CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Kitty Genovese Incident and the War in Bosnia

I.

ON MARCH 13, 1964, a little after 3 a.m., a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Catherine Genovese returned home to her apartment at 82 – 70 Austin Street in the Kew Gardens section of Queens in New York City. She was the night manager of a bar in a nearby community. Austin Street was a middle-class, tree-lined avenue flanked by apartment houses whose ground floors were given over to retail stores. The building where “Kitty” Genovese, as she was called by almost everyone in the neighborhood, lived was one such apartment house, a mock-Tudor structure with storefronts bordering the main street and separate entryways along the side and back to the apartments above. Adjacent to the apartment house was a suburban train station and commuter parking lot, which fronted on Austin Street.¹

Kitty Genovese parked her car in the train station parking lot, turned off the car lights, locked the door, and started to walk the one hundred feet to her entryway. Apparently she noticed something that alarmed her, because she then turned away from the direction of her entryway and toward the street, walking rapidly up Austin Street, where a half block away there was a police call box. She got only as far as a streetlight in front of the neighborhood bookstore before a man caught up with her, grabbed her, struggled with her, and stabbed her. She screamed. Lights went on in the ten-story apartment house at 82 – 67 Austin Street that faced the bookstore. Kitty Genovese cried, “Oh my God, he stabbed me! Please help me, please help me.”

From one of the upper windows in the apartment house, a man called down, “Let that girl alone.” Other lights were turned on. The attacker fled back up Austin Street toward a white sedan parked in the commuter parking lot and he crouched there. No one from any of the apartment houses came down to the street. Kitty Genovese struggled to her feet and turned back, away from the call box, toward the side of the building by the parking lot beyond which her apartment lay. But before she could even get to the corner of the building, the assailant was on her again. She cried out, “I'm dying! I'm dying!” as he repeatedly stabbed her.

Windows were opened again and lights were turned on in many apartments. The attacker ran to his car, got in, and drove away. A city bus passed. It was 3:35 a.m. No one came to Kitty Genovese's aid from any of the buildings that overlooked Austin Street. She staggered to her feet, and again began to try to reach her apartment, which lay on the far side of the building from where she had been attacked. She was, however, now too weak to reach her entry. She made it about halfway, and unable to go further, she crawled under the stairs of another entry at 82 – 62 Austin Street, and tried to hide there. Her attacker, having circled the scene at a distance, then drove back again to the parking lot, got out of his car, and methodically searched the entryways until he found Kitty Genovese and fatally stabbed her. He returned to his car and departed. Still no one came to her assistance. Indeed it was not until almost 4 a.m. that a call was finally made to the police. Throughout the assault, not one person telephoned the police or any of the emergency services. The man who ultimately did call explained that he had only done so after much deliberation; in fact, he had asked a friend on Long Island for advice, and that person had persuaded him to call the police.

Over the next few days police took statements from thirty-eight persons who had witnessed the crime. The nation was stunned by the appalling account of so many bystanders doing nothing while such a brutal crime was committed. People groped for an explanation of what had happened. Why didn't her neighbors help Kitty Genovese? In 1964, many experts on human behavior were sought out to provide an explanation for the apparent apathy evident in the circumstances of the Genovese murder.

One psychiatrist attributed the tragedy to a constant feeling in New York that society was unjust. “It's in the air of all New York, the air of injustice… the feeling that you might get hurt if you act, whatever you do you will be the one to suffer.” A sociologist at Barnard College offered an alternative view: it was an example of the “disaster syndrome.” The result of witnessing a catastrophe such as a tornado or a murder destroyed the witnesses' feeling that the world was a rational place and resulted in an “affect denial” that caused them to withdraw psychologically from the event by ignoring it. Another psychiatrist proposed that it was the confusion of fantasy with reality, fed by the continual watching of television, that was responsible. “We underestimate the damage that these accumulated images do to the brain. The immediate effect can be delusional, equivalent to a post-hypnotic suggestion.”

A psychiatrist suggested that the murderer vicariously gratified the sadistic impulses of those who witnessed the murder. “Persons with mature and well-integrated personalities would not have acted in this way.”

Dr. Karl Menninger, the director of the Menninger Clinic, attributed the tragedy to “public apathy that is a manifestation of aggressiveness.” And one theologian suggested that “de-personalizing in New York had gone further than we realized,” to which he added, “Don't quote me.”

One is inclined to be skeptical about such “explanations.” They seem to provide, if they provide anything, a commentary on the world of the speaker more than the world of the event. And yet such shocking instances of bystander behavior are not uncommon, even if few of them are attended by the publicity of the Kitty Genovese murder. In January of 2000, a boy was beaten on a Boston bus while passengers looked on and did nothing.² In September of 2000, a woman was lured into a luxury apartment in a suburb of Fort Worth and murdered. Although all of the neighbors heard what one of them described as “piercing, gut-wrenching scream[s]” and listened for half an hour while the woman was murdered, nobody called the police.³

When such incidents occur, many explanations are put forward. “I would assign this to the effect of the megalopolis, which makes closeness very difficult,” said one psychoanalyst at the time of the Genovese killing. “Apathy” was cited by many commentators as an explanation. Also, some referred to a “lack of concern for our fellow man.” But the thirty-eight witnesses of Kitty Genovese's murder did not simply look at the scene once and then ignore it. Rather they continued to stare out their windows. One couple turned out their apartment lights to get a clearer view.

What does explain this? Some of the most fruitful psychological research into the subject of emergency intervention was undertaken as a consequence of the Genovese murder. Two psychologists, John Darley at Princeton University and Bibb Latane of Ohio State University, spent four years in a program of research into what determines bystander intervention in emergencies. In a remarkable series of experiments, staging “emergencies” in stores, offices, and laundromats, ranging from epileptic seizures to thefts and disorderly conduct, they managed to discredit virtually all the usual explanations. Darley and Latane hypothesized that the paralysis that seemed to grip bystanders resulted from what they called a “diffusion of responsibility” that occurred in situations as diverse as when a woman falls and sprains an ankle, smoke pours into a room through a ventilating system, or a cash register is robbed.

II.

Latane and Darley found that the crowd behavior in the Kitty Genovese case was very much like that of crowds in other emergency situations. Car accidents, drownings, fires, and attempted suicides all seem to attract bystanders who watched these dramas in helpless fascination. Riveted by the events, the bystanders were distressed and anxious, often full of remorse afterwards, but unwilling to act at the time. Their behavior was, as Latane and Darley put it, “[n]either helpful nor heroic; but it was not indifferent or apathetic either.”

In general, people in nonemergency situations are quite willing to help when asked. Why aren't we even more willing in emergencies, in which the need for help is so much greater? Darley and Latane concluded that it was something about the nature of emergencies and not some pathology of the individuals who made up the crowd that accounted for the bewildering disassociation of bystanders in such situations. Emergencies, by their very nature, often involve actual harm or the threat of harm. An emergency can cost the life not only of the victim but of the intervenor, and the result even of a successful intervention rarely makes anyone better off afterwards than before the emergency event. Moreover, emergencies are, by definition, anomalous and rare events. Few individuals are prepared by training or practice to know how to handle such situations. Emergencies are unforeseen, and arise suddenly without warning. The bystander does not have time for consultation because the emergency, of all events, requires immediate, urgent action. Nor does the individual confronting an emergency come face-to-face simply with a single choice, but rather with a whole series of determinations, which he or she must usually make alone, even in the midst of a crowd.

The bystander must notice that something is happening, and then interpret the event as a real emergency. Further, he must decide that he has some personal responsibility for coping with it. At each stage of this process, the ambiguity of the event can paralyze a bystander, who is then forced to recycle through the entire process of decision. Is the event really an assault or just a noisy disagreement between two lovers? Are those screams of terror or peals of excited, nervous laughter? One witness to the Genovese murder said, “We thought it was a lovers' quarrel and I went back to bed.” And if it is decided that the event really is an assault and some action ought to be taken, who should take it? Another witness to the events on Austin Street said, “I didn't want to get involved.” It wasn't his job: it was for the police, or for Kitty Genovese's friends—he didn't know the woman—or perhaps for the woman herself to get out of the jam in which she found herself. To be “involved” meant taking on incalculable risks: suppose the man was arrested and tried; the person who called the police would have to testify; suppose the murderer was acquitted; might he then come after the witness? And finally, what exactly is the thing to be done: by the time most people had sorted out the salient facts, it was probably too late for the police to be contacted, arrive on the scene, and intervene in time to save the woman's life. Yet the middle-aged onlookers were scarcely in a position to tackle an armed killer themselves. They were not trained to act in such situations, had no experience of such horrors, and really had no idea what to do. Most people who saw the Genovese murder said simply, “I don't know—I don't know why I didn't do anything.”

To summarize, we can say that there are five distinct stages through which the bystander must successively pass before effective action can be taken: (1) Notice: he must become aware that some unusual occurrence is taking place; (2) Recognition: he must be able to assess the event and define it as an emergency; (3) Decision: he must then decide that something must be done, that is, he must find a convincing reason for action to be taken; (4) Assignment: the bystander must then assign some person, himself or another, or some institution to be responsible for action; he must answer the question “who should act in these circumstances?” (5) Implementation: having decided what action should be taken, he must then see that it is actually done. If at any stage in this sequence a crucial ambiguity is introduced, then the whole process must begin again. The presence of ambiguity in urban life, not the callousness of urban dwellers, is precisely what makes emergency intervention in cities so problematic. In Johnson City, Texas, one is likely to know whether the man who has just slumped against the doorway is John, who recently had a coronary bypass, or Jack, the town drunk. In Queens, it is less likely that one knows, or that one can predict what will happen if one intervenes.

So it was with the horrifying events of the three years 1991 – 1994 in the former state of Yugoslavia: fascinated, frightened, appalled, the civilized world was anything but apathetic. And yet, like Kitty Genovese's murderer, the killers in Bosnia returned again and again, once the threat of outside intervention dissipated, leaving the rest of us as anguished bystanders.

Someday people will ask questions about the terrible crimes in Bosnia that are reminiscent of those asked after the murder of Kitty Genovese: How could the civilized, comfortable, and safe world have let those crimes happen? For much of the sequence of events in Bosnia has a parallel with the crimes on Austin Street, especially the pattern of aggression that falters when confronted but which returns when it is not suppressed, and also the pattern of rationalization that organizes our thinking, and prevents decisive action in emergencies. The results of Darley and Latane's research offer a key to understanding what went wrong for more than three years in Yugoslavia as well as what went wrong that night in Queens. And this understanding can yield insights into the nature of the society of nation-states, a society that was just as shaken by the horror it witnessed but did nothing to stop as was the small community of neighbors in Queens.

III.

When President Clinton said, mistakenly, that the current conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina goes back to the eleventh century, he exposed more than a careless speechwriter of dubious erudition; rather he showed that he was unable to appreciate just what had happened.

