"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [17]

Chapter 28: "Let Us Be Pragmatic" Cleaning up the Maps July-August 1995

In order for the United States and its allies to achieve the peace deal they wanted and which they believed their clients could live with, the map of Bosnia needed to be "cleaned up" quite a bit. The three eastern enclaves of Srebrenica, Zepa, and Gorazde were an obstacle to this end, as was the fact that the Bosnian Serb regime still controlled much of Bosnia, and their allies in the Croatian Krajina still controlled a third of Croatia. Event during the summer of 1995 would change all that in grim fashion.

While this chapter is quite lengthy, I will not give a detailed synopsis of it because frankly if you don't know the essential outlines of what happened at Srebrenica in July of 1995, you most likely either aren't reading this blog or you have no interest in truly understanding what my mission in maintaining it is. As you might guess from the title of this chapter, the authors focus mainly on the sobering reality that the fall of Srebrenica and Zepa, if not exactly "planned" by the Bosnian government and the United States, were certainly events which proved beneficial to larger strategic goals.

The authors also understand that Washington and the international community were equally cynical in their dealings with Tudjman when Croatian forces unleashed "Operation Storm" which was clearly a creature of NATO planning and covert (and theoretically illegal) arms acquisition. The collapse of the Krajina Serbs statelet was sudden and total, as it had become little more than a corrupt paramilitary state led by craven bullies (Martic and Babic) who also turned out to be cowards who fled immediately, having done nothing of substance to prepare for the return of war. They left their people at the mercy of a well-armed and vengeful Croatian war machine, who helpfully publicized escape routes for terrified Serbs, although all too often they found that those routes, while open, weren't safe. They were exposed to abuse and attack from Croatian forces and civilians alike; and those who stayed behind--mostly those too elderly to flee--death and torture was their fate. Although the number of atrocities and deaths pales next to the numbers inflicted by the Serb nationalists, they were still part of a systematic plan which resulted in the largest single mass expulsion of people of the entire war. Within a few days, centuires of continuous Serb society in the Krajina had been completely eliminated.

Milosevic was silent through all that, even as he had pretended to be completely uninvolved in the Srebrenica operation (this book was written before later revelations of the involvement by the "Scorpions" and other Serb units had come to light). The protector of all Serbs, who had done so much to stir up and encourage the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia to take up arms, was now throwing them all aside.

The Croats were able to get away with this because they were obligated by their American sponsors to cooperate with the Bosnian government to take the war to the Serbs. They did so, and the Bosnian Army Fifth Corps took advantage of the altered balance of power to launch a successful attack out of the Bihac pocket. The collapse of the Bosnian Serb frontlines was about to happen.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [15]

Chapter 23: HMS Invincible Talks at Seas Summer 1993

This short chapter mostly concerns the ongoing talks which were held in 1993 in which the Western powers tried to push a peace plan onto the three parties they could all be coerced into signing. The theme that the international community implicitly accepted the ethnic carve-up of Bosnia continued, and the Bosnian government were increasingly being pushed harder to accept a peace plan which by this point left them with a fractured, land-locked statelet which was simply not viable as a functioning nation-state. As part of this pressure, the West had cultivated Bosniak politician/warlord Fikret Abdic as a potential rival to Izetbegovic, if only for leverage. At this point, Abdic--who had good relations with many of the nationalist Serbs in the areas around the so-called "Bihac pocket" which was his stronghold--declared his independence from the Bosnian state and established his own breakaway statelet within the borders of Bosnia.

While this was going on, the Croatian leadership was still maintaining diplomatic relations with their Serb counterparts. But while the continued possibility of a mutual Croat/Serb division of Bosnia at the expense of the Muslim plurality was ongoing, there was a contrary diplomatic track being pursued--the American pressure on the Croats to cooperate with the Bosnian government.

Chapter 24: A Question of Control The Market Square Bomb and the NATO Ultimatum February 1994

The mortar shell which killed sixty-nine people in Sarajevo on February 5, 1994 might have served as little more than a test case for how the differing parties in the war reacted. The Bosnian government was quick to express its outrage to any media outlet they could find. Radovan Karadzic was equally quick with his laughably inconsistent and illogical denials--the man had a real talent for changing his story as the facts eroded the ground under earlier disavowels of responsibility. And Canadian General Lewis MacKenzie was more than willing to lend his support for the whispering campaign among pro-Serb Westerners that Karadzic's claim that the bomb was actually planted by the Bosnian government was true. Of course, neither MacKenzie nor anyone else could come out and say such things--if they had done so, they might have been required to provide evidence. Evidence for a claim that the Bosnian government would have--indeed, could have--launched an inaccurate mortar shell into a crowded market square on a quiet day (mortars are not very accurate weapons--getting a direct hit on the first try is mostly a matter of dumb luck) in order to increase pressure on the Serbs. And for that matter, evidence that this scenario was more likely than the possibility that this mortar was simply one of the approximately 500,000 artillery projectiles the Bosnian Serb army had inflicted onto Sarajevo by that point. Such evidence was, not surprisingly, never forthcoming.

The attack pushed the international community to finally call for decisive action against the Serbs in the form of airstrikes. The Russians stepped in and pressured the West to work out a compromise. The Serb leadership, who realized that the presence of the Russians along with the UN willingness to serve as troops patroling--and therefore maintaining--the battle lines in Sarajevo--eagerly jumped on the opportunity to appear reasonable, and therefore agreed to a plan to place their heavy weapons under UN "control." Eventually, the Bosnian government--who smelled a rat--were pressured by the international community to accept this compromise.

The UN forces on the scene, led by General Michael Rose, were more concerned about avoiding air strikes than any larger strategic aims. It was typical of the mentality of the UNPROFOR leadership by this point in the war, Rose was primarily worried about the safety of the "peacekeeping" troops under his command and had little inclination to consider the larger issues of justice in the conflict. Therefore, as the Serbs continued to change the terms of the agreement and then drag their feet on complying even with that, Rose put his energies into finding ways to spin the reality in order to, in effect, "sell" the Serb actions in the best possible light. In the end, Karadzic and the Bosnian Serbs came out ahead--they still had actual control of their weapons, they still held the high ground around Sarajevo, UN troops now did some of the grunt work of manning the front lines for them, and the international community had been told that they had made concessions for peace. And certain elements within the UN were complicit in all this.

"Gaining Moral Ground" The Washington Agreement February 1994

While all that was happening, though, American diplomacy was pushing an agreement which would ultimately change the dynamic and the balance of power on the ground. This chapter summarizes the diplomatic and political actions which led to the formulation of the Croat-Muslim alliance, which was supported by the Croatian government out of necessity and moral pressure, and which was only possible with continued prodding and pressure from Washington. It was a marriage of convenience, not love, but it would work.

Washington Post Story on Bosnia Crisis

Old Troubles Threaten Again in Bosnia

The good news, I guess, is that at least a major newspaper is keeping Bosnia in the public eye.