Worlds Apart

BOSNIAN LESSONS FOR GLOBAL SECURITYBy Swanee Hunt

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4975-4

Contents

Author’s Note……………………………………………..xiMap of Yugoslavia………………………………………….xiiPrologue………………………………………………….xiiiAcknowledgments……………………………………………xixContext…………………………………………………..xxiSection 1: Officialdom……………………………………..31. INSIDE: “Esteemed Mr. Carrington”…………………………32. OUTSIDE: A Convenient Euphemism…………………………..43. INSIDE: Angels and Animals……………………………….84. OUTSIDE: Carter and Conscience……………………………105. INSIDE: “If I Left, Everyone Would Flee”…………………..126. OUTSIDE: None of Our Business…………………………….157. INSIDE: Silajdzic……………………………………….178. OUTSIDE: Unintended Consequences………………………….189. INSIDE: The Bread Factory………………………………..1910. OUTSIDE: Elegant Tables…………………………………21Section 2: Victims or Agents?……………………………….2411. INSIDE: The Unspeakable…………………………………2412. OUTSIDE: The Politics of Rape……………………………2613. INSIDE: An Unlikely Soldier……………………………..2814. OUTSIDE: Happy Fourth of July……………………………3015. INSIDE: Women on the Side……………………………….3316. OUTSIDE: Contact Sport………………………………….35Section 3: Deadly Stereotypes……………………………….3717. INSIDE: An Artificial War……………………………….3718. OUTSIDE: Clashes……………………………………….3819. INSIDE: Crossing the Fault Line………………………….3920. OUTSIDE: “The Truth about Gorazde”……………………….4121. INSIDE: Loyal………………………………………….4322. OUTSIDE: Pentagon Sympathies…………………………….4623. INSIDE: Family Friends………………………………….4824. OUTSIDE: Extremists…………………………………….50Section 4: Fissures and Connections………………………….5525. INSIDE: Family Ties…………………………………….5526. OUTSIDE: Federation…………………………………….5627. INSIDE: School Days…………………………………….5928. OUTSIDE: Forces and Counterforces………………………..6329. INSIDE: Blood………………………………………….6630. OUTSIDE: Trade-offs…………………………………….6831. INSIDE: Grim Lullaby……………………………………71Section 5: The End Approaches……………………………….7332. OUTSIDE: Security and Cooperation………………………..7333. INSIDE: Sarajevo Cinderella……………………………..7634. OUTSIDE: Failure at Srebrenica…………………………..7735. INSIDE: Magbula’s Parrot………………………………..8236. OUTSIDE: The Accident…………………………………..8537. INSIDE: Boys Pretending…………………………………8738. OUTSIDE: Bombs and Bluffs……………………………….8839. INSIDE: Side by Side……………………………………9040. OUTSIDE: Decisions at Dayton…………………………….92Section 6: After Dayton…………………………………….9741. INSIDE: Morning Has Broken………………………………9742. OUTSIDE: Waiting for Christmas…………………………..9943. INSIDE: Serb Exodus…………………………………….10144. OUTSIDE: Refugees in Austria…………………………….10345. INSIDE: Refugees at the Residence………………………..10546. OUTSIDE: Diplobabble……………………………………10747. INSIDE: Displaced………………………………………10748. OUTSIDE: Sowing and Reaping……………………………..11049. INSIDE: Banja Luka Bitterness……………………………113Section 7: Imperfect Justice………………………………..11750. OUTSIDE: War Criminals………………………………….11751. INSIDE: Uncatchable…………………………………….12252. OUTSIDE: Evenhanded…………………………………….12453. INSIDE: No Justice in Srebrenica…………………………12654. OUTSIDE: The Tribunal…………………………………..12955. INSIDE: Waiting for the Truth……………………………13156. OUTSIDE: Intelligence and Political Will………………….13557. INSIDE: Professor, Perpetrator, President…………………137Section 8: International Inadequacies………………………..14258. OUTSIDE: The Fourth Warring Party………………………..14259. INSIDE: City Signs……………………………………..14460. OUTSIDE: Out of Step……………………………………14861. INSIDE: By a Thread…………………………………….14962. OUTSIDE: Missing……………………………………….15163. INSIDE: Surviving the Peace……………………………..15364. OUTSIDE: Press Tour…………………………………….154Section 9: Women’s Initiative……………………………….15765. INSIDE: Organized for Action…………………………….15766. OUTSIDE: Lyons…………………………………………16067. INSIDE: “What’s an NGO?”………………………………..16468. OUTSIDE: Skewed………………………………………..16569. INSIDE: A League of Their Own……………………………16870. OUTSIDE: “With All Due Respect”………………………….171Section 10: Recreating Community…………………………….17371. INSIDE: Beethoven’s Fifth……………………………….17372. OUTSIDE: “Neither Free Nor Fair”…………………………17673. INSIDE: Sarajevo Red……………………………………17874. OUTSIDE: Re-leaf……………………………………….18075. INSIDE: Watermelons…………………………………….18276. OUTSIDE: Arizona……………………………………….18377. INSIDE: Three Hundred Gold Coins…………………………18578. OUTSIDE: Mistrust in Mostar……………………………..19179. INSIDE: New Bridges…………………………………….19280. OUTSIDE: Air Force One………………………………….194Bridging: Six Lessons from Bosnia……………………………1991. Test Truisms……………………………………………2002. Question Stereotypes…………………………………….2063. Find Out-of-Power Allies…………………………………2114. Appreciate Domestic Dynamics……………………………..2165. Find Fault……………………………………………..2226. Embrace Responsibility…………………………………..226Epilogue………………………………………………….235Notes…………………………………………………….239Index…………………………………………………….253

