Picture by Thomas Haley, taken from the Faces of Sorrow Exhibition
Keith Doubt has written a cogent analysis of one aspect of the logic of atrocity in Bosnia. He applies the sociological concept of "latent function" to show why and how Serbian radical nationalists used atrocities to spread guilt and complicity through the Serbian population at large and thus unite a body-politic behind their own particular agenda.
See: Keith Doubt, "The Latent Function of Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia."
First person accounts of genocidal atrocities are powerful witness to their systematic nature and massive scope. Community of Bosnia publishes these testimonies to deepen the world community's understanding of the genocide and the long-term repercussions for all humanity.
In mid-July, 1995, the UN proclaimed "safe havens" Srebrenica and Zepa were handed over by UN commanders to the Serb nationalist army, after being besieged, shelled and starved for almost three years. After the fall of Srebenica and Zepa, approximately eight thousand men and boys disappeared, and are feared dead. The surviving Muslim population was expelled to Bosnian goverment-held territories, with atrocities and maltreatment throughout the expulsion process. For an archive of reports on Srebrenica, see the Community of Bosnia Foundation Srebrenica page.
Early in the Bosnian war, the Serb religious nationalists captured the predominantely Muslim town of Foca, located on the banks of the Drina river in the eastern Bosnia. Only few days after entering the town, the religious nationalists started a systematic campaign of annihilating every trace of Bosnian Muslim civilization. The famous Aladza (Colored) mosque, built in 1551, was dynamited, and on its place, today, there is a bus parking lot. The state-run prison and the Partizan Sports Hall were transformed into rape camps where Muslim women and girls were held and raped for days, sometimes weeks.
The Community of Bosnia has adopted Foca as our sister-community in Bosnia. To learn more about Foca, please follow this link.
On November 9, 1993, after two days of concentrated cannon fire at point-blank range, the bridge at Mostar, built in 1566 to join the banks of the Neretva River, finally collapsed into the river. By eerie coincidence it was the 55th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night when Jewish synagogues and institutions were smashed and burned throughout Hitler's Great German Reich - that, too, was an integral part of what today is euphemistically called "ethnic cleansing." To learn more about Mostar and Islamic objects destroyed or damaged during the war in this town, please follow this link.
Read more about "ethnic cleansing" in Pocitelj by following this link
By April, 1993, the HVO turned against the BiH army and occupied one part of Stolac, dividing its territory with the army of Republika Srbska. The town was cleansed of its Muslim inhabitants. Then the HVO, which must have been disturbed by all the eclecticism of the town's architecture, destroyed much of its cultural heritage. To read more about Stolac, please follow this link
Eight State Department Reports on War Crimes in the Former Yugoslavia.
Indictments Against Goran Jelisic and Ranko Cesic
Indictments Against Karadzic and Mladic
Indictments Against Meakic, Kvocka, Prcac,..etc.
Indictments Against Miljkovic, Simic, Todorovac,..etc.
Indictments Against Dragan Nikolic
Indictments Against Sikirica, Dosen, Fustar,..etc.
Indictments Against Tadic and Borovnica
Indictments Against Kordic and Five other Bosnian Croats
Indictment Against Ivica Rajic
Indictment
Against Zoran Marinic of the HVO
For Atrocities against His Muslim Neighbors in
Busovaca
The suspects in the above indictments are currently in positions of
power and influence in Croat and Serb controlled sections of Bosnia.
Despite the Dayton accords, in which NATO pledged to arrest indicted
war-criminals if the NATO implementation force (IFOR) came across
them, NATO has not only not arrested them but is serving in effect as
their protectors, guarding their territories. For an accounting of
the exact location of the above suspects for genocide and crimes
against humanity, and their dealings with NATO troops in Bosnia, see
War Criminal
Watch
"The Guardian", London, Monday, 20 May 1995
by Ed Vulliamy
War in the former Yugoslavia seemed to catch the US government off guard. In fact that is far from the truth. US prolonged Bosnian war, claims Ed Vulliamy, citing diplomatic and intelligence sources in the United States.
Late in July, 1992, as "ethnic cleansing" and the Sarajevo siege hit a ferocious new high, a team from the Pentagon and CIA went to Capitol Hill to brief the Senate foreign relations committee.
An official present recalled the CIA being anxious to ensure that everyone was cleared. The committee was shown aerial photographs of dense forest on the mountains around Sarajevo, which would hide artillery. Those present were then told air strikes against the Serbs would be impossible in such terrain, said the official. That assessment was a strategic lie, in flagrant contradiction of another secret briefing which, the Guardian has learned, was given weeks before.