The war in Bosnia was the culmination of a constitutional implosion that occurred in Yugoslavia as a result of the collapse of a one-party Communist dictatorship and its replacement by means of media-dominated multiparty elections. This implosion propelled Slobodan Milosevic into the leadership of the Serbian Communist Party and his reinvention of the Party as the nationalist champion of Serbs. His subsequent actions, when coupled with a system of free elections in the federated states of Yugoslavia, led to the rapid secession of Slovenia and Croatia, which in turn led, finally, to the dismemberment of Bosnia. Four wars were fought—in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo—and four new states ultimately emerged from this constitutional and strategic process: Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro, and the Croatian-Bosnian Confederation.

There are two parts to this story. In the background is the history of the evolution of the Yugoslav state. In the foreground is the story of killers who came to Bosnia, at first timorously but murderously, and who were repeatedly frightened away by declarations on the part of the great powers, but who returned when these declarations proved to be mere threats. These killers returned, time and again, until 144,108 persons, including 16,795 children, had been murdered; 171,837 wounded (including 34,520 children), 12,290 disabled (including 1,879 children); in Sarajevo alone 10,436 were killed (of whom 1,592 were children). Not included are the statistics for the U.N.-declared “safe areas” of Srebrenica or Zepa, where the figures for massacres conducted by Serbian forces in the presence of U.N. peacekeepers were not complete as of this writing.⁴ As will be seen, the constitutional metamorphoses that the Yugoslav state underwent are intimately connected to the slaughter and degradation of the Bosnian Muslims, leading finally to the discrediting of the United Nations and the Wilsonian system of international law.

But first we must acquaint ourselves with some background information: the history of the Yugoslav nation-state, its national composition, and then a more detailed year-by-year recitation of the events from 1991 to 1995.

The post-Versailles constitution of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes of 1921 provided for a parliamentary democracy. This state located its capital in Belgrade and was quickly dominated by Serbs, to the disadvantage of Croat political groups. In 1928 Stjepan Radich, the Croat political leader, was shot to death on the floor of the National Assembly. The following year King Alexander dissolved the parliament, suspended the constitution, and seized absolute power. In Croatia a separatist group was formed, the notorious Ustasa, which assassinated Alexander in 1934. When the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, the Ustasa allied with the invaders and governed that portion of the country it was able to pacify. The Ustasa forced Orthodox Christians to convert to Roman Catholicism, rounded up Jews, and massacred about 400,000 Serbs. This post-Versailles, fascist campaign was the first occasion of a war between Serbs and Croats. It is not true that there is a long history of conflict between these native Balkan groups.

In addition to the claim that the recent wars in Yugoslavia are a continuation of an ancient conflict, it is often said that the war in Bosnia is an ethnic war. This too tends to obscure the issue, exaggerating the strangeness and the intractability of the conflict's sources. One way to appreciate the cultural history of the Balkans is to imagine three great cultural tectonic plates that come together there. To the west is the inheritance of Rome: the experience of the Renaissance, the Roman Catholic Church, the entire collection of attitudes that we think of as “Western.” From the east, the legacy is Byzantine: Eastern Orthodox in religion, authoritarian in politics. From the south comes the Islamic tradition brought to Europe by the Turks.

These three cultural plates divide what is ethnically a single people, the Slavs of the southern peninsula. All the Yugoslav groups in the war— Croats, Serbians, and Muslims—speak the same language, have the same genetic characteristics, and are to a very large degree intermarried. Indeed, until the twentieth century Croats and Serbs collaborated to fight the Turks and to free themselves from the Austro-Hungarian empire. The Muslims, whom the Serbian terrorists are fond of calling “Turks,” are in fact generally believed to be descendants of Bogomil Christians who suffered forcible conversion at the hands of the Ottoman Turks.

To say that this is an “ethnic conflict” is thus not quite right. There are no “ethnic Muslims” and in a strict sense there are really no ethnic Serbs or Croats, unless you think that Catholic Anglo-Canadians and Protestant Anglo-Americans are “ethnically” distinct. Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, and Muslims in all of these states are all Slavs: indeed the word “Yugoslavia” means “the land of the South Slavs.”

Serbian resistance to the Nazis and the Ustasa was initially led by Draza Mihailovic with military support by the British. This group was known as the Chetniks. After the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany in the summer of 1941, a communist insurgency known as the Partisans arose. This force, led by Josip Broz, was more successful than the Chetniks against the Nazis and Croats. Eventually Broz's partisans were armed and supported by the British, despite the fact that the arms were often used against the former allies of the British—the Mihailovic forces—and were ultimately, and predictably, used to seize power for the Communists after the war.

Broz, whose partisan name was “Tito,” ruled a brutal police state from 1945 until 1980. His conflicts with Stalin, however, and his position as a leader of the world nonaligned movement made him an attractive figure to many in the West. Moreover, because he was a Communist Croat, he seemed to bridge the conflicts of the Yugoslav experience in the Second World War. For these reasons, perhaps, the extent of his postwar domestic violence was greatly underappreciated by the international community.

Because Yugoslavia faced the virtual certainty of invasions by both the Warsaw Pact and NATO should war between those two alliances break out, Yugoslavia built up a well-equipped, well-supplied, modernized armored force. About half the federal budget of Yugoslavia went to the National Army (JNA). The officer corps was two-thirds Serbian, and the bureaucratic apparatus of the Communist Party and the organs of state were also dominated by Serbs.

Under Tito, Yugoslavia became again a federation of six republics. These boundaries roughly conformed to the ancient provinces that had existed in this region since the Middle Ages, but they did not strictly conform to any particular cultural division. Indeed, Serbia itself is only about 80 percent Serbian; Bosnia has no clear majority, being somewhat less than half Muslim. In 1974 Tito took constitutional steps to give more authority to the republics. It is this constitution that set the context for the conflict of the 1990s, because the controversial constitutional rearrangement of 1974 was in place when the shattering events of the late 1980s swept away the communist governments of Eastern and Central Europe. In addition to devolving power from Belgrade to the six capitals, the 1974 constitution granted autonomous authority to two provinces within Serbia itself. Kosovo (largely Albanian in makeup with a Serbian minority), and Vojvodina (largely Hungarian with a Serbian minority) border on Albania and Hungary, respectively. Granting them political autonomy was deeply resented by Serbia, and there were frequent reports in the Serbian media of mistreatment of the Serbian minorities in these two provinces.

In 1980 Tito died, and the federal presidency now circulated among the presidents of each of the six republics. Six years later, the Serbian Communist leader Slobodan Milosevic came to power in Belgrade. He saw that his future leadership and the future of Serbia lay not with the crumbling Communist powers in Central and Eastern Europe but rather, paradoxically, in the ethnically fraught province of Kosovo. It was in Kosovo that the Albanian majority, which is Muslim by religion, had been harassing Serbs and driving them out by various means. In 1987, Milosevic got control of the Serbian press, and he immediately made Kosovo the centerpiece of his campaign. The state-controlled press repeated a drumbeat of atrocity stories in which Albanian Muslims in Kosovo were reported to have terrorized minority Serbs. That same year Milosevic went to Kosovo and after an all-night mass meeting with Serbs in the province dramatically promised them that “nobody would ever beat the Serb again.” During the next two years, Milosevic organized a pan-Serb movement and sponsored solidarity meetings throughout Yugoslavia on the pretext of helping the embattled Kosovo Serbs. In 1988 Milosevic was able to seize control of the Kosovo government and force the Albanian leaders to resign in the face of mob violence. Later these leaders were arrested. He then turned his attention to Vojvodina, where he was able to replicate his Kosovo campaign with an “antibureaucratic revolution” aimed at the provincial government.

In the spring of 1990, elections following the disintegration of the single-party system in Yugoslavia brought nationalists to power in Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia. Thus by the time the Communist Party collapsed in 1990 Milosevic had been able to segue from his position as head of the Serbian Communist Party to a new role as the leader of the Serbian nation. In Croatia the Croatian extremist Franco Tudjman, formerly a henchman of Tito, came to power on a platform of secession from the Yugoslav state.

In May of 1991, Milosevic sent the JNA into Kosovo and Vojvodina, effectively ending their autonomous status and turning them into police states. These measures redeemed his pledge to reunite a Serbia divided by the 1974 constitution.⁵ Public demonstrations staged by Milosevic had already ousted the Montenegrin party leadership in 1989 and installed a Milosevic ally in power there. Serbia now controlled four out of the eight votes governing the federal presidency. Milosevic then refused to permit the Croat president to rotate into the Yugoslav presidency, as provided by the constitution. All this had the effect of completely unsettling the populations in the other Yugoslav provinces. It appeared that Milosevic had hit upon an effective strategy for turning the Yugoslav constitution into an instrument by means of which he could create a Serbian state. That same month the Croatians voted overwhelmingly in favor of independence, as had Slovenia the preceding December. Initially the two republics had sought greater autonomy within Yugoslavia, but Milosevic had blocked this; now the experiences of Kosovo and Vojvodina gave fresh impetus to complete secession.

On June 25, 1991, Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence from the state of Yugoslavia. This set off a brief war between Slovenia and the JNA, and a protracted war in Croatia between the newly independent government of Croatia and the Serbian minority, supported by the JNA. The ten-day war in Slovenia ended in mid-July with the withdrawal of the JNA and the transfer of full-scale hostilities to Croatia. In August a Serbian revolt in Croatia broke out in Dalmatia and around Knin.

Serb minorities believed they faced real dangers in Croatia along the coast of the Adriatic, and above the northern tip of Bosnia, on the border between Serbia and Croatia, and in a land-locked enclave about seventy miles west of Serbia. Here the Serbs had experienced some of the worst atrocities of World War II, and here they now followed with apprehension the rabid nationalist campaigns of Tudjman. When war finally came to Croatia, it was largely owing to Milosevic's success in portraying his struggle for “Serb rights” as part of the constitutional campaign to preserve Yugoslavia. This brought the JNA into Croatia on the side of the Croatian Serbs. Local Serb tactics in Krajina, a Serbian enclave in Croatia, engaged Croat forces in armed conflict, thereby enabling the JNA to intervene, claiming to separate the parties, but in effect, protecting and arming the insurgent Serbs. In the midst of the Serbian/JNA campaign in Croatia, the Bosnian Serbs set up their own parliament. By August, one-third of Croatia had fallen to the Serbs and Croatia had been stripped of its federal weapons and munitions.

