Foreword
By Philip
Corwin
n
July 11, 1995, the town of Srebrenica fell to the Bosnian Serb army. At the
time, I was the highest ranking United Nations civilian official in
Bosnia-Herzegovina. In my book, Dubious Mandate (Duke University
Press, 1999), I made some comments on that tragedy. Beyond that, I decried the
distortions of the international press in their reporting, not only on that
event, but on the wars in Yugoslavia (1992-95) in general. I expressed the wish
that there could have been, and must be, some balance in telling the story of
what actually happened in Srebrenica and in all of former Yugoslavia, if we are
to learn from our experience.
The report
by the Srebrenica Research Group, Srebrenica: Manipulating a Tragedy, answers that call. It presents an
alternative and well-documented assessment of the tragedy of Srebrenica, and of
the suffering of all the constituent peoples of former Yugoslavia. It is an
invaluable document. Of course, there will be those who will disagree with the
report’s perspective. But if we are to open a discussion that has been closed to
all but the faithful, if we are to prevent similar tragedies from occurring
again, then we must take seriously the accounts put forward by the bright and
discerning contributors to this document. No honest reader can doubt the
credentials of these authors. And no honest reader should doubt the importance
of what they have to say. I congratulate them on their scholarship and their
courage.
*
Coincidentally,
I have a personal reason for recalling what happened on July 11, 1995, for not
only was that the day Srebrenica fell, but it was also the day that a Bosnian
sniper tried to assassinate me as my vehicle, white and clearly marked as a UN
vehicle, was driving over Mt. Igman on the way back to Sarajevo from a staff
visit to Gorni Vakuf. A Bosnian sniper targeted our vehicle as we sped around
the hairpin turns of that narrow, rutted mountain road, and it was due only to
the courageous efforts of Bruno Chaubert, the Corsican warrant officer who was
my driver, that we survived. We knew from the trajectory of the bullet, and the
fact that we had identified ourselves only minutes earlier at a Bosnian army
checkpoint, that the sniper who fired on us was in Bosnian government controlled
territory, and that he knew who we were. Actually, the sniper had targeted the
driver, because he knew if the driver had lost control, then the vehicle and all
its passengers would have gone over the mountain. At the time, however, I chose
not to publicize the event because the Bosnian government would have denied it,
and the UN would not have protested, given its gaping lack of credibility with
the Bosnian government. But the message was clear. The Bosnian government
considered the UN to be its enemy.
*
When I
think back on the atmosphere at UN headquarters in Sarajevo in the days leading
up to fall of Srebrenica, I think mainly of confusion. UK General Rupert Smith,
the UNPROFOR commander in Sarajevo at the time, when speaking of the military
situation in the theater, was fond of saying “We have no intelligence”. NATO was
unwilling to share with the UN whatever intelligence it had, and the UN had very
few intelligence resources of its own. The UN had no satellites, and its unarmed
military observers (UNMOs) were not authorized to gather intelligence. Of course
they did, but they were limited in what they could collect. General Smith was on
target. We had very little intelligence regarding what was happening in and
around Srebrenica.
When the
Serbs first began moving on Srebrenica, we had no firm idea of the size of their
forces or of their intentions. In fact, most of the Western European officers,
including those of the UK, thought the Serbs were just going to lop off the
southern third of Srebrenica in order to be able to save mileage when
transporting troops and supplies across Bosnia from Serbia and points east. The
Serbs were terribly strapped for fuel. If they could cut across the southern
third of Srebrenica instead of going around it, they could save 40-50
kilometers. Besides, they appeared not to be attacking from the north, and not
to be creating a pincer movement that would have signaled their intention to
take the whole of Srebrenica.
Only the
Russians knew what was happening. The Russians in our command that I talked to
at the time smiled when I asked about Serb intentions in Srebrenica. They knew
the Serbs were going to take all of Srebrenica, and if possible the other
enclaves of Zepa and Gorazde. “It’s only reasonable,” one Russian officer said
to me.
Meanwhile,
General Kees Nicolai, a Dutch national and UNPROFOR Chief of Staff, was on the
phone constantly to The Hague, to discuss whether or not NATO should bomb.
