The War in Bosnia has been
described as“The systematic
attempt on the part of the Serbs to exterminate the Bosnian
Muslims” (David Rieff)
Prelude. On June
21, 1991, James Baker, the Bush Administration's Secretary of
State, told Yugoslav (Serb) leader Slobodan Milosevic that the U.S. supported "the unity
and territorial integrity" of Yugoslavia. It was a
statement made as much with the Soviet Union in mind as with
the Balkans, but it gave Belgrade an excuse to send the
Serb-dominated federal army into Slovenia and then Croatia to
prevent their secession. Undeterred, on June 25, both
Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence.
Sept. 25, 1991: UN Security Council
passes resolution imposing arms embargo on whole of former
Yugoslavia
December 1991: Bosnian Muslim leader
Alija Izetbegovic requests EU recognition of Bosnian
independence; asks UN to dispatch peacekeepers to Bosnia. EU
tells Izetbegovic recognition will require democratic
legitimacy: hold a referendum.
February 22, 1992: Izetbegovic holds
referendum, in which Croat and Muslim areas vote heavily for
independence. Serb leaders call for Serbs to boycott the
vote. Izetbegovic pleads: “It takes two sides to have a
war, and we will not fight” (Rieff: 131).
March 1992: Serb militias appear,
heavily armed and aided by Yugoslavian National Army (hereafter: JNA) troops; establish roadblocks.
War. April 1992:
Izetbegovic declares Bosnian Independence; Serbs launch
attacks, begin siege of Sarajevo (April 6) and the war in
Bosnia begins. UN moves administrative offices from
“safe” Sarajevo (where it had been in 1991) to
Zagreb, Croatia.
April 6, 1992: On the very day that
the European Community granted diplomatic recognition, the
siege of Sarajevo began (April 6). Bosnia's second largest
city, Banja Luka, and most of the rest of northern Bosnia
fell to the Serbs in the first month of the war. Across
northern Bosnia, “ethnic cleansing” drives Croats
and Muslims out, opening housing up for Serbs from Croatia.
In Banja Luka, 16 mosques and 11 Catholic churches are
destroyed; across northern Bosnia, 900 of 1000 Mosques are
made into rubble within 3 years. Serbs bar UN from area in
late 1992-93.
May 1992: Ethnic cleansing of
eastern Bosnian town of Zvornik: several thousand are killed
or missing, entire Muslim population is expelled.
Dec. 31, 1992: UN Sec.Gen.
Boutros-Ghali visits Sarajevo, and declares “you have a
situation that is better than ten other places in the
world,” and calls the whole conflict a “rich man's
war.” By that time, more than 17,000 had been killed and
110,000 wounded in Sarajevo alone.
Jan. 8, 1993: French peace keepers,
part of the U.N.PROFOR operation, escorting Bosnia Vice
President Hakija Turaljic from the Sarajevo airport, permit
Serb militiamen to take him from the convoy. Turaljic then is
shot dead; UNPROFOR troops do not act. Later, the French
officer responsible returns home and receives the Medal of
Honor (Lewis: 34).
1993: Sieges extended. Systematic
starvation of entire populations by the Serb fighters
surrounding cities of Tuzla, Srebrenica and Sarajevo brings
population to its knees. Bosnian Serb leader is Radovan
Karadzic, the Montenegro-born nationalist chieftain. Karadzic
is a poet and, in civilian life, bizarrely enough, a
psychiatrist. A sleek, fat man with an expensive
double-breasted suits, bushy eyebrows and flamboyantly styled
long hair, his good English charms the West. He preferred to
refer to Bosnia's Muslims as “Turks.”
early 1993: Journalists report that
a camp at Foca, near Sarajevo, is used to rape Muslim women.
UN refuses to investigate.
July 1993: "I think we are on
the threshold of the final solution," said Slobodan
Milosevic, the President of Serbia and architect of ethnic
cleansing. "The main remaining question is the question
of maps." UN Security Council this year declared six
sites to be UN-protected “safe areas.”
