A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (67 page)

We've chosen not to put troops on the ground because we don't believe it is in the vital interests of the United States to do so, which should always be the standard when a decision is made to put American troops into battle, combat situations.We took that decision, the last adniinis,tration took that decision, this administration has reconfirmed, reaffirmed that decision, and that is United States policy. So therefore, the United States has influence on the margins.''

There was much the United States might have done. It might have used the Serb seizure of Srebrenica and the ghastly television images to convince its European allies to rewrite the rules of the road in urgent fashion. It might have threatened to bomb the Serbs around Srebrenica and elsewhere in Bosnia if their troops did not depart the enclave, turn over the male prisoners unharmed, or at the very least stop shelling the Muslims who were in the woods trying to escape. It might have acted preemptively, warning the victorious Serbs that, they would be met with stiff retaliation if they turned their sights on Zepa, the safe area just south of Srebrenica, which was home to 16,000 vulnerable Muslims. If the United States failed to win support for such an aggressive response, and if the allies refused to support bombing, senior U.S. officials might, at the very least, have made the fate of the Muslim men their chief diplomatic priority. They might have warned Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic that economic sanctions would be stiffened and prolonged if the men in Mladic's custody were ill treated. They might have carefully tracked the whereabouts of the prisoners so as to send a signal to Mladic, Krstic, and the other Serb officers that they were being watched. Instead, the United States did none of the above.

With the preexisting constraints on policy internalized, U.S. officials did not take a very active role in tending to the crisis. As Sandy Vershbow, the director for European Affairs on the National Security Council at the time, recalls, "We assumed the worst. We weren't on a war footing around the clock. We just sort of watched helplessly from the sidelines."

The day after Srebrenica's fall, French president Jacques Chirac, known as "Le Bulldozer," called for the reestablishment of the safe area by force. Bosnian Serb political leader Karadzic scoffed, saying, "There will be no withdrawal. Srebrenica belongs to us.."z' UN and U.S. officials also dismissed the French idea as "unfeasible" Chirac kept at it, calling President Clinton on July 13 to say the separation of the sexes reminded him of World War II. "We must do something," Chirac said. "Yes," Clinton agreed. "We must act"

But "action" was a relative term. To Chirac it meant using U.S. helicopters to ferry French troops into the enclave to recapture Srebrenica. To Clinton this scheme was harebrained, and no other actions leapt to mind. After hanging up the telephone, Clinton muttered that only NATO bombing seemed to produce results. He turned to the young naval aide who had arranged the phone meeting with Chirac. "What do you think we should do on Bosnia?" the president asked. "I don't know, Mr. President," the aide stammered."

While the Clinton administration watched helplessly, the Muslim men hoped helplessly. By the evening of July 13, in the words of a subsequent UN investigation, the Muslim men of Srebrenica belonged to one of four categories: those alive and trying to escape through the woods; those killed on that journey; those who had surrendered to the Serbs and had already been killed; those who had surrendered and who would soon be killed .21

The United States, which had some five spy satellites operating in space at all times, snapping some 5,000 images per day, did not even concentrate on tracking the fate of the men. Each time a satellite camera clicked, it captured a 100-square-mile chunk of territory. When analysts knew precisely what they were looking for and, better yet, where they were looking, photo images could be invaluable. They could depict foreign troop locations, additional buildings at suspect nuclear weapons sites, and even mass graves. But competition to secure images was fierce, as the satellites were accounted for every minute of every day. The satellites over Bosnia took pictures from an SMO, or support-to-military-operations, perspective. They tried to detect Serb troop movements or locate Serb air defense systems that could take aim at NATO overflights. Unless explicitly instructed to do so, intelligence analysts did not spend their days counting specks that looked like men in stadiums or speculating about faint shadows that might hint at recently overturned earth around burial pits. Somebody senior in the U.S. policy community would have had to request a shift in the flight pattern and a reorientation of the analysts. This did not happen. "We weren't analyzing these pictures in real time for atrocity," Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence ard Research Toby Gati recalls. "We were analyzing whether NATO pii.ots were vulnerable."The analysts of intelligence data are trained to tell policy planners what they want to know, not necessarily what they should know. They are warned not to volunteer information or to make policy recommendations. Indeed, the CIA even boasts an ombudsman to guard against politicization and deter analysts from overreaching or drifting into advocacy of any kind. As one CIA official said, however, "It is tough to draw the line between what is politicized analysis and what is an agent simply saying, `You're stupid and wrong"'