Sentiment was divided. There were about 300 lightly-armed Dutch soldiers in
Srebrenica, scattered among the local population, and they would be at risk. And
the Dutch public would not take lightly having their soldiers killed by NATO
bombs, or being taken hostage in a country where their presence was dubious. The
Dutch government might even fall.
And then
there was the weather. Clouds, then sun, then clouds again. It was
unpredictable, weather satellites notwithstanding. Anyone today who says
otherwise is stretching the truth – in other words, lying. Yes, we had regular
weather reports, but they changed constantly. Meanwhile, the laptop bombardiers,
particularly those in faraway Washington, kept demanding air strikes. But to
European powers, the demands of the United States, which had no troops on the
ground and was tardy in paying its assessments, seemed like those of a
proverbial cowboy – full of bravado and recklessness, but short on wisdom. And
while certain elements in Washington seemed willing to fight to the death of the
last Dutch soldier, other nations with troops on the ground that might have been
killed or taken hostage were not so eager to welcome NATO intervention.
*
Once the
takeover of Srebrenica had been completed, I decided I would try to go there.
Obviously, I would not have been allowed to enter while the fighting was going
on. But once it was over, I thought I might be able to bring an international
presence to the scene, and perhaps negotiate the safety of the survivors. I was
able to get through by satellite phone to Bosnian Serb Vice President Nikola
Koljevic in Pale. I told him I wanted to go to Srebrenica, and I wanted to bring
General Nicolai with me. Koljevic returned my call within the hour and said he
had cleared the way for me to come alone. General Nicolai would have to stay in
Sarajevo. I would meet Koljevic in Pale, and we would go together to Srebrenica.
I then called my headquarters in Zagreb to tell them I intended to go to
Srebrenica, even though I knew the Bosnian Army might not let me out of
Sarajevo, or might never let me back in if I left. I thought it was worth a try.
As anyone involved in humanitarian work will attest, there is nothing that gives
one a rush like the prospect of being able to save hundreds, perhaps thousands,
of lives.
My
headquarters in Zagreb, however, suggested that I should stay in Sarajevo, and
send instead to Srebrenica one of my staff, a former U.S. military officer now
with the UN in Tuzla. I said I would consider it, but the fact was that no other
UN officer in Bosnia had the trust of the Bosnian Serbs. Zagreb didn’t
understand. It was not a matter of sending a UN representative. It was a
question of sending me or no one.
I had to
make a quick decision, and I had no one to consult. General Smith was busy;
General Nikolai was busy. And neither would not have told me what to do anyway.
It was my decision. I knew that my trip to Srbrenica would be resented by the
Bosnian government. As for danger, if I were with Koljevic, I would be safe in
Serb territory. The danger would be from the Bosnian government when I returned.
They had already blamed the UN for the fall of Srebrenica. They had already
tried once to assassinate me.
Looking
back now, I doubt if it would have mattered whether I went to Srbrenica, even
though at the time I had hoped it would. General Mladic was not about to be
deterred or dissuaded from his chosen course of action by my presence. In any
case, I decided not to go for a reason that I think was sound. I didn’t want to
be used.
I imagined
myself on television shaking hands with General Mladic as if I were endorsing
whatever was happening. No, I’d had enough of Balkan theater. I called Koljevic
and told him I wasn’t coming.
*
In the
years since Srebrenica fell, the name itself has become a buzzword for
allegations of Serbian genocide. Books have been written, reports have been
compiled, and radio and television broadcasts have saturated the air waves with
“evidence” of this crime against humanity. The United Nations Security Council
has convened an international tribunal in The Hague to “prove” this pre-trial
judgment. It would not be an exaggeration to say some journalists and aspiring
politicians have made careers out of promoting this allegation.
But the
situation is a bit more complicated than the public relations specialists would
have us believe. That there were killings of non-combatants in Srebrenica, as in
all war zones, is a certainty. And those who perpetrated them deserve to be
condemned and prosecuted. And whether it was three or 30 or 300 innocent
civilians who were killed, it was a heinous crime. There can be no equivocation
about that. At the same time, the facts presented in this report make a very
cogent argument that the figure of 7,000 killed, which is often bandied about in
the international community, is an unsupportable exaggeration. The true figure
may be closer to 700.
