ČITALI
SMO ZA VAS
BOSNIA
Recognition
What Did the United States Know?
No other atrocity campaign in the twentieth
century was better monitored and understood by the U.S. government.
U.S. analysts fed their higher-ups detailed and devastating
reports on Serbian war aims and tactics. One classified April
14 information memorandum, for instance, described the Serbs'
clear pattern of use of force, intimidation, and provocation
to violence aimed at forcibly partitioning [Bosnia] and effecting
large forced transfers of population. . . . The clear intent
of Serbian use of force is to displace non-Serbs from mixed
areas (including areas where Serbs are a minority) to consolidate
Bosnian Serb claims to some 60% of Bosnian territory . . . in
a manner which would create a "Serbian\Bosnia."
Balkan watchers also knew Miloševic well enough to alert their
superiors to his favorite stalling tactics. In the same memo
the analyst wrote, "Belgrade practiced the strategy of
the hyena in Croatia, curbing its most aggressive actions during
peak moments of international scrutiny and condemnation but
resuming them as soon as possible."='This was written just
a week into the war.
Jon Western, an analyst in the State Department's Bureau of
Intelligence and Research, was one of many U.S. officials charged
with processing Serb brutality on a daily basis. Western was
on the fast track in the department. Fair-haired, blue-eyed,
and nothing if not earnest, Western had joined the government
in 1988.
His first day's journal entry from INR, dated July 15, 1990,
read: "This is the job I've always dreamed of "Western
had grown up in North Dakota and never in his life seen a dead
body. Yet suddenly in 1992 he found himself confronted by reports
and photos that depicted human beings who "looked like
they had been through meat grinders:'
From the beginning of the war, he was tasked with sifting through
some 1,000 documents on Bosnia a day-open source reports from
foreign and American journalists and international human rights
groups, local press translations, classified cables from the
field, satellite intelligence, refugee testimony, and telephone
and radio intercepts. He used the data to prepare Secretary
of State Baker's morning intelligence summary.
In his training for the post of intelligence analyst, Western
had been taught to greet reports with skepticism. And the stories
emerging from Bosnia certainly seemed to warrant disbelief.
One cable described a nine year-old Muslim girl who had been
raped by Serb militiamen and left lying in a pool of blood for
two days while her parents watched, from behind a fence, as
she died. He did not believe it.
"You're taught to be objective," he remembered. "You're
trained not to believe everything you hear."=' Following
in the footsteps of Morgenthau in Constantinople and Twining
on the Cambodia-Thai border, Western confronted images he could
not process. But the refugees kept talking, making themselves
heard. The very same report about the Muslim girl crossed his
desk a second time when a separate group of witnesses confirmed
it independently to U.S. investigators.
Some of the images were superficially mild. For instance, Western
saw satellite photos that looked like they depicted the night
sky-hundreds of luminous little stars dotted a black canvas.
But the young analyst knew that the stars were not stars at
all but the glowing embers of small fires that proud Europeans
expelled from their homes built in their makeshift encampments
in the woods. In June 1992 he found himself assigned to conduct
a frame-by-frame analysis of television footage of the Sarajevo
"breadline massacre," in which a Serb shell blew twenty-two
shoppers apart. His was a taxing visual odyssey. Marshall Harris,
Western's colleague in the State Department, remembers, ` Jon
had it the worst.
He had to read everything that came in, no matter how horrific.
The rest of us got a summarized version of the brutality, but
he had to process every minute detail:'
However gruesome his tasks, Western had a job to do. Beginning
in late May he set out to see if there might be a pattern in
the refugee accounts and in the Serb military advance. He was
leery of leaping to conclusions because the Bosnian Muslims
had already gained a reputation for manipulating international
sympathy, Western demanded corroboration. Could the refugees
provide more descriptive detail about the weather on a particular
day? Did they recall the color of the buildings in the so-called
concentration camps? Could they describe the clothes of their
supposed assailants?