Thus the war in Croatia was significantly different from that in Slovenia. It was driven by Serb secessionists who wished to dismember Croatia, not by Croatian secessionists who wanted to leave Yugoslavia. Or, to put it differently, “[u]ltimately the war in Croatia, and later in Bosnia, was not so much a war of secession but a war provoked and waged by Serb nationalists and the Yugoslav army to establish a new Yugoslavia with new international borders.”⁶ It was a crucial mistake for the West to credit Milosevic's assertions that the state of Yugoslavia persisted at this point, allowing him to lay claim to the enormous magazines and matériel stationed in Slovenia on the northern border of Yugoslavia, where a Cold War invasion had been anticipated, and permitting him to return these stores to Serbia. But other European countries were pleased to have stopped the fighting in Slovenia through the Brioni Agreement and sympathized with Milosevic's protest that he had thereby lost a wealthy and important province. In fact, Milosevic was only too happy to see Slovenia go. This development now gave him a majority of 4 – 3 in the federal presidency, allowed him to quiet fears about German intervention on behalf of Slovenia, and permitted him to turn his attentions to Croatia. Unlike Slovenia, which had a small Serb minority, Croatia had about 600,000 Serbs living in four separated areas.

In the summer of 1991, following the end of the war in Slovenia, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands proposed sending a ground force to Yugoslavia. Reports of atrocities in Slavonia and other parts of Croatia were coming out of the now-collapsed state. Britain, however, resolutely opposed all efforts at sending troops and on September 19 was able to broker a statement on behalf of the European Community to the effect that no military intervention by E.C. states was contemplated. Within days, the Serbs unleashed massive attacks on various points in southern Croatia. The ancient and defenseless Adriatic city of Dubrovnik was shelled from the sea under the eyes of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, which duly reported each salvo but did not interfere. At the same time the Serbs began the siege of Vukovar, which was to prove a model for future campaigns. During the shelling of Dubrovnik, Serbian naval forces had been markedly anxious out of fear that the overwhelming power of the U.S. carrier task force that shadowed them might be used to destroy their attacking vessels. When nothing happened, the Serbs were emboldened. When the city of Vukovar surrendered in November, its inhabitants were massacred by Serb irregulars, and several hundred wounded Croatian soldiers were taken from a hospital in Vukovar, shot in a field, and buried in a mass grave. International forensic experts were subsequently denied access.⁷

In September the European Community sponsored a peace conference at The Hague. Lord Carrington was appointed by the European Union (as the E.C. became in November 1993), and in October he began efforts at mediation. This greatly respected figure saw the conflict as a reprise of the World War II Serb-Croat fighting. Both sides were equally culpable, and the trick was to contain the bloodshed through partition. That same month, Britain suggested to Serbia that it seek an arms embargo covering all the states of Yugoslavia. Perhaps it was thought in London that by this means any illusions about breaking away from Yugoslavia would be stilled in Bosnia, or at least that the parties would quickly come to terms with Serbia because without arms it would be futile to oppose the well-equipped JNA. In any event, in September the United Nations Security Council duly imposed an arms embargo against all the states of the former Yugoslavia.

In January 1992 the U.N. envoy Cyrus Vance achieved a negotiated cease-fire, and U.N. peacekeepers were stationed in Croatia to monitor compliance with the agreement. In accordance with the U.N. cease-fire, the JNA withdrew from Croatia. It proceeded to turn over its weapons* to the Bosnian Serbs, and Serbian/JNA heavy artillery took up positions around the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. The former states of Yugoslavia now braced for the third Yugoslav war—in Bosnia, where the Serbs now had a monopoly on heavy and advanced weaponry, while the Bosnian government was constrained from obtaining arms by the international embargo.

Near the end of the previous year, Bosnia had been forced to confront the possibility that it would have to withdraw from the Yugoslav federation. The Bosnian president, the former anti-Communist dissident Izetbe-govic, had traveled to Ljubljana and Zagreb on countless missions desperately trying to get the Slovenes and Croats to stay in the federation. The last thing the Bosnian leadership wanted was to face new independent states in Serbia and Croatia that could carry their war into Bosnia in order to incorporate areas with substantial Croat and Serb populations. The multicultural state of Bosnia could only survive within the umbrella of the Yugoslav federation. Milosevic, however, had methodically destroyed this option. The Hague peace conference had given an offer of E.C. recognition to any republic that met certain criteria for statehood; when Croatia and Slovenia prepared for independence, the Bosnians realized they could not remain in a federation virtually alone with Milosevic. Bosnia could not risk becoming the Kosovo or Vojvodina of the 1990s.

In January 1992 the E.C., after considerable debate and over Carrington's objections, recognized Croatian and Slovenian independence. The E.C. deferred action on Bosnia pending a referendum. Bosnia then held a referendum on independence in March. In an election boycotted by the Bosnian Serbs, 65 percent voted for statehood.

By April, there were reports of widespread shootings and bombings in Banja Luka and Mostar by Serb irregulars.⁸ The JNA announced it was necessary to intervene in Bosnia to protect Serbs. In the first six weeks of the Bosnian war that ensued, Serb forces, using the JNA command structure and weapons, seized about 60 percent of Bosnia. Bosnian Croats took another 15 percent. The Bosnian army itself was without JNA weapons and, in an absurd gesture aimed at reducing tensions, had voluntarily given up its territorial arms.

On April 27, Milosevic declared a new Yugoslav state composed of Serbia and Montenegro. On May 22, Bosnia was admitted to the U.N. as a member state along with Yugoslavia, Slovenia, and Croatia. Milosevic declared that all federal troops had been withdrawn from Bosnia; in June a report of the Secretary General of the U.N. also claimed that there were no Serbian soldiers in Bosnia. While this may have been formally true—JNA soldiers were “released” to join the Bosnian Serb army—it was not the reality. Indeed as James Gow noted:

The continuing presence in Bosnia after independence of the JNA, loyal to Belgrade, meant that although there were significant incursions across the River Drina between Serbia and Bosnia, there were also 80,000 troops already based in Bosnia.⁹

In 1992, the Bosnian Serbs set up a gulag of prison camps and detention facilities holding tens of thousands of Muslims and Croats. International investigators were denied access, though escapees described atrocities that they claimed were perpetrated in these camps. In the summer of 1992, an intrepid Newsday reporter penetrated one of the Serbian concentration camps, verifying these claims and exposing horrors that Europe had not seen since 1945. These exposés prompted Governor Bill Clinton to say on August 5, during his campaign for the presidency, “If the horrors of the Holocaust taught us anything, it is the high cost of remaining silent and paralyzed in the face of ethnic cleansing.” The next day, asked what he proposed, he stated, “We cannot afford to ignore what appears to be a deliberate and systematic extermination of human beings based on their ethnic origin; I would start with air power against the Serbs.”¹⁰

In response to mounting public outcry, the United Nations Security Council voted to send U.N. peacekeepers to Bosnia. Although it was estimated that 35,000 troops would be required for this mission, less than 7,000 were sent, largely drawn from British, French, Canadian, and Dutch forces. The arrival of U.N. troops was greeted with euphoria in Bosnia. Serb forces halted their attacks for a time in order to determine what effect the U.N. presence in Bosnia would have. These forces proved, along with the U.N. arms embargo, to be a fatal addition to the Bosnian equation. Now the Europeans—particularly the British—would be able to veto any actions against the Serbs on the grounds that U.N. or NATO armed action exposed their peacekeepers to reprisals.

In October 1992 Cyrus Vance, representing the U.N., and David Owen, who had replaced Lord Carrington for the E.C., proposed a new peace-keeping plan. It effectively recognized the ground gains by the Serbian forces and carved up Bosnia into various enclaves. The U.S. ceased supporting the no-fly zone which the British in December had argued against enforcing in any case—and which, though adopted by the Security Council in October 1992, would not actually be enforced until April 1993 by NATO—and began looking to the Vance-Owen Plan as offering a way out. Milosevic urged the Bosnian Serbs to accept the Vance-Owen Plan, and the United States strongly advised the Bosnian Muslims to agree, despite some misgivings over the Plan's apparent validation of Serbian territorial aggression.

In February 1993 the new American secretary of state, Warren Christopher, said that the “full weight of American diplomacy [would be brought] to bear” to win acceptance of the Vance-Owen peace plan that left the Bosnians only a fraction of their national territory. When the Bosnians were eventually coerced by the Americans into agreeing to the plan, the Bosnian Serbs rejected it. The Serbs saw no reason to give up any of their gains. Indeed, now the killing began in earnest as Serbs tried to garner new territory that might be converted at the diplomatic table into legitimate possession by another international peace plan. A new term had entered the world's lexicon: “ethnic cleansing.” This phrase was applied to the Serbian strategy of terrorizing the countryside in order to drive Muslims into surrounded and shelled cities. In this they were inadvertently encouraged by the United States, which had pressed for acceptance of a plan that ratified Serbian ground gains.

In May 1993, Christopher began referring to the conflict as a Yugoslav civil war, despite the fact that Bosnia had been a member of the U.N. for more than a year by that time. The U.S., downplaying allegations of Serbian atrocities, now said that all parties shared responsibility for human rights violations. The New York Times noted in April 1993 that the Clinton administration had “begun to talk about Bosnia differently, to cast the problem there less as a moral tragedy which would make American inaction immoral—and more as a tribal feud that no outsider could hope to settle.” The president explained the difficulty of getting agreement on a peace plan by observing that “I would think these fights between the Serbs and the Bosnian Muslims and the Croats go back so many centuries, they have such powerful roots that it may be that it's more difficult for the people to make a change than for their leaders.”

In May the Contact Group—formed by the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Russia—proposed a plan of safe areas into which the fleeing Muslims could go for protection, and in June the Security Council agreed to secure these areas by “all necessary measures,” including military force. The six “safe areas” announced by the U.N. Security Council were Sarajevo, Zepa, Bihac, Srebrenica, Tuzla, and Gorazde. Phillippe Morillon, the U.N. commander, negotiated an accord by which the Muslim defenders of Srebrenica handed over their weapons. He proclaimed that “an attack on Srebrenica now would be an attack on the whole world” and stated, “I will never leave you.” For a brief period, attacks on Srebrenica, swollen with refugees driven into the town by Serb offensives in the countryside, halted. But on May 14, 1993, President Clinton stated that “[o]ur interest is in seeing, in my view at least, that the U.N. does not foreordain the outcome of a civil war,” and Morillon withdrew to Sarajevo, where he was removed by the U.N. secretary-general, and was ultimately replaced by the more tractable British general, Michael Rose.

These events had the effect of encouraging the Serb forces in Bosnia to step up the violence and press their claims more aggressively, which puzzled and bewildered the rest of the world, including the United States. Although the Serbs seemed so unreasonable, in fact they were simply responding to the incentives offered by peace plans that recognized whatever they could take on the ground. No one seemed to appreciate that such encouragement was precisely what at least one state, the United Kingdom, actually had in mind because it believed that further resistance by the Bosnians was doomed and that the sooner the war was over and Bosnia partitioned along lines that recognized the military realities, the better for all concerned. Only the Americans appeared to have clung to the illusion that the Serbs would come around to the Vance-Owen Plan, or something like it, because the international community was united in proposing it and because the Serbs would not wish to defy the great powers indefinitely.

