Serbian-held territories of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslav wars. The War Crimes Tribunal accused Slobodan Milošević of “attempting to create a Greater Serbia“‘, a Serbian state encompassing the Serb-populated areas of Croatia and Bosnia, and achieved by forcibly removing non-Serbs from large geographical areas through the commission of criminal activity.
The Perpetrators
In every society people exist who voluntarily commit crimes.
Whether due to narcissistic personality disorders or sadistic dispositions,
these people experience a feeling of exuberance and liberation in their
actions. The snipers of Sarajevo, for example, enjoyed putting victims in their
crosshairs and having an unbridled power over life and death, as one of them
stated in an interview. Among the volunteers in the special operations units
were many who were filled with hatred toward an envisioned enemy, enjoyed
killing, or simply craved the business of war. The warlords attracted social
outsiders, petty criminals, hooligans, and weekend fighters who saw the war as
an adventure or a way to earn extra income.
However, the widespread expulsion on the scale experienced
in Bosnia was only possible because thousands of “ordinary men,” and very few
women, participated in these crimes alongside those who were predisposed to
violence. The International Criminal Tribune for the former Yugoslavia
estimates that 15,000 to 20,000 people participated in planning, administering
and executing “ethnic cleansing,” including members of the political
leadership, the bureaucracy, the police, and the military, who acted on their
own or carried out the instructions of their superiors. Many described later
that they experienced the war as a matter of defense in which killing was a
necessary evil. A sense of duty, an ideal of masculinity, and group pressure
interacted here. “There was no choice,” testified the Serb commander Dragan
Obrenović. “You could be either a soldier or a traitor. … We didn’t even notice
how we were drawn into the vortex of interethnic hatred.” Others were driven by
delusion, a sense of duty, opportunism, fear, sadism, or greed. Exhaustion,
stress, and alcohol led to emotional deadening and lowered inhibitions. The
police chief of Bosanski Šamac, Stevan Todorović, simply lost his nerve in the
face of the daily artillery shelling, the mountain of corpses, and the plight
of refugees. He was scared, panicky, and became an alcoholic. In this
condition, he paid little attention to the butchery carried out by his
subordinates. Many defended their actions on the reasoning that they were
simply carrying out their superior’s orders, similar to the excuses of German
executioners from the Second World War. Dražan Erdemović, a 23-year-old
executioner in Srebrenica, emphasized that he had fled from the executions at
the first available opportunity. Allegedly he did not kill willingly.
Amid all this, individuals still had leeway and opportunity
to make their own choices. Grozdana Ćećez, a Serb woman who was raped every
evening by her Muslim guards at the Čelebići camp, tried to ward off the
attacks by humiliating her abusers with the question: “I could be your mother …
don’t you have a mother?” The effect varied. Only one of the men was
embarrassed, apologized, and left without having done what he had come for.
Others, however, were not halted by her words, including one of her husband’s
former work colleagues and one of her son’s classmates.
Perpetrators found it easier to justify their own actions if
they could resort to symbolic forms of legitimation. The president of the Serb
Republic in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Biljana Plavšić, expressed remorse and referred
to her obsession over time with experiences and memories from the Second World
War. Radovan Karadžić reached into the prop box of folklore to proclaim himself
the descendant of the linguistic scholar Vuk Stefanović Karadžić and had
himself filmed in a bizarre pose wearing historical costume. Hajduks, the Robin
Hoods of the Balkans during the Ottoman era, were depicted as the role models
for the warlords. Whoever took part in the battles were perpetuating the
historical fight and carrying on the tradition of heroic deeds that had been celebrated
in oral history for generations.
The Media and the Escalation of Violence
The International Tribunal for Yugoslavia came to the
conclusion that the media was guilty of contributing significantly to the
brutalization of the war. Radio, television, and the printed press created
enemy images and stereotypes, spread rumors and untruths, provoked fear, hate,
and revenge, and broke down moral barriers. They resorted to well-tested
propaganda strategies to give the war the necessary psychological underpinning,
especially by portraying everything as black or white, by demonizing the enemy,
by ignoring, exaggerating, and falsifying information, by drawing parallels
between current occurrences and historic events and myths, by using hateful
language and constantly repeating the same messages. The authors of a study on
media communication noted correctly that the Yugoslav war was “the mere
continuation of the evening news by military means.”
