Atrocity And Outrage

The shock of recognition is acute. Skeletal figures behind barbed wire. Murdered babies in a bus. Two and a half million people driven from their homes in an orgy of “ethnic cleansing.” Detention camps, maybe even concentration camps. Surely these pictures and stories come from another time — the Dark Ages, the Thirty Years’ War, Hitler’s heyday. Psychic defenses struggle to minimize, to deny, to forget. Not here; not now. Europeans were supposed to have learned from the last terrible war on their soil not to murder their neighbors. Educated people, on the verge of the 21st century, in a relatively prosperous country that is a party to multiple human-rights treaties, do not drive innocents from their homes, shoot orphans, build detention camps.

But the evidence, accumulating for months, is now inescapable: like an addiction, hatred is consuming the people who used to call themselves Yugoslavs. Every throat slit makes someone else thirst for blood. “They killed my husband and son,” says a tearful Bosnian refugee. “They burned our home. But they can never rest easy, because one day we will do the same to them, or worse. My children will get their revenge, or their children.” No one anywhere can pretend any longer not to know what barbarity has engulfed the people of the former Yugoslavia.

The ghastly images in newspapers and on television screens last week also conjured up another discomfiting memory: the world sitting by, eager for peace at any price, as Adolf Hitler marched into Austria, carved up Czechoslovakia. ! For months, leaders in Europe and the U.S. have been wringing their hands over the human tragedy in the Balkans, yet have shied away from facing the hard choices that any effort to stop the killing would entail. Clearly, there is no simple solution, diplomatic or military. Economic sanctions, mediation and U.N. peacekeepers have been tried without stopping the fighting. No case for armed intervention appeals to any President, Prime Minister or people. Frustrated, Western leaders have averted their gaze while first Slovenia, then Croatia, now Bosnia descended into chaos.

Finally last week the cruelty captured in powerful pictures of dead children and imprisoned adults succeeded in rousing moral outrage. Like it or not, the world looks to the U.S. to lead an international response. In Washington the curious alchemy of press coverage, public opinion and a presidential campaign abruptly transformed the distant saga of suffering into a political question too sharp to ignore: Is it wise for the West — or is it required of the West — to intervene with military force in the Balkans? Does the new world order that George Bush espouses encompass a minimal moral code, starting with the command of the Holocaust-inspired international convention on genocide to “prevent and to punish” mass killings of ethnic groups? Or is Secretary of State James Baker right to argue that in Yugoslavia — and by extension in other bloody ethnic conflicts in countries not central to the immediate stability of the West — “we don’t have a dog in that fight”?

This is not a conflict in which civilian casualties are a secondary consequence of regular warfare: civilians are prime targets, and every method to terrorize, displace or, if need be, kill them is part of the arsenals on all sides. The fundamental objective of the war is Serbian “ethnic cleansing” — practiced by ethnic irregulars armed and supported by the Serbian government of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade — of large swaths of Bosnian territory to expel Muslims and Croats so that Serbs may move in. Croats under the harshly nationalist leadership of President Franjo Tudjman have joined in to grab their share of territory, and Bosnian Muslims, fighting at the raw level of their rivals, are likewise guilty of barbarism — and of inflating horror stories about the Serbs to win sympathy and support. But the Serb militiamen appear to be the worst offenders. “It is in the Serbian interest to terrorize civilians,” says Andreas Khol, an Austrian politician ) who frequently visits Yugoslavia. “It is part and parcel of the plan for a Greater Serbia.” Detention camps are just a way station before permanent expulsion.

For most refugees, the inducement to flee is fear of imminent death. Topcagic Muharem says he is the only Muslim survivor from the village of Koritnik. On June 20, he claims, Serb militiamen herded 57 Muslim men, women and children into a basement and tossed in hand grenades, then joked that the screams of the dying sounded “just like a mosque.” Ferid Omerovic, 37, is one of 9,000 from the Bosnian city of Bosanski Novi who reached a Croatian refugee camp in a U.N. convoy. “Life turned to hell two months ago,” he says. “All Muslims were fired from their jobs, we had no money to buy food, and we couldn’t get humanitarian help. Our houses were looted by Serbs — our neighbors.” He was detained in a stadium with hundreds of other men; left for days without food or water, they subsisted on grass. Eleven-year-old Lenida Konjic, who was among the group, says that “at night we were so scared we couldn’t sleep. We would just wait to be slaughtered.” It is not surprising that in exchange for a place in the refugee convoy, 4,000 inhabitants of Bosanski Novi waited in line for days to sign documents renouncing their property and pledging never to return.

What sparked the political uproar in Europe and the U.S. last week were emotional new charges that each faction in Bosnia is running a network of internment camps where beatings, torture, starvation and even murder are commonplace. International observers have been scrambling to investigate the claims, most of which come from interested parties, but inspectors have largely been kept out of the places they most want to see. Until they get unhampered access, sorting out reality from propaganda will be impossible.

So far, there is no evidence of genocide or systematic extermination; actual proof of individual murders is still rare. But there are numerous accounts of starvation, beatings, interrogation and miserable sanitation. Western diplomats think many of the camps will turn out to be similar to the few they have been allowed to see: harsh but not murderous detention sites where enemies, civilian and military, are warehoused before expulsion or exchange. Yet there is the fear that other camps could be much worse.

Bosnian officials, who present the most detailed bill of particulars, claim that Serbs are running at least 105 camps, through which 260,000 people have passed since April, with 17,000 deaths. At least 130,000 remain incarcerated. How bad are the camps? A Bosnian report, possibly exaggerated, tells of the Vuk Karadzic primary school in Bratunac, where Serbs are accused of bleeding 500 Muslims to death so wounded Serbs could get transfusions; at a cafe- pension named Sonje in the town of Vogosca, a Serb group led by one Jovan Tintor was said to have hanged prisoners by the legs and gouged out their eyes with special hooks. Serbs deny such stories and countercharge that Muslims and Croats are running 40 camps of their own where more than 6,000 Serbs have died.

Journalists have visited some of the camps and pieced together eyewitness accounts from refugees and escapees. At the Omarska iron-mining complex in northwest Bosnia, according to a former prisoner interviewed in the New York newspaper Newsday, more than a thousand Muslim and Croat civilians were held by Serbs in metal cages stacked four high, without food or water. He said groups of 10 to 15 were removed every few days and shot; many others were beaten to death. British television footage of an open-air jail at Trnopolje showed thousands of prisoners who were dirty, dazed and emaciated. The camera team found evidence of beatings, torture, dysentery and scurvy. Red Cross or U.N. observation of the camps, now being demanded by the U.N. Security Council, would check some abuses. But there are also “impromptu killing grounds,” says a Western diplomat, “where massacres take place, then the killers move on. This is not the kind of murder the U.N. or Red Cross can monitor.”

The world’s revulsion at all this is genuine and appropriate. But so far, the responses have been confused and tentative. As often happens, political considerations are at odds with military realities. What can outsiders do?

Overwhelmingly, U.S. and European military experts warn against getting involved. Yugoslavia is almost custom designed to frustrate any peacekeeping, or peacemaking, force. The terrain is mountainous, perfect for ambushes and hit-and-run operations. Many of the irregulars are well trained and are skilled in guerrilla warfare. The weapons they would use against an intervening force are small, portable and abundant. Western analysts point out that the fathers and grandfathers of today’s fighters tied down 30 Axis divisions for four years during World War II. The generals would prefer another Desert Storm: an obvious enemy, a clear military objective, wide-open terrain suited to air attacks and fast armor sweeps, an overwhelming preponderance of force. What they see in Bosnia is Vietnam, Lebanon, a quagmire of murky goals and slogging infantry combat, where air power cannot be decisive and enemies, allies and civilians are indistinguishable.

Aware of these constraints, some military and political leaders are calling for unconventional approaches. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher argues for arming Bosnian irregulars, who are badly outgunned by the Serbs, much as Washington helped the Afghan mujahedin. Colonel William Taylor, senior military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, thinks an air attack on power plants, fuel tanks and military posts in Belgrade could take the heart out of the Serbs’ fight. Others advocate an allied threat to destroy any Serbian plane, tank or piece of artillery that moves.

All such approaches are risky; whether they are worth taking depends on what the West deems its interest in the former Yugoslavia to be. In the realpolitik calculus of international affairs, Bosnia does not fit into any of the categories that demand intervention. No communist dominoes are at stake. Human-rights violations are gruesome but are not something for which any country wants to sacrifice its own soldiers. It is true that Bosnia- Herzegovina, Croatia and other former Yugoslav republics are now independent countries, but Europe and the U.S. tend to regard Serbian aggression against them as internal ethnic strife, not the kind of cross- border invasion that breaches international law.

But the chaos in the Balkans carries threats to European security. The tidal wave of refugees driven from Croatia and Bosnia is choking the absorptive capacity of neighboring nations. Since those who have driven away the exiles have no intention of letting them return, a more or less permanent and costly place must be found for several million embittered, possibly disruptive people — the Palestinians of the 1990s.

More worrisome is the possibility of further Serbian aggression provoking wider conflict. Serbs loathe, and oppress, the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo province, which is also home to 209,000 Serbs; some analysts predict that the Albanians there will rebel or that Belgrade will try to drive them out as soon as the Bosnian question is settled. Either eventuality could spur Albania to intervene. Hungary has massed troops at its southern border to protect 385,000 ethnic Hungarians in the Serbian province of Vojvodina. A Serbian effort to annex parts of Macedonia could prompt a response by Russia, Bulgaria or even Turkey.

None of this is good news for George Bush. On the eve of the Republican Convention, down to his lowest approval rating in the opinion polls, any false move could tarnish the President’s claim that he is uniquely qualified to lead the U.S. through the world’s dangerous waters. Up to now, his caution has been considered reasonable; after this week it could be judged timid and indecisive. In this highly charged atmosphere, Democratic campaign rivals and Republicans in Congress are pushing Bush to reconsider his policies. Yet voters could easily see a military commitment in Bosnia — or anywhere else — as an electoral gimmick. At the same time, Bush has proclaimed himself the master of the new world order, and many are watching to see how well he fulfills that role.

All of which explains the gyrations in Washington last week. One day a senior State Department official testified that economic sanctions against Serbia were working fine; two days later, after Bill Clinton said Bush should “do whatever it takes to stop the slaughter of civilians,” the President was driven to announce a flurry of new measures — full diplomatic recognition of Slovenia and Bosnia, international monitoring of Balkan borders and a call for a U.N. resolution authorizing force to deliver humanitarian aid — but hardly enough to frighten away Milosevic and his henchmen.

In Europe there is even less enthusiasm for military intervention. Leftists who filled the streets to protest the deployment of Pershing missiles are oddly silent about the human-rights disaster occurring a few hundred miles away. Britain and France are queasy over Bush’s idea of a U.N. resolution that would empower national armies to help deliver relief supplies, preferring to keep this job with the U.N. peacekeepers already in Sarajevo.

Even so, as the images of atrocity flicker across the world’s television screens, the U.S. and its allies find themselves forced to mull over the unattractive military options available that might put a crimp in Serbian aggression — or at least send a message of retribution to Belgrade. In the long run, the international community must develop a new ethic, and new institutions to match, concerned less with the sanctity of borders than with the rights of people. Until it does, the dilemma posed in Bosnia is likely to be repeated elsewhere, again and again.