A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (65 page)

Whatever theWest's secret hopes or stated fears that the enclaves would crumble, when the Serbs began their attack on Srebrenica on July 6, 1995, nobody besides the besieged Dutch peacekeepers and the Muslims within Srebrenica took it especially seriously. Mladic's forces began the attack by firing tank rounds at the white UN lookout cabins and sending the Dutch scrambling from their observation posts. The Serbs took Dutch hostages and stole their weapons, body armor, vehicles, and blue helmets and berets.

UN peacekeepers in Srebrenica were probably the least well informed of all the interested parties. Like Dallaire's hamstrung forces in Rwanda, the UN troops in Bosnia lacked an intelligence-gathering capacity of their own. The UN military observers (UNN/MOs) who provided the mission with its visual intelligence rarely spoke Serbo-Croatian and paraded around the countryside in luminous white four-wheel drives. Anybody interested in hiding anything could do so at the sight of the lumbering vehicles approaching. Thus, UN commanders depended upon intelligence input from the more powerful UN member states, who rarely delivered. If U.S. spy satellites or NATO planes picked up visual evidence or word of Serb troop advances toward Srebrenica, they did not share it with UN peace- keepers.Just as Dallaire's troops had to encounter militias in person if they hoped to document their activities, so, too, here, Dutch peacekeepers interested in learning the location of Serb troops had to patrol until they met up with Serb gunfire.' It was a twisted, Balkan game of blindman's bluff.

At the morning press conference in Sarajevo on July 8, the garrulous UN spokesman Gary Coward mechanically rattled off the names of the Dutch UN observation posts around Srebrenica that the Serbs had seized. When I approached him after the press conference and asked for his best estimate of the Serb objectives, he shrugged, grabbed a sheet of scrap paper from a nearby table, and drew a large, oblong circle meant to represent the safe area. "We think the Serbs want to do this," he said, blotting out the bottom third of the circle with scribbles. By taking control of the southern portion of the pocket, Coward and other UN analysts were predicting, the Bosnian Serbs could secure the hills that overlooked a crucial supply road. Coward then drew a second circle. "But we are afraid the Serbs want to do this," he said, scribbling out the entire circle so that nothing remained. "We simply don't know."The following day, when I asked Bosnian prime minister Haris Silajdzic to gauge Serb intentions, the prime minister pointed to the large map on the wall behind him. "You see those green dots?" he said, indicating the three specks representing the UN-declared safe areas in eastern Bosnia that were stranded apart from the rest of Muslim holdings. I nodded. "The Serbs want those to disappear," he said.

The Muslim-led government had cried wolf in the past often enough that it was difficult to know when to rely on its warnings. Silajdzic seemed to have received general alarms about Srebrenica's peril, but he did not know precisely what lay in store for the enclave's inhabitants. Certainly it seemed obvious that as winter approached the Serbs would seek to establish even more favorable "facts on the ground." Although the Serbs still controlled 70 percent of the country, the Muslim army had begun nibbling away at Serb gains. Deserted by Western nations, the Sarajevo government had begun recieving arms and advice from Islamic groups and governments around the world, and looked to get stronger with time. The Serbs needed to free up the 1,000 or so troops that ringed Srebrenica. Even without any intelligence, one only had to look at the map to know the Bosnian Serbs' strategic objectives.

Still, the Serbs' day-to-day plans were another matter. However untenable the isolated islands of thinly guarded territory, the neap had also come to seem oddly destined to endure. Some combination of Serb caution, UN deterrence, NATO airpower, Muslim resistance, and historic inertia would leave the safe areas intact. No major Bosnian town had changed hands in the past two years, and most Balkan watchers had difficulty imagining outright conquest. Srebrenica in particular was a place that had captured headlines in 1993 when it was declared one of the six safe areas. But it had since faded from public concern.