At the outset of war, in the bloody month of May 1992, a group from the CIA and National Security Agency- which handles satellite and aerial surveillance-briefed the state department on Serb artillery. One diplomat turned up. "There were three or four of them, and one of me," he recalled. "They were the aerial image analysis people and had done this for the Gulf war-the guys who tell the air force what can and can't be done. They know what they're talking about."
He said the team produced several clear aerial photos showing unprotected heavy guns around Sarajevo. "I said: 'Gosh, this stuff looks vulnerable.' It was sitting in fields or parked beside the road. They said yes, it sure did. And on the basis of their experience of Iraq, 95 per cent of it could be eliminated in one single day of air strikes-right at the start of the siege."
The diplomat wrote up the assessment in a memo to the assistant secretary for European affairs, Tom Niles. There was no response. Later, the diplomat was reproached for having written without proper clearance. The episode does more than afford cruel hindsight into what could have been done early in the war. It blows apart the myth that the Bosnian conflict came out of nowhere in an uncharted zone, that US intelligence was not properly "tasked" on Bosnia.
It is now clear that US intelligence agencies had mobilised handsome resources. The NSA had re-set orbiting satellites, or the Pentagon had dispatched spy planes over the area, both large operations. Bosnia was more than adequately tasked, and the evidence selectively shared. But the tasking was designed to come to nothing.
The fake, negative analysis that was disseminated in July illustrates the struggle behind the scenes in Washington as America navigated its unsteady course through Bosnia's carnage.
As the world's sole superpower, America might have held the key to peace, but the key was not turned in 1992 but only in the final hour, after three years of war. To understand what happened-if not forgive-it is necessary to recall, first, that George Bush's administration was divided before the war began. Institutions of state were inclined to steer clear of the Balkans, regarding them as Europe's insoluble problem.
But powerful individuals, and key sections of the state department, took a contrary view. They insisted that United States interests were at stake, or saw a moral onus on America to set an example in the post-communist order by enforcing a just outcome. The divide caused the most acrimonious battle over foreign policy since Vietnam.
In June, 1991, the secretary of state, James Baker, visited, Belgrade on the eve of war between Serbia and Croatia. He was unimpressed: "Up to my ass in Pygmies," was one off camera judgement.
President Bush's team included by chance, powerful veterans of service in Belgrade. Mr Baker's number two was Lawrence Eagleburger, who had promoted Yugoslav trade and financial interests in the West. His national security adviser was Brent Scowcroft, another old Belgrade hand. "We had come to form our views on Yugoslavia from Belgrade," said one senior official. "The Croats were 'dangerous coffee-house troublemakers'. The Muslims were fictitious mystics. They didn't exist.".
The Belgrade ambassador was Warren Zimmermann, who later resigned from the diplomatic service in protest at US policy. He now admlts: "We wanted to hold Yugoslavia together. The analysis was that there would be war if it broke up, so, wrongly, we clung on."
This analysis had been one of many warnings. In the autumn of 1990, the CIA had filed a prediction of imminent and violent break-up. There had been other, undisclosed, warnings.
In January, 1991, the state department was getting "good stuff" on the JNA (Yugoslav army), said one policy maker, which "made it clear they were about to decapitate the republics".
A diplomat recalled a visit by Borislav Jovic, the right- hand man of Serbia's president, Slobodan Milosevic, to Washington during early 1991. Mr Jovic told Mr Eagleburger: "There's going to be a war in Bosnia."
The preliminary war began in the summer between Serbia and Croatia, and one official recalled: "The great fear in the state department was that if the war was one-sided, America would get drawn in. So the tasking was to stop it appearing one-sided and get the dirt on the Croats". One diplomat added: "It was the most polluted analytical environment I knew in 25 years' service." Across the middle ranks of state were younger diplomats anxious that America play a role in defence of Croatia and later Bosnia. "The break-up of Yugoslavia was a done deal.
The question was what kind of break-up would it be? Although we couldn't change this piece of history, we could shape it significantly," was how one described their view. The first mutterings about using force against the Serbs accompanied the sieges of Vukovar and Dubrovnik in 1991.
"But," recalls Mr Zimmermann, "There was no call for air power at that time. I should have done that. I should have recommended it but I didn't."
That November, five months before Bosnia's war began, Mr Zimmermann did propose a United Nations peacekeeping force for Bosnia - a preventative deployment in a menacing situation. The Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, reflected recently that 20,000 soldiers would have "collapsed" his plans. But Mr Zimmermann was overruled by the UN envoy, Cyrus Vance. Another military initiative, this time from Europe, was quashed by the US. A senior state department source revealed three approaches by France to mobilise preventative peacekeepers in Bosnia.