Since the motto “no pictures, no news” prevailed in the
media age, the warring parties hired professional public relations agencies
abroad to promote their cause. Alone in the United States, they signed at least
157 contracts with partners between 1991 and 2002, a figure that most certainly
represents just the tip of the iceberg. Among the jobs to be done, for example,
was to improve the image of Slovenia and Croatia as Western European countries
or to equate the Serbs with Nazis. Thanks to satellite technology and digital
recording, editing, and transmission capabilities, international news
channels—especially CNN, BBC, and later Al Jazeera—brought images of the war
directly from the crisis regions to the rest of the world, thereby mobilizing a
global civil society calling for humanitarian and military intervention.
Hate-filled tirades appeared in the media on all sides,
making it soon hard to distinguish between true and false. In the Serbian
evening news, an alarmed public learned that Muslim extremists had supposedly
fed Serb children to the lions in the Sarajevo zoo. More dangerous than such
horror myths were the many unverifiable, one-sided, or falsified news stories
about events that sounded plausible, such as the report that Bosnian troops
were shelling their own civilian population in Sarajevo in order to place the
blame on the Serbs. German politicians were also tricked into believing a bogus
report or two, including one in which Serb doctors were said to be implanting
dog fetuses into Bosniak women. Such stories not only perpetuated repulsive
images of the enemy, they also appealed to forms of media voyeurism.
The war allowed aggression to be acted out openly and
provided a framework in which violent acts were suddenly wanted, encouraged,
and socially sanctioned. Under exceptional conditions, people can certainly be
tempted into committing deeds that they never would do under peaceful
circumstances. This makes it almost impossible to maintain friendly neighborly
relations in wartime. Once war has erupted, it becomes the source for a vicious
cycle of never-ending violence. It alters ideas, emotions, aims, behavior, and
identities of people from the ground up. People who are otherwise respectable
citizens may carry out personal vendettas under the guise of higher national
interests and thus attribute a type of private meaning to the war, and this may
even prompt acquaintances to go after one another.
Insecurity and anxiety are the most important means by which
to transform ethnic distance and latent nationalism into open antagonism. The
1993 British documentary We Are All Neighbors shows how uncertainty and fear,
rumors and media disinformation, followed by the first violent incidents and
finally the outbreak of war, turned peaceful coexistence into distrust, then
rejection, and eventually hate. In a village not far from Kiseljak in central
Bosnia, life seemed to be rather normal in 1993. As long as the artillery fire
was only to be heard faintly in the distance, Croats and Muslims met for coffee
as usual. No one believed that anything could change the good neighborly
relations. But the more the war interfered with daily life and the closer the
front approached the village, the more uneasy people began to feel. By the time
the first refugees arrived, people were talking about “us” and “them.” Visits
with one another became less frequent; some no longer greeted the others. Out
of doubt grew distrust, out of insecurity developed fear, and out of that,
betrayal. When Croat troops were about to launch an attack on the village and
therefore warned the local Croats, not one gathered up enough courage to inform
their Muslim neighbors. All Muslims could do once the assault started was to
tear out of town head over heels under a shower of grenades.
Similar examples of crumbling solidarity could be observed
everywhere as people became fearful of losing their homes or their lives. In
mid-1991, the Croat Witness E reported that, shortly before the assault on
Vukovar, his Serb friends left town. Why, he asked them. “They would shrug
their shoulders and they would say, ‘We believe you will see it soon too.’”
Witness DD, whose husband and two sons were murdered in the massacres in
Srebrenica, described the relationship to her Serb acquaintances: “We were
friends, in fact. We went to have coffee at each other’s houses. And if we were
working on something, we would help one another. We would help them, and they
would help us.” She later saw one of these neighbors standing among the
soldiers who took away her 14-year-old son, who was never seen again. At that
moment she remembered that many Serb women and children had left the area a few
days before the attack. “Then someone asked, ‘Where are you going? What’s
happening?’ … Their answer was very vague. ‘Some fools could come along and do
who knows what.’ … And we were wondering. Until then, they didn’t do anything
wrong. They didn’t hurt us and, of course, we didn’t hurt them either.”