Over the July 4 weekend in 1992,Western and a CIA colleague
worked around the clock for three days, poring over mounds of
classified and unclassified material. Gathering military intelligence
and refugee reports from all across Bosnia, they acquired the
most clear-cut evidence yet of a vast network of oncentration
camps. The Serb tactics in Brčko in nort em Bosnia resembled
those in Zvornik in eastern Bosnia and Prijedor in western Bosnia.
This suggested that the ethnic cleansing and the military attacks
had been planned and coordinated. Bosnian Serb artillery would
begin by unleashing a barrage on a given village; Serb paramilitaries
would launch infantry assaults, killing armed men, rounding
up unarmed men, and sending trembling women and children into
flight. When most Serb forces moved to the next village, a cadre
of paramilitaries and regulars stayed behind to "mop up:
'Within hours, they had looted valuables, shot livestock, and
blown roofs off houses. Non-Serb life in Serb territory was
banned. Some 10,000 Bosnians were fleeing their homes each day.2'
The Serbs' next moves were spookily easy to predict. As Western
remembers:
/We could see the attacks coming by watching our computer terminal
screens, by scanning the satellite imagery, or often just by
watching television. We knew exactly what the Bosnian Serbs
were going to do
next, and there was nothing we could do. Imagine you could say
"In two days this village is going to die," and there
was nothing you could do about it. You just sat there, waited
for it to happen and dutifully
' reported it up the chain.
But the chain was missing some links. The question about what
could be done, which was burning inside junior and midlevel
officials, had already
been answered by senior officials within the administration.
Powell, Baker, Scowcroft, Cheney Eagleburger, and Bush had decided
the United States
would not intervene militarily That case was closed. John Fox
of the State Department's Policy Planning Office recalls a climate
that eschewed mention of the possibility of U.S. intervention.
"For most of 1992, we couldn't send memos that called for
the use of American force," Fox remembers.
"The best we could do was to write arresting things that
led inexorably to the conclusion that force would have to be
used."
An ever-expanding posse of like-minded State Department officials
piped cable upon cable up the State Department food chain in
the hopes that one senior official would bite. There were no
takers. The young hawks recognized that they had several forces
working against them.
First, their higher-ups had narrowly circumscribed what everybody
within the building understood to be "possible." There
would be no U.S. military intervention in Bosnia. This was a
fact, not a forecast. This shaped the thinking of those who
sat before their computers or bumped into one another in the
department's drab cafeteria and decided whether and how to appeal.
Second, they were dealing with bureaucrats like themselves who
were protective of turf and career and not at all in the habit
of rocking the boat. Third, they knew that their strongest argument
for intervention was a moral argument, which was necessarily
suspect in a department steeped in the realist tradition.
Fox remembers diversifying his written appeals, offering"
something for everyone":
I used history, arguing that we had allowed fascism to triumph
before in this building, and that it had proven not to be such
a good idea. I argued that we should intervene because it was
"the right thing to do:' This is an argument you almost
never make in government if you know what you are doing. It
virtually guarantees that you don't get invited to the next
meeting and that you gain a reputation for moralism. I warned
them that if we let these killings happen this time around,
they would be the ones stuck holding the smoking gun. Of the
three types of argument-the historical, the moral, and the "cover
your ass" kind-the latter was of course the most compelling.
U.S. foreign service officers knew that Secretary of State Baker
believed that the United States did not "have a dog in
this fight." But undaunted by their superiors' indifference,
they kept the analysis coming. One of the most memorable overviews
of the situation came from the pen of Ambassador Zimmerman,
who, one month into the war, submitted a confidential cable
to the secretary of state entitled "Who Killed Yugoslavia?"
The cable was divided into five sections, each headed by a verse
from "Who Killed Cock Robin?" Zimmerman had been recalled
to Washington on May 16, 1992, and writing it was his last official
act as ambassador.