July 1993: U.S. troops arrive in
Skopje, Macedonia. An advance guard of 41 soldiers from the
U.S. Army's Berlin Brigade arrived in the former Yugoslav
republic of Macedonia to join 700 U.N. peace keepers keeping
an eye on the borders of neighboring Albania and Serbia. By
1995, 500 U.S. troops were there. (On Sept. 4, 1995, U.S.
pressure on Greece and Macedonia led to an agreement to end
the Greek blockade against Macedonia, 1994-95, which the U.N.
had called illegal.) They remain there until 1998 under U.N.
authority, and continue on after China blocks continued U.N.
mission there.
Sept. 1993: Serbs dynamite grand
mosque of Banja Luka, which one year earlier they had held up
to visitors as a sign of “normalcy” under their
occupation. Of the 1000 mosques in Bosnia, less than 100
remained by 1995.
November 1993: The Old Bridge at Mostar, erected in 1566, is destroyed by Bosnian Croat
shells.
Jan. 1994: Shell lobbed into
Sarajevo market kills 68, shocks world by the brazen defiance
of the move toward ending the siege there.
Feb. 9, 1994: NATO issues ultimatum
to Serbs: withdraw heavy weapons from area around Sarajevo,
or face NATO air strikes. Siege of Sarajevo abates; but Serb
militia leader Ratko Mladic initiates new siege of Gorazde, a
UN declared “safe area” for 60,000 Muslims trapped
there. British Gen. Michael Rose repeatedly refuses to call
for NATO air strikes, claiming that relief worker in Gorazde
who report mass killings are “exaggerating.”
N.A.T.O. Threats. April
10, 1994: For the first time in its 45 year history, NATO
warplanes attack. Two USAF F-16s attack a Serb command tent
near Gorazde. Serb forces retaliate: seize 150 UN peace
keepers, kill a British liaison officer.
April 1994: Five major nations,
called the “contact group” attempt to bring about
agreement on maps of partition of Bosnia (US, UK, France,
Russia, Germany). July 1994: Contact Group announced plan for
“rewards and punishments” to induce all sides to
settle the conflict. It called for UN lifting the arms
embargo against the Bosnian (Muslim) Government.
July 1994: UN force commander,
British Lt. Gen. Michael Rose accedes to Serb demand that the
only road into Sarajevo still open be closed. Earlier, Serb
negotiators had agreed the road could remain open, protected
by the UN.
Fall 1994: Cease fires near Sarajevo
ease suffering, but in November Bihac is besieged by Mladic's
Serb forces.
December 1994: the siege of Sarajevo
resumes for the third straight winter. Former US Pres. Jimmy
Carter arranges a 4 month cease fire, which begins on January
1, 1995. It called for roads to open to Sarajevo, where Serbs
had again menaced air relief supplies by restricting flights
in and out of the airport. Elsewhere in most of Bosnia,
fighting was in a lull. But fighting continued near Bihac.
Jan. 1 to April 30, 1995: Cease fire
occurs, but is violated many times.
May 1, 1995: Though 200,000 already
had died and 2 million had been made refugees, the Bosnian
Government formally allowed cease fire to expire April 30.
Fighting then resumed in rural Bosnia.
May 1, 1995: Croatia invaded and in
48 hours retook the 200 sq. mile Western Slavonia area of
Croatia which Serbs had seized in 1991.
July 11, 1995: Bosnian Serb forces
seized the “U.N. protected safe area” of
Srebrenica. 40,000 Muslims were expelled and reports of mass
executions and rapes soon surfaced from these refugees and
those of the safe area of Zepa, seized on July 25. In the
end, 7800+ are proven to have been massacred.
July 25, 1995: International War
Crimes Tribunal in Holland indicted Bosnian Serb military
(Mladic) and civilian (Karadzic) leaders for genocide.
August 1995: Croatian Army forces
attacked and retook the Krajina region of Croatia which had
been under rebel Serb control since 1991-92. At least 150,000
Serb civilians were made refugees by this action.