Chapter One

SECTION I Officialdom

1. INSIDE: “Esteemed Mr. Carrington”

On 3 July 1992, a plane landed in Sarajevo, carrying the diplomat Lord Carrington. He had a string of illustrious titles: former British defense secretary and foreign secretary, former secretary general of NATO. That summer day he was representing the European Community.

Only six hundred feet from the ramshackle airport, where a disabled Russian transport plane lay nose down, lived Nurdzihana Ðozic. Her apartment was on a front line, under constant attack from Bosnian Serb forces. A journalist, born in eastern Bosnia, Ðozic had worked in Belgrade for years before moving to the now-blighted neighborhood of Dobrinja, on the edge of Sarajevo. Ironically, her apartment had been built as part of the Olympic Village—a symbol of multicultural dexterity and discipline. She and her neighbors had been crouched in their cellar since the beginning of the fighting three months earlier.

Ðozic gave me a copy of the letter she had drafted to the visiting British dignitary. She’d braved heavy shelling and snipers to run across the street to a fabric store, now a makeshift press center. There she read her letter into a microphone for radio broadcast:

Esteemed Mr. Carrington, We, the citizens of what is probably the largest concentration camp in the world, beg you to keep in mind that 30,000 inhabitants of this neighborhood have awaited your arrival. We are Muslims, Serbs, Croats, and other nationalities. Those who think we were attacked because we are not Serbs are deluded. Deranged Serbs attacked Serbs here, deceiving their own nation with their moronic ambitions. Impatiently, in cellars and shelters, we turned on long-distance transistors to hear the results of your peace talks, to find out whether we will soon be able to take a step into the street without fear that we have stepped into death. Our hopes were in vain. Can you imagine what it’s like to live almost ninety days in a cellar, with manic artillery volleys overhead, demolishing and burning indiscriminately? Can you imagine what it’s like to live without electricity, water, food, air? Without dignity? Can you imagine what it’s like to give birth, become ill, and die in the same cellar? When the artillery rounds abated for a short time during your stay in Sarajevo, we hurried to the nearest parks, shielding ourselves from snipers. Making coffins from pieces of furniture, we quickly buried, with as much dignity as possible, the newest civilian victims. Tears of pain and anger flowed down the faces of mourning mothers, children, and the elderly. Tormented and degraded by hunger and exhaustion, we were powerless to silence the nests of machine guns, much less the shells and tanks. Meanwhile you, Mr. Carrington, were negotiating with our killer, with Radovan Karadzic. After all we’d endured, that news wounded us even more. Finally, Sir, we don’t know “the warring sides,” nor “the three sides who have been called by you to the negotiating table. There are those who kill us (and they will never kill us all) and those who at least endeavor to protect us. Given this, Mr. Carrington, if you come to Sarajevo again—and we sincerely hope that you will—pass by at least a few of these destroyed buildings, and see the innocent blood on the streets. Do that as a small gesture from a wise, worldly diplomat, but also to instruct your conscience. No one has the right to take away an entire season from us. No one has the right to do that: not politicians, not the Yugoslav People’s Army, not mercenaries, not domestic traitors and criminals. Nor do you have the right simply to observe without understanding what is really happening. Respectfully, and with the conviction that we will try, with help, to find an escape from the dark, damp cellars, where we have been driven, right before your very eyes,

The Inhabitants of the Sarajevo Suburb of Dobrinja

2. OUTSIDE: A Convenient Euphemism

International journalists were in a hole, reporting on events too tragic to be believed and policymakers too unfocused to respond. After all, the busy officials had a host of other problems on their minds, such as European unification, money laundering, NATO expansion, and genetically modified foods.

Many reporters hoped that “if the audience perceived events as real, they would have to act.” To avoid that pressure, some international officials de facto colluded with the aggressors by barring reporters from scenes of the worst atrocities. The officials claimed that journalists would further destabilize a chaotic situation; but in truth, damning accounts might have forced officials to admit that death camps existed.