He "argued that nationalism had "put an arrow in the
heart of Yugoslavia" and placed the blame squarely on Balkan
leaders like Croatia's "narrow-mind ed, crypto-racist regime"
and the Milosevic dictatorship in Belgrade: Innocent bystanders
. . . never had a chance against Milosevic's combination of
aggressiveness and intransigence. Historians can argue;' about
the role of the individual in history. I have no doubt that
if Milosevic's parents had committed suicide before his birth
rather than after, I would not be writing a cable about the
death of Yugoslavia. Milosevic, more than anyone else, is its
gravedigger.
Western leaders, he observed, were "no more than witnesses
at Yugoslavia's funeral."
Zimmerman asked Jim Hooper, recently promoted to become the
State Department's director of the Office of Canadian Affairs,
to join him in developing a menu of concrete policy options
for Bosnia. Hooper was skeptical that Deputy Secretary Eagleburger
would take his initiatives seriously. He thought Zimmerman was
the one who needed to argue for air strikes, but Zimmerman insisted
he would lose his access. "This was the classic bureaucratic
trap," says Hooper. "If you go to the boss with bad
news, the boss won't want to see you anymore." Hooper's
wife urged him to accept anyway. "If you don't take this,"
she said, "you'll wonder for the rest of your life whether
you could have made a difference." Hooper accepted the
offer and spent the second half of 1992 running the Office of
Canadian Affairs and, on a pro bono basis, trying to rally department
support for intervention.
U.S. diplomats who worked day to day on Bosnia became eager
to see a Western military intervention. They had not become
so engaged with Cambodia or Iraq in part because they had been
blocked from entering either country and directly witnessing
the carnage. Newspaper coverage had been sparse, as journalists,
too, were denied access. Americans were also probably less prone
to identify with Kurds and Cambodians than they were with Europeans.
But the most significant difference was that the Cold War had
ended, and there was no geopolitical rationalization for supporting
Serb perpetrators. Thus, for the first time in the twentieth
century, U.S. military intervention to stop genocide was within
reach.
But internal appeals alone were unlikely to make a dent in the
consciousness of senior policy-makers so firmly opposed to interveni
The State Department dissenters needed help from American repoxters,
editorial boards, and advocacy groups. Initially, they did not
really get it. Between April and early August many of the journalists
who swooped into Bosnia had never visited the country before
and compensated for their ignorance with an effort to be "even-handed"
and "neutral." Many recall scavenging to dig up stories
about atrocities committed by "all sides:' Many did not
portray the war as a top-down attempt by Milosevic to create
an ethnically pure Greater Serbia.
In early August 1992, however, the proponents of intervention
within the U.S. government gained a weapon in their struggle:
The Western media finally won access to Serb concentration camps.
Journalists not only began challenging U.S. policy but they
supplied photographic images and refugee sagas that galvanized
heretofore silent elite opinion. Crucially, the advocates of
humanitarian intervention began to win the support of both liberals
committed to advancing human rights as well as staunch Republican
Cold Warriors, who believed the U.S. had the responsibility
and the power to stop Serb aggression in Europe. The Bush administration's
chosen policy of nonintervention suddenly came to feel politically
untenable.
Response (Bush)
"Concentration Camps in Europe"
In the notorious Serb-run camps in northern Bosnia, Muslim and
Croat detainees were inhumanly concentrated. Onetime farmers,
factory workers, and philosophers were pressed tightly into
barracks. One prisoner's nose nestled into the armpit or the
sweaty feet of the eighty-five-year-old inmate beside him. The
urine bucket filled, spilled, and remained in place. Parched
inmates gathered their excretion in cupped hands to wet their
lips.
The camps of Bosnia were not extermination camps, though killing
was a favorite tool of many of the commanders in charge. Nor
could they really be called death camps, though some 10,000
prisoners perished in them. Not every Bosnian Muslim was marked
for death as every Jew had been in the Holocaust. Although injury
and humiliation were inevitable, death was only possible. Concentration
camps is what they were. Forever linked with gas chambers, concentration
camps were not a Nazi invention. The Spaniards had used them
in Cuba during a local rebellion in 1896, the British in South
Africa during the Boer War at the beginning of the twentieth
century.
