Why Bosnia?

At stake in Bosnia were two visions of society and democracy. Those who came under assault in the newly formed Bosnian state made clear that they stood for a society of equal citizens where the rights of all would be secured and protected under law as a matter of constitutional right. This was a vision of a multi-ethnic society in the tradition of the European Enlightenment. The embodiment of "rights" inherent in the status of citizenship was one of the more significant advances which the French Revolution had spread and integrated into the constitutional orders of European states over a period of two centuries. Yet, in the final decade of the twentieth century, it was to be a standard which Europe, led in this instance by France and Britain, would cynically abandon.

The opposing vision was the one promoted by the nationalist leaders of Serbia and Croatia. Insular, parochial, ethnocentric, this was a vision of a purified nation-state in which there was no room for the "Other." The in-gathering of a people into the bosom of the "mother country" meant in this instance the acquisition of the territory on which they lived. Serbia's nationalist ideology was unequivocal on this issue: the destiny of all Serbs was to live in one state, and since all land on which Serbs lived was by definition Serb land, it rightfully belonged to "Greater Serbia." They alone would unilaterally define its boundaries and remove any community which by their account did not "belong."

For their part, Croation nationalists--depending on the fervor of their nationalism and, accordingly, the degree of irredentist manipulation of history--claimed large swaths of Bosnian territory as their own. According to this view, BosniaHercegovina had no legitimacy as a separate nation, civilization, or state. Those who had lived in the land for generations and were not Serb (or Croat) were foreigners who had to be removed from it by all means necessary.

The shock troops in Bosnia for this brand of nationalism were Radovan Karadzic, General Ratko Mladic, and their confreres in the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS). Tihomir Loza explains the logic underlying the strategy and the tactics adopted by the Serbian nationalists in Bosnia.

What actually is the crime in Bosnia, the practice known in the West as "ethnic cleansing?" Undoubtedly it has been anything but a coincidence: the key component of a grand greater state project, and conducted through all political, psychological, and military means. The aim is not only to expel the ethnically "unclean" population from the desired territory but also to destroy all possibilities for their return--completely to dismantle the spiritual and material structure of the civilization of the unwanted population... [T]he expelled populations will stay away because they have no homes, mosques, schools, etc.--literally nothing to go back to. The problem is that since no one can destroy everything perfectly, not even [the] Serb armed forces, there is always the danger of the expelled population returning to the burnt remains of their existence. So the real guarantee is fear: the knowledge that their neighbors remain in wait, should they try to go back. According to numerous testimonies, special military expeditions from Serbia and Montenegro have sought not only to slaughter and expel but also to inspire or force the indigenous Serbs to do the same. The formula for territorial occupation that the expelled are compelled to accept is "either them or us." At the present score, the reality of course is "them."

It had been a long time since Europe had heard anything like the phrase Judenfrei. It returned again to Europe but it had a fresh ring: "ethnic cleansing." Entire villages were wiped out. Specific forms of assault were developed to inspire terror. Concentration camps were set up again on European soil reviving an earlier continental innovation. It all was part of the war that the Serbian and Croatian nationalists waged against the unwanted inhabitants of Bosnia and Hercegovina to remove them from the landscape.

The other intrinsic dimension of the war, of course, was the destruction or "disappearance" of all that represented the unique history and character of Bosnia and the intermingling of its diverse cultures. The country's architecture, its buildings, bridges, monuments built by the Ottomans were the most visible, most immediately tangible signs of Bosnia's "otherness." These became targets of relentless artillery bombardment or straightforward demolition. As if the intent was to destroy all recorded history, libraries housing rare books and priceless manuscripts were deliberately destroyed. Hundreds of delicately designed mosques, large and small, that had stood for centuries unharmed, untouched, disappeared overnight.

An entire way of life, a whole civilization in the heart of Europe was being wiped out. The world watched the events as if it were a Roman spectacle, taking no action to bring the massacre to a halt. Perhaps, the most egregious aspect of the war was not merely that the international community failed to intervene against the nationalist campaigns of "ethnic cleansing," but that it intervened in a manner which denied the Bosnians the means to defend themselves militarily.

A UN-imposed arms embargo guaranteed that the wellarmed nationalist Serbs and Groats could annex territory and expel over a million civilians while facing only limited resistance. While heavily armed Serbian and Croatian nationalist forces advanced upon their territorial claims, Western powers in the European Community and the Security Council, through their appointed mediators, worked at the drafting board to translate these military conquests into blueprints for the dismemberment of Bosnia. These blueprints for "peace," appropriately termed the West's modern version of classical "apartheid" by the editor of Oslobodjenje, Kemal Kurspahic, went through several metamorphoses to keep up with the pace of Serbian and Croatian gains. Thus "cantonization" led to "ethnic provinces" and, finally, to "partition." The Bosnians, at each step of their defeat, were asked to accept "reality."

The reality, as the Bosnians saw it, was that the West was complicit in engineering their defeat and the destruction of their society. Their emphatic denials to the contrary notwithstanding, the Western powers had made their position unmistakably transparent: they would not intervene in the war to defend Bosnia; they would not permit Bosnians to defend their country themselves or allow others to join in their defense; and they would compel them to surrender, accept defeat, and accede to the internationally legitimized carve-up of their country. The "reality" that the West finally demanded that Bosnia accept was a reality that the West had itself helped to create.

What made Bosnia such a singular moment in international relations was that in the end the European Community, the United States, and the United Nations actively collaborated in the advancement of a final solution for Bosnia-Hercegovina. To achieve this stage significant sections of the Western intelligentsia and their counterparts in various national governments had to walk quite a distance. It ultimately developed into a veritable long march back from the principles of the Enlightenment. Rousseau, Locke, Voltaire, Paine, and Jefferson were summarily abandoned. The process took the form of a remarkable "policy debate," a discourse in search of rationales, while, in the apt phrase of Venezuela's representative to the Security Council, Diego Arria, "slow-motion genocide" was systematically carried out in Bosnia.