The fact that the figure in question has been so distorted, however,
suggests that the issue has been politicized. There is much more shock value in
the death of 7,000 than in the death of 700.
There is also evidence in this report that thousands of Serbs were
massacred, expelled, tortured, raped, and humiliated during the wars within
former Yugoslavia. The international community has not seen fit to publicize
these atrocities with as much vigor as it has those of Srebrenica. That simple
observation does not justify what occurred in Srebrenica. But it is another
piece of the puzzle that explains the anger of the Serbs when they assaulted
Srebrenica. In May 1995, for example, just two months before Srebrenica fell,
the Croatian army captured Western Slavonia and expelled 90 per cent of the Serb
population in that region. Serbs had lived in Western Slavonia for hundreds of
years. But the international community said nothing about those expulsions; in
fact, it applauded the Croatian action, as though the Serb civilians deserved
what had happened. To massacre Croatians or Bosnians or Kosovars was genocide.
To massacre Serbs was regarded appropriate retribution. Clearly, the
international community has not seen fit to consecrate the massacres of Serbs
with monuments. Instead, it has issued arrest warrants for Serb leaders.
*
There are several points to
be made in any consideration of what happened at Srebrenica on July 11, 1995.
First, one has to realize that the tragedy of Srebrenica was part of a larger
tragedy, and that the attempt to interpret the wars in former Yugoslavia in
terms of what happened at Srebrenica, to present that one event as a microcosm
of the larger picture, is an attempt to distort the larger picture and to
demonize one of its actors. The experience of Srebrenica must broaden our
understanding of history, not diminish it.
What
happened in Srebrenica was not a single large massacre of Muslims by Serbs, but
rather a series of very bloody attacks and counterattacks over a three-year
period, which reached a crescendo in 1995. And the number of Muslim dead in the
last battle of Srebrenica, as BBC reporter Jonathan Rooper has pointed out, was
most likely in the hundreds, not in the thousands. Moreover, it is likely that
the number of Muslim dead was probably no more than the number of Serbs that had
been killed in Srebrenica and its environs during the preceding years by Bosnian
Commander Naser Oric and his predatory gangs.
Foreign
interventionists are fond of praising themselves for having invaded former
Yugoslavia for what they refer to as “humanitarian reasons”. But there has never
been a war fought for humanitarian reasons, and the wars in former Yugoslavia at
the end of the 20th century were no exception.
The events at
Srebrenica in July 1995 did not occur in a political vacuum. In fact, they might
never have occurred at all if Yugoslavia had not been forcibly dismembered
against the will of 45 percent of its people, the Serbs. (Serbs were about 31
percent of pre-war Bosnia). The break-up of Yugoslavia, in fact, was contrary to
the Yugoslav Constitution, which required that all three of the main populations
of Yugoslavia had to agree to any partition of Yugoslavia. And of course, the
Serbs never agreed. In my book, Dubious
Mandate, I report the following question, which was posed to me by a Bosnian
Serb: why, after 50 years as a Yugoslav,
should I suddenly be told I’m a minority in a Moslem State, when I was never
even given a choice?
People can
get very angry when you take away their country.
Today, one
can only imagine what might have happened in the Balkans if diplomacy had been
given a better chance, if NATO had not had the ambition it had to push eastward,
up to the borders of the former Soviet Union, to annex what is now being called
“the new Europe”. It is possible – not certain, but possible -- that in due time
there might have been a peaceful
break-up of former Yugoslavia, probably along different boundary lines. But the
decisions to fracture former Yugoslavia were taken precipitously, by minority
communities within Yugoslavia, and
were driven by powerful forces outside Yugoslavia – namely, those of
NATO, especially the newly-reunited Germany.
One of the
big lies we heard during the wars in Yugoslavia was that NATO had to intervene
because there was danger the conflict would spread. But no group within former
Yugoslavia had ambitions outside of Yugoslavia. It was the nations outside
Yugoslavia that had ambitions inside Yugoslavia.
When the
greatest military power of all time has an identity crisis, the world is in
danger. With the end of the Cold War, NATO’s role as a defensive alliance ended.
