By David Binder
On the surface, Belgrade, capital of Serbia and of what remains of Yugoslavia, seems almost like a normal metropolis these days: a lot of traffic, even traffic jams; shop windows full; well-dressed crowds in restaurants and cafes; kiosks selling a huge variety of newspapers and magazines, including porn; night spots and concert halls, offering the latest of the singers Ivana and Neda in the popular turbofolk vein. This surface is deceptive. Beyond the main streets are barracks crowded with destitute refugees, a total of more than seven hundred thousand from Serbian communities in Krajina, western and eastern Slavonia, Zagreb and other regions of Croatia, as we ll as from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Indeed, Serbia is host to more refugees than any other part of the former Yugoslav federation, a grim harvest of the latest Balkan wars. Tens of thousands may soon follow from eastern Slavonia and Bosnia. There have never been so many Serbs in Serbia. Fully one-quarter of the nine million people claiming Serbian nationality resided outside of the republic before the fighting started in 1991. Recent surveys show 70 percent of the Serbs living at or below the poverty line. The income of an average household of four has sunk to about $250 a month. (To be sure, similar levels of poverty are to be found in other areas of the former Yugoslavia).
Surface or below the surface, what struck me most on a return visit to Belgrade was the political vacuum created in Serbia by President Slobodan Miloshevich, co-author of the Yugoslav disintegration, along with his counter-parts in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia. Such was the scene in the weeks after the Dayton-Paris peace accords were endorsed by the Serbian leader, giving away huge chunks of Serbian-inhabited areas in Sarajevo and western, eastern, northern, and central Bosnia, just as he had conceded the Slavonias and Krajina to Croatia in the spring, summer, and autumn of 1995. The opposition, so vocal on other occasions, was quiet as if frozen (frozen out, in the case of Miloshevich's state-run television).
Call it not Serbia but a new land, Zombia. When I made this reference half in jest to a gathering of several dozen academics in Belgrade, their response was to gaze glassy eyed and silent, as if they, too, accepted to be zombies.
There is still a contrast between the Serbs of Serbia and the Serbs of Bosnia.
At the steel bridge across the Drina River at Mali Zvornik, a small town of Serbia, there is a border post manned by gun-toting frontier guards in dark blue-streaked camouflage uniforms. To the west across the swift-flowing green river lies the Republic of Serbians (Republika Srpska), created in 1992.
At the barrier, a van with license plates identifying its place of origin with the initials SS, standing for Serbian Sarajevo, came to a halt. A Yugoslav (Serb) guard looked in the trunk at some jerry cans filled with gasoline. "They're for my fa ther in Sokolac," the driver explained, mentioning a mountain town in the Republika Srpska.
"Empty them into your tank or get rid of them," the guard brusquely ordered. "Sanctions, you know." The sanctions were not those imposed by the United Nations on Serbia in 1992, tightened in 1993, and suspended in 1995, but rather the sanctions imposed by Belgrade on its neighboring Bosnian Serbs and reinforced in the wake of the Dayton-Paris agreements for a Bosnian peace settlement. A new shed for customs inspectors was under construction.
At Karakaj, the tiny border village on the west side of the Drina, a similarly uniformed and armed frontier guard looked at passports and identity cards and told two of us, "You'll need visas, stamped in your passes, forty-five Deutsche Marks apiec e."
This was the look of one of the newest, strangest, uneasiest borders in the world, the frontier between two Serbian states made official by the peace agreements as 1995 drew to a close - now a somewhat hostile and suspicious frontier between people who share a common language, history, family ties, and ultimately, a common fate.
Along the way, women muffled against the winter stood in the gathering twilight beside plastic containers of gasoline they hoped to sell. A sign near a farmstead announced honey for sale, perhaps a sign of incipient normality. Farther up the twisting mountain road lay the burned-out shells of houses - the remains of a Muslim village destroyed in 1992 fighting, its survivors scattered to the winds . Serb villages were similarly destroyed, but are being rebuilt. "if the Muslims return, I will leave," said Goran, our van driver and a former Serb soldier. "I will never breathe the same air with them again."
Vlasenica, a mountain town on Route 762 that had a Muslim majority before ethnic cleansing, is now a small command center for the U.S. Army's Fourth Battalion, Twelfth Infantry, while remaining at the same time the headquarters for the Drina Command of the Bosnian Serb Army. The two forces eye each other warily.
Down the road lies Pale, a tiny winter resort town high above Sarajevo that has been the capital of the Bosnian Serbs, swollen with refugees (most of them from Sarajevo), for nearly four years. There amidst the brutal Bosnian fighting - and NATO bombs in September - Dr. Radovan Karadzich has built a small new presidential c omplex, moving down the mountain from the previous Bela Kucha (White House) lodged in his former psychiatric clinic.
