Taken without permission. For "fair use" only:
From Covert Action Quarterly
by Joan Phillips
Joan Phlllips is a British journalist covering the Balkans and Eastern Europe. (Editor's note)
What are the roots of the Bosnian war?
The roots of the war in Bosnia lie in the interaction between internal tensions and external intervention. Yugoslavia, and all its component parts including Bosnia, worked as long as an internal equilibrium was maintained. This equilibrium depended on a complex division of power among the six republics that made up the Yugoslav federal state, as well as on a balance of rights and religions among the peoples intermingled throughout the republics. In creasingly vocal demands for ever more autonomy by some members of the federation-particularly Slovenia and Croatia-began to upset that balance in the 1970s and 1980s.
The resort to nationalism by politicians in all republics militated against the survival of the federation. Yugoslavia's history can be seen as a cycle of nationalist action, reaction and counter reaction, with Slovene, Croat, Serb and Albanian nationalists reacting against the assertion of nationalism by others. By the late eighties, when the unraveling of the communist order coincided with growing economic disparities between the republics, the espousal of nationalism had a particularly corrosive effect. By 1990, the Yugoslav state was certainly fragile.
But it took the intervention of out sidepowers to destroy it entirely. Without outside backing from powerful states, Slovenia and Croatia would have been wary of embarking on unilateral secession. Yugoslavia was still an internationally recognized state, an established international actor, a founding member of the United Nations, a leader of the non- aligned world and a country with a long history of ties with the West.
Germany's strong encouragement of nationalist leaders in Slovenia and Croatia to secede was therefore decisive. By spring 1991, Helmut Kohl's government had nailed its colors firmly to the secessionist mast. A U.S. diplomat told the New Yorker, "We were urging the Croats and Slovenes through Warren Zimmerman (the U.S. ambassador in Belgrade) to stay together. We discovered later that Genscher [Hans Dietrich Genscher, the then German foreign minister] had been in daily contact with the Croatian foreign minister. He was encouraging the Croats to leave the federation and declare independence" (1). Outside intervention of this sort removed the possibility of a local solution and pushed Yugoslavia over the precipice.
By calling Yugoslavia's territorial integrity into question, Germany and the other great powers that recognized the breakaway republics created a situation where everything was up for grabs. Western intervention encouraged a client mentality in a region with a history of weak states attaching themselves to great powers. German backing for Slovenia and Croatia was a green light for other republics to opt out of Yugoslavia and seek Western patronage. When the European Union subsequently recognized Croatia and Slovenia as independent states, it also invited all the Yugoslav republics to apply for independence. Presented with the choice of joining the Western-run world order or sticking it out in rump Yugoslavia, it was obvious which option would be chosen. Bosnia and Macedonia applied reluctantly-fearing that secession would lead to a conflagration-but grabbed the only chance they thought they would have. The tinder was piled high in Bosnia, where all sides began preparing for war. The spark was lit when the Western powers endorsed an independence referendum of dubious legality that ignored the aspirations of 31 percent of the population-the Bosnian Serbs- who wanted to remain citizens of Yugoslavia and who had genuine, historically rooted fears of being forced to live in a state dominated by Croats and Muslims.
What has been the policy and role of the U.S. in the conflict? What are the roles of the other external plarers-NATO, U.N., Russia, Western Europe, Islamic countries-and do they have competing or complementary interests?
Western foreign policy in Bosnia can only be understood in the context of the intensification of global competition among the major powers. The end of communism has led to the collapse of the international hierarchy that brought stability for 40-odd years. Today a new world order is being fashioned, and everybody is competing for a place at the head of the table. Through their interventions in the Balkans, all the major powers have sought to establish their global leadership at the expense of their rivals. Bosnia has become the theater of war in which the rivalries among the world powers are being played out.
Germany's role was decisive as the catalyst for the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Germany cynically used the conflict there to put itself at the center of superpower diplomacy. By breaking ranks and forcing through the recognition of Slovenia and Croatia, Germany was demonstrating its authority as the master of Europe. Germany's intervention did more than simply ignite the war in Yugoslavia, it made the conflict there the focus of internecine disputes among the Western powers. Intervention in Yugoslavia quickly became a game of one- upmanship by Western politicians striving to establish their credentials as world leaders. Every time one statesman urged the need for firm action in Bosnia, others felt obliged to respond with their own in itiatives.