The intellectual features of this discussion took unusual forms. Many false representations were necessary to establish the full repertoire of rationalizations which would then preclude effective action. It was necessary, for instance, to advance a new interpretation of history, undercutting the legitimacy of Bosnia as a political entity and a civilization, and to present the conflict as a civil war in which all sides were, more or less, guilty; a war in which there were no principles or ideals worth defending, or identifying with.

The debate began with the thesis of "ancient hatreds." The Balkans were presumably very unlike other, more "Western," societies in this respect. Thus, the war was characterized as the product of centuries-old enmities between the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims--a tribal blood-feud, a "typical" Balkan convulsion which could not be understood much less mediated by any intervention by the civilized world. "A problem from hell," was U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher's repeated refrain as he tried to explain, with appropriately furrowed brow, why the world stood by as the Serb and Groat nationalist forces steadily "cleansed" and occupied Bosnia. These people, he would state over and over again, have hated each other for hundreds of years.

Patronizing, superior pronouncements from statesmen and commentators, of course, relied heavily on willful amnesia regarding the "ancient hatreds" which "provoked" centuries of bloodletting in Europe, the Americas, and across the globe between, among, and by the now "civilized" states'--Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States. In the Balkans "ancient hatreds" became the central motif of every cliche. "Their" wars were irrational, insensate, primeval bloodletting; "our" wars were fought for principles--democracy, freedom, God, and Free Trade.

Such views were expressed at the highest levels of the American foreign-policy establishment. In early February 1993, the former editor of Foreign Affairs, William Hyland described the war in Bosnia as "a fight among gangsters." No distinction was made between the aggressor states and the people under attack--they were simply all "gangsters." This crude and uneducated statement went unchallenged on the premier newscast of the Public Broadcasting System. The concept of equivalence was part of a broader notion that the war in Bosnia was a "civil war" in which the international community ought not to become involved militarily lest it enter the ubiquitous "quagmire." For those who preferred to stand aloof and observe the consummation of the "Greater Serbia" or "Greater Croatia" project, it became crucial to designate the conflict as "civil" in form.

This view was propagated despite the fact that Bosnia had received international recognition as an independent and sovereign state. Unlike the other new states in the Balkans, it had followed very precise procedures laid down by the European Community in order to secure recognition. The United States supported this process and accorded recognition following an internationally monitored plebiscite in March 1991 where 68 percent of the electorate voted in support of a multi-ethnic independent state. Despite demands and threats by extreme Serbian nationalists including Radovan Karadzic in Sarajevo "substantial numbers of Serbs voted in favor of independence and against the recommendations of Karadzic's extremists."

On April 6, 1992, the day Bosnia-Hercegovina's independence was recognized by the European Community, tens of thousands of citizens drawn from all of Bosnia's nationalities, gathered before Bosnia's Parliament on the embankment of the Miljacka river. They demanded that "the ethnic nationalists who began dominating Bosnia and Hercegovina's politics .. [after the December 1990 elections] form a government of national unity." True to Sarajevo's long tradition of tolerance, the crowd held signs declaring: "We Can Live Together."

However, Radovan Karadzic, the Serbian nationalist leader, had declared that Sarajevo's streets would "run with blood," if Bosnia's declaration of independence were confirmed by the European Community. As the crowd stood before the Bosnian Parliament calling for "peace" and "reconciliation" among all national groups, one of Karadzic's bodyguards opened fire from the Holiday Inn. Karadzic made his way out of Sarajevo and that evening Serbian heavy artillery opened fire from the hills overlooking the city. It was the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo.

With direct collaboration and instigation from Belgrade "Serbian paramilitary forces invaded Bosnia en masse and, with assistance from federal army units, unleashed a wholesale military assault on the newly recognized nation." International borders were crossed and supply convoys from Serbia became a permanent feature of the war's military logistics. General Momcilo Perisic of the Yugoslav Army would later openly acknowledge the commanding role played by his forces in conquering southeastern Bosnia which was then handed over to local Serbian paramilitary units.

Nevertheless, James Hogue, editor of Foreign Affairs, repeatedly emphasized

in public appearances that "this is a civil war," and like William Hyland, assured the American public that "there [were] no good guys in this battle." This insistence on the existence of perfect symmetry led eventually to U.S. Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, declaring before the Congress that all three sides shared responsibility for atrocities in Bosnia. However, as The New York Times soon revealed, Christopher's testimony "ran counter to State Department reports to the United Nations on human rights abuses." In fact, the State Department had for more than a year been reporting Serbian responsibility for an "overwhelming majority" of the atrocities and the "complicity by the Milosevic regime and the Government of Croatia in atrocities of both regular and paramilitary forces." The State Department's own internal reports showed "an absence of support by the Bosnian Government" for any excesses. Despite the Hyland-HogueChristopher thesis no such symmetry existed. Nevertheless, it became a crucial pretext for policy.

Throughout the war there were those who called it by its real name. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Marek Edelman, the last surviving commander of that heroic resistance to the nazis, said that "in Bosnia, we are witnessing mass slaughter, and Europe is behaving the way it did toward the resistance in the Ghetto." In Sarajevo, Mustafa Spahic, a Muslim cleric, said:

Bosnia's Muslims are the new Jews of Europe. But we have no America to lean on. We have no one to lean on .... This is the first genocide to be committed under the protection of the United Nations. This is the first world-class crime to be carried out like a football game before the eyes of the entire world on television.

Bozidar Milicevic, a Croat fighting in the Bosnian Army, said: "In Sarajevo, we're fighting so all nations of this country can live together. Europe has sold out its own values."