In fact, the US Department of State narrowly avoided just such a predicament. John Fox, an Eastern European specialist on the policy planning staff, granted that “the US government had in its possession credible and verified reports of the existence of … Serbian run camps in Bosnia and elsewhere, as of June, certainly July, 1992, well ahead of the media revelations.” But it was only after an August 2 exposé of the camps by the investigative reporter for Newsday Roy Gutman that a State Department spokesman acknowledged the camps’ existence.

The next day, Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Niles retracted the confirmation in a statement to Congress: “We don’t have, thus far, substantiated information that would confirm the existence of these camps.” Representative Tom Lantos (D-CA) decried the secretary’s “diplomatic double talk.” According to John Fox, who was painfully aware of the contradiction, “I was told that we couldn’t afford to continue to confirm the existence of these camps.” Those instructions, he claimed, came from the very top—Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who had been ambassador to Yugoslavia. But Warren Zimmerman, another former ambassador to Yugoslavia, agreed that there was a deliberate effort to “downplay the importance of these camps … [because of] the desire not to create a situation where we would have to respond.”

The concealment effort involved more than Foggy Bottom, as the State Department is known. Occasionally the public was given poorly informed oversimplifications, such as President Clinton’s remark that “until those folks get tired of killing each other over there, bad things will continue to happen.” Granted, the president was in a bind—wanting to avoid US military intervention, but needing to appear decisive. He also had to be aware that the Russians would construe US military involvement as a threat to their security. The last thing Clinton needed was for that important relationship to be damaged.

On the other hand, concerned members of Congress reminded the White House that leaders of rogue states were watching the new administration. If the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or the National Security Council ignored the extermination of Bosniaks, their inaction might be interpreted as a sign that the United States would not confront other threats, such as the development of biological weapons in Iraq or the training of terrorists in Sudan.

And the United Nations? The UN war crimes panel in early 1992 delayed looking into allegations of genocide. Instead of full research and disclosure, empty resolutions and ultimatums abounded. Resolution 713. Resolution 815. Resolution 819. Resolution 824. Resolution 836. Resolution 844. Resolution 908. Resolution 913. In the first eighteen months of the war, the UN Security Council passed forty-seven resolutions and the president of the council issued forty-two statements related to the war. Meanwhile, as the Serb police chief in the northwestern city of Banja Luka confirmed, droves of civilians were being deported in railway cattle cars. That image evoked Jewish deportations from the same city during World War II, the very crime in which Kurt Waldheim—who went on to be UN secretary general and president of Austria—was eventually held complicit.

In fact, Austria was the first member state to beseech the UN to establish “safe areas” inside Bosnia—enclaves in which Bosniaks could find protection. But objectors worried that UN troops would be required to protect the areas. Some said the term implied that other places would not be safe, thus inviting Serb attacks there. Lord Owen of Britain and Cyrus Vance of the United States, respected co-chairs of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia, expressed reservations, with Owen noting that the safe areas were “flawed in concept” and would encourage “ethnic cleansing.”

“Ethnic cleansing” is a code for murder or expulsion because of lineage. Those two words, having entered the English language in the 1990s as the translation of a phrase often used by Yugoslav media, were becoming commonplace in sanitized discussions about the war. But this Orwellian word twist was nothing new. As early as the 1930s, Soviets had referred to the “cleansing of borders” when forcing Poles from their homes. Nazis, too, used the expression. An area from which the entire Jewish population had been expelled was said to be “cleansed of Jews.” During World War II, the idea entered Yugoslav military doctrine. An Ustaše commander referred to “the prearranged, well-calculated plan for cleansing our Croatia of unwanted elements.” On another side, a Chetnik urged his compatriots to “cleanse [the territory] before anybody notices and with strong battalions occupy the key places … freed of non-Serb elements.”

Although the notion of ethnic cleansing was known to be a distortion of an evil reality, the term still took root as the war progressed, spreading tendrils into the international media. An attentive reader objected to the New York Times: “We should not invite into our language terms which obscure political realities…. For the Nazis, to murder became to ‘grant a mercy death,’ genocide was ‘the final solution.’ But none of us is free of the danger of self- (and other) deception through language corruption…. Soldiers ruthlessly killing innocent civilians or brutally expelling them from their communities out of ethnic hatred is not ‘cleansing.'”

Officials in the international community no doubt wished they could grapple with the trouble that had appeared on their watch. But ultimately, overlooking or euphemizing the grotesque cruelty in the southeast corner of Europe was a moral sacrifice most seemed willing to make. Many took time for no more than a paternalistic shake of the head over Balkan troublemakers.