There were those who said that NATO should have been dissolved, now that there
was no more Soviet Union. But there were also those – many of whom were
bureaucrats benefiting from the existence of such a massive organization -- who
said NATO should now be used as a weapon to forge “democracy” around the world –
in other words, it should be used to promote the global economy, and make the
world free for Coca-Cola. Four of the six constituent republics within former
Yugoslavia agreed to this immediate transition to “democracy”. Serbia did not,
and it paid the price. In fact, everyone in former Yugoslavia paid the price,
and Srebrenica was part of that price.
Post mortem
studies of events in the former Yugoslavia, including those by the United
Nations, have cited the international community’s inability to recognize “evil”
as the main reason for its being unable to end the wars of the 1990s in the
Balkans. If such self-delusion were not so tragic, it would be comic. Wars have
never been fought to destroy evil, no matter what religious zealots may assert.
Wars have been fought for economic, political, strategic and social reasons. The
wars of the 1990s in the Balkans were no different. It was geopolitics, not
original sin, that drove NATO’s ambitions.
But take
this quixotic assertion about evil one step further. As I have asked in my book
Doomed in Afghanistan (Rutgers
University Press, 2003), are we to prepare peacekeepers for deployment in the
world’s trouble spots by giving them EAT (Evil Awareness Training)? Must the
world’s leaders receive religious instruction on the nature of evil before they
can be effective interlocutors and diplomats?
This
abstract flummery about evil has an even more insidious dimension, in that
implies that the only effective action is military action; therefore, NATO
should have acted sooner to bomb the Serbs, a people clearly demonic for not
wanting to have its country dismembered. Trying to understand why one party to
the conflict acted as it did is not an option for the Ayatollahs of the
international community.
And there
is still more mischief that flows from this assertion that policy decisions
should be made on the basis of evil awareness. If recognition of evil is to be
the basis for military intervention, then who shall be The Grand Inquisitor? Who
shall decide who is evil? The answer is not very difficult to imagine.
Apparently, the most powerful nations, themselves exemplars of The Good, shall
determine who is evil. And for now, the Inquisitors, the identifiers of evil in
the Balkans, reside in The Hague.
*
On 21 August 2000, a blue-ribbon panel on UN Peace Operations issued a
report that sought to provide direction for future peacekeeping operations in
light of lessons learned from several operations during the 19900s, that in
former Yugoslavia among them. In its report the Panel had this astonishing
paragraph:
Impartiality for United
Nations operations must therefore mean adherence to the principles of the
Charter: where one party to a peace agreement clearly and incontrovertibly is
violating its terms, continued equal treatment of all parties by the United
Nations can in the best case result in ineffectiveness and in the worst may
amount to complicity with evil. (UN document A/55/305)
And
what should the peacekeeping forces do in such as a case in order to ward off
“complicity with evil?” The Panel suggests that the peacekeepers should
transcend their mandate and behave in accordance with the higher principles of
the Charter. In other words, the mandate of the peace keeping force, a mandate
diligently negotiated by the Security Council, should be abandoned if Satan is
spotted on the horizon. This is the
lesson learned, the Panel would have us believe. And if this lesson had been
learned before the Balkan wars of the 1990s, NATO would have bombed the Serbs
much sooner, is the undeniable implication. Thus, the vendetta continues against
a country whose great sin was its refusal to be dismembered in order to make way
for the global economy.
For
the record, the United Nations has never worked in such a fashion. The normal
procedure is for the Security Council to adopt a resolution containing a mandate
for its peace keeping forces. Each mandate is unique, depending on the
situation. If a mandate proves to be ineffective, then the Security Council can
change that mandate. Those nations that voted for a mandate do not appreciate
having it changed at the whim of those who claim to have sighted Evil. If a
mandate is to be changed, it must be changed by those who adopted it.