The U.S. has played a leading role in Bosnia since spring 1992, when it intervened to restore its authority as global policeman. The U.S. Ied the campaign to recognize Bosnia; used its authority on the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions against Serbia, establish a war crimes tribunal and enforce the no fly zone; used its dominance of NATO to press for air strikes against the Serbs; and acted unilaterally to scuttle peace plans and undermine the arms embargo. There is no principle at stake in the U.S. approach; avowed principles (and the Bosnian Muslims) are always sacrificed to realpolitik. The object is to bolster America's authority at the expense of its rivals. Washington's advo cacy of a more punitive anti-Serb policy throughout the Bosnian war has been aimed at presenting the Europeans as appeasers and the Americans as decisive leaders.
The Europeans have tried to seize the initiative from the Americans. France has often taken a bellicose line over Bosnia. In June 1992, then President Francois Mitterrand flew into Sarajevo to demand the opening of the airport. Seven months later, his foreign minister threatened to use force to liberate prisoners from detention camps in Bosnia. Earlier this year, French President Jacques Chirac led the charge for intervention against the Serbs. France's high profile role in Bosnia and its tug of war with the U.S. reflect its insecurity following German reunification in 1990. France's status has diminished since the end of the Cold War. Before that, it could pose as the leading power in Europe; now it fears being squeezed out of the international order. Paris is especially paranoid about the strengthening U.S.-German alliance.
Britain has sought to bolster its declining great power status through intervention in Bosnia. From playing host at the 1992 London conference on Yugoslavia, througthe commitment of more ground troops in 1994 and 1995, to the recent London conference, John Major has tried to play the states man in Bosnia in a bid to bolster his authority on the international stage. The fact that even Britain, which has no desire to go to war in Bosnia, has ended up dispatching more troops there reveals the pressures driving all the Western powers to militarize their foreign policy.
Russia has intervened in Bosnia in a bid to reaffirm its status as a great power whose counsel must be sought. Its intervention in Yugoslavia has less to do with any genuine empathy for the Serbs and more to do with Moscow's antipathy to Western meddling in what it considers to be its sphere of influence.
The leaders of the Islamic world have become involved inthe war in Bosnia out of motives similar to those of the Western powers-mainly a self interested desire to bolster their authority at home and abroad. Taking a stand on the war is seen by these leaders too as a way of lending legitimacy to their rule at a time of popular cynicism.
There has been an unseemly competition among the Islamic states to be seen as the best defenders ofthe Bosnian Muslims. Meanwhile, the more secular Turkish state has seized the opportunity provided by the war in Bosnia to prove its worth as a regional power and to cement relations with the U.S.
The Western powers want to use the Yugoslav conflict to establish their authority, but none has any desire to get bogged down in a war in the Balkans. Yugoslavia is not Somalia, where the U.S. Marines barely managed to go in and out (killing 4,000 Somalis in between) without things getting completely out of control. Unlike Somalia, where there were far fewer outside players involved, a concerted Western military intervention in the Balkans would not only destabilize an entire region of Europe, it would also bring to the surface underlying conflicts among the great powers and accelerate the break down of the international order.
Despite these fears, intervention has acquired its own momentum. Western diplomacy over Bosnia is a deadly game. Each new initiative is put forward to make a Western politician appear resolute, but without committing his government to a major intervention. Chirac's bluster about liberating Srebrenica was a good example of this-the French president felt he could say what he wanted and nobody would call his bluff. The problem is that every initiative inflames the war and increases the pressure on Western governments to intervene to sort out the mess they have created.
The Western powers have so far stopped short of an all-out military intervention. Yet inexorably, they have been drawn deeper into the war. The increasingly public fracturing of the Western alliance increases the danger of events sliding out of control. A subjective desire to hold the alliance together, out of fear of what may happen if it falls apart, may no longer be sufficient to arrest an apparently unstoppable dynamic toward unilateralism. The conflict of interests is assuming an institutional form, with the Americans attacking the Europeans through NATO, and the Europeans attacking the Americans through the U. N.