Thanks to its spy satellites, radio and phone communications,
and agents on the ground, the United States had known of the
Serb camps since May 1992, But midlevel and junior U.S, officials
remember the offices above them were a "black hole:' "We
would send things up and nothing would come back," said
Western. "The only time we would get a response was when
the press covered a particular event."'° U.S. analysts
knew that Muslim and Croat men were being incarcerated and abused,
but Bush administration officials never publicly condemned the
camps or demanded their closure. It would take public outrage
to force their hand.
Western journalists heard reports of the camps' atrocities but
did not immediately accept them. The first convoy of Muslim
and Croat refugees from northern Bosnia crossed into Croatia
in June. Laura Pitter, a freelance journalist, remembers her
reaction to the horrors described by the first wave of refugees:
They were talking about women being put in rape camps. They
were talking about all these killings-some they said they'd
seen, others they'd only heard about. They talked about people
being thrown off cliffs, men being held and tortured and starved
in camps. We stayed up talking to them until 2 a.m. So many
different people from different places were describing these
incredibly similar experiences. They seemed credible, but I
still wondered if they were all just repeating the same rumors.
No matter how much I heard, I just found it hard to believe.
I couldn't believe. In fact, I didn't believe.
Pitter sat around her colleague's apartment that night debating
the veracity of the reports. She filed stories over the course
of the next week about the refugee crisis but talked only generally
of the refugees' "allegations" of atrocities. A few
weeks later she finally chose to file a more detailed story
told to her by a man who was able to escape from a Serb-run
camp with the help of a Serbian Orthodox priest. The camp, in
the northwestern Bosnian town of Brcko, was situated in a slaughterhouse.
The same machines formerly used to kill cattle were used to
kill his fellow prisoners, the witness said. Pitter's news agency
United Press International, refused to run the story saying
there was not enough proof and citing legal concerns.
One Muslim, Selma Hecimovic, took care of Muslim and Croat women
in Bosnia who had been raped at camps the Serbs established
specifically for that purpose. She recalled the ways journalists
and human rights workers pressed the victims and witnesses of
torture:
At the end, I get a bit tired of constantly having to prove.
We had to prove genocide, we had to prove that our women are
being raped, that our children have been killed. Every time
I take a statement from these women, and you journalists want
to interview them, I imagine those people, disinterested, sitting
in a nice house with a hamburger and beer, switching channels
on TV I really don't know what else has to happen here, what
further suffering the Muslims have to undergo. . . to make the
so-called world react."
The first high-profile press reports of Serb detention camps
appeared in July and American and European journalists flooded
to Bosnia. Newsday's Roy Gutman, a British film crew from the
Independent Television News (ITN), and the Guardian's Ed Vuillamy
led the way. On July 19, 1992, Gutman published an article from
the Manjaca camp, where he accompanied representatives of the
International Committee for the Red Cross
(ICRC), then performing its first inspection. Supervised at
all times by Serb escorts, Gutman was allowed to speak only
with eight handpicked prisoners. Still, he managed to piece
together-mainly from those inmates who had been recently released-tales
of beatings, torture, and mass executions. One seventeen-year-old
survivor described being hauled to the /
camp in a covered truck along with his father, grandfather,
brother, and 150 -others.
He said eighteen people in the six-truck convoy died from asphyxiation.32
In a story entitled "There Is No Food, There Is No Air,"
Gutmanrelayed a Muslim relief worker's account that six to ten
people were dying daily in the Omarska camp near the Serb-held
town of Prijedor. On July 21 Gutman's Newsday story "Like
Auschwitz," described the deportation of thousands of Muslim
civilians in sweltering, locked freight cars." Gutman,
who later won the Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches on the camps,
used terms such as "sealed boxcars" and "deportations,"
which could only remind readers of events of fifty years before.