Karadzich has been denounced more often and regularly as a liar than any other politician involved in the Yugoslav conflicts - whether Serb, Muslim, Croat, or American. (The mendacity contest would be much more lively if the other leaders in the Bosnia conflict were subjected to critical analysis.) Unlike the others, he has become a political untouchable, not to be spoken to by the likes of Admiral Leighton Smith, the blustering commander of NATO's Bosnia operations, or by any other Western offi cial.
If he felt severe pain after battlefield setbacks, the punishing Dayton-Paris agreements, and indictment by an international tribunal as a war criminal, Karadzich certainly wasn't displaying it during a recent visit. Was the former practicing psychiatrist practicing denial? Whatever, I had never seen him so relaxed, sporting a many-colored silk tie, his voice calm and even, not fearing the future, although that future surely involves his departure from public life.
Security outside his modest, tasteful offices appeared to be light - far less than the security forces deployed to protect Slobodan Miloshevich in Belgrade - at the heart of the world's newest internationally recognized statelet. The metal detector was turned off "for the night," a guard said. (During the visit, Pale was blanketed overnight by twenty-two inches of snow. But these are hardy people, and by midmorning the Bosnian Serb capital had dug itself out and the government was functioning - a vivid contrast to the January week of paralysis induced in Washington by a blizzard of lesser intensity.)
Not that Karadzich belittled the problems he personally faces, or the problems faced by the 1.5 million Bosnian Serbs.
In response to a question, he said "at least forty thousand" Serbs had been killed in the Bosnian fighting since April 1992: "close to twenty thousand military and more than twenty thousand civilians - nearly ten thousand in Sarajevo alone." This estimated toll, until now a military secret, was not made public before, he said. If true, the military killed in action would represent one-quarter of the eighty-thousand-man force fielded by the Bosnian Serbs since April 1992 - a staggering blood sacrifice.
Karadzich said that NATO air strikes in September - killed 209 Serbian civilians (the number of military men killed in the raids remains a secret). One American bombing raid, for instance, killed Serb refugees quartered in a former military barracks at Han Pijesak, where American air strike planners apparently thought General Ratko Mladich, the Bosnian Serb commander, might be. (These casualty estimates were later supported by Serbian intelligence officials in Belgrade).
The worst problems of the moment for his Rorschach republic remain the Serb-majority boroughs of Sarajevo, which are to be demilitarized and then administered after mid-March by the Muslim-led government of Bosnia and Herzegovina under the Dayton plan, and Brcko, the chokepoint on the Serb corridor along the south bank of the Sava River between west-central Bosnia and eastern Bosnia. Unless compro mises are found permitting the Serbs to feel comfortable in these pinched-nerve spots, the future of Karadzich's people will be very dark.
"If there is a solution for Sarajevo and if there is a solution for Brcko, we can function," Karadzich said. Could he then live with it? "Yes." The acute sensitivity of these two areas has been illustrated by the exodus of some of the seventy thousand Bosnian Serbs from their homes in traditional Serbian neighborhoods of Sarajevo. Some scorched the earth before departing, burning their homes and taking with them the excavated remains of their dead loved ones from the borough of Grbavica in mid-January.
Asked what was his biggest mistake, Karadzich replied: "We neglected relations with the media and an approach to the Americans."
New elections? He will probably step down, but at least he will stay in the Serbian Democratic Party he helped found in 1990 and then, as he said, "reluctantly" headed.
Asked about the war crimes tribunal, he said: "I'll go to the Hague. I won't say a word there." Perhaps this was an expression of Karadzich's religious side and the tradition of martyrdom in the Serbian Orthodox Church, of which he is a devout member. Icons of saints hang on the walls of his office.
Concerning the issue of atrocities in and around Srebrenica last July, the focus of the Hague indictments against him and General Mladich, Karadzich first recounted Muslim atrocities against Serbs in Srebrenica and the surroundings in 1992: "1,260 killed, 60 villages burned - 58 mass graves with between 10 and 50 bodies in each." This, as a prelude to the summer of 1995 when "they [Muslims] killed 100 Serbs, civilians, and soldiers."
"We decided to disarm Srebrenica," he said of the rationale for last summer's offensive. "If not they would have cut us in two."
Karadzich's arithmetic on Srebrenica was as murky as that of the United Nations and the CIA (which claim thirty-five hundred Muslims slaughtered and fifty-five hundred missing), and he acknowledged this. "It's still being investigated," he said. "I suppose we will have to have an international commission." (Such a commission, if it ever comes into being, would face other formidable tasks even if it managed to complete a study of Srebrenica, because American and German reporters keep publishing fresh allegations, based mainly on hearsay, of other mass killing sites: a disused mining pit southwest of Prijedor and a dam northwest of Zvornik. On the other hand, there have been front-page reports of mass graves - such as one "discovered" in October near Kljuc in western Bosnia where, Prime Minister Haris Silajdzich alleged, more than five hundred Muslims had been killed - that quietly evaporate d after a United Nations investigation established no such thing: a single body was turned up in the case of Kluj.)
Of Srebrenica Karadzich said that according to his information, "More than five thousand Muslim soldiers tried to escape through the forests, with some civilians - I don't know how many were killed, more than a thousand, another one thousand near Zvornik. Tops two thousand. Over three thousand got through. We lost four h undred." The battles lasted thirty days, he said.
Massacres of civilians? "I have no indication of that," he said.
Mass graves? "I asked that the media go there - they didn't find it." He was referring to the fact, supported by detailed Republika Srpska documents, that in the latter half of August, less than a month after Srebrenica was conquered by the Serbs, twenty-five foreign journalists from six countries, including Mike Wallace of CBS, toured the Srebrenica area carrying CIA reconnaissance photographs of purported mass grave sites, searching for evidence of war crimes. Some reported what they saw (no mass graves). Some did not (notably Mike Wallace). So much for the claims of exclusivity of a young Christian Science Monitor reporter, David Rohde, who entered the region nearly two months later without permission of the Bosnian Serb authorities and "discovered" what he alleged was a mass grave site. He was arrested the second time he headed in looking for scenes of atrocities.
This media slant on Srebrenica was but a repetition of the pattern of the coverage of the entire Bosnian conflict: regurgitating horror stories and numbers of victims solely on the basis of allegations from the Muslim side - with a semblance of authenticity provided by endorsements from the United States government and sometimes from United Nation officials - without the slightest independent effort to solicit the Serbian version of the events.
That pattern was evident also in the media treatment of the event that was used as a pretext for the launching (under American direction) of the massive NATO campaign of air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs late last summer: the explosion of a mortar shell in a Sarajevo marketplace that killed thirty-seven people on 28 August 1995.
Western television, radio broadcasters, and the press immediately and unanimously blamed the massacre on the Bosnian Serbs and were content when, less than a day later, the United Nations Protection Force said that on the basis of cursory investigation the culprits were indeed Serbs. Very quickly, however, sharp dissent emerged within UNPROFOR from a Russian colonel and from British and French officers who had investigated the site of the impact. Their independent conclusions, that evidence gathered at the site strongly indicated that the Muslim-led forces in Sarajevo were responsible for the mortar shell, were scarcely noted by the media in the West. It also appears from one British report that findings of Muslim responsibility for the marketplace massacre were actually suppressed by a senior American official in Sarajevo. (1)
In the same vein, while quick to accuse and then indict Karadzich and General Mladich for committing war crimes, with both men making themselves available for interviews by adversarial Western journalists, correspondents have made little or no effort to confront such figures on the other ethnic sides as Dario Kordic, a Bosnian Croat indicted for the slaughter in 1993 of scores of Muslim villagers in the Lashva Valley, or Naser Orich, the young commander of Muslim forces in Srebrenica, accused of atrocities against Serb villagers in 1992, 1993, 1994, and 1995. Both are at large in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Clearly, many years will pass before fact can be separated from fiction in the tallying of atrocities on all three sides - Serb, Muslim, and Croat - in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The immediate prospect for the region as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization assembles its force of sixty thousand would appear to be peaceful. None of the three parties of the Bosnian civil war has the slightest intention of tangling with heav ily armed peacekeepers. So aside from the occasional agents provocateurs, one can expect calm as long as the foreign troops are on the ground. But it would be foolish to expect the Balkan kaleidoscope to stop turning.
Franjo Tudjman's vision of a Greater Croatia is well known, from his private talks with Miloshevich in March 1991 and from the map he drew on a napkin for Paddy Ashdown, the British parliamentarian, in May 1995, chopping out a large part of Bosnia and Herzegovina for his Croatia. Similarly, Alija Izetbegovich has made no secret of his long-time ambition for a Muslim-dominated Bosnia-Herzegovina - "even if it takes twenty-five years of fighting." Past performance would indicate that neither the United States under Bill Clinton nor the country under his successor will have the power to restrain the ultimate ambitions of either its Croat or Muslim allies.
The only party that seems to lack territorial ambitions at this stage and is most amenable to United States influence is the impoverished, isolated, and war-weary Serbia.
At this stage, there appears to be no planning whatsoever for the period after NATO troops depart at the end of 1996. It is hard to imagine that there will be much enthusiasm among Americans - or Western Europeans - to finance a post-NATO peacekeeping force for Bosnia. Hard to imagine, too, that peace will hold without the forces from outside.
Skepticism is not a common American trait, but skepticism is warranted here.