In one day in July 1993, 3,777 artillery shells fell on Sarajevo, a U.N.designated “safe area” and part of the “heavy weapons exclusion zone” announced by the Contact Group.* President Clinton, in Asia for an economic summit, was enraged and asked his national security advisor to submit a plan to break the siege. But the Pentagon plan that resulted called for 80,000 troops, and this was thought politically unsupportable; the president had hoped perhaps 10,000 would be enough, and he dropped the idea. Then on October 20, 1993, he announced that “the conflict in Bosnia is ultimately for the parties to resolve” and repeated this later, saying: “Until these folks get tired of killing each other… bad things will continue to happen.”

On February 4, 1994, a mortar attack on a Sarajevo market killed sixty-eight and injured another two hundred. Again public opinion was outraged by events—Sarajevo had been under siege for almost two years at this point—and again a weapons exclusion zone around Sarajevo was proclaimed. A small number of NATO air strikes occurred, and the Serbs actually turned over heavy weapons within the zone. For a period, the daily bombardment of Sarajevo ceased. Citizens of the besieged town could walk rather than run across streets raked by sniper fire. The Serbs regrouped to determine how to continue their siege without their heavy weapons. But the U.N. troops, lightly armed and dispersed, were effectively captives of the Serbs, and the U.N. commander, General Rose, could not bring himself to call on NATO for further support that might risk retaliation against his troops. U.S. proposals for the use of force against the Serbs were repeatedly vetoed by the U.N. Political Counselor, who reported to the U.N. Secretary-General, and the weapons turned over during this period were later simply reclaimed by the Serbs. In April, only two months later, Rose sent troops to Gorazde, one of the six safe areas, but was compelled to allow them to be disarmed by the Serbs. On April 23, President Clinton demanded that the Serbs cease shelling Gorazde, stating that if this did not happen, NATO would conduct “massive air strikes,” including “strategic targets.”¹¹ The Serbs appear to have learned not to credit such threats and replied by taking U.N. peacekeepers hostage; when this occurred, NATO action was canceled. In May, Tuzla, another safe area, was shelled, killing seventy in a single day. On May 3, 1994, the President stated, obviously disheartened, and unable despite repeated efforts to move his allies, “I did the best I could. I moved as quickly as I could. I think we have shown a good deal of resolve.”¹²

In the ensuing year, safe areas at Gorazde, Zepa, and Srebrenica were all isolated, bombarded, and put under siege, and a fourth safe area, Tuzla, was also again attacked. On June 5, 1995, an anguished president said, “It's tragic, it's terrible. But these enmities go back five hundred years. Do we have the capacity to impose a settlement on people who want to continue fighting? We cannot do that. So I believe we're doing the right thing.” Then on July 11, 1995, 400 Dutch peacekeepers watched as Srebrenica, one of the “safe areas,” was overrun and “sanitized” by occupying Serbs. Approximately 8,200 men and an undetermined number of women were trucked out by the Serbs and murdered, many within the hearing of the Dutch forces allegedly deployed to protect them. This left Sarajevo itself, Gorazde (which was now cut off from the outside), Bihac, and Zepa surrounded.

Finally in August of 1995 another mortar attack on the Sarajevo market galvanized public opinion. Seven shells fell within ten minutes, killing 37 persons and wounding 84. The next day U.N. peacekeepers deserted Gorazde, which ironically was a necessary step to true protection of the safe area. Rose's successor as commander, General Rupert Smith, asked for NATO air strikes, and following a two-week series of air and artillery strikes on Serb positions, the Serb campaign against Gorazde was halted and the siege of Sarajevo was finally lifted. Croatian forces entered the war in September and relieved the safe area at Bihac, driving about 100,000 civilian Serbs out of Croatia in a Croatian variant of ethnic cleansing. An agreement was forced upon the parties by the United States at an air force base in Dayton, Ohio. The agreement was subject to all the vagaries of hostilities in Bosnia and politics in the United States, but it soon became clear that the killing of Muslims had almost completely stopped as a result of the combined efforts of NATO Rapid Reaction Force shelling, the Croatian offensive, and U.S. air intervention. Despite some constitutional legerdemain on the part of U.S. negotiators, the country was effectively partitioned, owing to the unwillingness of the West to enforce the guarantees of the agreement that provide for repatriation of those systematically driven from their homes. The hardest days, diplomatically, lay ahead over communities like Brcko that link disparate enclaves of Serbs, and complications arising from the U.S.-contrived Croatian-Muslim federation. The murder of Muslim civilians with JNA heavy weapons, however, had been stopped by air and artillery strikes that took only about fourteen days and incurred not a single American casualty.

IV.

Darley and Latane's work can usefully be applied to the Bosnian emergency by examining the various stages that the bystander goes through before actually acting. With some slight reworking of their categories, I take there to be five stages: notice, definition, decision, assignment, and implementation. The bystander's attention must be forcibly drawn to the event so that she realizes something unusual is happening (notice); she must then recognize the event as an emergency, and not simply an ordinary event that appears to be an emergency (definition); she must then find conclusively good reasons for action (decision); and then determine who should act (assignment); and finally commit to some particular action and see that it is done (implementation). If an ambiguity is introduced at any stage—“Did I actually hear someone cry for help, or was that the sound of the television in the next room?” —the decision procedure is aborted and the cycle must begin all over again. This anxious cycling, not apathy, is what Darley and Latane found to be the state of mind of the persons who failed to intervene in the Kitty Genovese case. In the example of Bosnia, there were frequent efforts by government officials to introduce ambiguities into the debate, no doubt because these officials had real doubts themselves as to the true nature of the facts, but also because they wished to deflect public calls for action that they believed would be futile or counter-productive, while the Serbs maintained what might well be called a “strategy of ambiguity” in order to prevent Western intervention.

NOTICE: GETTING OUR ATTENTION

There are two parallel institutions, among others, that operate to bring the events of an emergency to our attention: the news media and the intelligence agencies. The latter's work is almost exclusively confined to alerting public officials, but the former, though they deal with the mass of the public, are no less powerful in moving official opinion, partly because officials must cope with public opinion shaped by the news media. Furthermore, there is some interplay between the intelligence product and the stories reported by journalists: intelligence reports can be leaked, or tailored to give a distorted picture to the press for political reasons.

American officials appear to have been well served by their intelligence agencies in having the looming crisis in Yugoslavia brought to their attention early on, and we may assume that the agencies of other states were also monitoring the situation. In 1990 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) correctly predicted the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia; at the beginning of 1992, with diplomatic attention focused on negotiations to achieve a cease-fire in the Second Yugoslav War (in Croatia), the CIA foresaw that the Third Yugoslav War (the war in Bosnia) ¹³ was about to begin. Moreover, the CIA also predicted that recognition of Bosnia might serve as a pretext for war against that state, absent some larger effort at containing or deterring the aggressive JNA and the Serbs. Finally, according to several former officials, the State Department was aware of the existence of Serbian detention centers for Bosnian Muslims as early as April of 1992, and by June had confirmed reports of torture and concentration camps.¹⁴

The American public and the publics of other concerned countries did not have access to these reports, of course, but they were nevertheless kept informed of events in Bosnia by televised and print journalism. There really can be no doubt that Cable News Network (CNN) was an influential factor in bringing the crisis to the attention of the public. This has also been the case in other emergencies: the spectacles of starvation in Somalia and mass slaughter in Rwanda are two recent examples of events that simply would not have been noticed in earlier periods. The “CNN Effect”— the jolt to public opinion given by televised attention to foreign crises—is now beyond question.* One can see this in the preoccupation of the public with events in Somalia, but not in the Sudan, in Haiti but not in Liberia, in Chechnya but not in Nagorno-Karabakh. In the first of each pair, the public was made to notice that something unusual and dramatic was happening; in the second, owing to the difficulty of getting televised coverage of events there, the public was not provided the same riveting and anguishing images, with the result that a great number of people simply never “noticed” those events.

In Bosnia this can be well illustrated by the televised accounts of three separate bombings of Sarajevo. In the course of the siege, more than 600,000 shells fell on a civilian capital with no significant military production. But it was three bombings of marketplaces that somehow stirred the public imagination.¹⁵ In 1992 one such bombing led directly to U.N. economic sanctions against Serbia and Montenegro. In February 1994 a market bombing, which killed sixty-nine, prompted NATO to issue an ultimatum for Serbs to withdraw their heavy artillery. Finally, in August 1995, it was the bombing of a Sarajevo market by Serb mortars, which killed thirty-seven and wounded eighty-four, to which NATO responded with the bombing and artillery campaign that broke the siege of the city. One can only speculate about the reasons for such a reaction. After all, libraries, mosques, hospitals, and schools in Sarajevo had all been targeted and hit by the Serbs; what was it about the bombing of a market that seemed to hit a nerve in public opinion? Perhaps it had to do with the televised images such bombing provided. Unlike the scenes of bombed-out buildings, the photos of the market, with colorful clothes strewn among the vegetables and fruit stalls, the paving stones still wet and vivid with blood, provided disturbing yet compelling images. It was possible to televise such an atrocity only moments after it had occurred, with the shock still visible on the faces of the victims, and the wounded and dying bodies in disarray in what was otherwise a familiar and domestic setting. Shopping in an open-air market is so innocent and pleasant an act, so tied to bringing home food for a family, that its violent disruption is bound to capture our attention and shake our complacency.

While the effect of televised images is hard to overstate, I am inclined to believe that it was the print media that were most effective at bringing the public to a recognition that events in Bosnia demanded their attention. This was done in three ways: first, by deepening the significance of the televised images through the evocative writing of journalists pointing out the cultural and historic importance of ethnic cleansing; second, by exposing governments in acts that were designed to obscure public notice of these events; third, by casting doubt on the role of other media, especially the Milosevic-controlled Serb media organs.

On September 22, 1991, during the war in Croatia, the New York Times wrote in an editorial:

Destruction on this scale has no precedent in Europe since Nazi Germany's vengeful “Baedeker” raids on English cathedral cities in 1942, and the Allied firebombing of Dresden… The loss of life in Yugoslavia is tragic. It piles horror upon horror to engage as well in cultural extermination.¹⁶

The Washington Post picked up this theme when the war in Bosnia began, publishing on October 16, 1992, this passage:

The atrocity of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia is apparently an even more thorough business than the evidence of widespread murder, deportations and brutality would indicate… Serbian attacks… have purposely and successfully targeted national libraries, museums and archives… a kind of “ethnic cleansing” that adds a chilling new dimension to the atrocities that now dominate the news.¹⁷

Articles of this kind added depth to the CNN reporting by asking the public to notice a dimension of the emergency that is hard to picture on television, the cultural aspect of the ethnic cleansing of the Serbian campaigns.