N.A.T.O. Intervention. Late
August 1995: After Serb gunners again defied U.N. warnings
against attacks on the capital of Sarajevo by lobbing a shell
into a crowded market killing 37, U.N. authorized sustained
N.A.T.O. air strikes against Serb positions.
-In the first attack, more than
60 aircraft attacked sites throughout Bosnia.
-This was the first large scale
military action ever undertaken by N.A.T.O.
-The wider objective was to
force a political settlement of the whole war. Air raids
continued for two weeks.
Sept. 1995: Negotiations. Serb
President Milosevic joined his counterparts from Bosnia and
Croatia in negotiations to end the Bosnian war first in
Geneva, and then (through foreign ministers) in New York.
U.S. mediators hosted the latter. A new element was that the
Yugoslav/Serbian Government alone spoke for the Bosnian
Serbs: no representation was given to the Serb
“government” in Pale, Bosnia.
Sept.-Oct. 1995: Bosnian Government
Army overran many Serb-controlled regions of Bosnia; shelled
and advanced on Serb positions near Sarajevo. These moves
were protested by the U.N., who sought no side to take
advantage of the change in military balance produced by the
U.N. authorized NATO air raids.
Nov. 1995: Under U.S. Government
auspices, Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia sent top government
officials to Dayton, Ohio to negotiate peace. Early agreement
was reached on return of Eastern Slavonia to Croatia.
Dayton
Accords. Nov.
21, 1995: Presidents of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia
initialed comprehensive peace agreement. Terms:
-Muslim-Croat Federation (51% of
land area) and Serb republic, Republika Srpska, (49%)
will be states within one country
-refugees may return to homes
-Sarajevo and suburbs to be
unified and placed under Federation control
-60,000 NATO peacekeepers
(20,000 US) to patrol
-all signatories pledge to cooperate with the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
Nov. 22: UN sanctions against Serbia
lifted.
Dec. 1995: US, NATO Peacekeepers
arrive in Bosnia. Called IFOR, the contingent's name is
changed to SFOR in 1996. Troops remained into the middle of the 2000s.
Force levels of 12,000 in 2002 were reduced to 7000 in
2004. The largely NATO force
transferred authority to a force representing the states of the European
Union, Eurfor Althea. Non-NATO states
participating in SFOR during its period of operations included important
U.S. ally Australia, former ally New Zealand, neutrals Sweden, Austria,
Ireland, and Finland, friendly Muslim states Morocco and Egypt, and others
including Malaysia, Argentina, and Russia.
sources cited:
David Rieff, Slaughterhouse:
Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1995).
Anthony Lewis, “War
Crimes,” The New Republic (March 20, 1995):
29-34.
Annotated Bibliography on the conflict in Bosnia
For further reading, see
Prof. Bowen's essay elsewhere on this
website, and the sources below:
The
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
This official website presents
indictments, case information, judgments, opinions of the
justices, and much more to help the student grasp what
corroborated evidence shows to have taken place when
genocide and war crimes became Serbian state policy in
Bosnia (and to a much lesser extent, Croatia and Kosovo).
Steven Burg, "Why Yugoslavia
Fell Apart," Current History (Nov. 1993): pp.
357-363.
Focuses on the role of
International Organizations' roles in the collapse of
Yugoslavia.
Steven Burg, "The International
Community and the Yugoslav Crisis," in International
Organizations and Ethnic Conflict, Milton J. Esman and
Shibley Telhami, eds. (Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 1995): 235-274.
Extends on the arguments made in
Burg (1993, above). Provides excellent analysis of the
behavior of external actors (Europe, USA, Russia. G-7,
CSCE) in dropping the ball which might have preserved
peace in the face of the slide toward war. Traces the
comings and goings of various intermediaries much more
directly and objectively than does the Owen volume
(below).
Lenard Cohen, "The
Disintegration of Yugoslavia," Current History
(Nov. 1992): pp. 369-375.
Discusses the reactions of the
West to the democratization of Yugoslavia.
Mark Ellis, "Non-Negotiable:
War Criminals Belong in the Dock, Not at the Table," Washington
Post (May 9, 1999): B1, B5.
Argues that criminal courts
could have impeded the later rounds of the Balkan wars.