What the soldier Milicevic, a Croat and a Bosnian, had expressed represented that other vision which insisted that human beings were not like "cats and dogs," as Radovan Karadzic had once described the nature of coexistence between Serbs and non-Serbs. There were hundreds of thousands in Bosnia who did not believe in apartheid or consider themselves to be like animals in the manner which the Serb nationalist leader had managed, inadvertently, to characterize himself and stigmatize his own followers. Close to eighty thousand Serbs shared the siege of Sarajevo with their Croat and Muslim neighbors. Indeed, throughout the war thousands fought and died for the idea of a multinational, cosmopolitan, pluralist society--an idea Bosnia had embodied for centuries.

It was this tradition which was defended in Bosnia and placed in great peril. Colonel Jovan Divjak, the Deputy Commander of the Bosnian Army is a Serb. His colleague, Colonel Stjepan Siber, also a Deputy Commander is a Croat. Nearly one third of the Bosnian Army is Serbian. At Sarajevo's main daily newspaper, Oslobodjenje, the Deputy Editor is Serbian, as are a third of the active staff of the paper. Vladimir Stanka, a young Serbian reporter at Oslobodjenje explained,

My job is to try and capture something of the truth. My Serbian roots are irrelevant in this. What does matter is what is happening here, and that is plain. The city I live in, the city where I was born, is being terrorized by militarists.

But it was as if the Bosnians were speaking into a void; the world seemed not to hear them.

As Ivo Banac, Professor of History at Yale University, puts it, to secure Bosnian territory for the project of "Greater Serbia," the nationalists in Serbia "had to turn a relatively peaceful population . . . into a group that would become auxiliary to the aims of the aggressors." Myths disguised as history were designed to breed fear and insecurity among Serbs, wherever they lived. The cultivation of group paranoia became an important task for Serb nationalists. The Muslims of Bosnia suddenly became the enemy within. By conflating the demons of yesteryear with the stereotypes of today, neighbors were converted into the conquering Turks of the Middle Ages who had occupied "Serb" lands and oppressed the Serb nation. This vision of the Ottoman Turk was fused with a caricature of Islamic "Mujahideen" descending on the Balkans intent on establishing a terrorist state in Bosnia. The safety and the future of the Bosnian Serbs, therefore, lay not with an Islamic enemy that might destroy them but with brother Serbs in a powerful "Greater Serbia." This was the essential or, rather, crude argument against cohabiting with Muslims in Bosniat and, therefore, an argument for the elimination of Muslims from Bosnia. As Serbia's war of "self-defense" took its murderous course, the argument was further refined. The war became Christianity's last stand against Islamic hegemony over Europe. The Serbs were fighting the last Crusade.

Serbia's ambitions in Bosnia were to be matched in full measure by those of Croatia. In March 1991, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Franjo Tudjman of Croatia met in Karadjordjevo on the Croat- Serb border to define the meaning of"cantonization" by agreeing on the carve-up of BosniaHercegovina between the two larger states. "The division of Bosnia-Hercegovina," writes Jelena Lovric, "was the subject of their deepest mutual understanding." This understanding on their common goal was reached between the two foes a full year before Bosnia-Hercegovina declared its independence-- a point worth remembering for those who blindly argue that the Serbian assault on Bosnia was a consequence of the Bosnian declaration of independence. As far as Milosevic and Tudjman were concerned, Bosnia's fate was settled regardless of whether or not it declared its independence from Yugoslavia. The March meeting between the paramount leaders of Serbia and Croatia was followed by a meeting between their Serb and Croat surrogates in Bosnia. On May 6, 1991, Radovan Karadzic of the Serbian nationalist SDS and Mate Boban of the Croatian nationalist HDZ met at Gratz, Austria, to define their separate territorial shares of Bosnia-Hercegovina.

While Bosnia's towns and villages were set ablaze, governments in Pards, London, New York, and Washington, unencumbered by any great sense of urgency, engaged in a protracted, contentious and, in the end, sterile debate over the options available to them to stop the war. A remarkable turn to this debate came early on in the United States when, in September 1992, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell declared his opposition to the use of American ground forces in Bosnia. Powell's remarks became a key moment in a fateful miscasting of the debate which would have tragic consequences for the Bosnians. Powell noted that tens or hundreds of thousands of American troops might be required to staunch the war. Powell's reluctance about committing forces on such a scale were countered by General William Odom's open advocacy of deploying hundreds of thousands of NATO forces in former Yugoslavia. The bogey of massive intervention had been unleashed on a fearful and confused public.

The debate was remarkable for its narcissism. From afar Bosnians listened in exasperated disbelief. Much of the American intelligentsia, its press, its military, and its politicians were living in a peculiar world all their own. They argued, wrung their hands, and expressed great angst over the question of massive intervention and what it might cost the United States. The last superpower could only conceive of itself being involved on some extraordinarily grand scale or not at all. No one took note of the fact that the Bosnians had not asked for massive intervention. Sefer Halilovic, at the time the Commander of the Bosnian Army, repeatedly stated that Bosnia did not want the United States or any other power to deploy its ground forces in the Balkans. The Bosnian request was straightforward. If the United States or Europe would not assist Bosnia in defending its integrity as an integral state or believed they were under no obligation to forcefully deter acts of genocide, then at the very least these Great Powers should cease to deliberately obstruct the ability of Bosnia to act in its own self-defense. The simple, yet fundamental, maxim of the Bosnians was: If you cannot or will not help, then have the moral decency to cause us no harm.

In September 1991, at the request of the Belgrade authorities, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 713 which imposed an arms embargo on a still extant Yugoslavia. As Albert Wohlstetter has observed, "Milosevic wanted UN 713 because a continuing monopoly of heavy guns and armor made it easier for his 'federal' army to complete his program of ethnic cleansing." It is this embargo which the Great Powers through their domination of the Security Council continued to relentlessly apply to Bosnia following the break-up of Yugoslavia.