The offers, made during the second half of 1991, were to send 6,000 paratroopers if the US would match them. "The idea was that Britain wouldn't be left out and the Dutch might contribute-a credible force of 20,000," said the source. "I wrote a paper in December saying we have got to match the French - put these guys in. This is a cheap and effective way to forestall violent partition and massive atrocities."
French military sources have confirmed the scheme. But, said the US source: "It was fought off; Mr Baker said he never saw my memo. I was told the idea was vetoed by Mr Eagleburger and Mr Scowcroft at the NSC. The reasons explained were: too expensive at $12 million you've got to have a fire before you need a fireman; and it's never been done before."
A top intelligence source said the CIA knew the Yugoslav army was digging trenches around Sarajevo in December 1991 - four months before the war - and a former diplomat confirmed this information was passed to the state department. "The Serbs were reading us well," said Mr Zimmermann. "They were prepared to push as far as they could, until someone pushed them back.
And they were not pushed back. "The American policy- making machine had seized up.
"A lot was happening but the system had ceased to function," said one diplomat. "We dug in as a foreign policy machine, but this was just Eagleburger on the phone to Vance and Scowcroft. Our action memos would come back marked 'overtaken by events' or 're-submit'. The irony is they were overtaken by events, not us."
In June, 1992, outrage over ethnic cleansing and the Sarajevo siege swung Mr Baker behind air strikes. One former senior official explained the pandemonium: "They said: 'Jesus, we need an alternative policy.' They didn't have one, because they had suppressed it! That's when my office went from being out in the cold to Piccadilly Circus. Suddenly, target lists were being drawn up . . ."
An unexpected proponent of the sea-change was department spokeswoman, Margaret Tutwiler, whose job was to deliver the line. But colleagues recall her close to tears of rage, pleading "I can't lie to the press" and pressing Mr Baker to take a tougher line. After the Sarajevo bread queue massacre in May, 1992, she had slammed the Washington Post onto her desk and said: "We need a new policy."
The most formidable opposition to engaging the Serbs came from the Vietnam weary Pentagon, under the then joint chiefs chairman, General Colin Powell.. Officials recall how the chiefs of staff turned up at deputies committee sessions at the White House saying no US military personnel could be put at risk. "They would never say 'we can't do that'. They would say things were very costly or dangerous, like 'it'll take 100,000 men to secure a corridor from Split to Sarajevo'. It was a disgrace. Cowardly and insidious, the way they carried on," said Mr Zimmermann.
The CIA was similarly negative. One diplomat saw a letter from President Bush to a mutual friend, saying he had been told intervention would cost "millions of men and bottomless treasure". "They were terrified of mission creep," said one official. "Once the war was raging, the US military secretly opposed basic operations. In private, the joint chiefs contested the no-fly zone, the Sarajevo airlift, and air-drops of food into the eastern enclaves."
Meanwhile, the military was streamlining viable options for intervention, in case ordered in by the president. But, the Guardian has learned, the viable options were locked away in a safe by Gen. Powell himself. Not one of the senior civilian appointees to the Pentagon under President Clinton has ever known where they are.
In the final weeks of the Bush presidency, 12 interventionists opened a formal dissent channel against Mr Eagleburger with a counter-policy. It was, says one of its authors, "a strategy to defeat and contain the Serbs". The US should lead a coalition of those willing to provide arms and close air support to a Bosnian-Croat alliance.
The memo was greeted in Mr Eagleburger's office on October 11 with "the run-around - some quibbles about the Vietnam quagmire, and a plan to reform the state department". "I met Eagleburger much later," says the author. "And I said: 'Couldn't more have been done 250,000 lives ago? History will be a harsh judge of all this.' He seemed very uncomfortable. 'Don't give me that history crap,' he said." With the election of November lost to Bill Clinton, Mr Bush had a final trick up his sleeve: intervention in Somalia. "There was no doubt," said one senior planner at State, "That Somalia was instead of Bosnia, a way of staying out of Bosnia."
"We do deserts, we don't do mountains," was Gen. Powell's famous statement, contrasting Bosnia with the Gulf. Mr Eagleburger delivered a celebrated swan song which some colleagues say marked a coming-round on Bosnia branding President Milosevic and others as war criminals. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, a powerful player was moving in to wreak havoc in Washington: Britain.
Eyes were now on Mr Clinton, whose campaign against Mr Bush's Bosnia policy had appeared robust. In the event, judged one diplomat: "Clinton was mugged. Not just by the same old bureaucracy, but by Europe too, and Britain in particular."