V.P. Gagnon Jr., "Historical
Roots of the Yugoslav Conflict," in International
Organizations and Ethnic Conflict, Milton J. Esman and
Shibley Telhami, eds. (Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 1995): 179-197.
Presents a historic portrait of
the founding, inter-war, and communist eras, focusing on
the role of Serbia within the enlarged Yugoslav states
1918-1991. Assembles strong evidence that the wars of the
1990s in the former Yugoslavia were not the result of
ancient feuds but "the purposeful creation of
specific sectors of the country's political elite, which
provoked conflict along ethnic lines." Much more
skillful and direct than the book length focus on just
the 1980s and 1990s given by Silber and Little (below).
Roy Gutman, “Tragedy of
Errors,” The New Republic (October 26, 1998):
15-19.
Addresses the after-effects of
the world's response to Serb-run ethnic cleansing in
Bosnia; i.e. Serb ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
Richard Holbrooke, To End a War revised edition
(NY: Modern Library, 1999).
Pres. Clinton's chief negotiator's memoir of his role
in negotiating the conclusion of the conflict in Bosnia.
Excellent profiles of the protagonists who made the road
to Dayton, Ohio (where peace was forged) so difficult.
Richard Holbrooke, "Why are we in Bosnia?" New
Yorker (May 18, 1998): 42-45.
Pres. Clinton's chief negotiator provides interesting
insights into the struggle between the Pentagon and the
State Department concerning the role of U.S. power in
Bosnia in 1995. Also reports that French Pres. Chirac
delivered an ultimatum to Pres. Clinton on June 13-14,
1995, demanding greater U.S. involvement or France would
pull out unilaterally. Shows a relatively low level of
engagement in the issues by Pres. Clinton, e.g. that he
was unaware that a NATO plan to assist the U.N. in a
rapid evacuation of U.N. personnel ("Operations Plan
40104," which never was implemented) would virtually
automatically involve U.S. Armed Forces. Revealingly
shows the personal stakes involved in the decision to
respond to the massacre at Srebrenica (July 1995):
Holbrooke's son was apparently in the nearby "safe
area" of Tuzla at the time, as was U.S. Assistant
Secretary of State John Shattuck. Holbrooke wins the
candor award when he states that "NATO finally did
what it should have done years earlier: it launched
massive air strikes against Bosnian Serb positions."
Provides further insights into the 1995-98 phase of the
NATO deployment in Bosnia, the post-war role of indicted
war criminal Radovan Karadzic, and the clear judgment of
Madeline Albright, whom Holbrooke quotes as saying
"there will be other Bosnia's in our lives."
Rezak Hukanovic, The Tenth
Circle of Hell : a memoir of Life in the Death Camps of
Bosnia (NY: New Republic/Basic Books, 1993).
Stunningly direct, first person
account of the storm of "ethnic cleansing" in
Bosnia as viewed from the eye of that storm in the camp
at Omarska. (For more information on the hundreds of
concentration camps created during the Bosnian war, and a
map to their locations, go here)
Rezak Hukanovic, "The Evil at
Omarska," The New Republic (February 12, 1996):
pp. 24-29.
Eyewitnesses from concentration
camps' stories are told in a brief version of the book
above.
Borijove Jevtic, "The Murder of
Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, 28 June 1914" in Eyewitness
to History ed. John Carey (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987):
pp. 441-444.
Eyewitness testimonial from one
of the terrorists, gives insight into the deep roots of
Serb nationalism.
Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts:
A Journey Through History (New York: Vintage, 1993).
Travel writer and Atlantic
Monthly editor Kaplan takes an early 1990s tour of
the Balkans. Mixes history and stories to inform a
commentary that locates the impulse toward war among the
former Yugoslav peoples as an expression of ancient
feuds. Strong on Serbia, Kosovo and Macedonia (and
Romania), the book is less convincing about Bosnia, as
Kaplan anticipated the worst conflict would come in
Kosovo. He misjudged his moment, but not the story
overall.
Anthony Lewis, “War
Crimes,” The New Republic (March 20, 1995):
29-34.
Journalist and editorialist
Lewis frankly confronts the meaning of Serbian policies
in Bosnia.
Ryan Lizza, "A Final
Solution," The New Republic 220, 19 (May 10,
1999): 28-29.
Traces the origins of
eliminationist racism toward Kosovars and others, to the
writings of Serb intellectuals in the 1930s.
Rusmis Mahmutcehajic, The Denial
of Bosnia (University Park PA: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2000).
An extended polemic on the theme
that, while Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic and Croatia's
Franjo Tudjman (inexplicably spelled Tudman throughout
this book) primarily were responsible for the corrosive
spread of ethnic nationalism into what Mahmutcehajic
regards as the ancient Bosnian state and its tolerant,
multi-ethnic Bosniak culture, the European peace
negotiators also need to be blamed for accepting the
premise that a "Muslim" state is what a largely
secular Bosnian culture wanted, or needed. Witheringly
indicts negotiator David Owen, and Harvard political
scientist S. P. Huntington, as accomplices in the
transformation of Western consciousness of the Bosnian
situation from one of clear Serb aggression into one of
irreconcilable "clashing civilizations," a view
that demanded partition of Bosnia to contain these
intractable forces. An advocacy piece in the service of
multi-ethnicity, tolerance, and the end to nationalism in
the Balkans, and the intellectual laziness that abets it,
the book includes a dizzying array of maps and charts.
"Milosevic, Slobodan,"
from Current Biography Yearbook 1990: pp. 442-446.
Lists basic biographical
information and early career of the Serb leader;
curiously omits mention of the suicides of his parents.
Does cover the large influence of his wife on his
thinking.
Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short
History updated edition (NY: NYU Press, 2000).
Thorough, balanced history of
the disputed area and much of the Southern Balkans.
Effectively demonstrates the hollowness of the Serb claim
to Kosovo.
David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (NY: Harcourt Brace,
1995).
Assuming a reader has a rudimentary understanding of
what Bosnians, Croats and Serbs were doing to one another
in Bosnia, 1992-95, this diplomat's memoir adds details
about the involvement of outside powers in Bosnia's slow
descent into hell. Owen, a British former Foreign
Secretary, along with former U.S. Secretary of State
Cyrus Vance, traveled widely and met with most key
politicians of the European states, the European Union,
the former Yugoslavia, and the U.N. He shares the
atmosphere and content of those interactions; even
providing a timeline of what went on that closely
resembles his personal calendar. Modestly, Owen opines
"I am convinced that if President Bush had won
re-election in November 1992 there would have been a
settlement in Bosnia-Herzegovina in February 1993 on the
basis of the Vance-Owen Peace Plan..." (357). Europe
surely tried, he argues: "The member states of the
European Union and their Foreign Ministers did accept
responsibility and devoted much time and effort and
considerable resources... to help resolve the crisis in
the former Yugoslavia" (367). Once again, as in all
things apparently, Bill Clinton seems to be at fault:
"It was a tragedy that President Clinton did not
exercise leadership..." (358). Some rays of truth
penetrate through this partisan fog of European
self-exoneration, e.g. "The Bosnian Muslims
...suffered... by far the most the longer the war went
on" (365) and "prolonging the war meant
prolonging the Serbs' ethnic cleansing, prolonging the
casualties of war" (365). But the volume overall is
unsatisfying. Why is it that Europeans and Americans
cannot jointly accept that responsibility can be
equitably shared in this disaster?
David Rieff, "The Institution
that saw no evil," The New Republic (February
12, 1996): pp. 19-23.
Sharp indictment of the U.N. in
regard to Bosnia. Makes many of the same general points
as made in his book long Slaughterhouse (below),
but does so in more economical prose and with full
evidence of the Serb-run massacre of Muslims at
Srebrenica available to reinforce his points.
David Rieff, Slaughterhouse:
Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1995).
A searing, if disorganized,
indictment of the UN, and to a lesser degree, the entire
west in its dithering attention to genocide in Bosnia.
Unlike many strained academic commentaries, Rieff focuses
responsibility squarely on the Serbian leadership, in
Bosnia and elsewhere.
Michael G. Roskin, The Rebirth
of East Europe (Upper Saddle River NJ: Prentice Hall,
1997): 170-187.
A dated, brief overview of the
origins of Yugoslavia, the Balkan Wars of the pre-WWI
era, the "Fake State" of communism there
(1945-90), and the 1990s. In a mere seventeen pages
Roskin is able to conclude that "the truth is... all
sides committed atrocities in the fighting (but the
Bosnian Serbs committed more)" (p. 176). Though
published in 1997, the Dayton Accords of 1995 somehow
were still in the future, and the author's best guesses
on that theme, e.g. that Republika Srpska would formally
join Serbia, prove little guide to understanding what
will become of Bosnia or the region in the period after
Serbia's loss of Kosovo (June 1999) and the end of the
Milosevic dictatorship there (October 2000).
Serbian Academy of Sciences,
"Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences (SANU) of
1986," in From Stalinism to Pluralism: a documentary
history of Eastern Europe since 1945 , Gale Stokes, ed.,
second edition (NY: Oxford U.P., 1996): 275-280.
This famous manifesto from 1986
illustrates the support for Serbian nationalism and the
depth of resentment toward Yugoslavia among intellectuals
in Serbia long before the collapse of that socialist
state. Refers to the migration of Serbs from Kosovo as
"genocide," illustrating the paranoia and
exaggerated sense of victimhood of leading Serb
intellectuals in the 1980s.
Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia:
Death of a Nation (NY: Penguin, 1995).
Chronology organizes this tour
of the events c.1985-95 by Financial Times
correspondents. Directly parallel to the Discovery
Channel six part, six hour television series of the same
title. Strong on details, especially in 150 plus pages on
the period prior to the outbreak of fighting in Slovenia
and Croatia (1991). Analysis of the dozens of peace
plans, negotiations, etc. continues this focus on the
fine points, missing the somewhat larger patterns at
times. Encyclopedic in its nearly 400 pages of coverage,
the book anticipates a greater U.S. postwar role in what
it presciently titles its final chapter: Pax Americana.
Gale Stokes, ed., From Stalinism
to Pluralism: a documentary history of Eastern Europe since
1945 second edition (NY: Oxford UP, 1996): 275-80.
A book of original documents
from both major sides in the global Cold War over Eastern
Europe, including most of the most celebrated utterances
(e.g., the Brezhnev Doctrine). Yugoslavian coverage is
proportional to the wider scope of the volume, and
includes excerpts from the Stalin-Tito correspondence
leading to the 1948 split between the USSR and
Yugoslavia; Milovan Djilas' critique of the "New
Class" and other issues; the 1970s "Praxis
Group" (Marxist) critique. Of greatest value to
understanding post-Communist Yugoslavia are four
documents including the Constitution of Croatia, D. Rupel
on the Slovene National Question, and most significantly,
the Serbian Academy of Sciences' 1986 nationalist
"Memorandum" which widely is recognized for its
seminal role in rekindling Serbian nationalism, among
intellectuals and Marxist politicians.
Stacy Sullivan, "Milosevic's
Willing Executioners," The New Republic 220, 19
(May 10, 1999): 26-35.
Analyzes the basis for public
support for Milosevic and genocide among Serb
intellectuals. Usefully read alongside the Serbian
Academy of Sciences 1986 piece (above) and the Ryan Lizza
essay. Together they reinforce a view that tends to
demonstrate that a long pattern of Serb intellectuals'
support and Serb common people's support for extreme
nationalism.
Warren Zimmermann, Origins of a
Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and its Destroyers (New York:
Random House, 1996).
The book length memoir and
analysis by the last U.S. Ambassador to pre-war
Yugoslavia.
Warren Zimmerman, “The Last
Ambassador: A Memoir of the Collapse of Yugoslavia,” Foreign
Affairs (March/April 1995).
Reports the close ties between
Karadzic and Milosevic. Recounts US policy blunders in
the early 90s in a shorter version of the book
immediately above.