The New York Times was also willing to expose efforts by the U.S. government to avoid notice. On August 27, 1992, the Times* charged that the State Department had purposefully not tried to confirm reports of Serbian ethnic cleansing for fear of triggering the Genocide Convention. On December 20, 1992, the Times reported that, having received reports in the spring of concentration camps where Muslims were tortured and murdered, “Washington did not press for immediate investigation of the camps. Instead, it tried to keep the reports from becoming public.” It was not until the summer of 1992 that a reporter was able to visit the camps and publish testimony of murders and atrocities. Even then, “the U.S. [merely] expressed concern and insisted that the Red Cross be allowed into the camps. It said nothing about freeing those imprisoned or punishing the perpetrators.” Le Monde reported that the United Nations had attempted to suppress its own report for more than a year showing that “Serbs alone have pursued ethnic cleansing as a planned and systematic government policy.”¹⁸

Finally, print media called attention to the role of the media itself in creating Serbian fanaticism and in attempting to prevent the world from noticing the crisis. The Times in an editorial published November 7, 1992, pointed out that when the JNA began the siege of Sarajevo one of the first targets of their bombardment was the television tower that allowed Bosnia's independent, multiethnic TV station to broadcast. Milosevic's media campaigns were widely noted, including the observation by the Times that “a climate of hate did not exist throughout Yugoslavia before warmongers created it, partly by manipulating the news.”

At first, intelligence reporting and official reaction seemed to be in synch. As early as September 1991—three months after the outbreak of the First Yugoslav War (in Slovenia)—Secretary of State James Baker denounced the JNA for “actively supporting local Serbian forces… causing the deaths of citizens it is constitutionally supposed to protect” and went before the U.N. Security Council to say that “the Serbian leadership” and the JNA were “working in tandem [to] create a ‘small Yugoslavia' or ‘greater Serbia.’” But it simply wasn't clear that events in Yugoslavia, which had successfully been brought to the attention of world leaders and their publics, constituted a real emergency—a systematically organized mass killing—and should be understood that way. Instead, for a long time it appeared that preserving the Yugoslav state in its entirety could stave off a true emergency. As a result, some eight months after Slovenia made its first formal move toward secession, the United States and the E.C. member states, as well as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), were still voicing continued support for a unified state under Belgrade. Baker asserted that the United States would not recognize the independence of Slovenia and Croatia “under any circumstances.” When independence was declared by the two republics, “[b]oth the Bush administration, through the personal visit to Belgrade… of Secretary of State James Baker, and the members of the European Community… warned Slovenia and Croatia that they will find neither diplomatic recognition nor economic assistance following a unilateral decision on their part to quit the Yugoslav system and declare themselves independent.”¹⁹

Thus it was obviously not enough to merely notice, as Baker clearly did. There also had to be a recognition of emergency, and this required an understanding of the situation that, for a long time, eluded the United States and its European allies.

DEFINITION: RECOGNIZING AS AN EMERGENCY

This recognition was long in coming. Indeed, several ideas were deployed, at different times, to effect what the Washington Post called “a flight from reality” and a condition of “denial.”²⁰ Perhaps the most potent of these was that the conflict in Bosnia was a “civil war” and thus part of the normal evolution of state formation. Events worthy of notice were taking place, perhaps, but they did not constitute a true emergency. The appropriate use of the term “siege” was debated, with the inference that Sarajevo and other surrounded and bombarded cities were not really under siege because their citizens could have fled, quite consistently with the mission of the Serbs (who were more than happy to see them go), and were restrained from leaving either by fear or by actions of the Bosnian government that tried to keep its beleaguered citizens from deserting the capital. The Balkans were often described as a place with a long history of unfathomable violence, implying that war in Bosnia was really not so out of the ordinary. Finally, for a period there was doubt cast upon the persistent rumors of a network of Serb concentration camps, including specifically rape camps.

Henry Kissinger was among those who took the view that Bosnia was not “a true nation” and had no specific cultural identity; rather it was a kind of no-man's-land where rival ethnic groups vied for power. The war in Bosnia “is a civil war,” he wrote, “not an invasion of a sovereign country by a neighbor. Croatia and Serbia support their nationals inside Bosnia, though Serbian assistance is most flagrant.”²¹

If it was a civil war, however, precisely against the government of what state were the insurgent forces fighting, Bosnia being no “true” nation-state?* A civil war pits the insurrectionary forces within a state against the government of that state or against other forces attempting to seize the power of the State; by definition, it postulates a “true” State, over whose government the war is being fought. Moreover, if the conflict in Bosnia were a civil war, how could the insurgent forces have been the “nationals” of other member states of the U.N.? Rebels are the nationals of the state whose government they wish to seize; if they are the nationals of some other state, which is “supporting” them, then they are an invasion force and not the partisans of a civil war. On Kissinger's view, whose nationals were the Bosnian Muslims? They couldn't have been nationals of Bosnia, because it was, on this view, not a true nation-state. Were they then the nationals of Croatia and Serbia? And if they were, then are we to understand that the murderous attacks on them by these states were engagements in a civil war against the governments of Croatia and Serbia by rebellious Muslims, and that this civil war simply happened to take place outside the territorial borders of both states?

The history of the four Yugoslav wars—in Slovenia (1991), Croatia (1991–, Bosnia (1992 – 1995), and Kosovo (1999)—invites confusion in characterizing the conflict, and in fact initially the United States and the European Community took the position that Slovenia and Croatia were illegal secessionists. That would have made the first two Yugoslav wars “civil” wars because there was only one state party to the war, Yugoslavia. This characterization, which eventually all parties—including even the Serbs—were forced to drop, might analogize the Belgrade regime in 1991 to that of Washington in 1861: a central federal government facing seceding states and struggling to hold the entire group together. Indeed Milosevic often made use of this analogy at the time, claiming among other things that the oppression of Serbs in the seceding states was like the practice of slavery by the American Southern states, against which federal troops had been used. Whatever the merits of this grotesque simile, it has little application to the war in Bosnia, owing to Belgrade's agreement in 1992 to recognize Bosnia as a separate state.

The reason that Secretary Baker and others initially characterized the war in Yugoslavia as a civil war between a central government in Belgrade and breakaway secessionist states with capitals in Ljubljana, Zagreb, and Sarajevo was simply that they believed that the breakup of Yugoslavia would lead to a bloodbath, which they of course wished to avoid. But this wholesome objective would not be served by such a characterization pre-cisely because it was wholly contrived and had no relation to constitutional events within the state of Yugoslavia. Once Milosevic found himself able to manipulate the organs of a multinational federal state to effect a Serbian dictatorship, messages such as Baker's and the E.C.'s gave him a green light to use the JNA as ruthlessly as he wished²²in pursuit of a constitutional arrangement that was itself really as much a new state as any of the others.

Perhaps what some had in mind was not that Bosnia was engaged in a civil war against Belgrade, but rather that the Bosnian Serbs and Croats, in their attempts to dismember Bosnia and amalgamate with their respective states across the border, were fighting a civil war against Sarajevo. The reason many persons held that Bosnia was not a “true” nation-state was that there is no single ethnic, “national” group that utterly dominates the state so that it becomes the engine of welfare for that group. It is disquieting that such an argument should be made in Europe today (it would dis-quaqualify many African and Asian states) because it so clearly calls to mind a precedent one would think that statesmen would shun. When Adolf Hitler wished to incorporate Czechoslovakia into the German Reich, he quite correctly pointed out that the Sudeten Germans were a large minority in Czechoslovakia (a more discrete and insular minority than the Serbs, one might add, who speak the same language as all other Bosnians), and that the Czechs themselves were not a majority national group (being about the same 44 percent that the Bosnian Muslims are in that state). Czechoslovakia was not a true nation-state, Hitler argued, with perhaps more justice than this can be said regarding Bosnia (which after all was the result of a national referendum and not of a great-power arrangement like the one at Versailles that created Czechoslovakia). On these grounds, Hitler argued that the Sudetenland ought to be amalgamated with Germany, just as Serbian leaders in Belgrade argued that Serbian areas of Bosnia should be detached from Bosnia and added to Serbia.

Civil wars are commonly held to be the bloodiest and most violent of wars. For our purposes, what is important about the characterization of a crisis as a “civil war” is that it blurs recognition of the crisis as an emergency. Though it makes the horrible reports coming in from the war no less horrible, they now conform to our expectations²³ and such a conflict will be resolved, presumably, in the usual way. The most frequently heard argument for enforcing the arms embargo against Bosnia—which Bosnia claimed to be a violation of that state's Article 51 right of self-defense under the U.N. Charter—was that to allow the Bosnians to be supplied with arms would merely prolong the war. That is, lifting the embargo would attenuate the natural course of such conflicts, increase the casualties and suffering, to no different end. Moreover, intervention in a civil war—like intervention in a marital dispute—is not only risky but officious. In the normal course of things the parties sort these matters out among themselves; there is no emergency, at least not for the society of states.

Against this view of the “normal” course of events, there intruded the insistent reports of Serb concentration camps. I believe there can be little doubt that, but for the suffering of Jews and others in the Nazi death camps in World War II, the news of Serb extermination and torture camps at Omarska, ²⁴ Trnopolje, Susica, and elsewhere would not have had the same, sickening effect on public opinion.²⁵ Two heroic figures stand out in this reporting: Roy Gutman of the American newspaper Newsday, who managed to talk his way in August 1992 into the Omarska camp to confirm stories of torture and executions; ²⁶ and Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the first nonCommunist prime minister of Poland, who was appointed in August 1992 by the United Nations as special rapporteur on human rights abuses in the former Yugoslavia.

Mazowiecki filed a series of eighteen reports over the ensuing three years. In contrast to other U.N. reports which studiedly de-emphasized or obscured the facts of mass atrocities, Mazowiecki's are unflinching, carefully documented, and filled with gritty, factual detail. One documented 119 rape-induced pregnancies (from which it has been estimated a figure of 12,000 rapes in total can be statistically extrapolated).* One of his first reports described a Serb attack on Prijedor²⁷ the preceding May and gives a striking picture of the practice of ethnic cleansing. On the night of May 29, Serb tanks and infantry took up positions around Prijedor.

When the attack began Serbs from the village guided the tanks to the homes of certain Muslims and the inhabitants were asked to come out and show their identity cards. Many of those who did were summarily executed…. Some 200 residents of Partisan Street were executed and a hundred homes were destroyed. During the [tank and artillery] attack the local radio continued to call for the surrender of arms, yet not one shot had been fired by the Muslims.

When the artillery barrage stopped around noon, Serb paramilitary moved in and slit the throats of Muslims. “The bodies of the dead were carried away by trucks, which left a trail of blood.” Those not killed immediately were transferred to a convoy heading toward Omarska. Badly damaged houses were bulldozed, and their foundations covered with fresh earth. Five mosques were destroyed; the Muslim cemetery was razed.²⁸

Mazowiecki's final report, from Srebrenica, gives a detailed summary. This account is taken from the Report: ²⁹ On July 11 the Muslim “safe” enclave of Srebrenica fell to the Serbs. U.N. Dutch troops stood by while between 38,000 and 42,000 Muslims were expelled from the area. A group of mainly women, children, and elderly men were taken in trucks, some of which were driven by U.N. personnel, to U.N. headquarters at Potocari, where upon arrival they were forcibly seized by armed Serbs. Beatings, abductions of women, and acts of physical violence often resulting in death then occurred; witnesses reported executions. There were many reports of shots and screams in the nearby cornfield during the night.