The Serbs had a virtual monopoly of heavy weapons having acquired nearly the entire military assets of the Yugoslav Army, including production facilities. On December 18, 1992, the UN General Assembly woke up to the perversity of an embargo which denied a member state the right to self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter.

It therefore voted by an overwhelming majority to lift the arms embargo against Bosnia and asked the Security Council to immediately revoke resolution 713 and authorize "all means possible" to preserve Bosnia's territorial integrity. The General Assembly's request to the Security Council was ignored.

The enormous dichotomy between the standpoint of the General Assembly and that of the Security Council went largely unnoticed in much of the press. Ian Williams, a journalist with The New York Observer was one of the few writers to note the disparity.

The sordid maneuverings in the Security Council in April [1993] raise the question of whether the carnage in the Balkans could actually have continued for the past year without the UN. The most notable example of the UN's contribution to the mayhem in the region has been the lopsided arms embargo against BosniaHercegovina, which in principle favors the Serbs .... The Balkan crisis has shown that, far from being the keystone of the new world order, the United Nations has no independent volition apart from the Security Council, which can and does ignore the will of the General Assembly .... A series of creeping procedural changes since the end of the Cold War have virtually made the Council a tight cabal of the five [permanent members'] foreign ministries.

Despite intense diplomatic pressures against them, three non- permanent members of the Security Council, New Zealand, Pakistan, and Venezuela, consistently opposed the position of Britain and France on the arms embargo. Following a visit to the besieged town of Srebrenica in April 1993, Diego Arria, Venezuela's Ambassador to the United Nations, appealed once again to the Security Council to lift the one-sided arms embargo against Bosnia. Arria's speech was "reported to have brought tears to the eyes of listening UN staff members." The Venezuelan request was rejected at the behest of Britain, France, and Russia. Articulating diametrically opposite positions from week to week, the United States continued to intermittently call for a lifting of the arms embargo while in practice sanctioning its continuance.

In late June 1993, Venezuela and Pakistan again appealed to the Security Council to lift the embargo against Bosnia. Addressing the Council, Diego Arria, responded to the British and French objections:

We are told that lifting the arms embargo would increase violence. Already nearly two hundred thousand people have died. More than two million people have been displaced from their homes. Twenty thousand women have been raped. The International Court of Justice and the World Conference on Human Rights have indicated that Bosnia-Hercegovina is a victim of genocide and "ethnic cleansing," among other unspeakable crimes. For this Council, then, what precisely does it mean to say that violence would increase and spread?

If an armed people possess a greater ability to defend themselves, this does not mean that violence would necessarily increase. When the Bosnians are in a position to defend themselves, circumstances may deter the Serbs and, above all, place limits on their capacity to act with impunity.

More war? Rather, it is the international community's inconsistent attitude in the adoption of measures to stop aggression that has given free reign to the escalation of the conflict. It has essentially meant a massacre of mainly the Bosnian Muslim community. This is the reality .... To do all that one can possibly do to prevent a people from exercising its fight to defend itself in order to survive means to shoulder moral and political responsibilities of extraordinary significance.

Despite Arria's repeated appeals the Security Council did not revoke the arms embargo against Bosnia. In an attempt to parry the issue, the British and French governments instead advocated the establishment of "safe havens" in six Bosnian towns. The Americans endorsed the idea with some equivocation, acknowledging in the words of one American intelligence official that a "polka dot solution" would result in "six little West Banks in Western Europe with enormous problems." The American official explained whimsically, 'You can't create a viable economy inside a polka dot."

The Bosnian government denounced the proposal as one in which a formal UN vote was providing international sanction for the formation of "ghettos" on its territory. Alija Izetbegovic, the Bosnian President, declared on Radio Sarajevo.

If the international community is not ready to defend the principles that it itself has proclaimed and which it proclaims to be a reflection of its fundamental values... [and instead] prefers to close its eyes before the most ruthless violations of human rights and international law, even more to reward both aggression and genocide, let it then say this openly both to our public and its own... Let it proclaim that the UN Charter and all the carefully and patiently built rules of international law are no longer valid.

The Bosnians reminded the United Nations that earlier Security Council resolutions had already authorized UN forces to use all available means to protect the delivery of relief supplies and that the UN had the authority under international law to break a military siege directed exclusively at the slaughter of non-combatants. Arria told the Security Council on June 4, 1993, "we should call them what they are: ghettos, refugee camps, open jails, areas under threat; but we should never be so brazen as to call them 'safe areas."' Nevertheless, on June 4 a resolution declaring that six designated "safe areas" be placed under UN protection was voted in the Security Council.

As the Council passed yet another toothless resolution the Serbs attacked Gorazde with impunity. Sixty thousand civilian refugees in the town came under a relentless artillery barrage, electricity and water were cut, and food convoys blockaded in yet another violation of the Geneva Convention. Hadzo Efendic, a Deputy Prime Minister in the Bosnian government and a former Mayor of Gorazde told the press, "We have thousands of people in Gorazde who are just like sacrificial lambs. Europe is responsible for this. It has tied our hands, and all that the rest of the world has done is watch."

As the world watched, a shadow play of negotiations moved between London, Lisbon, New York, Athens, and Geneva. The talks began in earnest during August 1992 in London, four months after Bosnia's independence had been recognized by the international community, and quickly took on the pattern of a farce.

In London the Serbs had agreed to cease all hostilities, to place all their heavy weapons in Bosnia under UN supervision, to end Serbia's involvement in the conflict, and to permit humanitarian relief to flow unimpeded to civilian population centers. Yet, after the London Conference not a single element in the agreement was implemented. At this stage the EC and the UN mediators made a fateful choice. Rather than insist firmly that the first principles had to be enacted before further negotiations could proceed, the mediators allowed the breach of key understandings to become an operating premise.