Prime Minister Silajdzic's warning sounded more like a sigh than a siren. Bosnia's Muslims had suffered for so long and so prominently that after years of protestations-"How could you let this happen to us?"most now seemed resigned to the outside world's indifference. The UN arms embargo remained in place. NATO planes flew overhead but had only undertaken handful of pinprick bombings against Serb forces shelling the safe areas. Whenever the Serbs had rounded up and humiliated UN peacekeepers, the NATO powers had simply backed down. Western policymakers clung to their neutrality in the conflict and refused to line up behind the Muslims. Silajdzic's caustic fatalism reflected the mood in the capital, where people no longer dashed behind barricades at the hint of flying metal or moved circuitously around town to avoid deadly junctions. Most now chose the quickest route to their destinations. "If you run, you hit the bullet," the Sarajevo saying went. "If you walk, the bullet hits you." Foreigners who remained in the city had once been welcomed as messengers, but now they were reminders of an outside world that had watched Bosnia perish. Doors were slammed in the faces of reporters; the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) was mocked as the UN Self-Protection Force. With so many broken promises and broken lives, nothing could surprise the Bosnians.The prime minister sounded like a man who had run out of options:

To whom am I supposed to talk at this stage? We know the American people have a sympathy for the underdog. They know what is happening to us, and it bothers them. But the American government talks only about its interest-which is to do as little as possible. Bosnia is not a vital U.S. interest, so why would America risk its name, credibility and prestige here?

Yet there was defiance in Silajdzic's tone as well. "In the first year of the war, we were in great danger of disappearing from the earth, but Bosnia has escaped execution," he said. "We are now like men walking the streets saying hello to people who had seen us hanging from the gallows the day before" In fact, although many in the country had escaped death, the men of Srebrenica would not.

U.S. intelligence analysts had predicted Srebrenica could not survive, but when the attack began, they underestimated Serb intentions. At the CIA the National Intelligence Daily on July 9, 1995, stated that the Serb offensive against Srebrenica was "most likely to punish the Bosnian government for offensives in Sarajevo." It was also "a means to press a cease-fire." On July 10 the CIA assessment remained the same-the Serbs would not try to take the town because they would not want to deal with its inhabitants.'

They would "neutralize" the safe area rather than overrun it altogether. And on July 11 the charge at the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo sent a cable at 6:11 p.m., nearly two hours after the enclave had already fallen, relaying the views of a "drained and downcast" Prime Minister Silajdzic:

No consensus has formed among government and diplomatic contacts here as to the ultimate Serb military strategy, but most think it is interactive-that is, the [Bosnian Serb army] probes resistance and pushes until it locates an opportunity. [Muslim] officials now fear the Serb aim in Srebrenica is to "expel and occupy," the former being pursued with brutality.... Another contact summed up the Serbs' objective, "They want it all."'

Evidence gathered later indicates that the Serbs did in fact begin their offensive intending only to seize the southern section. But when they realized, to their amazement, that the Western powers would not resist, they opted to plow ahead and gobble the whole pocket.

The normally ambulatory and zealous press corps paid little attention to Srebrenica in advance of its fall. The American and European journalists based in Bosnia in the summer of 1995 had not visited the town, which the Serbs had sealed off since the spring of 1994. In addition, trapped in Sarajevo, journalists were stuck relying inordinately on the United Nations. And senior UN officials, long impressed with what they said was General Mladic's military acumen, had been conned by Serb assurances.The Dutch in Srebrenica first appealed to UN force commander Janvier to summon NATO air support on July 6. But he turned down that request and four others that followed, including a pivotal request the night before the Serbs' final push.Janvier did not believe the Serbs would go all the way. Indeed, even when the Serbs fired on Dutch forces on the ground, clearly warranting the use of force in self-defense, the French general remained frozen by his mistrust of NATO airpower and his trust of Serb promises. "I spoke to [Bosnian Serb general Zdravko] Tolimir and he says they do not intend to take the enclave," Janvier told a UN crisis team on July 10. "I believe him. If they do take the enclave, I'll draw my conclusions." Janvier also believed the Serbs when they claimed that Dutch peacekeepers had not been taken hostage. Tolimir had told him that any Dutch in Serb custody had "asked to be taken in ... for their own safety."' In fact more than thirty Dutch peacekeepers had been forcibly disarmed and incarcerated.