A second group of about 15,000 draft-age Muslims and several women and children marched on foot out of Srebrenica toward Bosnian lines, consistent with earlier Serb campaigns of displacing Muslims. Most of this group were civilians, but between 3,000 and 4,000 may have been previously armed defenders of the city. This group was repeatedly shelled; these men who surrendered were physically assaulted, often fatally. Others were lined up against a wall and shot or were taken by the hair and their throats slit. The journey was fraught with chaos and violent attacks; thousands of persons in this group were executed by Serbs. Witnesses reported that some Serbs were disguised as U.N. officials (apparently with blue berets provided by the Dutch troops). Of this second group it is now believed that 7,500 were captured and murdered.*

In a summary section the Report drew several conclusions, including that credible direct and circumstantial evidence existed of mass executions, countless rapes and physical assaults, and the destruction of property by the Serbs. Ominously the report noted that still unaccounted for were thousands of Muslims who were removed from Srebrenica, and that the rapporteur had been unable to verify claims that they were in detention. In fact, they were not.

But the most startling element of the report, whose dispassion and repeated reliance on the credible “reports of international observers,” gruesome detail, and evenhandedness are notable, was the letter that accompanied it. “Speaking of protecting human rights is meaningless in the context of the lack of consistency and courage on the part of the international community and its leaders,” the letter read. The U.N.'s own leadership had frustrated Mazowiecki's efforts to call attention to the “barbarous acts and terror on an enormous scale” that had occurred. He now resigned to protest U.N “hypocrisy” in “claiming to defend [Bosnia] but in fact abandoning it.”

There were other figures,* including especially those conscientious young career foreign service officers who resigned their posts in protest over U.S. Bosnian policy, who enabled the world to understand that regardless of its juridical characterization, what was happening in Bosnia constituted a true emergency. By operating in tandem with the media, these officers were able to bring to the public information that otherwise was confined to diplomatic cable traffic. The New York Times, in an editorial on December 20, 1992, observed, “[T]he U.S. Government received the first unconfirmed reports from Bosnia that Serbs were setting up concentration camps in which Muslims were being tortured and killed…. Washington… tried to keep the reports from becoming public. If other countries received similar reports, they gave no public sign…. What did the world do?”

Even still, it was not enough to provide the world with clarifying ideas that defined the crisis as an emergency, that showed us why what was happening was so unusual. Once we realized that the reappearance of concentration camps, tank and artillery supplemented by organized paramilitaries, and international complacency in the face of these facts were the salient features of the crisis, we still required a reason to act. Events were now defined as an emergency, but this would not lead to intervention unless there were some decisive reason to intervene. Notice—the awareness that something dramatic is happening—and recognition that that “something” is an emergency—still waited on a decision to act. That could only come if the emergency was defined in terms that gave bystanders good and powerful reasons for action.

DECISION: DECIDING TO ACT

Pope John Paul II was one of those leaders who provided states with reasons to intervene in Bosnia. He issued a statement after the Mazowiecki report that read in part: “The news and pictures from Bosnia, particularly from Srebrenica and Zepa, testify to how Europe and humanity are still collapsing into the abyss of degradation… They are crimes against humanity [which amount to] a defeat for civilization.”³⁰

Whose job is it to defend civilization, however? States have an interest in protecting the worth and value of civilized life. Achilles' shield depicts, it will be recalled, not only war and the law courts, but also religious ceremonies and wedding feasts. But what motivates states is not the same as what might move an individual or a nongovernmental organization or even a particular group of states, like an alliance, to intervene in an emergency. The case of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait provides an instructive example.

It is frequently remarked that the reason the United States led a coalition of states in a campaign to expel an Iraqi occupation force from the state of Kuwait was because vast oil reserves lay within the territorial domain of Kuwait. Allowing these reserves to fall into hostile hands would have threatened the economic and military security of the West, of which the United States was the leader. If Iraq had invaded a state poor in resources, like the Kurdish section of Iran, the West would have done nothing, as indeed it did nothing during the Iraqi invasion of Iran.

This description of events is a kind of half-truth: it is true that the potential possession of crucial raw materials by an enemy gives a state a good reason to be sensitive to the actual seizure of those raw materials. With the vast new reserves Kuwait would have brought him, Saddam Hussein might have been able to raise oil prices to the economic detriment of many industrialized countries; certainly he was no counsel of oil-price restraint, as the Kuwaitis have been. Absent such a reason, it is quite possible that the United States and other powerful states would not have marshalled the enormous forces that won the Gulf War. But it is not true that the United States would have found such a threat to its prosperity a sufficient reason to intervene. Imagine, for example, what America would have done if, instead of simply invading and annexing Kuwait, Saddam Hussein had fomented a democratic uprising against the notably undemocratic Kuwaiti regime, and later contributed troops to aid a provisional government that had nominally maintained Kuwait's independent status but had overthrown its monarchy. It is highly implausible to imagine that the United States would have sent 400,000 men to the Arabian desert in such circumstances. What proved crucial in the Gulf conflict was the combination of both material reasons for intervention and the threat posed to the foundations of the states system. The Iraqi attack on Kuwait was the first time since the founding of the United Nations that one member state had invaded another, conquered, and annexed it. It was this intersection of interests, strategic and constitutional, that galvanized great power leadership.

Similarly, in Bosnia it was necessary for world leaders to recognize both the strategic reasons for acting and the legal imperatives to do so. Stopping a campaign of ethnic cleansing, which threatened the most basic human norms of decency, could provide one; the recognition of Bosnia as a true European state, with a right to exist, could afford the other.

For this reason, the answers to two apparently quite unconnected questions were both critical to moving the United States and other states to act: first, were the atrocities in Bosnia part of a systematic campaign of ethnic and cultural extermination against the Muslims or were the atrocities simply examples artfully chosen by the media of acts that had been in fact committed by all sides to the conflict? And second, were the borders of the Bosnian state worthy of legal respect or were they merely an arbitrary, anomalous hindrance to the recognition of the principle of self-determination by national groups? Dimitri Simes put these questions powerfully when he wrote, on March 10, 1993:

It is hard to justify U.S. intervention on moral as well as geopolitical grounds. First, all sides in the war in Bosnia have committed atrocities, although the Serbs have committed more than the others, partly because their military advances gave them more opportunities. Paradoxically, because of Western insistence that the Serbian Army stay out of the confrontation, the fighting was assigned to the ill-disciplined Serbian militia in Bosnia, thereby increasing the likelihood for abuses. Second, do we really believe that the administrative borders in the ex-Yugoslavia—set up by Tito's Communist regime and based neither on history nor on current demography—should be treated as sacred?³¹

Simes may have been misinformed about the role of the Serbian army. In fact we know that Serbian irregulars (many of them members of the JNA who were detached from their regiments) were deliberately deployed in order to confuse the situation legally, disguise the role of Belgrade, and give the appearance of a Bosnian civil war rather than a Serbian invasion. Simes, however, was not alone, and with his customary insight, he had gone right to the heart of the matter: both of his questions had to be answered before a decision to act would be taken.

ETHNIC CLEANSING

On November 20, four months before Simes's article in the New York Times, Mazowiecki noted that particular attention should be drawn to the “appalling extent of persecution by ‘ethnic cleansing' against those of Muslim ethnic origin [who are] threatened with extermination.”³² By contrast, in Simes's view, there is nothing unique about “ethnic cleansing”: the atrocities committed by the Serbs were no different, though perhaps they were somewhat more numerous, than those committed by all the other parties to the Yugoslav conflict. To the extent that Serbian atrocities were more numerous, according to Simes this was partly because the JNA had not been an active party to the war, forcing Serbia to rely on irregular partisans, and partly a result of the large amounts of Bosnian territory under Serb control. To assess the truth of these observations, we might begin by asking: What is ethnic cleansing? Is it a random affair of irregular militias? Did all the parties to the Yugoslav conflict participate in such campaigns?

The forced resettlement of populations on the basis of their cultural identity is hardly novel or peculiar to the Balkans. Assyrian, ³³ Greek, and Roman conquerors—to say nothing of the treatment of the American Indians—all provide precedents for such behavior.³⁴ Even the calculated destruction of an ethnic group and its culture, as was attempted by the Nazis against Jews, by the Turks against Armenians, by Australians against Tasmanian Aborigines, is hardly unique to Bosnia. What makes “ethnic cleansing” so odious is precisely the world's experience with it, especially in this century. The very term, with its eugenic overtones of extermination, repels and chills because it is not new—because, that is, it reminds us of precedents, of other horrors and other places.

The first English use of this term that I have been able to locate³⁵ occurred when a Reuters reporter in Belgrade quoted Croatia's Supreme Council as charging that “the aim of [a particular Serbian expulsion of Croats] is obviously the ‘ethnic cleansing' of the critical areas to be annexed to Serbia.”³⁶ One year later, a reporter writing in the New York Times in the summer of 1992, noted that “the precondition for [the creation of Greater Serbia] lies in the purging—‘ethnic cleansing' in the perpetrators' lexicon—of wide areas of Bosnia of all but like-minded Serbs.” Indeed what partly made the term so shocking was its casual use by the Serbs until the world community seized on this phrase. One scholar, Norman Cigar, has traced the phrase to the original program of the Serbian Chetnik leadership, issued on December 20, 1941. Two of the stated objectives of this program were

to cleanse the state territory of all national minorities and anti-national elements… [and] to create a direct, continuous, border between Serbia and Montenegro, and between Serbia and Slovenia, by cleansing the Sandzak of the Muslim inhabitants and Bosnia of the Muslim and Croatian inhabitants.³⁷

Why was this necessary? Why didn't ethnic dominance suffice in those areas where Serbs were in a majority? To understand the answer to this is to see why ethnic cleansing is a strategic and tactical set of ideas, and not just an emotive name for atrocities; it is also to see why the multiethnic state of Bosnia, unlike the states of Croatia and Serbia, is unlikely to have been a perpetrator of this strategy.

The biologists Stjepkp Golubic, Thomas Golubic, and Susan Campbell have published a demographic study of the Bosnian population that quantitatively demonstrates its essential indivisibility without mass resettlements.³⁸ Working from the 1991 census, they show that the districts in which various groups—Serb, Croatian, Muslim—were dominant prior to the war were neither homogeneous nor contiguous. Each of these areas in which a particular group had a dominant plurality also include a substantial percentage (between 22 percent and 43 percent) of another group. Moreover, each collection of dominant districts that was aggregated by contiguity amounted to only a fraction of the total population of the group, leaving between 35 percent and 68 percent of that group outside the area of its dominance.