The London Conference had recognized the territorial integrity of Bosnia-Hercegovina and implicitly identified the aggressor by imposing specific sanctions against Serbia. However, a month later in September 1992 as negotiations resumed in Geneva, the arrival of David Owen, the new EC interlocutor, heralded a radical alteration in the terms of reference for the conference. The mandate of the Geneva conference was clear: to implement the London principles. Vance and Owen began to take steps which led ultimately to the evisceration of the principles upon which the negotiations for a settlement had been based. In August 1992 the London Conference had recognized Bosnia's territorial integrity as indivisible. Ten months later, in June 1993, David Owen would reveal his willingness to accept the Milosevic-Tudjman plan to "partition" Bosnia by declaring, "I am a realist."

Kasim Trnka, former Chief Justice of Bosnia's Constitutional Court argues that Vance and Owen introduced two fundamentally flawed assumptions into the negotiation process which were "responsible for all the subsequent weaknesses of the peace negotiations sponsored by the EC and the UN." In London, it had been determined "without ambiguity that Bosnia was a sovereign state which had the legal right to defend itself against the aggression of another state," but Trnka insists that the negotiators abandoned "the starting position of the London Conference... and thus abandoned their mandate." When they reached Geneva, Vance and Owen fundamentally altered the underlying formulation which had focused on Bosnia as a target of externally backed aggression. Instead, argues Trnka they "imposed the formulation of 'three warring factions' upon the negotiations."

They brought delegations into the negotiation process which they, as mediators, chose to identify as representatives of the three largest nationalities in Bosnia-Hercegovina. The implications of this change were to prove tragic. The new formulation ignored the fact of aggression which the London principles had recognized. By ignoring the element of aggression the EC and UN mediators gave preeminence to the view that the war was essentially a civil, inter ethnic, and religious war. Although the Bosnian government reflected a multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan, and pluralistic constituency, it was now designated a "faction." This formulation placed the legitimate and legally elected organs of state power on a par with illegitimate self-proclaimed structures which were engaged in acts of aggression backed by external forces.

Thus, the Geneva Conference accepted, as legitimate representatives of the three nationalities, the leaders of three particular national political parties. None of these individuals had ever been given any mandate in an election to negotiate away the existence of Bosnia-Hercegovina as an integral, undivided state. They represented parties which had been elected to the parliament of the country, but they could not even pretend to represent the entire community to which they belonged; there existed several other parties representing other political tendencies and drawing support from varied national and multinational constituencies. In addition, in the last elections, more than one-fourth of the electorate did not support any of the three political parties which Vance and Owen elevated to the status of the national representatives of the "warring factions."

The framework imposed upon the peace talks by the West's mediators effectively disenfranchised a large segment of the Bosnian population. Analysis of the 1990 election shows that one-half of the voting population of Bosnia was not represented at the peace negotiations. In the election, onethird of the eligible voters had abstained, while one-third of those who voted did not vote for any of the nationalist parties, casting their votes instead across ethnic lines for non-national liberal or social democratic parties. The election rules had also provided for a "Fourth List" for elections to the Bosnian Presidency which allowed Bosnians to vote for independent candidates who refused to define themselves by ethnicity. The Bosnian Vice-President, Ejup Ganic, a "Muslim," was elected to the Presidency from the fourth list. Thus 50 percent of the republic's citizens had--by voting or by abstaining--clearly demonstrated that the nationalist current was not strong enough to overwhelm all of Bosnia. The so-called "warring factions" at the UN-EC negotiating tables had among them the votes of only half the electorate of Bosnia--and even these were not necessarily votes for the partitioning of Bosnia. The exclusion of a significant group of Bosnian society from the peace talks revealed the ideological assumptions of the negofiators who had set their minds at arriving at some form of ethnic division of Bosnia as the only permissible basis for a solution.

The men and women who had voted against the various nationalist currents were "those who were born in or now live in mixed marriages, and who by definition can have no place in the national states. The group [would] also include those Serbs, Muslims, and Croats whose political beliefs reject any chauvinistic, clerical formula" for the ordering of state and society.

There was, thus, a "fourth estate" which could not and would not be defined by ethnicity. Their presence at the negotiating table--objectively sharing the same vision of society that the Bosnian government was seeking to defend-- would have made it virtually impossible to premise the debate and the solutions on the notion--zealously advanced by the Serb and Croat nationalists---of an ancient and irreconcilable conflict which could only be resolved through partition. For when the electoral strength of the SDA and the non-nationalist parties was combined it represented a clear majority in favor of maintaining Bosnia-Hercegovina as a unitary multinational state. By consciously excluding the "fourth estate" of non-nationalists from the peace negotiations Vance and Owen narrowly confined their mediation effort inside the prison of ethnic politics.

When the political representatives of the non-nationalist parties arrived in Geneva in August 1993 to protest, along with the SDA, the Owen-Stoltenberg partition plan, they were treated with contempt by mediators apparently incapable of assimilating the phenomenon of Bosnians who failed to fit neatly into the Owenite category of a faction driven by ethnic nationalism. Although the "fourth estate" had received more votes than Mate Boban's HDZ, they were excluded from the EC-UN peace negotiations.

"According to Lord Owen, we are nothing at all. We thought the negotiators should come up with a fourth republic where all the normal and mixed-marriage people could live," a young woman doctor of Croat and Serb parents told a New York Times reporter in Sarajevo. Sitting with her best friend, a Muslim woman, whose fiance is a Croat soldier fighting in the Bosnian Army, the doctor explained,

We're neither Muslim, nor Croat, nor Serb. A normal person in this situation is one who has an identity that goes beyond his or her nationality. Imagine asking people who they are and the only thing they can come up with is "I'm a Groat" or "I'm a Serb" or whatever. Imagine, these people were born that way and they haven't made any progress since.