*
There is
one more general comment I must make, by way of background, about the wars in
former Yugoslavia, and that comment involves the concept of historical memory. We allow certain peoples to have
historical memory. We allow the Jewish people to remember the Holocaust. And
they should remember it. It was a
terrible tragedy. But we do not allow the Serbian people to remember their
massacre during World War II at the hands of the Nazis, whose puppets at the
time were Bosnian and Croatian fascists. This is not to say that all Bosnians and Croatians were Nazi
collaborators; but the Croatian Ustaše regime, which included Bosnia,
was. And why should Serbs not have
been suspicious and angry when they were suddenly told that vast numbers of
their people were about to become minorities in new countries that were their
killers during World War II? Especially when the Serbs had never even been
consulted! They would have been crazy not to be anxious. Imagine if a decade
ago the people of Israel had been told that they would immediately become a
minority in Yassir Arafat’s Palestine. My question is, why did the international
community not understand the perplexity, the anger, and the historical memory of
the Serbs?
The events
at Srebrenica in July 1995 had a history. To begin with, when it and other towns
in Bosnia were declared safe areas, those areas were never “delimited”. In other
words, no one had specified what were the legal boundaries of Srebrenica. That
meant there was no definition as to where demilitarization was supposed to end.
The town of Srebrenica was generally considered to be within the safe
area, but from the town outward there was a large region comprising villages,
forests, and hills, which were not considered part of the safe area. Thus, if
those areas were attacked, or if an attack were launched from there, either by
Serb or Bosnian armies, the UN had no right under its mandate to intervene
unless the attack were directly against UN soldiers, in which case they could
exercise the right to self-defense.
And let me
assure you, there were attacks on
Serb villages in the region, and they were launched from within the safe area
of Srebrenica.
Here is a
comment by two Dutch journalists, Jan Willem Honig and Norbert Both, from their
book entitled: Srebrenica: Record of a
War Crime:
On
16 April 1993, the Security Council adopted Resolution 819, which declared
Srebrenica a safe area. The resolution was dangerously inconsistent . . . The
Council agreed on creating a safe area without specifying what the “area” was
and how its safety could be achieved . . . The Council firmly placed the onus on
the Serbs and the Muslims to make Srebrenica safe. UNPROFOR’s role would simply
be to “monitor” the humanitarian situations. (pp. 103-104)
Meanwhile, the main threat in Srebrenica to any legitimate cease fire was
the Bosnian commander in the area, Naser Oric, who used Srebrenica as a base for
his murderous forays into Serbian villages in the countryside. Once again, let
me quote Honig and Both:
The
Dutch were blamed for the perceived failure of the UN to do enough for the
people of Srebrenica. Matters were not helped by the character and behaviour of
the dominant personalities in the enclave. Naser Oric, the overall military
commander, and his two main “brigade commanders”, Zulfo Tursunovic and Hakija
Meholjic, appeared to the Dutch to be little more than gangsters, who terrorized
the refugee population and profited greatly from the war. These men jealously
protected their own fiefdoms. As the
refugees were not represented in the local governments, international aid
agencies suggested in the second half of 1993 that the refugees should elect
their own representative to assist in the distribution of food. The man was
found murdered the day after his election.
Oric
and his cronies were also responsible for much of the trouble with the Serbs,
which stemmed from Muslim raids on Serb communities just outside the enclave.
Also, Oric’s men had the disconcerting habit of taking up positions close to the
Dutch and then opening fire on the Serbs, hoping to entice them and the Dutch
into a firefight. (pp. 132-133.)
Two other journalists, Laura Silber and Allan Little, who will never be
accused of being sympathetic to the Serbs, note in their book Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation, that “on
January 7, 1993 (the Orthodox Christmas), Oric’s forces launched a surprise
attack on Serb positions to the north, killing Serb civilians and burning their
villages.” (pp. 265-266) Serb sources claim Oric massacred as many as 2,500
Serbs on this occasion. Even allowing for exaggeration in the count, there is no
doubt that the number slaughtered was substantial, brutal, and not to be
forgotten. And this attack occurred only three months before Srebrenica was
declared a safe area. In short, Serbs had good reason to doubt that Srebrenica
would ever be safe for them so long as Naser Oric and his gang were operating
there.
In his report issued on 30 May 1995, the UN Secretary-General had this to
say about the Bosnian Government’s provocations from the safe areas:
The party defending a
safe area must comply with certain obligations if it is to achieve the primary
objective of the safe area regime, that is, the protection of the civilian
population. Unprovoked attacks launched from safe areas are inconsistent with
the whole concept.