Nor did dominance correlate with cultural purity: Bosnian Croats in the north of Bosnia, where they were the dominant group, lived with substantial minorities of Muslims, as they had (peacefully) for centuries. If statistical dominance does not correlate with cultural purity, and if the areas of dominance are not contiguous, then to achieve the dictatorship of one cultural group would require a use of force like ethnic cleansing. Moreover, the cultural patrimony of historic Bosnia would also have to be destroyed:

Architecture… bridges [and] monuments built by the Ottomans were the most visible, most immediately tangible signs of Bosnia's “otherness.” These became targets of relentless artillery bombardment or straightforward demolition. [L]ibraries housing rare books and priceless manuscripts were deliberately destroyed… Hundreds of delicately designed mosques, large and small, that had stood for centuries unharmed, untouched, disappeared overnight.³⁹

One reason why the Vance-Owen Plan, which envisioned ten separate provinces, was criticized as a concession to Milosevic's program was that it was estimated that an additional two million persons would eventually be forced to leave their homes.⁴⁰

Ethnic cleansing is more than simply a new name for forced resettlement, however. It is a calculated strategy that occurred when the political objectives of the parliamentary nation-states Serbia and Croatia (though they may have been led by communists or fascists) confronted the complex demography of the state of Bosnia.

Just as the Krajina region of Croatia, for example, is now 91% Serb, though it was only half Serb before it was seized by Serbian military and paramilitary forces in 1991, so too in Bosnia, connecting a Greater Serbia called for cleaning non-Serbs from areas of Bosnia such as Prijedor, Srebrenica, Foca, Gorazde, and Brcko where Serbs had been a minority, as well as from Banja Luka, where they had been a majority. In Zvornik, where Muslims once constituted 65% of the population, now… they are just a handful. In Prijedor, by September 1992… Serb radio announced that the Serbs were now a majority and were ready for a referendum.⁴¹

Nor is ethnic cleansing only a strategy. It is also a well-defined system of military tactics, coordinating JNA and militia forces, involving a particular set of military maneuvers including artillery bombardment, encirclement, terrorism, and the maintenance of detention camps.

The tactics of ethnic cleansing are by now well known, though not always well appreciated. In the first stage, an operation commences with isolated terrorist attacks by Serb irregulars on rural populations of Muslims.* Thereafter, the role of armor and systematic shelling by heavy weapons is integral to its operations. The U.S. submission to the War Crimes Tribunal gives numerous accounts, of which I will excerpt an example:

A 27-year-old Bosnian Muslim witnessed the Bosnian Serb artillery bombardment of Biscani at about noon on July 20, 1992. Biscani was one of many Muslim villages in the Prijedor area and had a population of about 1,000 Muslims. Since May 1992, there had been Bosnian Serb soldiers and other officials in the town. From May to July, their activities had been limited to provoking the population by insults, residential searches, and general harassment. The primary targets of the provocations appeared to be the wealthier and more prominent citizens of the town, including doctors, lawyers, and business owners. Sometime between 2 pm and 3 pm on July 20, the artillery bombardment was lifted, and the town was assaulted by a force of Bosnian Serb infantry supported by one tank and one armored personnel carrier. Members of the attacking unit were Bosnian Serbs from the Prijedor area and from areas in the vicinity, such as Sanski Most and Banja Luka. The witness recognized several of the attacking soldiers as residents of the Prijedor area. All wore camouflage uniforms, red berets, and had the Serbian flag on one sleeve of their uniforms. Small groups of soldiers quickly occupied virtually every house in the village. After they had secured each house, they shot and killed most of the male residents in or immediately outside their homes. The women and children were rounded up and placed in a small number of houses so that they would be easier to watch. The witness observed the shooting through a window from inside one of the houses. He saw two soldiers kill Vehid Duratovic and Sadik Causevic as they attempted to run away. He also saw seven Bosnian Serb soldiers assemble five male residents of the village in front of a wall of a house across the street where one of the Bosnian Serb soldiers shot and killed them. Four of the five victims were: Rifet Duratovic, Mirsad Kadiric, Ifed Karagic, and Ibrahim Kadiric. From July 20 to 27, the surviving local residents, mostly women and children, buried the victims' bodies in the local cemetery. On July 27, about 35 women and children and about 15 men were rounded up by Bosnian Serb soldiers. The witness believed that this group constituted all the remaining survivors of the village. This group was forced to walk to an unknown location near the entrance to the city of Prijedor where Serb soldiers had set up a roadblock. At about 8 pm, a bus arrived and transported the entire group to the Trnopolje detention camp. (Department of State).⁴²

These tactics drove unarmed farmers and the residents of small villages away from their homes seeking protection. The refugees flooded into towns that swelled with their numbers. The “safe area” concept was actually quite consistent with the Serbian campaign of ethnic cleansing. It made towns like Tuzla and Zepa into concentration camps full of hungry and defenseless people without sanitation, without medicine, without effective weapons. And that brings us to the second stage of ethnic cleansing, the siege of cities that have been engorged by the arrival of rural refugees.

At this second stage, the Serbs, using JNA artillery, fired round after round into the surrounded city. When one sees the now familiar CNN film clip of a multistory apartment house in Sarajevo crashing down, one mustn't think that that is the result of isolated mortar fire. Rather, it is the result of artillery and heavy tanks in stable emplacements firing heavy caliber shells into the steel and concrete of the targeted building in a sustained bombardment.

In the third stage, the besieged city surrendered. When this occurred, the Serbs culled the men of military age. These were taken out of town and machine-gunned, and buried in mass graves. Then the tactical focus shifted to the remaining women. One element of ethnic cleansing has to do with the calculated policy of rape. This wasn't so much to eliminate the genes of Muslims (a kind of genocide), however, as it was to humiliate Muslim women so that they and their husbands would never want to return. Only when the men had been murdered and the women defiled did the buses arrive to take the remaining refugees to the humanitarian centers manned by the U.N. outside Serb territory. This explains the peculiar demographics of the refugee population, in which only the very old and the very young appear to be surviving when these are in fact the most vulnerable populations among refugees.

Ethnic cleansing is thus not merely a political goal. It is a coordinated set of tactics in service of a well-thought-out military strategy. Its success depended in part upon the nonenforcement of the U.N. Security Council resolutions that established the no-fly zone and banned JNA logistical support, upon the luring of refugees into the “safe areas” declared by the U.N. Security Council and upon the U.N. arms embargo that kept the Bosnians from effectively returning the fire that rained down upon them from artillery positions around their towns. Which is to say that “ethnic cleansing” depended upon the tacit cooperation of the U.N. Security Council, which studiedly and repeatedly confirmed all three of those supporting elements.

According to a Pentagon official, “[w]hen the Serbs began to move [against Sarajevo], we saw them executing the same strategy they had employed against other enclaves. They do not conduct a direct assault but surround the area and create an increasingly dire humanitarian situation.” By using their control over access to the surrounded enclave, the Serbs could negotiate with the U.N., allowing humanitarian aid only to the extent that such negotiations enhanced the Serbian military position and compelled the U.N. forces (Unprofor) to become voluntary hostages. David Owen reflects this role as unwitting accomplice in his autobiographical memoir. “Living with the arms embargo,” he writes, “for all its inconsistencies and evasions, was never an immoral position for it ensured the continuation of Unprofor's humanitarian mandate for the first few years, when it saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”⁴³ He has a point, of course—but that point is enfolded within the Serbian tactics of ethnic cleansing, which carefully manipulated the “humanitarian mandate” to achieve its military goals.

One final element of this strategy must be touched upon.

The aim is not only to expel the ethnically “unclean” population from the desired territory but also to destroy all possibilities for their return—completely to dismantle the spiritual and material structure of the civilization of the unwanted population… [T]he expelled populations will stay away because they have no homes, mosques, schools, etc.—literally nothing to go back to…. [T]he real guarantee is fear: the knowledge that their neighbors remain in wait, should they try to go back. According to numerous testimonies, special military expeditions from Serbia and Montenegro have sought not only to slaughter and expel but also to inspire or force the indigenous Serbs to do the same….⁴⁴

Thus the strategy of ethnic cleansing is hardly a random affair managed by uncoordinated bands of irregulars. General Momcilo Perisic of the JNA has openly acknowledged the commanding role played by his army in the conquest of Bosnia.⁴⁵ Many facts, including logistical ones, support this finding of coordination, but some of the most telling of these facts are the most humble. International observers were at first puzzled to see rows of shoes neatly lined up on the edge of roadsides or forests where it was later determined that mass executions had taken place. Apparently the victims were instructed to remove their shoes before they were marched off to their execution sites. This small detail suggests a coordinated tactical plan that Serb commanders were instructed to follow, for it is unlikely that this would occur coincidentally at different sites.

All of this information was of course available to the states of the West—the United States and her European colleagues on the Security Council. What blurred these facts—just as Darley and Latane had predicted—was the introduction of a crucial ambiguity by the Serbs and others. High-ranking officials in the West repeatedly stated that all parties to the conflict were at fault, and implied that Muslims, Serbs, and Croats had all participated in such campaigns of “ethnic cleansing.”

On May 18, 1993, Secretary Christopher, in preparation for testimony that day before Congress, asked the Balkan desk of the State Department to come up with examples of Muslim atrocities in the war in Bosnia. The desk officers angrily declined: they said that though there had been Muslim atrocities, they paled in comparison with those committed by the Serbs. Later that day, Christopher nevertheless stated in his testimony: “It's easy to analogize [Bosnia] to the Holocaust. But I never heard of any ethnic cleansing by the Jews against the German people.” The acting assistant secretary for human rights later reminded Christopher, in a memo since disclosed, that, of the documented atrocities, only a handful (6 percent) could be attributed to Muslims, and that, in contrast with the Serbian and Croatian campaigns of ethnic cleansing, no evidence linked these isolated incidents to the central Bosnian army command or to the Bosnian government. In fact, the New York Times later reported, the State Department had for more than a year been reporting “complicity by the Milosevic regime and the Government of Croatia in atrocities of both regular and paramilitary forces.”

Nevertheless, other officials testified before the House National Security Committee as late as November 1995 that all sides in the conflict shared the blame. “There are no white hats there” became something of a cliché among officials.⁴⁶ Similar sentiments were voiced by the U.N. secretary-general, who lamented that the conflict had “spared no one in its violence.”

Indeed at the time one often heard, at first sotto voce, from senior officials that there was “evidence” that the Bosnians had shelled themselves on at least one occasion—the deadly mortar attack on the Sarajevo market on February 5, 1994—in an effort to kindle foreign intervention. Owen repeats this in his memoirs, unfortunately citing Tanjug news agency, a Belgrade government source; there is supposedly at least one U.N. report that attempted to make this claim, though later studies have been unable to confirm this. The most experienced and respected diplomats in the United States and the United Kingdom—Lawrence Eagleburger, a former ambassador to Yugoslavia and subsequently U.S. secretary of state, and Lord Carrington, a World War II veteran and former British foreign secretary—both quietly let it be known that to knowledgeable observers of the region all sides had a share in the responsibility for atrocities.