Even if intelligence officials had been told to find evidence of atrocities, they might not have been able to detail the killings immediately. Sifting through the availab.e data, analysts say, can be the equivalent of trying to drink water from a fire hose.'' Gati claims that even a concerted campaign to track the fate of the men could have left them stumped: "Say we had taken these photographs and noticed the men disappear from the fields. No people can mean they've been taken somewhere. No people can mean the Serbs are beating the crap out of them. But no people doesn't necessarily mean the Muslims are dead." Still, an administration that announced it was monitoring the Bosnian Serbs and their captives might at least have made some Serbs think twice before they obeyed Mladic's murderous orders.

Srebrenica's missing men and boys were not entirely forgotten. After one of her conversations with Ambassador Sacirbey in New York, Ambassador Albright did make inquiries. On July 14, 1995, she phoned Deputy National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and, on his suggestion, asked the intelligence community to try to find evidence corroborating Sacirbey's tip. It is not entirely clear what happened next. Perhaps the National Photographic Interpretation Center's special team that analyzes satellite and U-2 spy-plane imagery did not get around to it until later, as some have reported.21 Or perhaps the photo analysts reviewed their images quickly and reported back that they could not corroborate the reports. Either way, no senior administration official remained on top of the issue, demanding daily updates on the location (and welfare) of the men in Mladic's custody. If the photo analysts looked, they looked without urgency. As one former senior U.S. intelligence official put it, "It's one thing to say, `Hey, take a look, if you don't mind.' It's another thing entirely to say, `God damn it, these men are in danger and may even be dead. Let's find out immediately! I mean now!"

Fighting the Last War

The United States has a tendency to "fight the last war" in response to genocide. U.S. officials processed Cambodia through the prism of Vietnam, the Kurdish slaughter through the Iran-Iraq war, and Rwanda through Somalia. With Srebrenica, the precedent that informed international humanitarian and U.S. policy judgments was not an actual war. It was the August 1992 battle for access to Serb concentration camps.Then, when Newsday, ITN, and the Guardian produced photos of emaciated prisoners and refugee accounts of torture, starvation, and executions, the Bush administration had tailored its threats to secure inspection visits. "We will not rest ... until we get access to the camps," President Bush had said. And in fact, though the vast majority of Bosnian citizens continued to live under terrifying siege, American and European demands for access did enable the Red Cross to begin inspections.The harshest of the camps were closed down, and the treatment of prisoners in some of the others was said to have improved.

By 1995 Western policymakers were experienced in dealing with Serb brutality and atrocity, and they expected to see patterns repeated. At the July 12, 1995, State Department press briefing, Nicholas Burns responded to a reporter's grilling by saying that "given past practice," the United States did "have a number of concerns about the capacity and the inclination of the Bosnian Serb forces to treat well and justly captives." In 1992, he said, the Serbs "displayed for all the world to see brutal tendencies" toward Muslim prisoners. "They should not repeat those very grave and serious mistakes now," he warned. "They should treat these people well. Burns never imagined that captivity would not be an option open to Srebrenica's Muslim men and boys.

Western officials focused their diplomatic efforts on demanding access for the International Committee for the Red Cross.They expected slowly but eventually to ameliorate camp conditions. "We had the Omarska model in our mind;" remembers John Shattuck, U.S. assistant secretary of state for human rights. "We assumed we would eventually get access to these guys and that they'd be badly roughed up." Many would be beaten in slow torture, they would be starved, they would be humiliated, and some would even be killed. But most would be kept alive to dig trenches or to serve as booty in a prisoner exchange. The Serbs were presumed rational actors, who followed predictable patterns. "There was nothing in the history of that war, brutal as it was," Gati recalls, "that would indicate Mladic would kill every last one of them"

Senior officials in the United States who were now focusing on Bosnia around the clock did not really consider the possibility of extermination. National Security Adviser Lake remembers: "I had been paying attention long enough to imagine the Serbs would do something truly awful, but I wasn't imagining `a Srebrenica' because it hadn't happened before. There was still room for shock. It was like Vietnam: You knew how terrible it was, you came to expect the worst, but you could still be shocked by My Lai"

Assistant Secretary Holbrooke rejects the claim that what followed in Srebrenica could have surprised senior Clinton administration officials. "We didn't need specific intelligence to know that something terrible was going on," Holbrooke says. "In fact, the search for intelligence is often a deliberate excuse to avoid or at least to delay action. We knew what needed to be done. If we'd bombed these fuckers as I had recommended in November and in May, Srebrenica wouldn't have happened."

The United States and its European allies responded generously to the 20,000 Muslim refugees who were arriving harried but alive in Muslim territory. They erected a sprawling tent city on the Tuzla air base, where Muslim women and children were fed, sheltered, and given medical care. Muslim men were conspicuously absent.

The State Department ranks had been emptied of some of the young officers who might have risen in the open forum to clamor for rescue. And the policy divisions within Clinton's cabinet were predictable. Even the most activist of Clinton's senior advisers had accepted that although they would like to change U.S. policy, they could not do so in time to affect the fates of the Muslims purged from Srebrenica. "Once the men were in Mladic's custody," one State Department official explains, "we forgot about them because we knew we could no longer address their futures"

In the week after the fall of Srebrenica, the traditional division of labor unfolded. Relief organizations, human rights groups, and UN agencies attempted to process the sea of Muslim displaced persons in Tuzla. Diplomats and politicians weighed the geopolitical implications of the fall of the safe area and debated how to respond to the Serb assault on Zepa and likely future attacks on other Muslim territory. UN officials thought first and foremost about the fate of Dutch peacekeepers who remained in Mladic's custody. And it was left to the Swiss-based ICRC to tend to the fates of the Muslim prisoners from Srebrenica. The ICRC was a small nongovernmental organization with no muscle behind it and a library of conventions that had gone unheeded in the past. It was tapped to perform the function it had always performed-negotiating access with the Serbs, compiling lists of missing, and inspecting prisoner conditions. When its requests for access were ignored, the organization did not blare an alarm. Red Cross officials, who operate on the basis of the consent of all parties and who try to keep a low profile, hoped that the next day would bring better luck.

Just as the Iraqi government had done while it was gassing the Kurds, the Serbs stalled brilliantly during this period, employing tactics that they had mastered in the war. They never refused access to international observers; they granted it so as not to arouse suspicions but then blocked or "postponed" it on the grounds that they could not guarantee the safety of visitors. Despite the repetitiveness of the sequence, diplomats and ICRC officials joined the pantomime, failing to grasp that they had a very short time to influence Serb behavior.

Murder

The vivid and consistent testimony about murder continued to pour in from Muslim refugees, and the suspicions of a handful of U.S. government officials were stirred. On July 16 the Washington Post began report ing gruesome refugee accounts of mass executions. A teenager, Senada Cvrk, recalled watching some twenty young Muslim men be taken away on the evening ofJuly 12.The following morning, before her bus left, she went to fetch water in a field outside an old car battery factory where the refugees had sought shelter. There she found her friends stacked in a pile, dead, their hands tied behind their backs.28 Other Muslims described to the American media rapes and throat-slittings carried out before their eyes.The major newspapers and television outlets brimmed with graphic depictions of Serb butchery. On July 17 the CIA's Bosnia Task Force wrote in its classified daily report that although it lacked "authoritative, detailed information," refugee accounts of atrocities "provide details that appear credible! '29