The U.S. may pay a high price for acting unilaterally in Bosnia. Going it alone is doing irreparable damage to the alliance system upon which the U.S. has depended for half a century. The more the U.S. alienates its alliance partners over Bosnia, the less it can expect of the alliance next time it wants a favor done. In the past, the U.S. has been able to get multilateral cover for its foreign policy adventures. After Bosnia, it will be that much more difficult. The next time the U.S. asks the British or the French to support an invasion here or a bombing there, the old allies are likely to think twice.
Western foreign policy is driven by realpolitik, but in the post-Cold War era, it is increasingly presented in moral terms as a fight between "civilization" and "barbarism." Today the most effective foreign policy is one which enables the government in question to take the moral high ground at the expense of a rival power. Thus, intervention in Bosnia is justified as a moral imperative, and discussions of the war are replete with evocations of the Holocaust.
'Justwar" doctrine is dvided in two parts: Having a just cause and prosecuting a war justly. Which actors can fairly lay claim to either requisite? Which cannot?
The war in Bosnia is a civil war involving four parties, three of whom (the Bosnian Serbs, the Bosnian Muslims under Fikret Abdic, and most of the Bosnian Croats) do not support the new state which was created by international diktat in April 1992.
The Western media have presented the complex civil war in Bosnia in Gun fight at the OK Corral-terms as a two way fight between "good guys" (Bosnian Muslims) and "bad guys" (Bosnian Serbs) -nobody is sure what to call the Bosnian Croats, not to mention the Bosnian Muslims fighting alongside the Bosnian Serbs around Bihac. This sort of inanity was the stuff of Cold War propaganda decried by the same liberal journalists who perpetrate it today.
There are no "good guys" and "bad guys" in Bosnia, just a lot of victims of a bloody civil war. Yet practically everybody seems to have singled out the Bosnian Serbs as the villains of the piece. In one of the most defamatory campaigns of the modern media age, the Serbs have been vilified as beasts, bar barians, rapists, psychopaths, communists, fascists, and Nazis. Serbian victims of war-in Mostar, Sarajevo, Zenica, Srebrenica and countless towns and villages across Bosnia, not to mention in Croatia where there are virtually no Serbs left-have simply been written out of the story because their plight does not fit the black-and-white media coverage.
A civil war unleashed by outside meddling has been reinterpreted as a war of "genocide" waged by the Serbs. The jargon in which the war is now routinely discussed evokes parallels with the Second World War and the systematic extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. The Bosnian Serbs are accused of conducting "ethnic cleansing," running "death camps" and "rape camps," and carrying out "genocide." Serb politicians, generals and soldiers have been indicted on charges of "genocide" by a kangaroo court established in The Hague to try people for war crimes like the Nazis at Nuremberg.
This emotive terminology sensationalizes acts of war common to all civil wars and suggests they are unique to the conflict in Bosnia. The uprooting of large numbers of civilians from areas of conflict is not peculiar to Bosnia. Many more millions of people have been driven from their homes in the civil wars in Mozambique, Liberia, Sudan, Angola, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and countless other countries. There are 20 million refugees worldwide and an other 26 million internally displaced persons.(2) In the case of Bosnia, a process common to all wars has been singled out as something exceptional by journalists who cannot seem to tell the difference between facts of war and war propaganda.
Detention camps have been a routine feature of all wars this century. There were no "death camps" in Bosnia. This travesty was invented by journalists (with assistance from Ruder Finn, a U.S. public relations firm) unable to distinguish between an Omarska and an Auschwitz. The former was a makeshift holding camp where some people were arbitrarily brutalized and executed; the latter was a vast assembly line for the systematic extermination of the Jews.
The war in Bosnia has caused tremendous human suffering. But not a shred of evidence has been put forward to substantiate the charge of "genocide." Instead, lurid tales of mass slaughter spun by journalists who have abandoned all professional standards have created an uncritical climate in which any exaggeration can be reported as fact. Fictional death tolls are deployed in the cause of encouraging military intervention by the West. Figures of 200,000 dead-plucked from nowhere or Bosnian government press releases-are bandied about by media hacks, but there are no reliable statistics. The best figures are from neutral organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose estimates are in the low tens of thou sands.(3) Everything else is just propaganda.