Containment Policy
While public opinion in the West favored military
intervention in light of the horrific images from Bosnia that flicked across
people’s television screens every evening, political leaders remained reticent.
Die for Sarajevo? Politicians and military experts knew that it would not be
enough to simply make threatening gestures, but they feared the risks of
deploying ground troops. Nor was there any hope that an intervention could
offer political solutions since the warring parties had already rejected one
peace plan after another.
Because the war continued to escalate, the credibility and
reputation of the international community in dealing with Yugoslavia suffered.
Miscalculations and delayed reactions as well as conflicting national interests
and evaluations prevented the West from presenting a united front and made it
look thoroughly helpless, disoriented, and devoid of any overall concept on how
to cope with the situation. An army of special envoys, diplomats, and military
experts scurried around just trying to catch up with the tumultuous events,
hundreds of ceasefires were broken, and the heads of state of the world’s greatest
powers exposed themselves to public ridicule by arrogant provincial politicians
from the Balkans. Not only did the international community lack the political
will to form a united approach, it also possessed no effective instruments of
conflict management.
For all these reasons, the international community limited
itself to developing a strategy of humanitarian relief and containment. It
imposed an arms embargo and commissioned the United Nations in Sarajevo with
the distribution of food and medicine. Serbia and Montenegro, which had united
as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, were punished in May 1992 with
comprehensive economic and diplomatic sanctions. In February 1993, the UN
Security Council established the International Criminal Court for the Former
Yugoslavia to prosecute the worst war crimes.
In light of the relatively weak response from the West, the
Bosnian government received support from the Islamic world. Hundreds of
millions of U.S. dollars are thought to have been spent between 1992 and 1995
on illegal weapon sales. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Malaysia, and Indonesia were
particularly prominent sponsors. Radical, violence-prone groups from abroad
also arrived in the embattled region, including up to five thousand Iranian,
Afghani, and Saudi mujahideen fighters who joined the Bosniak armed forces.
Although conflicts between Saudi Arabia and Iran, between the Sunnis and
Shiites, stood in the way of a unified Islamic policy, pan-Islamic solidarity
was strengthened. This encouraged the re-Islamization of Bosnian Muslims, who
felt abandoned by the West.
Brutal “ethnic cleansing” continued to force thousands of
people to flee to the cities, where unsustainable conditions had prevailed for
months. Therefore, the UN Security Council declared Srebrenica, Sarajevo,
Tuzla, Žepa, Goražde, and Bihać “safe areas” in April and May 1993. Lightly
armed Blue Helmet peacekeeping forces were to provide humanitarian aid under
the protection of possible NATO air strikes. The concept of the safe areas
revealed serious flaws from day one, starting with the fact that peacekeepers
were being sent into a region in which there was no peace to keep. The rules of
their deployment referred to consent of the conflicting parties, impartiality,
and nonuse of force except in self-defense. The Blue Helmets therefore did not
have either the mandate or equipment and arms necessary for active battle.
“Knowing that any other course of action would jeopardize the lives of the
troops, we tried to create—or imagine—an environment in which the tenets of
peacekeeping … could be upheld,” stated UN secretary-general Kofi Annan later.
The Security Council passed more than 200 resolutions to stitch together a
complex and contradictory mandate, the boundaries of which were
incomprehensible to all. Where did this mandate start, where did it end? Ultimately,
the tragedy was that the term “safe area” duped the population into believing
these areas offered a measure of protection that actually never existed.
Furthermore, there was an extreme disparity between the UN’s aims and its
resources: instead of the 34,000 soldiers demanded by UN headquarters to man
the six designated safe areas, the UN member states only sent 7,500 soldiers to
serve.
Meanwhile, the possibility of “humanitarian intervention”
was being debated throughout the West. These debates between advocates and
opponents of such intervention were particularly controversial in Germany,
where the central question was whether Germany should and could participate in
military operations abroad in the future, although these were expressly
prohibited by the constitution. Because the German air force had been
participating in the international airlift to Sarajevo since July 1992, members
of Germany’s Liberal and Social Democratic parties turned to the Constitutional
Court in April 1993. The judges ruled on 12 July 1994 that Germany could take
part in peacekeeping missions without having to first amend the constitution,
as long as parliament approved the mission by simple majority. Step by step,
the self-imposed limitation on military involvement that had prevailed in
Germany since 1945 gave way to a greater acceptance of the idea to deploy
German troops abroad and to assume a new foreign policy role in world politics.
Srebrenica
On the morning of 11 July 1995, Bosnian-Serb army and police
units stormed the safe area of Srebrenica, which had been under artillery fire
for days. Although the president of Republika Srpska, Radovan Karadžić, had
ordered the removal of the Muslim population from the enclaves of Srebrenica
and Žepa back on 8 March, the attack caught the 150 Dutch UN troops deployed
there completely by surprise. During the torturous July days that followed, as
many as 8,200 men and boys were systematically executed by Serb forces, making
the Srebrenica massacres the first legally recognized genocide on European soil
since 1945. In a tragic way, this incident symbolized the belated, helpless,
and fully inadequate response of the West.
From the standpoint of the Bosnian Serbs, there were many
reasons to attack the city. They viewed eastern Bosnia as ancient Serbian
territory, the Drina River as an “internal river” and not a “border,” as
General Mladić expressed it. “The main obstacle today is Srebrenica with which
the Germans and Americans, who defend it, want to fix Serbia’s border at the
Drina,” he said in addressing his soldiers. “It is your task to prevent this.”
In the summer of 1995, Mladić’s troops controlled all of eastern Bosnia with
the exception of a few enclaves, while the Bosnian army only launched attacks
periodically against the regions surrounding what were actually demilitarized
safe areas. Bosniak troops had grown increasingly strong since 1994, had
retaken regions, and were preparing to break the siege of Sarajevo in the
summer of 1995. In this context, the Bosnian military pulled soldiers out of
Srebrenica, a clear indication that they did not intend to make a serious
effort to defend the enclave. Furthermore, the Serbs could count on
encountering no resistance from the UN peacekeeping troops. That spring a
precedent had been set in Croatia in which the Croatian army had overrun the UN
safe area in western Slavonia and driven out the Serb population living there.
Last but not least, contempt and revenge against the balija, a derogatory term
for Muslims, played a role after Muslim militias had caused a bloodbath in the
villages of Glogova and Kravica on the Orthodox Christmas Eve of 1993. “Kad,
tad”—sooner or later, Serbs vowed, there would be revenge.
A dangerous concoction of strategic scheming, nationalist
incitement, and outright vengefulness was brewing as Mladić’s men waited for an
opportunity for the ultimate reckoning with the Muslims. In the preceding
months, thousands had flown to the safe area from the large territories under
Serb control. Instead of 9,000 people, there were now 30,000 people in the
city—another reason why the UN military experts believed that Srebrenica could
not be taken by force. General Mladić assessed the situation differently and
assumed that he could force the city to surrender without a major battle by
placing it under siege. However, contrary to expectations, Muslim soldiers,
along with a good number of the male population, decided to break out of town
during the night of 11 July. This made the Serbs hopping mad. It was then, at
the latest, that Mladić must have given the order to massacre as many men and
boys as they could find. Following the assault on the city, his troops captured
all those seeking protection on the grounds of the UN compound in Potočari or
hiding in the surrounding woods. Thousands were taken away in buses, packed
into empty school buildings or warehouses, and then slaughtered like livestock
or systematically executed.
The 17-year-old Witness O, who was able to escape, severely
injured, after a mass shooting on the morning of 15 July 1995, recounted the
events of that night: “The situation was chaotic. We were all tied up. … the
firing started, and then they would call out people in groups of five. … And
when it was my turn … we were told to find a place for us, … when we were on
the right-hand side of the truck, I saw rows of killed people. It looked like
they had been lined up one row after the other. … And when we reached the spot,
somebody said, ‘Lie down.’ And when we started to fall down to the front, they
were behind our backs, the shooting started. … I felt pain in the right side of
my chest. … I was waiting for another bullet to come and hit me and I was
waiting to die. … I don’t know how long it took. They kept bringing people up.
… Once they had finished, somebody said that all the dead should be inspected …
and if they find a warm body, they should fire one more bullet into their
head.” Miraculously, Witness O was overlooked, so that he was later able to
crawl away on all fours into the forest.