He quoted a Muslim student who said, "We all felt like
Jews in the Third Reich:''
Gutman relied on refugee testimony to give readers a glimpse
of Omarska, the worst of the Serbs' camps, where several thousand
Muslim and Croat civilians, including the entire leadership
of the town of Prijedor, were held in metal cages and killed
in groups of ten to fifteen every few days. A former inmate,
Alija Lujinovic, a fifty-three-year-old electrical engineer,
had been held in a northeastern Bosnian facility where he said
some 1,350 people were slaughtered between mid-May and mid June.
Not surprisingly, just like the Khmer Rouge and the Iraqi government,
the Serbs denied access to relief officials and journalists
who wanted to investigate. On August 2, 1992, Gutman filed a
story in which Lujinovic, the survivor, offered grim details
of Serbs slitting the throats of Muslim prisoners, stripping
them, and throwing them into the Sava River or grinding them
into animal feed.
The following day U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher
finally confirmed that the United States possessed evidence
of the camps. He admitted that the administration knew "that
the Serbian forces are maintaining what they call detention
centers" and that "abuses and torture and killings
are taking place." But he insisted that the Serbs were
not alone, adding, "I should also note that we have reports
that Bosnians and Croatians also maintain detention centers.
"The United States did not have evidence that similar atrocities
had occurred in the other camps, but Boucher still broadened
the appeal for access. "All parties must allow international
authorities immediate and unhindered access to all the detention
centers," he said. "We've made clear right from the
beginning of this that there were various parties involved in
the fighting; that there were people on all sides . . . that
were doing bad things"
Even Boucher's diluted condemnation proved too much for his
bosses. The following day, on instructions from Eagleburger,
Assistant Secretary of State for Europe Tom Niles backtracked,
testifying on Capitol Hill that the administration in fact did
not have "thus far substantiated information that would
confirm the existence of these camps." Boucher's admissions
had caused a spike in elite pressure for intervention. A senior
State Department official said at the time, "Our intention
was to move the ball forward one step, and the [news] reports
moved it forward two steps."3' With Niles's retreat, the
Washington-based journalists became furious.
The Washington Post's veteran correspondent Don Oberdorfer wrote
in his journal, "I had rarely seen the State Department
press corps-or what was left of it in August-so agitated"
From then on, the reporters assumed the administration was obfuscating
or lying outright. Congressman Tom Lantos, the Holocaust survivor.
who had found the Bush administration's response to Iraqi atrocities
"nauseating," was again enraged. He confronted Niles
by grabbing the morning's New York Times, which led with the
headline about the camps. "You remember the old excuse
that while the gas chambers were in full blast killing innocent
people, we could say, not very honestly, `we don't know,"'
Lantos challenged Niles.
"Now, either Mr. Boucher is lying or you are lying, but
you are both working for [Secretary of State] Jim Baker, and
we are not going to read Boucher's statement in the New York
Times and listen to you testify to the exact oppošite."'9
Since no reporter had yet visited the Omarska death camp, the
Bush administration could still claim that the refugee claims
were unconfirmed.
On August 5 Boucher said Red Cross officials had visited nine
camps and reported "very difficult conditions of detention:'
But he said, "they have not found any evidence of death
camps. "The Holocaust standard, he implied, had not been
met. Boucher went on to note that the Red Cross had not yet
been allowed to visit the most notorious camps. Asked what the
United States would do when evidence had been gathered against
those responsible, Boucher said he did not know of any plans
for a war crimes tribunal. And no, he stressed, the administration
was not considering using force.""
President Bush remained immobile on the question of U.S. intervention.
In an interview published the same day, he was quoted as saying
that military force "is an option that I haven't thought
of yet." He met the objections of critics by falling back
on the Powell-Weinberger doctrine. "Now we have some people
coming at me saying, `Commit American forces,"' Bush said.
"Before I'd commit forces to a battle, I want to know what's
the beginning, what's the objective, how's the objective going
to be achieved and what's the end:'^' These were of course reasonable
questions,but there was no indication that anyone at the upper
levels of the U.S. government was trying to supply answers.