The second problem with the lexicon of "ethnic cleansing," "death camps," and "genocide" is that it is used selectively. The Serbs certainly have blood on their hands. But have all the atrocities in this dirty war been committed by one side? Why are 600,000 Serbian refugees invisible to the media? (4) Why did journalists not bother to investigate detention camps run by the Bosnian Croats and Muslims which together held more prisoners than were held by the Serbs? Why have Serb victims been written out of the story? Is it because the Serbs really are the only guilty ones? Or is it because a conformist media pack jumped on the antiSerb band wagon and never bothered to ask any questions about what was really going on in Bosnia?
This is a vicious civil war in which all sides have been brutalized. But it is not a Holocaust. The invention of fascism in Bosnia renders banal the experience of the real Holocaust and rehabilitates the people who were really responsible for genocide. If what is happening in Bosnia is a Holocaust, then it follows that the crimes committed by the Nazis were nothing out of the ordinary. By going on about "genocide" in Bosnia, the something-must-be-done brigade is complicit in the trivialization of the Holocaust.
What is the desirable outcome and how should it be attained?
The only real solution to the war in Bosnia is a local solution. There is no Western solution. In the stampede toward intervention, the fact that the Western powers are largely responsible for the tragedy in Yugoslavia has been forgotten. A war that would probably never have happened without outside intervention, and which would certainly not have been so bloody, has been prolonged for three-and-a-half years by foreign meddling. Western involvement has led to broken cease-fires, dashed peace deals, intensified fighting, and a rising body count . As long as the Western powers are involved, and as long as the Serbs are singled out as the aggressors, the other parties to the conflict will have an incentive to carry on fighting and the war will continue.
Many insist that "something must be done" about Bosnia. But what is the "something' and who should do it? The interventionists do not seem to have noticed that the Western powers "doing something" under U.N. banners has usually meant large numbers of people getting killed. Sending troops to do something ("save the starving") in Somalia meant U.S . Marines in helicopter gunships killing Somalis by the thousands on the streets of Mogadishu. Doing something in the Gulf ("defending democracy") meant killing 180,000 Iraqis in the desert. The US. doing something in the former Yugoslavia ("deterring Serb aggression") meant giving explicit backing to the Croatian blitzkrieg that eliminated the Krajina Serbs from lands where they had lived for hundreds of years. How many times do we have to watch this happen before the blinders come off?
We are being asked to entrust the fate of the peoples of Bosnia to persons with more blood on their hands than all the militiamen in Bosnia put together. The five powers with permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council are directly or indirectly responsible for literally millions of deaths around the globe -in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Rwanda, Kenya, and countless other killing fields-yet these are the forces being asked to save the people of Bosnia.
It is not possible to think of a single example where Western intervention has had positive consequences for the people concerned. Have the Kurds being bombed by Turkish planes in their "safehavens" in Iraq benefited from the intervention of their Western protectors? What have the people of Haiti gained from "Operation Restore Democracy"?
The idea that solutions can be imposed from outside is undemocratic. What is democratic about the greatest power on Earth occupying your country and imposing "democracy" at the point of a gun? And what about all those other forgotten interventions in Angola, Panama, Mozambique, Afghanistan, Liberia, Nicaragua, Indonesia, and Palestine, where Western involvement left bodies piled high? The trouble with the "something must be done" school of intervention is that it cannot see that the worst outrages are carried out not by the powerless but by the powerful.
The presumption that the West knows what's best for Bosnia is galling. The demand for intervention rests on the idea that people over here know what's best for people over there-in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti-and that the people who live there are like small children who cannot look after themselves. There is an automatic assumption that wisdom resides in the West. The most fervent exponents of this elitist view today are not the old fashioned racists who think that colonialism was a good thing, but the radicals who used to oppose intervention in the Third World.
What exactly are the legions of liberal laptop bombardiers proposing in Bosnia? After airstrikes against the Serbs, what comes next? A protectorate run by the great powers presiding over what's left of Bosnia? In the old days that was called colonialism. Now it's called a peacekeeping operation.
The consequence of the "something must be done" school of liberal moralizing is to strengthen the moral authority of the major powers to intervene in other people's countries. Worse, it gives them a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
The right of the Western powers to bomb people in faraway places when ever they feel like it is not enshrined in any international resolution, statute or convention. According to the U.N. Charter, the Security Council has the right to use force as a last resort in cases of interstate aggression that threatens international peace. The conflict in Bosnia is a civil war, not a case of interstate aggression. And the only threat to international peace it poses is due to the meddling of foreignpowers.
Author's Footnotes: