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In early April 1992, little more than a week after officers of the
newly christened Bosnian Serb Army launched their campaign of
limited conquest in Bosnia, officials in Washington began receiving
reports of atrocities, among them mass executions, beatings,
mutilations, and rape. Jon Western, at the State Department, then
working on human rights in Bosnia, recalls that
many of these atrocities looked an awful lot like
what we had heard and read about during World
War II-the Balkans historically produce a lot of
disinformation-and we were trained to look at
them critically and decipher what was real. But as
reports continued to come in..., it became apparent
that they weren't just propaganda.
In fact, we were getting reports from a number of
sources: eyewitnesses who had been incarcerated
in concentration camps begin filtering out in
summer 1992 and began giving accounts of atrocities that we could cross-reference with those from other eyewitnesses....16
As the Serbs prosecuted their "lightning campaign"-the Bosnian
Serb Army of eighty thousand men, which had come fully equipped
from the Yugoslav National Army, conquered 60 percent of
Bosnian territory in scarcely six weeks-State Department officials
compiled testimony of increasingly shocking and gruesome
atrocities. Jon Western recalls that children were "systematically
raped":
There was one account that affected me: a young
girl was raped repeatedly by Serb paramilitary
units. Her parents were restrained behind a fence
and she was raped repeatedly and they left her in a
pool of blood and over the course of a couple of
days she finally died, and her parents were not able
to tend to her; they were restrained behind a fence.
When we first heard this story, it seemed very
hard to believe but we heard it from a number of
eyewitnesses ...and it became apparent there was
validity to it.
Western and his colleagues were struck not only by the cruelty of
these abuses but by their systematic nature; they very rapidly
came to understand that though the Serb soldiers and, especially,
the "paramilitary" troops responsible for "mopping up" were
committing wildly sadistic acts of brutality, often under the
influence of alcohol, their officers were making rational, systematic
use of terror as a method of war. Rather than being a regrettable but
unavoidable concomitant of combat, rapes and mass executions and
mutilations here served as an essential part of it.
The Serbs fought not only to conquer territory but to "clear" it of
all traces of their Muslim or Croat enemies; or, as the notorious
Serb phrase has it, to "ethnically cleanse" what they believed to be
"their" land. Of course making use of terror in such a way is
probably as old-and as widespread-as warfare itself:
Houses and whole villages reduced to ashes,
unarmed and innocent populations massacred en
masse, incredible acts of violence, pillage and
brutality of every kind-such were the means
which were employed by the Serbo-Montenegrin
soldiery, with a view to the entire transformation
of the ethnic character of regions inhabited
exclusively by Albanians.
This account is drawn from the Carnegie Endowment's Report of
the International Commission to Inquire into the Cause and
Conduct of the Balkan Wars, published in 1914.17 Substitute the
word "Muslims" for "Albanians" and the sentence could have been
composed in spring or summer of 1992. Not only was the
technique of "ethnic cleansing" identical, its purpose-"the entire
transformation of the ethnic character of regions"-was clear to all.
The motive force driving Serbs to fight to achieve a "Greater
Serbia"- or "all Serbs in one country"- depends however on a
fortuitous conjunction of factors: a set of powerful historical
legends combined in a cherished nationalist myth; the advent of
economic hardship and the uncertainty brought on by the end of the
cold war; and the rise of an ambitious, talented, and ruthless
politician.
On the nationalist myth in particular Tim Judah writes splendidly,
briefly describing the Battle of Kosovo of 1389, and discussing its
transformation into the founding epic of the Serbian "exile." The
story he tells does much to explain both the Serb obsession with
the treachery of outsiders and their quasi-religious faith in the
eventual founding, or rather reestablishment, of the Serbian state.
It was at Kosovo that King Lazar and his Serb knights rode boldly
out to take the field against the Turks under Sultan Murad and
defend Europe against the infidel. The Serbs lost this
battle-although, as Judah shows, the evidence for this is
ambiguous, as it is for much of the story; they later came to blame
the defeat on the (probably imaginary) treachery of Vuk Brankovic,
one of Lazar's favorite knights. As Petar Petrovic-Njegos, prince-bishop of Montenegro, wrote in his 1847 epic The Mountain
Wreath:
Our Serbia chiefs, most miserable cowards,
The Serbian stock did heinously betray.
Thou, Brankovic, of stock despicable,
Should one serve so his fatherland,
Thus much is honesty esteem'd.
Judah argues that the "myth of treachery was needed as a way to
explain the fall of the medieval state, and it has powerful seeds of
self-replications contained within it," which have sprouted into an
obsession with betrayal. (During the 1991-1995 war, Judah notes,
with "monotonous regularity losses were always put down to secret
deals-and treachery.")
In the last supper the night before the battle, Brankovic plays Judas
to Lazar's Christ; in causing the Serbs to lose the battle, and thus
their country, to the Turks, Brankovic's betrayal made way for the
crucifixion of the Serb homeland itself. But, as Judah writes, Lazar's
"idea that it is better to fight honourably and die than to live as slaves" not only "provided for Serbs an explanation for their oppression by the Ottomans,"
it also identified the whole nation with the central guiding raison d'etre of Christianity: resurrection. In other words Lazar opted for the empire of heaven, that is to say truth and justice, so that the
state would one day be resurrected. An earthly kingdom was rejected in favor of nobler ideals-victim hood and sacrifice-and this choice is to be compared with the temptations of Christ.
As Jesus would be resurrected so Lazar would be: and so, as well,
would Serbia. This becomes a holy certainty, premised on the Serbs'
heroism and their sacrifice in losing to the Turks. "That is what
people mean when they talk about the Serbs as a 'heavenly people,'"
Zarko Korac, a psychology professor at Belgrade University, tells
Judah.
In this way the Serbs identify themselves with the
Jews. As victims, yes, but also with the idea of
"sacred soil." The Jews said "Next year in
Jerusalem" and after 2000 years they recreated their
state. The message is: "We are victims, but we are
going to survive."
Milosevic himself exploits this powerful ideological view of
history-Professor Korac believes that for most Serbs "it is not a
metaphor, it is primordial"-as a motivating force; but he has not let
it limit his own tactical flexibility. Judah rightly emphasizes that
Milosevic plainly did not always believe armed conquest and ethnic
cleansing central to carrying out his project in Bosnia, for example.
Well before the Bosnians declared independence and war broke out in the spring of 1992, Milosevic tried hard to woo Bosnia into
remaining in what was left of the Federation-which, of course,
Slovenia and Croatia having seceded (and the Serbs of the Krajina
now "liberated" from Croatia and loosely tied to Serbia), was now
politically dominated by the Serbs.
The Bosnians referred to Milosevic's planned state derisively as
"Serboslavia" and it is no wonder they wanted no part of it; but the
Serb leader's tenacious attempts to persuade the Bosnians not to
follow the Slovenians and Croatians in seceding show him to be much
more a ruthless political tactician than an ideologue, a distinction he
would confirm by his behavior four years later when he abandoned to the "ethnic cleansing" of the Croatian army the very Krajina Serbs his National Army made such a show of "liberating" in 1991.
In the event, though, and not surprisingly, Bosnia would not be
wooed. Although its inexperienced leader, Alija Itzetbegovic,
understood the danger of declaring independence-his nascent state, a
third of whose people were Serb, might instantly collapse in
war-his desperate proposals (offered jointly with the Macedonian
president) to make of Yugoslavia a loose confederation were hardly of interest to Serbia, Croatia, or Slovenia. Slovenia, a small, prosperous republic with few Serbs and therefore of no real importance to Milosevic, was determined to secede, and once the Slovenes departed, the Croats were bound to follow (in fact, both republics seceded from Yugoslavia on June 25, 1991).
This left the Bosnians with a stark choice: either passively sink into
a reconfigured Yugoslavia dominated by Milosevic and the Serbs, or
declare independence and pray that the world would recognize the
new country and somehow protect it from the onslaught to come.
Itzetbegovic chose the latter, imploring the "international
community" to recognize his new country and to send United
Nations monitors to patrol its territory and prevent the war he
knew would come. After a referendum on independence was duly
held in February 1992 (which the Bosnian Serbs boycotted), the
"international community" in early April recognized Bosnia as a
sovereign state, and gave it a seat at the United Nations. But
sending troops to protect the new state, even lightly armed
"monitors," was a different matter. According to John Fox, a
regional official on the State Department's Policy Planning Staff at
the time,
The French came to the [Bush] administration at
very senior levels...once in the early phase of
Belgrade's attack on Croatia, and at least once well
before the military campaign against Bosnia, and
they made a proposal to join with the United
States, and other willing states, to put preventive
peace-keepers on the ground across Bosnia-to
support the legitimate elected government of
Bosnia, to stabilize and prevent the outbreak of
conflict, and to see Bosnia through that transition
process to becoming a new independent state.18
One might consider the proposal to dispatch peacekeeping troops
as either a relatively inexpensive way to prevent what seemed an
inevitable and possibly horrendous war, or as a risky initiative that
would involve Americans in a situation that didn't have a clear "exit
strategy." In any case, Fox says, "the French never got a very clear
answer." His office, the Policy Planning Staff, had proposed that
the Americans join the French; but "that proposal was not
accepted."