Both the UN and the government of the Netherlands promised
to investigate and report their findings on the greatest mass murder of postwar
European history to a shocked world. Their reports placed responsibility on
many shoulders: the UN Security Council, for limiting its involvement to
containment and choosing a peacekeeping mission that was not implementable and
based on an ill-conceived concept of safe areas; the UN member states, for
sending too few, poorly trained, and insufficiently equipped Blue Helmets into
a highly dangerous operation; the imprudent UN commanders in Srebrenica who did
not have serious reconnaissance equipment at their disposal, for evaluating the
situation quite falsely up to the bitter end and for not concerning themselves
with the fate of those taken prisoner by the Serbs after the town fell; the
headquarters of the UN peacekeeping forces in Zagreb, for turning down requests
by the UN troops on site for NATO air power; and the defense minister of the
Netherlands, for supporting that decision because he feared reprisals against
fifty-five of his soldiers who served as Blue Helmets and who were being held
hostage by the Serbs. Yet, with all that said, incidents of mass murder on this
scale far exceeded what most people could have imagined.
The Dayton Peace Accord
NATO had been bombing Serb positions on a limited scale
since the brutal mortar attack on the Markale market in Sarajevo on 6 February
1994, in which at least 68 people were killed and 197 injured. But the
Srebrenica massacre became a clarion call to action for the West, and the
alliance started a campaign of massive bombardment. With the help of foreign
arms shipments and American military advisers, the Croatian and Bosniak armed
forces became more professionally run, improved their military clout, and could
seriously challenge the previously superior Bosnian Serb army. The myth of Serb
invincibility was definitely shattered when the Croatian army overran the UN
safe area in western Slavonia in May 1995 and finally conquered the so-called
Republic of Serb Krajina in its Operation oluja (Storm) in August 1995, thereby
driving away 150,000 to 200,000 Serbs. In cars, buses, and horse-drawn wagons,
tens of thousands of men, women, and children fled head over heels, with barely
any time to gather together the bare necessities. Once the political leadership
also bolted, the statelet collapsed altogether. The Serbs only managed to hold
onto an area in eastern Slavonia that was later reincorporated peacefully into
Croatia. As far as it was concerned, Zagreb had thus solved the “Serb question”
permanently. Very few of the displaced Serbs returned to their homes when the
war ended.
All of these factors led to a military standoff in mid-1995.
Bosnian Serbs and Croat-Muslim troops each controlled about half of the
territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina. That fall, U.S. special envoy Richard
Holbrooke presented an agreement that he intended to bulldoze through. For
three weeks, the presidents and the delegations from Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Croatia, and Serbia were housed in a lockdown situation at Wright-Patterson Air
Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, until they came to an agreement on 21 November
1995. The peace accord was formally signed in Paris a month later on 14
December.
The Dayton Accord squared the circle by keeping
Bosnia-Herzegovina as a unified state with its prewar borders (Muslim position)
and by dividing it into two quite independent yet constituent entities (Serb
position). The Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was ruled by Croats and
Muslims, received 51 percent of the territory and thus a symbolic majority. A
complicated system of cantons was meant to fulfill the Croat demand for
autonomy (but never did). The other entity continued to be the Serb Republic
(Republika Srpska), which received 49 percent of the territory. Very few
competencies were delegated to the central government in Sarajevo, namely
foreign policy, issues of citizenship, and monetary policy. The so-called
entities governed themselves practically autonomously and were permitted their
own currency, police force, and army. The agreement guaranteed that all
refugees and displaced persons could return and demanded the prosecution of war
criminals. To implement the accord, the international community installed a
High Representative with quasi-dictatorial powers and sent a 60,000-strong
peacekeeping force under NATO (and later EU) command.
The initial euphoria over the end of the war soon subsided,
and the general mood sobered. Society had changed to such a degree that
peaceful coexistence of the different nationalities seemed impossible. Roughly
100,000 people had lost their lives, and more than two million had been driven
from their homes. The Dayton Accord created a highly complicated and barely
functional state that was weakened by a general unwillingness to cooperate,
political radicalism, and serious economic problems. Last but not least, the
new state suffered from the fact that a major part of the population did not
identify with it.
