Colossus (29 page)

Here was genocide. Where was the United Nations? The answer is that it was right there; indeed, with grotesque irony, its forces effectively presided over the worst of the genocidal atrocities.

The initial efforts to avoid a conflict in Yugoslavia had in fact been left to an
ad hoc
international conference under the former British foreign secretary Lord Carrington. But in 1991 the United Nations turned to an American, the former secretary of state Cyrus Vance, to negotiate the deployment of peacekeeping forces (UNPROFOR), which were duly sent to Croatia and later Bosnia. Specified towns were designated as “safe areas,” which UNPROFOR was charged with protecting. At the same time, the UN imposed sanctions on the whole of Yugoslavia, including Bosnia, a circumstance that greatly handicapped the Bosnian Muslims, who had no significant internal source of arms and other supplies; the Bosnian Serbs, by contrast, received substantial assistance from Belgrade.

It is important to recollect that much of the responsibility for this woefully ill-conceived response lay with the European powers that had pro-
claimed their ability to cope with the Yugoslav crisis without American assistance. Supposedly, this was to be “the hour of Europe.” But Europe, as usual, spoke with multiple voices. It had been the German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, euphoric after the ease with which his country’s reunification had been achieved in 1990, who had accelerated the disintegration of the Yugoslav federation by his precipitate recognition of Slovenian and Croatian independence in the autumn of the following year. By contrast, the British government adopted a posture of studious, not to say shameless, neutrality, insisting as the conflict escalated that it was a civil war between morally equivalent foes, obsessed with their own “ancient hatreds.” Successive British foreign secretaries willfully ignored the evidence of the sustained campaign by Milosevic to whip up murderous nationalism among the Serbs and instead concentrated on blocking any effective intervention—by anyone.

In fact, the Bush administration had contemplated “a sort of mini-Iraq thing” as early as the winter of 1991, drawing up contingency plans for a military strike against the Serbs. It was decided instead to take the Europeans at their word. “They will screw it up,” argued Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, “and this will teach them a lesson.”
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Eagleburger’s successor, Warren Christopher, was also inclined to keep out of what he called “a problem from hell.” And during the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton himself had argued that American troops should not be sent “into a quagmire that is essentially a civil war.”
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This was a line echoed on numerous occasions by key figures, not least Colin Powell, still chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (“No American President could defend to the American people the heavy sacrifice of lives it would cost to resolve this baffling conflict”) and Defense Secretary William Cohen, who unwittingly gave a “green light” to Serbian attacks on Gorazde when he declared that the United States would not enter the war to avert its fall.
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Nevertheless, the arguments for intervention never went away in Washington.
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And with every harrowing news report from Bosnia, they grew stronger.

American indignation took time to overcome European appeasement, however. In May 1993 the British government smothered American proposals to lift sanctions and launch air strikes against the Serbs (“lift and strike”). In November the following year the Foreign Office protested indignantly when the United States unilaterally ceased to enforce the arms
embargo.
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American planes flew supplies of medicine to Sarajevo and enforced a UN-authorized no-fly zone (as if ethnic cleansing were being carried out from fighter planes). But air strikes against Serb positions were opposed by the British on the ground that they would leave UNPROFOR forces vulnerable to Serb reprisals. It took an atrocity on the scale of the massacre at Srebrenica—a town supposedly under the protection of Dutch blue helmets—to tip the balance belatedly in favor of American intervention. Now the United States insisted that NATO bomb the Serbs in earnest. Sure enough, Operation Deliberate Force, coinciding as it did with a major Croatian offensive and a rift between Milešović and the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadjić, forced the Serbs to retreat.