3. INSIDE: Angels and Animals

Sitting at my kitchen table, Drago Štambuk leaned forward, his chin propped on his palm. He was anxious to give me his perspective on the war—through a Croatian lens, but still nationalist. A medical doctor and published poet, Štambuk had grown up on the Dalmatian coast. He was close to President Tudman and had served as Croatia’s ambassador to India and Egypt. During the war, he was posted as ambassador to Britain.

“I was galvanized when I saw the bloodshed and destruction,” Štambuk told me. “So I telephoned the British Foreign Office and said, ‘I’m very worried about what’s going to happen in Yugoslavia. May I speak with somebody?’ The person said, ‘I can meet you for lunch in a pub.’ So we met, and I told him, ‘I believe in preventive medicine. Can you do something politically and diplomatically—you meaning the British government, or the West altogether—to prevent this war? Because it’s going to be terrible.’ He listened but made no comment. That’s how the meeting ended.”

Štambuk told me he tried to make politicians and journalists comprehend what was happening:

Why couldn’t they have listened to people like me who understood the country and knew what would follow? The signals were all there. You just needed to read them and draw the conclusion. And it was a terrible conclusion. When Tito created Yugoslavia, he insisted on equality among ethnic groups. He would kick one on the head and another in the eye. So, regarding ethnicity, we were all more or less equal. But when he died, this equality wasn’t good enough for the Serbs.

According to the former ambassador, Miloševic and his cronies had actively fomented the strife. The Academy of Arts and Sciences, an influential group of Serb intellectuals, published an inflammatory memorandum in Belgrade in 1986. “It was clear what would happen,” Štambuk said. “From ideas, to words, to deeds. Miloševic stirred up normal people around the country. Then Serbs in all the republics started taking over institutions. They manipulated the law to put the whole budget of Yugoslavia into the Serbian kitty. Serbia was trying to take over the country from the inside. It was like marriage rape.”

A key moment in Miloševic’s political power grab, Štambuk explained, was an incendiary 1989 speech “to a million people gathered in Kosovo, calling on all Serbs to unite. People in the other republics started focusing on their own people, like the Croats in Croatia. Elections with nationalist parties were organized. The Serbs in Belgrade looked at the other republics and claimed, ‘These are separatists!’ That simply wasn’t the case. Separatism was born in Belgrade.”

“Before the war,” he mused, “I never thought of myself as this or that ethnic group. And then all this started happening…. You begin to think, ‘Where do I belong?’ And it’s natural to try to find your own group.”

Once people are divided into groups, conflict grows in the gaps between them. He said, “It’s so easy to react, to kill in revenge, to do the same things to the other side. But for me, just common humanity was most important.” Štambuk looked away, sighed, then continued: “One of my friends said, ‘I can forgive Serbs everything, except one thing. I cannot forgive them for making me fight.'”

Drago Štambuk was interviewed on TV in response to an April 1993 massacre of more than one hundred Bosniaks—mostly women, children, and elderly men—in the village of Ahmici. He recounted the experience to me:

Even though Muslims and Croats had lived peacefully together, all the Muslim homes were destroyed, while the Croat section was untouched. Croat militia burned some of the victims alive. I was representing Croats in the UK. I saw the burned bodies of the Muslims on the television, and I was horrified. The announcer said “Croats did it.” Then the interviewer leaned toward me and said, “Now Croats are like Serbs.” Margaret Thatcher had told me, “Stay with what you want to say. You don’t have to answer their questions.” But I couldn’t do it. I was so shattered. There I was, standing for people doing horrible things. And I said—it just came out—I said, “I’m ashamed to be here.” That was the only human thing I could say. “I’m ashamed to be here.” I repeated it twice, because one time wasn’t enough.

Not everyone supported Štambuk’s frankness in the studio that night, he told me:

A few Croats called and said “Why didn’t you lie on television last night? Serbs always lie.” I said, “I didn’t, because then I’d be like them.”

I thought if I managed to convince people of the truth, that would be enough. They’d be on the side of the victims. It was a huge disappointment when I realized that wasn’t the case. In the real world, interests are more powerful than principles. That was a great awakening for me. There were always agendas I didn’t know about. I had to play to politicians’ interests. That was the terrible lesson, that politics is rooted in selfishness and greed. Sometimes politicians set a house on fire, then extinguish the fire to get credit, rather than preventing the fire in the first place.

“So the war was allowed to go on,” the poet continued. “And when I met with refugees brought to Eng land, their stories were terrible. What is it with human nature? How can people become so bestial? Is it only that they lose their sense of shame? Or is it that we are, inside, capable of wonderful, angelic deeds, but also heinous crimes? If you say that part of our nature is animalistic, I think you are not being kind to animals.”

The way the sea embraces the island gradually, steadily, so will we, children of God’s providence, come to love ourselves again.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Worlds Apartby Swanee Hunt Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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