The "normal people" were not permitted representation

Although he would later claim regretfully that he had never intended the peace talks to end in the partition of Bosnia, Cyrus Vance nonetheless went along with David Owen for most of the fide. Three days after Owen publicly embraced Milosevic's partition plan in June 1993, Vance discreetly distanced himself from the scheme, when he told The New York Times, "Right from the beginning, we always said there can be no partition. It's wrong. It's the equivalent of endorsing ethnic cleansing." Vance's disavowal came too late to make any difference. Moreover, it represented dissembling after the fact. Vance and Owen early on had changed course together and taken the road which would lead to partition. For this reason George Kenney, the American diplomat who resigned in 1992 as State Department desk officer for Yugoslavia, declared that Owen and Vance "bear a heavy responsibility for collaborating with Serbian aggression." While more than a million persons were driven in terror from their homes, Vance and Owen crafted a proposal which would divide Bosnia into ten ethnic provinces.

In their critique of the Vance-Owen proposals, Stjepko Golubic, Susan Campbell, and Thomas Golubic have argued persuasively that solutions "defined by the principle of a carve-up on the basis of ethnicity are inherently unworkable attempts to divide the indivisible." In a detailed review of demographic statistics they show the high level of integration of Bosnian society. In order to achieve the scale of ethnic segregation which David Owen on behalf of the European Community proposed as the basis for a solution, the permanent--not temporary--rending of Bosnian society was required. The dislocation from homes and villages where families had traditional links extending back five centuries or more would for the first time in history be given international sanction. Such a solution in the end represented "a clear case of realpolitik that sacrifices the interests of the very people it purports to protect."

If the Milosevic-Tudjman partition plan--adopted by David Owen in June 1993 on the heels of the Serbs' rejection of the earlier Vance-Owen plan--actually became a reality, a classified State Department report concluded that an additional two million persons would be forced to leave their homes. The prospect of such a plan actually becoming a reality disturbed even normally staid voices. The New Yorker warned in July 1993 that the United States had one "last chance" not to become implicated in an EC-UN scheme of apartheid.

There are many unhappy precedents for this kind of scheme. In South Africa, the mad dreamers of apartheid forcibly resettled three and a half million people in a cynical hopeless quest to create a chain of ethnically "pure" states. What they created instead was untold suffering, chaos, and a ferocious new breed of petty tyrant: the Bantustan leader .... What South Africa and the former Yugoslavia really have in common is simply their pain and their manipulation by politicians who exploit the idea that only ethnically homogeneous societies can be successful. What is in some ways most frightening at this point in the Yugoslav tragedy is the willingness of Western governments to accept this patently false and racist idea-- to agree, in effect, to the creation of Bantustans in Europe.

Alternative measures could have been adopted at almost any stage. The most critical would have been the lifting of the arms embargo. The timing was ideal in 1993. In the United States a new administration was taking power in Washington and appeared at first willing to confront the question of Serbian aggression head on. But in early February 1993 David Owen and Cyrus Vance shifted the Geneva peace negotiations to UN headquarters in New York. In a series of well-publicized appearances before the world press the two mediators condemned the new Clinton administration for suggesting there was any alternative to their plan. Vance attacked his critics within the administration declaring his effort to be "the best settlement you can get" and asserting that it was a "bitter irony to see the Clinton people block it." Meanwhile, Owen with characteristic arrogance declared the proposals to be "not just the best act in town, [but] the only act in town." He publicly denounced the U.S. government declaring it to be "largely the fault of the Americans" that he could not "get the Muslims on board." Frequently referring to the multi- ethnic government in Bosnia pejoratively as "the Muslims," Owen demanded that the American President "make it clear to Izetbegovic [the Bosnian President] that he's got no real alternative."

In February 1993 a timid and uncertain Clinton Administration finally yielded to Vance and Owe n by publicly endorsing a settlement based on ten ethnic provinces and accepting for the first time that territory seized by Serbian forces in their campaign of "ethnic cleansing" would be recognized as a fait accompli. Categorical American statements regarding the impossibility of accepting any settlement that endorsed the forcible seizure of territory which had been ethnically cleansed were now replaced by meager utterances by senior U.S. officials. Madeleine Albright, the American representative to the United Nations, awkwardly announced that the United States "will try to make a peace settlement which does not punish the victims and does not reward the aggressors."

Enormous pressures were brought to bear upon the Bosnian government to sign the Vance-Owen plan and formally accept the ethnic division of their country. With a Bosnian signature in hand the two negotiators confidently predicted that Milosevic would see to it that the Bosnian Serbs signed. Owen told the Financial Times that Milosevic was a man who could be counted on. "Cy's [Vance] relationship with [Milosevic] is a very important one," said Owen. "There is trust there, at a level of man for man."

With the Bosnian government's last slender hope of finding support in Washington dashed by the mediator's diplomatic maneuvers, a bitter Bosnian delegation under obvious duress signed the Vance-Owen proposals at the end of March 1993. They declared, without much conviction, that the Clinton administration had promised that if the Bosnians signed the accord and the Serbs continued their assaults, then Washington would genuinely do "everything in its power" to lift the arms embargo.

The cheery optimism of Vance and Owen quickly proved to be a chimera. As predicted, their plan provided a perverse rationale for one of the most violent phases of land grabbing and "ethnic cleansing" yet seen in the Balkan war "by tempting the 'owners' of the national provinces to full possession of their mini- states."

In early February 1993, as Vance and Owen insisted in New York upon ten ethnic provinces being the "best game in town," intensive new assaults by Serbian forces in eastern Bosnia rapidly turned tens of thousands of terrified civilians into refugees in the depth of winter. The New York Times reported "a renewed Serbian campaign to expel Muslims from towns and villages in Bosnia-Hercegovina [that] appears to have been set off by the United Nations [Vance-Owen] proposal to divide the country into semi-autonomous provinces." By April it had reached a crescendo as an estimated sixty thousand refugees poured into a tiny besieged enclave in eastern Bosnia known as Srebrenica. Under a constant barrage of Serbian artillery fire, starved of basic supplies, and death tolls mounting each day, Srebrenica became, for a period, a modern-day Guernica.

As the Serbian offensive gathered speed in eastern Bosnia, the Croatian government abruptly broke off its tactical military alliance with the Bosnian Army. In spite of vociferous dissent within the Croatian community, the Tudjman government in Zagreb reverted to its old arrangement agreed with Milosevic in 1991--the partition of Bosnia between Croatia and Serbia. The Vance-Owen plan provided the perfect entree. By defining the basis of a solution to be ten ethnically defined provinces, nationalist elements in both Serbia and Croatia acted unilaterally to ensure that Vance's and Owen's theoretical framework would reflect a territorial minimum for the final carve-up of Bosnia. The diplomatic niceties imagined by the mediators of a step-by-step agreement were bluntly shunted aside as the "theory of ten provinces" became facts defined by military occupation.

Whether the mediators used the phrase "cantonization," "ethnic provinces," or "partition," they all amounted to a code word for the dismemberment of Bosnia. In early April 1993, Gojko Susak, the Croatian Minister of Defense, crossed the border of Bosnia-Hercegovina and in the town of Travnik (granted to the Croats under the Vance-Owen plan) demanded that the Croatian national flag be flown over a city within the borders of Bosnia. At the prodding of the Zagreb government, Croatian paramilitary units began a violent assault on the civilian Muslim populations in Travnik, Vitez, Zenica, and Mostar. The Croatian military offensive in Bosnia was carried out relentlessly throughout the spring and summer of 1993. In late August the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) accused the Croat forces under Mate Boban's command of carrying out atrocities against Bosnian Muslims "as brutal as any so far witnessed."

The UNHCR stated that Bosnian Croat forces had waged a campaign of"brutal ethnic cleansing, murder, looting, rape and other abuses" against Muslims in southwestern Bosnia. The UN also revealed that fifteen thousand draft-age Muslim men were being illegally held in concentration camps in western Bosnia following their detention by Croat forces in the summer of 1993. In September 1993 UN officials described civilians who had been released from Croatian detention centers as looking "like concentration camp victims from the Second World War."

In a replay of the Vance-Owen tactics in February 1993, the Bosnians in August were given an ultimatum by David Owen and Thorvald Stoltenberg to accept a new partition plan which left the country "virtually landlocked and geographically disjointed . . . sandwiched between the new Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia." The Financial Times reported that Bosnia's President, Alija Izetbegovic, had been given a "chance to choose peace--at the risk of losing his country." Observing that "Serb enthusiasm of the [OwenStoltenberg] plan" reflected this fact, the newspaper quoted a member of the Bosnian Serb delegation who "gleefully boasted" that Owen's ultimatum to the Bosnians meant that "the Turks [a derogatory term for Bosnia's Muslims] are going to be like walnuts in a Serbo-Croat nutcracker."

The United Nations' and the European Community's entanglement in the center of an ugly paradox was evident. The UNHCR and other international organizations had clearly identified paramilitary formations and specific individuals responsible for a preponderance of the war's worst atrocities. Nevertheless, UN and EC negotiators in Geneva continued to engage with such elements as "acceptable" interlocutors. And, in the end they went one astonishing step further. They accepted the proposals of men who had been publicly identified with war crimes as a valid diplomatic basis upon which Bosnia-Hercegovina would be partitioned and thus cease to exist.

The role of the United States in ultimately sanctioning the ruin of Bosnia requires special mention. In early February 1993, three weeks after the Clinton administration assumed power, the new Secretary of State Warren Christopher issued an idealistic statement on Bosnia: "Bold tyrants and fearful minorities are watching to see whether ethnic cleansing is a policy the world will tolerate .... [O]ur answer must be a resounding no." Within six months a "resounding no" became a "perhaps," then a "maybe," and finally an inaudible "yes."

The new American administration presented a spectacle rich in irony and contradiction. In early February the United States expressed grave reservations about the Vance-Owen proposals. Yet, by the end of that same month Clinton and Christopher had endorsed the Vance-Owen framework which accepted Serbian territorial conquests in Bosnia and the forced removal of non-Serb populations from those territories. By July 1993, Warren Christopher was able to declare that Bosnia was not of "vital interest" to American foreign policy and bemoan the fact that Washington had become a "oneissue city." The New York Times noted that Christopher "made no secret of his desire to move attention away from Bosnia."

In April 1993, Bill Clinton declared without equivocation that [e]thnic cleansing is the kind of inhumanity that the Holocaust took to the nth degree. The idea of moving people around and abusing them and often killing them, solely because of their ethnicity, is an abhorrent thing and it is especially troublesome in that area where people of different ethnic groups lived side by side for so long together. I think you have to stand up against it. I think its wrong.

Yet, the following September in his first public meeting with the Bosnian President, Clinton told Izetbegovic he had to accept ethnic partition. According to The New York Times, Clinton explained that "Washington and its allies were not going to commit the military resources to fundamentally change the balance of power." The Bosnians bitterly understood the policy of cynical realism which had long prevailed against them. As Milos Vasic observed, they had learned their diplomacy the "hard way" and disposed of "their illusions about injustice," 'the sovereignty of an internationally recognized state,' and being victims who should be protected."