Itzetbegovic would be given no "peace keepers"; but after all he had
international recognition. The Serbs were not impressed. "Milosevic
couldn't care less if Bosnia was recognized," a laughing Dr. Karadzic
later told a television interviewer. "He said, 'Caligula proclaimed his
horse a senator but the horse never took his seat. Itzetbegovic may
get recognition but he'll never have a state.'" Karadzic, the
self-proclaimed leader of the Bosnian Serbs, now declared, in a
famous speech during the waning days of the integral Bosnian
parliament in Sarajevo, "I warn you, you'll drag Bosnia down to
hell. You Muslims aren't ready for war-you'll face extinction."19
He was right. By the time Cyrus Vance, the United Nations
negotiator, concluded the ceasefire in Croatia on January 2, 1992,
thousands of Serb troops were heading for Bosnia in their tanks and
armored personnel carriers. On May 5, all soldiers and officers of
the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) who came from Bosnia were
taken out of the main force, complete with their equipment, and
officially became a "Bosnian Serb Army" of more than eighty
thousand fully trained men. Over the objections of the Bosnian
government in Sarajevo, the Serb forces took up strategic positions
around the country, clearly preparing for war. Jerko Doko, then
Bosnia's minister of defense, explained in testimony at The Hague
that
this could be seen by the deployment of units; the
control of roads by the JNA; the relocation of
artillery on hill tops around all the major cities of
Bosnia-Herzegovina; their collaboration with
extremist forces of the [Bosnian Serbian
Democratic Party], arming them and assisting the
arming of them.
But Belgrade retained control. "We promised to pay all their costs,"
said Borislav Jovic, then a close aide of Milosevic's. It was not, he
said, as if the Bosnian Serbs had their own state budget to draw on.
"They couldn't even pay their officers." Doko remembers the
National Army commander, General Blagoje Adzic, visiting troops
near Banja Luka and Tuzla toward the end of March 1992 in order to
check their preparedness for the coming combat operations in
Bosnia-Herzegovina.
As for the Bosnians, they were, as Karadzic said, unprepared for
war. "Before the fighting," David Rieff writes in Slaughterhouse,
"Alija Itzetbegovic insisted there could be no war because one
side-his own-would not fight. To have imagined that carnage could
have been averted for this reason was only one of the many culpably
naive assumptions the Bosnian presidency made."
The Serb leaders, on the other hand, could not have been more
prepared. During the last few years a group of selected senior officers had secretly developed a military strategy to guide the "Bosnia Serb Army" in its campaign to seize control of most of Bosnia. The objectives were in turn based on ideological claims of Serb
vulnerability, Serb suffering, and Serb destiny that virtually every
Serb who read a newspaper, listened to the radio, or watched
television would by now know by heart.
The center of the ideology remained, as it had for six centuries, the
redemption of the defeat at Kosovo. In 1889, on the 500th
anniversary of the battle, Serbia's foreign minister declared that the
Serbs had "continued the battle in the sixteenth, seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries when they tried to recover their freedom through countless uprisings." As Judah notes, Milosevic himself would make use of this occasion a century later to invoke "Lazar's ghost" to come to the Serbs' aid.
By this time, Milosevic was making use of an ideological program,
drawn up by Serbian intellectuals, that came to be called "the
Memorandum," a kind of quasi-sociological rendition of the Lazar
legend. In September 1986, extracts from this document, which was
drafted by sixteen eminent economists, scientists, and historians in
the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences at the suggestion of the
prominent novelist and nationalist Dobrica Cosic, had been leaked to
the Belgrade press, and (in Judah's phrase) shook "the whole of
Yugoslavia" with "a political earthquake."
In the key section entitled "Position of Serbia and the Serbian
People," the writers launch a vigorous, bitter attack on what they call
the "Weak Serbia, strong Yugoslavia" policy implicit in the
"injustices" of Tito's 1974 constitution (which in effect "divided
Serbia in three," by making Vojvodina and Kosovo autonomous
provinces; though on Serbia's territory, they both retained a right to
vote in national government institutions).
The Serb exodus from the province of Kosovo-which, as Judah
shows, has amounted only to a relative decrease of population with
respect to the Albanians-the writers repeatedly describe as "the
genocide in Kosovo." The shift in population in Kosovo-which
results from "a physical, moral and psychological reign of
terror"-together with the economic and legal "hardships" all Serbs
suffer daily, "are not only threatening the Serbian people but also the
stability of Yugoslavia as a whole."
In the Federation's "general process of disintegration," the
academicians wrote, the Serbs "have been hit hardest" and in fact the
country's difficulties are "directed towards the total breaking up of
the national unity among the Serbian people." Observing that 24
percent of all Serbs live outside the Serbian Republic and more than
40 percent outside of so-called "inner Serbia," the writers declare:
A nation which after a long and bloody struggle
regained its own state, which fought for and achieved
a civil democracy, and which in the last two wars
lost 2.5 million of its members, has lived to see the
day when a Party committee of apparatchiks decrees that...it alone is not allowed to have its own state.
A worse historical defeat in peacetime cannot be
imagined.20
The roots of Milosevic's, and Karadzic's, ideological campaigns are
all here: the near-hysterical sense of historical grievance and
betrayal, the resentment over Serbia's "inferior political position,"
the heightened rhetoric about the "genocide" of the Serbs-a term
used to describe the exile of Serbs from their rightful lands but that
evokes darker suspicions of the true intentions of Serbia's betrayers.
To combat these injustices Serbs are obliged to seize their fate in
their own hands and achieve the long-awaited resurrection of King
Lazar: "the territorial unity of the Serbian people." They must act
not only to ensure their survival but to lay claim at last to an
ancient birthright: "the establishment," the Memorandum says, "of
the full national integrity of the Serbian people, regardless of
which republic or province it inhabits, is its historic and
democratic right."
Dominating the newspapers, television, and radio from the late
Eighties onward, Milosevic and the other purveyors of this
ideology brilliantly exploited the insecurities and fears of a people
caught in a maelstrom of economic decline and political change. In
the Serbian press all Muslims became "Islamic fundamentalists," all
Croats "Ustase." As Norman Cigar writes in a chapter of his
Genocide in Bosnia entitled "Paving the Way to Genocide," well
before the actual breakup of Yugoslavia, "influential figures in
Serbia had begun to shape a stereotypical image of Muslims as
alien, inferior and a threat to all that the Serbs held dear."
Such propaganda, fed incessantly to a people who in many cases
had been prepared for it by their own cherished historical myths,
served to transform neighbors into "the other"-outsiders, aliens.
And Milosevic did not find it difficult, in the bewildering world of
nascent popular politics, to portray a relatively new phenomenon
for Yugoslavs-the legitimate political opponent-as a mortal
threat. By "isolating the entire Muslim community," writes Cigar,
such propaganda would ensure that "any steps...taken against
Muslims in pursuit of Belgrade's political goals would acquire
legitimacy and popular support."
Such "steps" were even then being prepared. During the late 1980s
a small group of officers (among them, then Colonel Ratko Mladic)
who called themselves the "military line" had begun meeting
secretly with members of Serbia's secret police.
By 1990, or perhaps a bit earlier-the timing here is a matter of
controversy-the officers had drafted what they called the "RAM
plan" which set out schemes for the military conquest of "Serb
lands" in Croatia and Bosnia. The plan was called RAM, or
"FRAME"-it is not known what the individual letters stand
for-because it makes clear the boundaries, or frame, within which
the new Serbian-dominated lands will be established. As Jerko
Doko, the former Bosnian minister of defense, describes it in his
Hague testimony:
The substance of the plan was to create a greater
Serbia. That RAM was to follow the lines of
Virovitica, Karlovac, Karlobag, which we saw
confirmed in reality later on with the decision on
the withdrawal of the JNA, the Yugoslav People's
Army, from Slovenia and partly from Croatia to
those positions.21
In their plan, the officers described how artillery, ammunition, and
other military equipment would be stored in strategic locations in
Croatia and then in Bosnia, and how, with the help of the Secret
Police, local Serbian activists would be armed and trained, thereby
creating "shadow" police forces and paramilitary units in the towns
of the Croatian Krajina and throughout Bosnia. And, as early as
July 1990, this is precisely what the Army began to do. In the area
of Foca, according to Doko,
The JNA had distributed among the Serb voluntary
units about 51,000 pieces of firearms and [among] SDS members, about 23,000..., [the Army] also gave them armoured vehicles, about 400 heavy artillery pieces, 800
mortars....
The leaders of the Bosnian Serb Army would be able to depend
upon this "parallel power structure" of dedicated, often fanatical,
and now well-armed men to support their troops as they carried
out their campaign to conquer Bosnia. For "to conquer" here does
not mean simply to subdue. In Bosnia people of different religions
tended to be well mixed together; many cities in the Drina Valley,
for example, adjacent to the border of Serbia itself, contained large
numbers of Muslims.
The officers confronted, then, both a demographic and a strategic
challenge. They must create a new state whose contiguous territory
bordered the Serbian motherland-and which held most of the
"liberated" Serbs. "The fact that Muslims are the majority,"
Karadzic said, "makes no difference. They won't decide our fate.
That is our right." Serb lands were Serb lands, regardless of who
happened to live there.
And thus came into use "ethnic cleansing," an ancient and brutally
effective technique of war christened by the Serbs with a modern,
hygienic name. In city after city, town after town, in the spring and
summer of 1992, the Bosnian Serb Army and its commandos and
paramilitary units launched their attacks in precisely the same
pattern. It was clear these operations of conquest and cleansing
were minutely, and centrally, planned. According to Vladimir
Srebov, a former Serbian Democratic Party leader who read the
"RAM Plan," the officers stipulated a vast program of ethnic
cleansing the aim of which "was to destroy Bosnia economically
and completely exterminate the Muslim people." As Srebov later
told an interviewer:
The plan...envisaged a division of Bosnia into two
spheres of interest, leading to the creation of a
Greater Serbia and a Greater Croatia. The Muslims
were to be subjected to a final solution: more than
50 percent of them were to be killed, a smaller part
was to be converted to Orthodoxy, while an even
smaller...part-people with money-were to be
allowed to buy their lives and leave, probably,
through Serbia, for Turkey. The aim was to cleanse
Bosnia-Herzegovina completely of the Muslim
nation.22
This plan was not fully accomplished, although it is astonishing to
think that it might have been. With some exceptions, when the
Serbs launched their campaign on March 27, 1992, they chose as
their first objective to seize those parts of Bosnia closest to Serbia
and to the (now Serbian-controlled) Krajina, regardless of who lived
there. Within six weeks they controlled 60 percent of the country,
and though they would later increase their gains, occupying, at their
strongest, some 70 percent of Bosnia's territory-Serbs made up
slightly less than a third of Bosnians-and though the fighting and
shelling and skirmishing would go on, the front lines would not
change dramatically during the next three years of the war.
When the Serb gunners began shelling cities and towns in Bosnia,
the pattern of "cleansing" emerged immediately. Army units would
form a perimeter around a town, setting up roadblocks. Messages
were sent inviting all Serb residents to depart. Then the artillerymen
would begin their work, shelling the town with heavy and light
guns; if defenders fired back, the Serb bombardment might last
many days, destroying the town and killing most of those in it; if
there was no resistance, the heavy guns might stop in a day or two.
Once the town was considered sufficiently "softened up," the
paramilitary shock troops would storm in, and the terror would
begin.
Like the camp guards-whom they visited when they could in
order to take part in torturing prisoners-the paramilitary troops
had one responsibility: to administer terror. After a town had been subdued by artillery fire the paramilitaries "mopped up." Many
bore on their person all the iconography of World War II "Chetnik"
nationalists: bandoliers across their chests and huge combat knives
on their belts; fur hats with symbols of skull and crossbones; black flags, also with skull and crossbones; and the full beard, which, as Ivo Banac says, "in the peasant culture of Serbia is a sign of mourning; somebody dies, one does not shave. This was something that happened in times of war...."23
Often the paramilitary troops would arrive at a newly conquered
town with lists of influential residents who were to be executed;
just as often they simply shot, or stabbed, or mutilated, or raped
any resident whom they managed to find. These killers, many of
whom were criminals who had been released from prison to "reform
themselves" at the front, were attracted to the job by their virulent
nationalist beliefs, by simple sadism, and by greed. Looting Muslim
houses made many of them rich.
Many of the sadistic, high-living, and colorful paramilitary leaders
became celebrities in Serbia. Zeljko Raznatovic, for example, known
as Arkan (everyone knew his Serb Volunteer Guard, by far the
strongest and best armed of the paramilitaries, as Arkan's Tigers),
was a famous criminal-a bank robber by profession who was
thought to be wanted in several European countries, in several of
which he had been imprisoned and escaped.
Judah speculates that Arkan's legendary prison escapes have owed
much to his longstanding contacts with agents of an espionage
network run out of the Yugoslav Secretariat for Internal Affairs, for
whom he reputedly worked as an assassin abroad. (His day job was
running a pastry shop.) Having lately married a Serbian pop singer
in a huge wedding, Arkan now is a member of the Yugoslav
parliament.
Despite their flamboyance and seeming independence, Arkan's
Tigers and the other paramilitaries-Vojislav Seslj's Chetniks, the White Eagles, the Yellow Ants (the name is a testament to their
prowess at looting)-were creatures of the Serbian state. As Milos
Vasic, an expert on the Yugoslav military, writes, "They were all
organized with the consent of Milosevic's secret police and armed,
commanded, and controlled by its officers."
Though it is unclear how specifically the officers described actual
tactics in the RAM Plan, the similarity of atrocities committed in
town after town lends credence to Beverly Allen's assertion, in
Rape Warfare, that they debated in detail the most effective means
of terror. Allen quotes one document, "a variation of the RAM
Plan, written by the army's special services, including...experts in
psychological warfare," that offers a chilling sociological rationale
for the tactics of ethnic cleansing:
Our analysis of the behavior of the Muslim
communities demonstrates that the morale, will,
and bellicose nature of their groups can be
undermined only if we aim our action at the point
where the religious and social structure is most
fragile. We refer to the women, especially
adolescents, and to the children. Decisive
intervention on these social figures would spread
confusion..., thus causing first of all fear and then
panic, leading to a probable retreat from the
territories involved in war activity.
This is why Vasic calls the paramilitaries the "psychological
weapon in ethnic cleansing." The men knew that they must be
brutal enough, and inventive enough in their cruelty, that stories of
their terror would quickly spread and in the next village, says Vasic,
"no one would wait for them to come." He estimates that the
paramilitaries consisted on average of "80 percent common
criminals and 20 percent fanatical nationalists."24
Jose Maria Mendiluce, an official of the United Nations High
Commission on Refugees, who happened to pass through Zvornik
on April 9, was watching the paramilitaries "mopping up" the
town, when he suddenly realized that "the Belgrade media had been writing about how there was a plot to kill all Serbs in Zvornik....
This maneuver always precedes the killing of Muslims." As
Michael Sells, who includes this quotation in his The Bridge
Betrayed, comments,
The national mythology, hatred and unfounded
charges of actual genocide in Kosovo and imminent genocide in Bosnia had
shaped into a code: the charge of genocide became a
signal to begin genocide.
Army gunners-some of them positioned across the Drina in Serbia
itself-targeted Zvornik and drove its few, lightly armed defenders
out in a matter of hours. Then Vojislav Seslj and his Chetnik
paramilitaries moved in.
Mendiluce watched as the soldiers and the paramilitaries did their
work:
I saw lorries full of corpses. Soldiers were dumping
dead women, children and old people onto lorries. I
saw four or five lorries full of corpses. On one
bend, my jeep skidded on the blood.25
United Nations investigators say Seslj briefed his Chetniks in a
local hotel, reading out a list of the names of local Muslims who
were to be killed. "Milosevic was in total control," Seslj later told
an interviewer, "and the operation was planned...in Belgrade."
The Bosnian Serbs did take part. But the best
combat units came from Serbia. These were special
police commandos called Red Berets. They're from
the Secret Service of Serbia. My forces took part,
as did others. We planned the operation very
carefully, and everything went exactly according to
plan.26
According to the United Nations, some two thousand people from
Zvornik remain unaccounted for. As for the other 47,000 Muslims,
they were expelled, many of them forced onto the roads with only
what they wore. Zvornik, which had a thriving community of
Muslims for half a millennium, now has none.
Sometimes the cleansing was carried out more gradually. Early in
1992, members of a small paramilitary group seized control of
Prijedor's television transmitter, thus ensuring that the town
received only programs from Belgrade-programs which, UN
investigators wrote, "insinuated that non-Serbs wanted war and
threatened the Serbs." Soon Yugoslav National Army troops, fresh
from the Croatia war, began arriving in the Prijedor area. The Army
officers demanded that Prijedor's leaders permit their troops to take
up positions around the city, from which they could control all
roads to, and exits from, the district.
It was an ultimatum. The legitimate authorities
were invited for a guided sightseeing tour of two
Croatian villages...which had been destroyed and
left uninhabited. The message was that if the
ultimatum was not [accepted], the fate of Prijedor
would be the same. ... The ultimatum was
accepted.27
With Bosnian Serb troops guarding all roads, Prijedor became
isolated. The Serbs closed down the bus service. They required that
people have permits to visit even nearby villages. They imposed a
curfew. The telephones were often not working.
On April 30, in a swift, well-executed coup d'etat, local Serbs
seized control of Prijedor itself. According to the United Nations
investigators, the Serbs had been preparing to seize power for at
least six months, arming themselves with weapons secretly
supplied by the Army and developing their own clandestine
"parallel" administrations, including a "shadow" police force with
its own secret service.
Non-Serbs now began to lose their jobs. Policemen and public
officials were the first to be dismissed, but the purge went on until
even many manual workers had been fired. The "shadow"
administrations already long prepared by the Serbs simply took
over the empty offices.
The new Serb policemen, often accompanied by paramilitaries,
began to pay visits throughout Prijedor, pounding on the doors of
all non-Serbs who held licenses to own firearms and demanding
they turn them in.
...The non-Serbs in reality [had become] outlaws.
At times, non-Serbs were instructed to wear white
armbands to identify themselves.
Finally, near the end of May, the local press-newspapers, radio,
and television-began to broadcast a more hysterical version of
Belgrade's propaganda, claiming that dangerous Muslim extremists
were hiding around and within Prijedor, preparing to seize the town
and commit genocide against the Serbs.
By now it had become quite clear what this accusation heralded.
Those few Muslims and Croats who still had weapons decided to
move first. As the UN investigators describe it:
On 30 May 1992, a group of probably less than
150 armed non-Serbs had made their way to the
Old Town in Prijedor to regain control of the
town.... They were defeated, and the Old Town
was razed. In the central parts of Prijedor..., all
non-Serbs were forced to leave their houses as
Serbian military, paramilitary, police and civilians
advanced street by street with tanks and lighter
arms. The non-Serbs had been instructed over the
radio to hang a white piece of cloth on their home
to signal surrender.
According to the UN Report, "Hundreds, possibly thousands were
killed...frequently after maltreatment." Those who survived were
divided into two groups: women, children, and the very old were
often simply expelled; as for the men, thousands were sent to
Keraterm and Omarska, the two nearest concentration camps.
Although the fighting on May 30 began a general exodus of
non-Serbs-the Muslim population dropped from nearly fifty
thousand in 1991 to barely 6,000 in 1993-it very quickly became
clear that the Serbs were targeting for actual deportation the elite of
the city: political leaders, judges, policemen, academics and
intellectuals, officials who had worked in the public administration,
important business people, and artists. And, after the burning of
the old town, any "other important traces of Muslim and Croatian
culture and religion-mosques and Catholic churches
included-were destroyed."
On the morning of May 30, 1992, two heavily armed soldiers came
to his door and summoned him and, within hours, Rezak
Hukanovic, a forty-three-year-old father of two, broadcaster,
journalist, and poet, found himself packed into a bus with scores of
other frightened men, bent over, his head between his knees, peering out of the corner of his eye at the tongues of flame rising from the Old City of Prijedor. He was on his way to Omarska.
Click here for Mark Danner's full New York Review of Book series on the
war in the former Yugoslavia
1. Roy Gutman of Newsday broke the story of the camps
in his article on August 2, 1992; see his collection, A
Witness to Genocide (Macmillan, 1993). But it
was not until August 6, when Britain's International
Television News (ITN) broadcast the first television
pictures from the camps, that President Bush found himself
forced to defend his "standoffish" policy toward
the former Yugoslavia. See the first article in this series,
"The US and the Yugoslav Catastrophe," The New York
Review, November 20, 1997.
2. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (Simon and
Schuster, 1993), p. 90. Perhaps it was this apparent
absence of mortal fear, recalling the "supposed
fatalism" of the Muslims, that led the SS men to coin the
nickname Musulmen; or it may have been the "swaying
motions of the upper part of the body," brought on by
severe muscle atrophy, which the Germans thought echoed
"Islamic prayer rituals." See Wolfgang Sofsky, The
Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, translated by William
Templer (1993; reprinted in translation by Princeton University Press, 1997),
p. 329, note 5.
3. Quoted in Gutman, Witness to Genocide, p. 47.
4. See "Omarska Detention Camp," War Crimes in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Volume II (Helsinki Watch,
1993), p. 108.
5. "J." worked in the kitchen
at Omarska. See War Crimes in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Volume II, p. 103, and, for
the earlier quotations about the beatings, p. 101.
6. Final Report of the United Nations Commission
of Experts Established Pursuant to Security
Council Resolution 780, 1992 (United Nations,
1994), Annexes, pp. 48-49.
7. See War Crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Volume II, pp. 110-111.
8. See Raul Hilberg, "The Anatomy of the Holocaust,"
in Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton, editors, The
Holocaust: Ideology, Bureaucracy, and Genocide
(Kraus International, 1980), pp. 90-91.
9. See Sofsky, The Order of Terror, p. 115.
16. Drawn from an unbroadcast section of an
interview with ABC News, "While America Watched:
The Bosnia Tragedy," January 1994.
17. Republished as The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913
Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a
New Introduction and Reflections on the Present
Conflict by George F. Kennan (Carnegie Endowment, 1993), p. 151.
18. Drawn from an unbroadcast section of an
interview with ABC News, "While America Watched: The Bosnia Tragedy," January
1994.
19. See "The Gates of Hell," Program Four (UK TX
version) in The Death of Yugoslavia, Brian Lapping
and Associates; Laura Silber, consultant.
20. See "The SANU 'Memorandum,'" in Boze Covic, editor, Roots of
Serbian Aggression: Debates Documents Cartographic Review
(Centar Za Strane Jezeke Vodnikova, Zagreb, 1991).
21. Testimony of Jerko Doko, The Prosecutor v. Tadic,
case IT-94-I-T, June 6, 1996, pp. 1359-1361, in
"Testimony Offered to the International Commission for
the Former Yugoslavia," The Hague, June 6, 1996.
22. See Adil Kulenovic, "Interview with Vladimir Srebov," Vreme (Belgrade),
October 30, 1995.
23. See Rabia Ali, "Separating History from Myth: An Interview With Ivo Banac,"
in Rabia Ali and Lawrence Lifschultz, editors, Why Bosnia? Writings on the
Balkan War (Stony Creek, Connecticut: Pamphleteer's Press, 1993), p. 158.
24. See Milos Vasic, "The Yugoslav Army and the Post-Yugoslav Armies," in D.A.
Dyker and I. Vejvoda, editors, Yugoslavia and
After: A Study in Fragmentation, Despair and Rebirth (Longman,
1996), p. 134.
25. See "The Gates of Hell," Program Four in The Death of Yugoslavia.
26. See "The Gates of Hell," Program Four in The Death of Yugoslavia.
27. See United Nations Report, Annex V, "The Prijedor Report," paragraphs 6-13,
16, 19-20.
Witness to Genocide
by Roy Gutman
180 pages, (out of print)
published by Macmillan
Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia's War
by Ed Vulliamy
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published by Simon and Schuster
The Tenth Circle of Hell: A Memoir of Life in the Death Camps of Bosnia
by Rezak Hukanovic and with a Foreword by Elie Wiesel
164 pages, $20.00 (hardcover)
published by New Republic/Basic Books
Late-Breaking Foreign Policy: The News Media's Influence on Peace
Operations
by Warren P. Strobel
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The Serbs: History, Myth and the Resurrection of Yugoslavia
by Tim Judah
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Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia
by Beverly Allen
180 pages, $19.95 (hardcover)
published by University of Minnesota Press
The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia
by Michael A. Sells
244 pages, $19.95 (hardcover)
published by University of California Press
"Yugoslavia: 1989-1996"
by Warren Zimmermann, in US and Russian Policymaking with Respect to the
Use of Force, edited by Jeremy R. Azrael, and Emil A. Pagin
217 pages, $15.00 (paperback)
published by Rand
The Conceit of Innocence: Losing the Conscience of the West in the War
Against Bosnia
edited by Stjepan G. Mestrovic
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published by Texas A&M University Press
This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia
by Thomas Cushman and Stjepan G. Mestrovic
412 pages, $18.95 (paperback)
published by New York University Press
Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of Ethnic Cleansing
by Norman Cigar
247 pages, $29.95 (hardcover)
published by Texas A&M University Press
Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West
by David Rieff
274 pages, $12.00 (paperback)
published by Touchstone
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