In
recent months, (Bosnian) government forces have considerably increased their
military activity in and around most safe areas, and many of them, including
Sarajevo, Tuzla and Bihac, have been incorporated into the broader military
campaigns of the government side. The headquarters and logistic installations of
the Fifth Corps of the government army are located in the town of Bihac and
those of the Second Corps in the town of Tuzla. The Government also maintains a
substantial number of troops in Srebrenica (in this case, a violation of a
demilitarization agreement), Gorazde and Zepa, while Sarajevo is the location of
the General Command of the government army and other military installations.
Please note that in his report, the Secretary-General refers to all the safe areas, not just Srebrenica.
And just as Srebrenica could not be isolated then in any discussion of the
Bosnian Government’s military campaigns, it should not be isolated now in any
discussion of what happened in Srebrenica three months later when Serb forces
overran the town. From a military standpoint there was no question that the
Bosnian Serb army had to react to military attacks from the enclaves. The safe
areas in eastern Bosnia were like holes in a blanket. All of the enclaves were
behind Serb military lines, and had to be closed off. Not only did they pose a
military threat, but their location forced Serb forces to detour around them and
waste precious fuel in a time of war. As the Russian officer in Sarajevo had
said to me, it was only “reasonable” that the Serbs should capture the eastern
enclaves.
(And while I am on the subject of fuel, let me point out how foolish it
is to allege, as some have alleged, that the Serbian army loaded hundreds of its
victims at Srebrenica into refrigerated trucks, and transported the bodies to
some obscure site, and then buried them in mass graves. Where would the Serbs
have found the fuel to perform such an operation? I can personally recall when
UNPROFOR had to give the Serbian army fuel to withdraw Serbian tanks from the
exclusion zone around Sarajevo. The Serbs, whatever their political agenda,
didn’t have the fuel to move hundreds or thousands of bodies anywhere, not in
refrigerated trucks, not in any trucks.)
Back to military concerns. It was evident by July 1995 that the Bosnian
Serb army could not continue to allow five enemy bases to exist behind its front
lines. Mind you, I am not speaking about the humanitarian issue here, because I
have never, and will never, condone the slaughter of civilians. But it would be
irresponsible to ignore the military aspect of the campaign in eastern Bosnia
when discussing Srebrenica, just as it would be foolish to ignore the historical
process that led up to the events of July 1995.
Today in
Bosnia there is a campaign of disinformation that has all but buried the facts
along with the bodies. To pretend that the events in Srebrenica were a microcosm
of any sort is to take an oversimplified, fast-food view of history. One
isolated event does not explain a process as complicated as war. History is not
a collection of sound bites. History is a process with several watersheds, and
to understand Srebrenica one must understand the watershed of NATO’s identity
crisis.
As part of that campaign of disinformation, the authors of recent reports
about Srebrenica, both inside and outside the UN, have judiciously avoided
interviewing those in the know who might not have told them what they wanted to
hear. For example, the authors of the first comprehensive United Nations report
on Srebrenica, entitled “The Fall of Srebrenica,” issued in the fall of 1999,
never interviewed me, and did not list my book in their short bibliography, even
though I was the ranking UN official in Bosnia at the time of the takeover of
Srebrenica. Nor was I alone in being ignored by the compilers of politically
correct history.
In my
case, my major error was that I dared to defend the United Nations at a
time when it was fighting as hard as possible to be a scapegoat. UN leadership,
which was desperately trying to curry favor with the United States in order to
prevent the world organization from completely collapsing, could not afford to
criticize the world’s only superpower. The United States, which had been useless
in Rwanda, embarrassed in Somalia, and frustrated in former Yugoslavia, needed a
sacrificial lamb. And because I refused to be part of the UN’s mea maxima culpa campaign, I was
ignored. There were others too, prominent intellectuals, who were ignored in the
flurry of reports that emerged, “studies” righteously denouncing the United
Nations for not having recognized the existence of evil. But one day their
story, our story, must be heard if one is ever to understand the history of
Srebrenica, of former Yugoslavia, of Europe, and of the world. The beginnings of
that untold story, hitherto marginalized by official renditions, are here for
all to read in this report.
—
July 2005
New York City
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