The institutional framework within which American policy over Bosnia evolved was bewildering in its complexity. Not only the UN but also NATO, to say nothing of the Conference on (later Organization for) Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Council of Europe and the West European Union; all, it seemed, had to have their say.
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Yet the overwhelming impression remains that if one institution got it completely wrong in Bosnia, it was the United Nations. And its failures were in large measure a result of the conduct of two permanent members of the Security Council: Britain and, to a lesser extent, France. (Significantly, it had been at Jacques Chirac’s insistence that the UN troops in charge of the so-called safe areas were commanded by a French general.)
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In the end, the Dayton Accords drawn up and forced upon the recalcitrant Serbs—after the Croats and Muslims had struck a deal of their own—were the work of none of these august bodies but of an informal Contact Group, composed of the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Russia, the nineteenth-century great powers doing business as of old, but now under firm American leadership in the person of Richard Holbrooke.
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With sublime insouciance, the French foreign minister still insisted: “One cannot call it an American peace,” even requesting that the Dayton agreement be referred to as the “Treaty of the Élysée.”
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The reality was very different. It was the threat of American air strikes that forced the Serbs to accept a smaller share of the partitioned Bosnia. It was the presence of twenty thousand American troops—a third of the Implementation Force (IFOR)—that ensured they did not renege on the agreement.

The disintegration of Yugoslavia had begun in Kosovo; it also ended
there. It had been at a rally in Kosovo in 1989—to mark the 600th anniversary of the battle of Kosovo Polje—that Milošević had first revealed his mutation from Communist to radical nationalist. In one respect the case of Kosovo was clear-cut: unlike in Bosnia, there was a large ethnic majority, since Albanians accounted for more than three-quarters of the population, a proportion that had risen during the 1980s owing to the higher Albanian birthrate. But although Tito had granted its inhabitants a measure of autonomy in 1974, Kosovo had remained a province of Serbia. Whereas both the European Union and the United States had not hesitated to recognize Bosnian independence, which amounted to the secession of one of the republics from the Yugoslav federation, they felt unable to do the same for Kosovo. The trouble was that even as the Serbs were forced to compromise in Bosnia, so they stepped up their long-running campaign of violence and intimidation against the Albanian majority in Kosovo. Ethnic cleansing resumed: at Drenica in March 1998 eighty-five Kosovar Albanians were killed; at Racak ten months later, another forty-five. Support for the militant Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) grew. Peaceable Albanians began to seek refuge across the border.

The compromise that emerged at Rambouillet from the mediating efforts of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was designed to stop the violence simply by postponing a decision on Kosovo’s constitutional status: for three years the province would come under NATO control, after which a referendum would determine its future.
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The Serbs rejected this. The United States knew how to change their minds. Yet three things were different about the decision to unleash the full might of the U.S. Air Force against not just the Serbian forces in Kosovo but Serbia as a whole. First, the Clinton administration did not seek the approval of the United Nations Security Council; it was NATO, not the UN, that went to war. Secondly, this was an intervention that very clearly violated the sovereignty of Serbia, precisely why approval from the UNSC was not sought. At the time a number of commentators (this author among them) worried that the war violated not only Article 2 of the UN Charter but also the Helsinki Accords Final Act and indeed NATO’s own defensive rationale.
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There was a plausible ground for intervention—to avert genocide—but it required a UN resolution to be legitimate. Thirdly,
the air strikes had the unanticipated effect of worsening the situation of those on whose behalf they were launched. Altogether between December 1998 and May 1999 an estimated thirty thousand Albanians were killed and nearly a million people were forced from their homes. Most of this happened after the bombing began on March 24, 1999. With war declared, Milošević felt able to pursue ethnic cleansing with almost Hitlerian ruthlessness. He underestimated American resolve, however, and after seventy-eight days of bombing was forced to capitulate. Once again airpower sufficed to eliminate Serb resistance; American troops could be deployed— as seven thousand of a fifty-five-thousand-strong Kosovo Force (KFOR)— without a shot’s needing to be fired, though it may be that Milošević gave in only to avert an assault by U.S. land forces in support of the KLA.
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In 2003 this simple fact seemed to be generally forgotten: There was no United Nations approval for the NATO war against Serbia. Only after the war—on June 10, the day after Milošević’s surrender—did the UNSC provide a resolution (1244) on which the military occupation of Kosovo could be based, leading to the creation of the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), which currently governs the province. Also generally forgotten, at the time of writing, is the fact that the Kosovo question has in no sense been answered. Violence in the province has not ceased, despite KFOR-sponsored “fun runs” and other wholesome initiatives: in August 2003 two youths were murdered in the tiny Serbian enclave of Gorazde-bac.
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Nor has the Serb government shown any sign of abandoning its claim to sovereignty. Kosovo remains a civil war on hold.

