thought the best way to ensure peace was to recognize Croatia and, eventually, Bosnia, and pressured the West to follow. At the same time, the international community refused to lift the arms embargo it had imposed on the entire region. That left every republic except Serbia–which inherited the military assets of the Yugoslav People’s Army–at a severe disadvantage. When the war broke out, Bosnia couldn’t defend itself and looked to the United Nations for help. But the West activated UNProFor (the U.N. Protection Force) not to silence the Serb artillery surrounding the capital but to deliver bread and medical supplies to the victims. The U.N. action in May and June 1992 was aimed at alleviating suffering but only prolonged the conflict.
For the Europeans, the last three years have been a high-stakes poker game–mostly one of bluff. The United States has never anted up by contributing troops: George Bush and Bill Clinton rejected that option as a vote loser. But America has kibitzed constantly (to the extreme annoyance of its allies), criticizing European impotence–and pocrisy–in the face of Serb terrorism. “Up until now, the French and the British have been playing a double game,” says a U.S. official. “They clamor for strong action through NATO channels, then they undermine it by slamming on the brakes through U.N. channels.”
But washington is hardly guilt-free. Without taking an active role on the ground, it has pressured the U.N. Security Council to pile on more aggressive – and impossible–tasks. As Rifkind said last month, “We do not vote for resolutions that we are not prepared to deliver the manpower required to help implement.” Originally constituted for the “delivery of humanitarian supplies,” UNProFor’s mandate has steadily grown, but without the necessary means to carry out its changing mission. At U.S. insistence, the Security Council added provisions to protect relief convoys, impose a no-fly zone, enforce monitoring at the Serbia-Bosnia border, establish safe areas, set up weapons-exclusion zones and call for airstrikes. Every one of these provisions has failed–thanks to a lack of political will and manpower. “Nothing is more dangerous for a peacekeeping operation than to ask it to use force when its existing composition, armament, logistic support and deployment deny it the capacity to do so,” says U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who has shown scant leadership himself during the crisis.
The safe areas, now under attack, illustrate the weakness of Western planning and follow-through. Formed after the near collapse of Srebrenica in the spring of 1993, these havens were designed by the allies to protect Muslim civilians. At the time, Boutros-Ghali warned the Security Council that to deter attacks on the six designated enclaves, “approximately 34,000 additional troops would be required.” At a minimum-assuming that the warring parties would agree to demilitarize–an extra 7,600 soldiers would be needed. The West opted for the cheaper demilitarized solution, but ponied up only a token force. Lightly armed, the peacekeepers put up a poor defense, especially since the combatants didn’t lay down their weapons. The Muslims used the safe areas as a home base for guerrilla raids. The Serbs looked upon them as jigsaw pieces of Greater Serbia, staving off NATO reprisals by using U.N. personnel as human shields.
Throughout the crisis, France and Britain have complained about U.S. naivete–particularly when it comes to the efficacy of air power and the tendency to oversimplify the political situation. “The Europeans are gutless, and the Americans are brainless,” says Michael Clarke, head of the Center for Defense Studies at King’s College in London. “It’s almost like the lion and the scarecrow in ‘The Wizard of Oz’.” There’s something to the charges. In May 1993, Clinton sent Christopher to Europe to gather support for a campaign pledge to lift the arms embargo against the Bosnians and conduct airstrikes on the Serbs while the Muslims learned how to use the new equipment. The trip was a disaster. Clinton hadn’t prepared his counterparts across the Atlantic–as Bush had assiduously done before sending James Baker to organize an international coalition against Baghdad. The Europeans, furious that the U.S. administration would expose their ground troops to Serb retaliation, lectured Christopher, who came back empty-handed. The administration never picked up that cause again. Instead, it left the lift-and-strike option to Republican leaders like Bob Dole, who has used it to hammer U.S. and U.N. policy failures.
The United States and Europe have never seen eye to eye on the combatants, either–with calamitous results for diplomacy. Paris and London tend to see a moral equivalence of all sides in Bosnia, which accounts for their producing peace plans that sacrifice fairness for expediency. Washington focuses on the origins of the war, clearly labeling Serbs as aggressors and Muslims as victims. The result: the United States withholds its support from flawed proposals, which ratify Serb gains, in favor of unattainable ones that return land to the Muslims. U.S. insistence on doing the right thing scuttled the Vance-Owen plan, which carved Bosnia into 10 autonomous provinces. Washington has since tried to lure the combatants to the table with a proposal that offers 51 percent of the country to a Muslim-Croat federation. The Bosnians are holding out for a better deal, but may end up with a worse settlement. Meanwhile, both sides have decided to get what they can by slugging it out.
