Despite genocide and rape in Bosnia, U.S. intervention was a tough sell for the public
After promising help, Bill Clinton still had a tough case to make
During the 1992 election season, candidate Bill Clinton happily criticized the Bush administration’s lukewarm response to the crisis in Bosnia. Starting in April of that year, images filtered in from abroad, depicting flaming skyscrapers and pedestrians as they ducked from sniper fire on the streets of Sarajevo. Clinton’s bold rhetoric paid off, for less than a year later, he became president, finding himself tasked with the more serious and challenging matter of acting on the criticisms.
Intervention, of course, was no simple thing. The Bosnian War came out of the complex dissolution of Yugoslavia, a Slavic nation that crumbled along ethnic lines into six separate countries, including Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The population of that last country consisted of 44 percent Bosniak Muslims, 31 percent Orthodox Serbs, and 17 Catholic Croats. Though Muslims made up the largest plurality, they were put at a severe disadvantage as smaller ethnic groups received military assistance from the neighboring nations that sympathized with them.
Bosnian Serbs proved to be the conflict’s real aggressors. They were aided by weapons and extra personnel from Serbia, which was ruled by Slobodan Milošević, a demagogic president whose nationalist rhetoric drummed up favor for Serbian interference in Bosnia.
The Bosnian Serb army, called the Army of Republika Srpska (or VRS), did not merely terrorize civilians in Sarajevo. They conducted campaigns in the countryside to expel Bosniak Muslims from their homes, setting fire to towns and executing and raping inhabitants. Early on in the war, Bosniak Serbs converted the town of Liplje into a concentration camp, where hundreds were held to be killed, tortured, and raped, before fortunately being liberated by 300 armed Bosniaks a week later. But the Serbian strategy simply meant bringing similar devastation elsewhere, involving tactics of displacement, destruction, looting, terrorism, rape, torture, and murder for the ultimate goal of preparing Muslim-occupied areas for Serbian annexation.
The American media was early to beat the drum of intervention; a month into the war William Safire wrote in The New York Times, “No longer should any people get away with barbarism in the name of vengeance.”
Safire encouraged an international force to set out decisive measures against Serbia, including seizing airspace, implementing embargoes, and freezing assets. But even the actions championed by the attentive and vigilant would prove weak in retrospect. Following his inauguration, President Clinton walked into an international work in progress. Other than an airlifting program conducted by the Air Force to supply the most deprived blockaded areas, early U.S. involvement came mostly in contribution to an allied effort engineered largely by European powers, who set up no-fly zones, refugee camps, preserved the Sarajevo airport, and delivered food and medicine to those in need.
During his presidential campaign, Clinton spoke boldly about implementing the policy of “lift and strike,” referring to suspending weapons sales in the region and exercising airstrikes on belligerent Serbs. But reality compelled him to reject these policies, even when they they came to him from Congress, on the grounds that Western European allies opposed them and argued that they endangered volunteers on the ground. Though Clinton talked in bold and certain terms on the campaign trail, he remained conflicted, vacillating between approaches. This hesitation came to a head when, after a meeting with French president Jacques Chiraq, the French leader described the position of the U.S. Commander in Chief as “vacant.”
From 1993 to 1995, matters in Bosnia only got worse. The Siege of Sarajevo continued on, while small Muslim towns continued to be razed, burned, and terrorized by VRS forces. This calculated strategy produced thousands of refugees, leading to the establishment of a refugee-settlement complex in the town of Srebrenica (pronounced Srebreneetsa), presided over by U.N. peacekeeping volunteers from countries like the U.K., Germany, France, Canada, and the Netherlands.
In March 1993, when Srebrenica’s refugee population exploded to 60,000, U.N. commander Philippe Marillon visited without permission from the U.N. He was assailed by worried refugees who wondered how they were to survive the likely advance of nearby Bosnian Serb forces. Marillon, a man with an inclination toward bombast, then announced to them, “You are now under the protection of the United Nations … I will never abandon you.”
He was wrong.
Already in April, VRS forces, led by commander Ratko Mladić, surrounded Srebrenica, provoking the U.N. to declare it the first ever “safe zone” and to prohibit military action in the area. But the ruthless policies of Bosnian Serbs found their ends by other means. “We needed them to surrender,” recalled a Bosnian-Serbian soldier. “But how do you get someone to surrender in a war like this? You starve them to death.” So they cut off the transport of food and medicine, making life in Srebrenica even more tenuous.
Tensions escalated further in the spring and summer of 1995. In May, NATO bombed a Serbian ammunition store, but the measure provoked the VRS to take 400 U.N. peacekeepers hostage, giving them severe bargaining power. This allowed them to persuade the U.N. forces to relinquish significant control of the refugee compounds in Srebrenica, which at the time held some 20,000 to 25,000 people.
With the presence of international aid effectively wiped out in Srebrenica, VRS forces began to terrorize and rape refugees—a rampant tactic that outraged the international community. Witness Zumra Šehomerovic described the scene of collective helplessness and inaction. In one instance, Bosnian Serbs raped a woman in sight of a Dutch soldier who simply put on his Walkman and ignored it. In another case, a soldier laughed as he murdered an infant to silence its crying.
Then, beginning on July 11, as international forces negotiated for refugees to be allowed to flee Srebrenica by bus, the Mladić-led VRS began corralling males of military age, as well as boys and old men, to slaughter them. By the end of the massacre, 7,079 men and boys were killed. It was the bloodiest day on European soil since World War II.
It took some time for international intelligence to gather a sense of the devastation at Srebrenica. U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright showed aerial photos of mass graves to her diplomatic colleagues, in an attempt to rally support for a decisive use of force. The tide of political will began to turn in August, when Croatia scored a major victory expelling Serbs from Krajina. Then on August 28, 1995, Serbian forces bombed the Markale marketplace, killing 43 civilians and wounding 75 others. Two days later, NATO allies conducted an airstrike campaign on strategic Serbian VRS locations.
Operation Deliberate Force dropped 1,026 bombs over three weeks, forcing Serbia and VRS military leaders to the negotiating table. What followed was the Dayton Agreement, which established Bosnia and Herzegovina as a confederation consisting of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Republika Sprksa, providing enough latitude for the country’s ethnicities to pursue their separate interests, while still keeping the country intact.
Keeping the peace would require significant work. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole crossed party lines to side with President Clinton to enforce the accords, which would mean putting American troops on the ground. Amid these actions, intervention of any kind remained severely unpopular, both with the American public and prominent leaders like Senator John McCain.
Twenty-two years on, the agreement has survived as an imperfect resolution. The economy suffers a 25 percent unemployment rate, and antipathies and traumas still abound, though the Dayton Agreement marked the termination of a period of brutal and genocidal violence that left more than 101,000 people dead.
On the matter of intervention, retrospective opinion has mostly come down against the fecklessness and hesitation of international efforts. To start, the U.N. made a formative error modeling itself as an impartial peacekeeping force, when conditions required stronger interventions against the genocidal campaigns of the Bosnian Serb army. On the 10th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, then-U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan admitted “that great nations failed to respond adequately” to the crisis, and to devastating results.
The Bosnian War caught headlines again in 2011, although briefly, when commander Ratko Mladić, so-called Butcher of Bosnia, was arrested and charged with war crimes for role in the genocidal actions of VRS forces. To many, it was a proper and righteous measure. But like too many others, it came too late.