By this stage in the war, Janvier and other UN officers processed intelligence through a lens of a preexisting prejudice that held that the Bosnian Muslims were the ones destabilizing the peace and provoking the Serbs. At this same July 10 meeting, Janvier stressed that it was the Bosnian Muslims who were attacking the Serbs and the Dutch in an effort to "push us into a path that we don't want." His civilian counterpart,Yasushi Akashi, shared this perspective, which helped justify UN refusals to summon NATO air- power."The [Muslim army] initiates actions and then calls on the UN and international community to respond and take care of their faulty judgement," Akashi said By 1995 senior UN officials spoke as if almost everything the Serbs did was merely "retaliatory," while everything the Muslims did was "a provocation"

There was a grain of truth to much of the UN rhetoric. The Bosnian Muslims did stage attacks from safe areas, which were supposed to be demilitarized. Indeed, for Bosnians and foreigners alike, there was no worse feeling than hearing a hefty Bosnian artillery piece being wheeled just outside their window and then fired into the Sarajevo night; the incoming barrage was always disproportionately punishing. But most of the raids were forays to retrieve food and supplies from neighboring Serb villages, revenge attacks for the sieges to which the Serbs were subjecting them, or efforts to recapture lands from which they had been purged. Sergio Vieira de Mello, who spent 1993 living under siege in Sarajevo as the head of UN civil affairs, recalls approaching the Bosnian Serbs about a particularly heavy week of shelling. Vieira de Mello first contacted Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic to complain that for every sixty outgoing Bosnian rounds, the city of Sarajevo was earning 600 incoming. Karadzic claimed not to knew what Vieira de Mello was talking about and referred him to Bosnian Serb military commander Mladic. When Vieira de Mello registered the same complaint with Mladic, the Serb general looked up and snorted," That is the appropriate ratio."

If the first bout of wishful thinking occurred in not predicting that the Serbs would attack Srebrenica when they did, the second lay in not anticipating the speed with which the Serbs would seize the safe area. Seeing no response from Washington or NewYork, the Serbs, like the Rwandan Hutu government and r.iilitia before then, kept pressing. Many Muslims in Srebrenica expected the Serb assault would be temporary and the international community would intervene. One fifty-five-year-old Muslim later recalled:

By July 11, UNPROFOR soldiers were in a constant retreat.... I locked the door of my house and joined the retreating civilians and soldiers.... So many people like myself thought that what was happening would only be a temporary thing. ..."It was a U.N. `safe haven,' there is no way it will be allowed to fall," I thought. That's why I didn't take anything with me when I left my house. I just locked my door and figured I'd be back in a few hours or a few days at the longest. Now all I have with nie-of all the things I owned-are the keys to the front of my house.'

While Muslim civilians coddled their house keys and mistakenly looked to the UN for protection, the peacekeepers expected the town's largely unarmed Muslim defenders to offer the first line of defense and NATO airpower to supply the second. But crammed into what amounted to an ethnic ghetto for more than two years and disgusted by the corruption of their local leaders, the morale of Srebrenica's Muslims had plummeted. Reluctant to fight, they were told for a long time they would not have to. Up until hours before the Serbs entered Srebrenica, Colonel Tom Karremans, the Dutch commander of UN troops in Srebrenica, promised NATO air strikes. On July 10 Karremans met with Muslim military leaders and assured them that forty to sixty NATO planes would soon arrive to stage a "massive air strike." "This area will be a zone of death in the morning," Karremans told the desperate Muslim leaders, pointing to a broad swath of territory that the Serbs had just occupied south of Srebrenica. "NATO planes will destroy everything that moves," he said.' That night Dutch peacekeepers and Bosnian soldiers and civilians kept one eye on the sky, longing to see NATO bombers, and the other eye on Serb trucks, armored personnel carriers, tanks, and infantrymen closing in on the town. Because the United Nations had promised bombing, the Muslims had not reclaimed the tanks and antiaircraft guns they turned over to the UN in 1993 as part of a demilitarization agreement. They knew that on their own they would eventually be overrun by Serb forces. They needed the UN and NATO, and they feared that if they took back their weapons, the blue helmets would use this as an excuse to shirk their duty to defend the pocket.'

Finally, around midday on July 11, four hours after the Dutch commander in Srebrenica had submitted that day's futile request for NATO assistance and five days after he had made his first appeal, a NATO posse of eighteen jets set of= from their base in Italy. Muslim civilians had already begun fleeing the town. When the NATO planes arrived overhead, one pair of U.S. F-16s could not find the Serb targets and another NATO pair bombed near a Serb tank with little effect. The Serbs threatened to kill Dutch hostages if air attacks continued, and the Dutch government and the United Nations commanders opted to negotiate a surrender.