Continued warfare has conveniently served quite different political ends in Europe and the United States. Britain and France insist that the Muslims lost years ago and should take what they can get at the bargaining table before the Serbs wipe them off the face of Bosnia. In fact, despite the recent loss of Srebrenica and Zepa, government forces have made incremental gains around Sarajevo-territory that could help them strengthen a postwar state. For its part, the United States sometimes exaggerates the threat of the Bosnian Serb army to keep out U.S. combat troops. The BSA is actually so overstretched and burdened by morale problems that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic ordered thousands of “draft dodgers” living in Serbia back into military service across the Drina. Some Pentagon officials admit that the Serbs aren’t the juggernaut they’re sometimes cracked up to be. According to retired Gen. Bernard Trainor, fewer than 60,000 NATO troops would be needed for an extraction of UNProFor; by extension, far fewer than the 25,000 U.S. troops would be required to fulfill Clinton’s pledge.
That day of reckoning won another postponement, thanks to last week’s threat to the Serbs. Massive air attacks, the allies now say, won’t necessarily trigger a pullout of U.N. soldiers–and will keep the U.S. First Armored Division in Bad Kreuznach, Germany, where it has recently been rehearsing a withdrawal. The ultimatum may also save Clinton from a potentially damaging showdown with Congress, which will fight to keep U.S. soldiers out of Bosnia. At a private dinner the president hosted earlier this month for fop advisers and legislators, NEWSWEEK has learned, Newt Gingrich told Clinton that as long as he didn’t send ground troops, he was on safe turf. If the Senate passed a resolution the president didn’t like, Gingrich suggested, Clinton should veto it–because, he said, it would clarify the policy for Americans and make him look stronger in the eyes of foreign leaders.
It took more than strength to persuade the allies to go along with the U.S. push for aggressive airstrikes, a plan they’d rejected outright last November Going into last week, France insisted on reinforcing Gorazde with the help of American transport and attack helicopters. The White House grew increasingly reluctant–and curious about why President Jacques Chirac seemed so hellbent on the idea. (Said Clinton to Major, “He’s strong and he’s smart,but he’s French.”) There were trade-offs, of course. The Europeans gave up “dual key,” the cumbersome chain of command that relied on U.N. civilians to approve NATO air power The United States agreed to limit its bombing campaign to Gorazde, provided it could go to the North Atlantic Council, the political arm of NATO, to request strikes on other targets.
Will the threat deter the Bosnian Serbs? At the weekend, they were joined by Croatian Serbs and rebel Muslims in an all-out attack on Bihac, a strategic area with a large munitions factory and rail lines linking regions of Serb-held Bosnia. NATO issued no threats. But the Croats offered the Bosnians “urgent military assistance.” If Zagreb enters the conflict, there will only be more war–and greater shame.
With the Bosnian Muslims unequipped to put up a fight– and the West unwilling to intervene militarily – the Serbs now control more than 70 percent of Bosnian territory.
Refugees U.N. Troops Bihac 65,000 1,243 (Bangladesh, Denmark) Zepa 15,000 79 (Ukraine) Tuzla 252,000 1,428 (Jordan, Norway, Sweden. Pakistan) Sarajevo 140,000 6,530 (Egypt, France, Russia, Ukraine) Source: UNHCR/U.N.
Secretary of State James Baker tells Serbian President Slobodan Milo-sevie the Bush administration doesn’t want the post-cold-war world to crumble into ministates. Miloseric evidently thinks the West will look the other way if he tries to seize territory from Yugoslav republics that want to secede, such as Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Serb shells kill at least 20 civilians in the so-called bread-line massacre in Sarajevo. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney says military intervention is not an option; the Western allies settle for slapping economic sanctions on Serbia. Later in the summer, press revelations that the Serbs are running concentration camps for “ethnically cleansed” Bosnians elicit outrage–but no new response from the West.
Western negotiators have painstakingly drawn up a peace plan that divides Bosnia into a patchwork of Serb, Croat and Muslim territories. The European allies support it, but the new Clinton administration advises the Bosnian government to reject it. As the Serbs press their attack, Washington opts for airdrops of food.
Intense Serb shelling prevents humanitarian aid from entering Sarajevo. NATO “forward air controllers” are deployed to help guide Western airstrikes; the Bosnians want NATO bombs to help dislodge the Serbs from around the city. NATO, losing a chance to quash Serb aggression, announces that airstrikes will be aimed only at aiding humanitarian convoys.
After government troops attempt to break the siege of Bihac, a U.N. “safe area,” the Serbs launch a blistering assault. Washington suggests an “air exclusion zone” to prevent the Serbs from flying over the region, combined with heavy bombing of Serb targets. Britain and France veto the idea. U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry says the Muslims have “no prospect” of winning back territory they’ve lost.
To force the Serbs to return stolen U.N. weapons, NATO calls in air-strikes. In return, the Serbs take hundreds of peacekeepers hostage and shoot down an American pilot. The U.N. command in Bosnia circulates a secret memo to the West, predicting the Serbs will attack “safe areas.” No one moves to reinforce them; within weeks, they begin to fall.