Nevertheless, something highly significant had happened. In the words of Michael Ignatieff, the war’s most astute observer, “Humanitarian intervention in Kosovo … was never exactly what it appeared. It was never just an attempt to prevent Milosevic from getting away with human rights abuses in Europe’s backyard. It was also a use of imperial power to support a self-determination claim by a national minority—a claim that used violence in order to secure international notice and attention.”
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True, as Max Boot noted, the United States was “trying to play the role of imperialist on the cheap,” inhibited by the Clinton administration’s “ ‘no casualties’ mindset,” while at the same time remaining indifferent to the “collateral damage” that inevitably resulted from high-altitude bombing.
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But the
discovery that the United States could shoot first and seek UNSC resolutions afterward was a revelation. Almost equally important was the realization on the part of the American commander General Wesley Clark that decision making within the structure of NATO was only slightly less cumbersome than decision making within the UN.
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The American appetite for untrammeled command over its military ventures had already been whetted, more than two years before September 2001.

Superficially, the crises in Yugoslavia and Iraq had much in common. Both were multiethnic polities created after World War I. Both had been held together in the 1980s by ruthless dictators guilty of human rights abuses. In both cases economic sanctions had unintended consequences. Both had revealed the limits of the United Nations as an entity. And both had showcased the daunting capability of the American military. To some observers in the aftermath of the war against Serbia, there was an obvious conclusion. Serbia and Iraq would continue to be sources of violence and instability as long as they were ruled by Slobodan Milošević and Saddam Hussein. Their overthrow was something that the United States was capable of effecting. But it might well have to act without the authority of the UN.
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Much had been done in the name of humanitarianism in the 1990s; some skeptics were even moved to grumble about the “imperialism of human rights.” Yet the most disastrous violation of human rights, an indubitable case of genocide, was greeted by both the United States and the United Nations with a lamentable apathy. This was the systematic massacre of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority instigated by the leaders of the country’s Hutu majority.

Those who are sentimentally attached to the United Nations as an institution should be forced to study its abject failure to respond to the ghastly events that unfolded in Rwanda in the mid-1990s, which claimed at least half a million lives. It is well known that the Clinton administration’s attitude was determined, as usual, by the fear of American casualties. The decision to send a laughably small force of two hundred U.S. troops to Kigali airport in 1994 was based on the repulsive calculation that “one American casualty is worth about 85,000 Rwandan dead.”
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The American insis
tence that any UN force be kept as small as possible; the American delaying tactics over proposals to send reinforcements; the American insistence that any U.S. troops be paid for by the UN in advance; the American refusal to jam Hutu radio broadcasts—these were acts of shameful negligence in the face of a genocide vastly greater than anything that happened in the Balkans.
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But those who today see the French president Jacques Chirac as the keeper of the conscience of the international community should also ponder France’s role in this nightmarish episode. For it was France that since the early 1990s had lent military support to the Hutu-dominated government of Juvénal Habyarimana. It was France that conceived of the Ugandan intervention in support of the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front as an “Anglo-Saxon” plot against
la francophonie
in Africa. It was the French who sent troops to create “safe areas” for Hutus—among them the perpetrators of the massacres—in the southwest of the country. And it was the French who objected furiously when the crisis in Rwanda engulfed their client state Zaire, leading to the fall of one of the most egregious tyrants of the postcolonial era, Marshal Mobotu Sese Seku.
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When Chirac visited New York in the summer of 1995, he disconcerted UN officials by telling them, “If you want to find idiotic behavior you can always count on the Americans.”
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This took some nerve.