Clinton was also frank in telling journalists that they had "to see this Bosnia thing in the context of everything else that's going on in the word including Russia." A key American consideration had always been not to act in any manner in the Balkans which might provide the slightest provocation to panSlavic nationalists in Russia who opposed American led efforts to structure a transition to capitalism in the former Soviet Union. Writing in The New York Times, Dimitri Simes, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argued that Boris Yeltsin and not Bosnia was and ought to be America's prime concern:

In contrast to Kuwait, Bosnia has never been an American ally. And there is no oil there either .... Also, disciplining Serbia may damage our ability to address a more important issue: aid to Russia .... Yet, support is badly needed for Boris Yeltsin's democratic government. No peripheral causes should be allowed to divert U .S. attention from that fundamental issue.

Thus, as Dr. Eqbal Ahmed observed, any American "action against genocide had to be indefinitely postponed for the sake of Boris Yeltsin's political viability."

By failing to support the defense of Bosnia-Hercegovina against Serbian and Croatian aggression, the West, in effect, was coming to terms with a war of conquest. The sense of injured nationalism which can be mobilized into an enormously destructive force had appeared once again in Europe. Since it did not arise in a powerful industrialized European state which could threaten the order of the entire continent, it was tolerated by the liberal democratic order in much the same way as Third World regimes of similar character have been readily accommodated for decades.

In the half century since the defeat of fascism in Europe a new generation of leaders and intellectuals had come of age who had had no direct experience of the regimes that rose in Italy, Germany, and Spain in the early decades of the twentieth century. Four decades of the Cold War had intervened to obscure from view the dangerous consequences of the aggressive nationalist projects embodied in Europe's fascist movements. In light of events in southeastern Europe today, however, it would not be inappropriate to reflect anew on the question of fascism.

Thomas Mann had spoken of the need for vigilance when he described fascism as "a disease of the times which is at home everywhere and from which no country is free." Although the term has often been used loosely and inappropriately in modern political discourse, political parties and movements with fascist characteristics have continued to endure in many societies. Hugh Trevor-Roper pointed out long ago that fascism as a philosophy had "no... intellectual rigor, no agreed prophets . . . Its origins are plural, divergent, imprecise." Paul Sweezy also observed,

[s]o far as internal economic or social problems are concerned the program of fascism is a mass of ill digested and often mutually contradictory proposals which are notable chiefly for their unmistakably demagogic character. Hardly any of these proposals is novel or original; almost without exception they have appeared and reappeared in earlier periods of social distress. What gives to fascism coherence and vitality is its stress on nationalism, its demand for the restoration of a strong state power, and its call for a war of revenge and foreign conquest.

Fascism's promise of stability and order appealed to conservative elements worried by the emergence of mass parties on the left. "Fascism, as an effective movement, was born of fear," writes Trevor-Roper.

Faced by the terrible threat of bolshevism, the European middle classes, recently so confident, took fright. And in their fright they found themselves crouching in the same postures and adapting some of the ideas which they had once ridiculed.

A half-century later the Croat and Serb nationalist revivals emerged as the leading alternative to the "bolshevism" of the Yugoslav Communists. What is confusing is that the Milosevic regime emerged from the shell of the League of Communists of Serbia. But it is entirely misleading to say, as is frequently said, that Milosevic is some sort ofunreconstructed Bolshevik. "He is certainly not that," argues Banac. "There is no connection with his origins... the basic defining element is fascism." The European Community and the United States came to terms with this variant of Serb nationalism, the segregationist ideas and col&blooded practices of which they had so volubly condemned. While not an ideal option, it was certainly to be preferred to any variant of socialist perestroika, in Yugoslavia or anywhere else in Europe.

The earlier naive presumption embraced by the European and American political establishments in the aftermath of the Cold War was that the new epoch, then dawning, would deliver to the populace of the "other camp" the capitalist cornucopia. Indeed, this had been the alluring promise. However, the great celebration over the demise of "actually existing socialism" obscured the emergence of darker realities. Long suppressed nationalist and fascist forces surfaced from the locked caverns of history, and any illusions that the transition from "socialism" would "evolve naturally" toward stable and "liberal democratic" structures fell victim to a recrudescence of domestic bigotry and revanchist violence. The illusion that old structures would be replaced by firm constitutional guarantees of civil liberties and new forms of economic prosperity soon disintegrated as post-socialist elites in several states succumbed to an unseemly scramble of primitive accumulation and nationalist wars of conquest.

The pragmatic men of the West then came to terms with fascism in the manner of their fathers. "These men could feel emotion for Czechoslovakia," observed the Manchester Guardian regarding 1938, "but their rational judgment told them that what they desired was not possible in practical terms."

Milosevic, Karadzic, Seselj, and Boban were only nasty little fascists on the periphery of Europe; unlike Hitler, they represented no significant threat to the Great Powers other than the setting of an awkward precedent. In the end, Serb and Croat nationalists were offered exactly what they had killed for.

Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the appreciation of necessity. "Necessity is blind only in so far as it is not understood." Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence of natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves .... Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with real knowledge of the subject. Therefore the freer a man'sjudgrnent is in relation to a definite question, with so much the greater necessity is the content of this judgment determined; while the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and conflicting possible decisions, shows by this precisely that it is not free, that it is controlled by the very object it should itself control. Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature which is rounded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development.--Frederick Engels, Anti-Duhring

This article ran originally under the title "In Plain View.' It has been excerpted from the introduction to Why Bosnia? Writings on the Balkan War, edited by Rabia Ali and Lawrence Lifschultz (Stony Creek, Connecticut: The Pamphleteer's Press, 1993). See the complete version of the original text for footnotes. Rabia Ali is currently working on a study of populist politics and authoritarian structures in modern Pakistan endfled, Inheriting the Earth: Zulfikar All Bhutto and the Pakistan People's Party. Lawrence Lifschultz has been South Paia correspondent for the FarEastern Economic Review. He has also written extensively on European and Asian affairs for The Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique the BBC and The Nation.

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