These perceptions, perhaps more than any other fact, introduced a pervasive ambiguity into the situation and slowed Western response. They are vaguely analogous to the perceptions on the part of the bystanders in Queens that Kitty Genovese was somehow mixed up in something that had led to the attack on her. Those who actually knew her (though slightly) were the very ones who knew that she worked in a bar, often came home late, was vivacious and outgoing.

This perception that “all sides are implicated” also fed the strict neutrality observed by the U.N. peacekeeping force. Observance of this neutrality had the perverse effect of making the Bosnians a constant irritant to the U.N. officials. Owen observes that the “prevailing view” of U.N. commanders was that “Unprofor's [United Nations Protection Force] worst problems were with the Muslims.” When food convoys came to deliver humanitarian supplies to the enclaves, desperate crowds of Muslims would gather and try to keep the U.N. trucks from leaving. The British foreign secretary complained that the Bosnian Muslims were using Unprofor forces as a shield, as when Bosnian government forces would fire out from one of the “protected” but surrounded enclaves. General Rose repeatedly told observers that his governing rule was not to cross “the Mogadishu Line”—a phrase alluding to the U.N. experience in Somalia, when a mission that began as neutral peacekeeping led to involvement in a factional war, including a punitive search for a particular Somali warlord. The U.N. representative of the secretary-general, Yasushi Akashi, resolutely refused to authorize NATO air support when he believed this would amount to a partisan contribution to one side, exceeding the “mandate” provided by resolutions of the Security Council.*

Why did such experienced and distinguished diplomats as Eagleburger and Carrington, Owen and Douglas Hurd contribute so thoroughly to muddying the waters, and clouding the otherwise clear perceptions of emergency and the necessity to act? And why did not the Muslims succumb to the sort of tactics that worked so effectively for the Croats and Serbs? Why didn't “all sides do it”? I think the answer to both questions is the same, and I hope it justifies the time spent on the description of ethnic cleansing in a book about the history and future of the modern State.

As we have seen, “ethnic cleansing” is more than simply the aggregate of countless individual atrocities. It encompasses a set of military tactics carefully designed to exploit the deep weaknesses in the nation-state. When Eagleburger and Carrington spoke about Yugoslavia, they spoke from broad experience and knowledge about the Serb-Croat nationalist struggles that, since the early part of this century, were saturated in the very sort of ethnic fanaticism that led to policies of “cleansing” territory of other ethnic groups. When these policies were deployed by former communist leaders like Tudjman and Milosevic to consolidate their own power in the aftermath of the collapse of communism, they led inevitably to the atrocities of the Bosnian theatre; the very intermixture of groups there insured that. Thus the war seemed merely like a continuation of the Serb-Croat struggle, which was the focus of their experience and insight. But it was also a brutal assault on Bosnian Muslims, and the media, which these statesmen so distrusted and despised, were making this assault into a defining hour for the society of nation-states. Could that society set legal standards for admission and defend those states that met those standards? Or was the conundrum of self-determination—when does an ethnic minority get its own state, thereby creating a new minority from the now-detached remnants of the formerly majority group—somehow bound up with the nation-state? Could tumors of nationalism grow and attack a modern state with a strategy, ethnic cleansing, that specifically arose from this conundrum, thus paralyzing the rest of the members of the society of states? To see the conflict as one that necessarily implicated “all sides” was to miss what was unique and defining—and yet seeing the parties in this way reflected how trapped these statesmen were in the paradigms of the nation-state. Experienced statesmen were slow to appreciate that action needed to be taken because they did not understand that the policy of ethnic cleansing posed a mortal, moral threat to the society of nation-states. Thus when these men were discredited by the horrors they did not prevent, the society of nation-states that they represented (as appointees of the U.N., the E.U., the OSCE*) was discredited also.

The Muslims were emphatically not the architects or perpetrators of ethnic cleansing because they did not see themselves as a separate national entity (rather more as a religious one) and few initially wished to have a state whose legitimacy depended upon its championing a particular national or cultural group. This was dramatically demonstrated when an attempt by some Muslim elements to sequester Sarajevo Serbs in a football stadium was swiftly halted and roundly denounced. Bosnia was a multicultural state. Thus the helpful efforts of outside diplomats to partition the state (as was done in Ireland, India, and Cyprus) were perceived by the Bosnian government as an effort to destroy the fabric of their state, not simply take away territory. As Gow noted:

The E.C. effort was essentially based on the adoption of an idea—ethnic territories or “cantons”—propounded by the Serbian camp. Understood by the E.C. negotiators as a means to propitiate the Serbs and avoid war, it was in reality a charter for “ethnic cleansing”: ethnically designated cantons created the basis for ethnically pure territories.⁴⁷

It is estimated that about a third of the marriages in Sarajevo are “mixed” —that is, multiethnic. Approximately one-third of the Bosnian government army is Serb. While there can be no doubt that Muslims have perpetrated atrocities (indeed, have been indicted by the War Crimes Tribunal⁴⁸), the strategy of ethnic cleansing would have been antithetical to the constitutional ethos of their state when war broke out, though this ethos was sorely tested by events in the war, and there is at present a strong Muslim nationalist party.

ARBITRARY BORDERS

One other muddying characterization was offered up by Western statesmen. Whether or not they were able to persuade their publics that all parties to the conflict were equally culpable, there remained the idea that Bosnia's borders were essentially arbitrary (“set up by Tito… and based neither on history nor on current demography”) and thus that the terrible events in Bosnia were part of a necessary adjustment: an event worth noticing, of course, an emergency even, but not an event that required any action by others. Thus, as U.S. Ambassador John Scanlan put it, “Two thousand years of imperial invasion and subjugation of the indigenous populations have imposed artificial borders which have left three million Serbs outside Serbia, two million Albanians outside of Albania, three million Hungarians outside of Hungary.”⁴⁹ This makes any violation of Bosnian borders seem understandable and less reprehensible. It implies that certain adjustments ought to be made to correct territorial oversights on the political cartographer's map. In fact, the borders of Bosnia-Herzegovina have been virtually unchanged for almost five centuries.

The “stranded” Albanians, and Hungarians, and Serbs, and others have been in the provinces they currently inhabit for similar periods of time, much longer, it must be observed, than the Poles in what was once Germany, or the Russians in what was once Poland, borders that are perhaps better denominated as “artificial,” but that few American ambassadors, I think, would suggest need adjustment.

In his memoir, Owen denigrates the “internal borders” of Yugoslavia that formed the state of Bosnia. “The unwarranted insistence on ruling out changes to what had been internal administrative borders within a sovereign state was a fatal flaw.”⁵⁰ These borders were “arbitrary,” conceived by Tito's commanders “during a march” at the end of World War II. If Croatia and Bosnia had the right to secede, Owen argues, then surely the same right to self-determination should be extended to the Serb minorities living in those countries, and the borders adjusted accordingly.

There is some reason to doubt the factual basis for this argument. Historians generally agree that Bosnia was considered a distinct entity that maintained its identity throughout long periods in the Middle Ages until its conquest by the Ottoman Turks in 1463; the border between Croatia and Bosnia roughly corresponds with the extent of Ottoman penetration into Europe, and the border between Serbia and Bosnia, the Drina River, has not been breached since 1919. For our purposes, however, the greater significance of Owen's argument lies in his invocation of the paradox of self-determination. Why indeed should not the Serbs in Bosnia be allowed to secede? And then why not the majority Muslim populations in border towns along the Drina like Visegrad and Zvornik, whose peoples were slaughtered or made refugees? Why should not these have been allowed to remain and simply secede from the seceding Serbs? If, as Owen suggests, borders are arbitrary that do not correspond to the ethnic demographics of the local community, what precisely qualifies as the defining community? The IRA has long argued, for example, that the referendum to which the United Kingdom has agreed for the determination of the future of Northern Ireland must be based on an island-wide, rather than six-county, franchise. If they are wrong because Northern Ireland is in some way demographically distinct (“Protestant,” for example), then what of the minority Catholics in the six counties? Shouldn't they be allowed to have a referendum limited to themselves on the same theory that allowed the Northern Irish to confine their referendum and exclude the Southern Irish?

This paradox of self-determination bedevils the nation-state. It is the original sin of this constitutional order, present at the creation of the American nation-state in 1861 and the German nation-state in 1871, the two first models of this archetypal form. The nation-state's “sin,” if that is the way to put it, is that it promises to deploy a state on behalf of a nation when nations as such (cultural and ethnic groups) are a distinct categorical entity from states (legal and strategic structures). “All nations are entitled to their own states” is really a way of saying “all states must define and locate their nations,” a lesson that Slobodan Milosevic, among others, clearly learned in his post-communist phase. The society of nation-states has no more significant responsibility than to manage this paradox. If every nation gets its own state, then who decides the territorial extent of the state when a national group is unevenly spread over many countries, dwelling within other national groups and encompassing other groups that dwell within it? Each nation-state develops its form of the State for strategic purposes—that is, it selects a legitimate form of the State that will serve as an effective military instrument to resist coercion; but if every nation gets its own state, then the strategic imperative of the State turns inward, to civil war, as each ethnic and cultural group attempts to assert itself, and the State endlessly divides and redivides along smaller and smaller sociological lines—or the strategic imperative of the State turns outward, to conquest, as each State collects its nationals and those territories important to their welfare, adding new members, subsuming them and then asserting their right to exist within a single state. This is more than a problem, it is a paradox because every nation-state also defines its “nation” for constitutional purposes—that is, it determines which cultural group on behalf of whose welfare the resources of the state will be deployed. But how can every nation get its own state when every state must choose its nation? Because of this paradox, the society of nation-states, rather than the single nation-state itself, sets limits on how a state may define its nation (representative democracy and human rights) and how the nation may define its state (the inviolability of borders).

The society of nation-states decides, either in peace conferences like those at Versailles and San Francisco, or in the ongoing institutions set up by these peace congresses—like the U.N.—what elements are required for self-determination. This could not have been clearer than in the example of Bosnia because the E.U. set up a special tribunal—the Badinter Commission—to set the criteria for international recognition of the new states being formed from the former communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe. Bosnia was recognized by the E.U. only after it had specifically satisfied the Badinter criteria, which included respect for the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations and the Charter of Paris, especially with regard to the rule of law, representative democracy, and human rights; guarantees for the rights of minorities; and respect for the inviolability of frontiers.⁵¹

By contrast, recognition of statehood on the basis of the criterion of nationality alone puts the ball in the court of the State itself. Nationality is very much a creation of culture and demographics, and therefore it is to some degree manipulable by the State, as Hitler showed. Thus to permit the transgression of Bosnia's borders by charging that they were merely “administrative” rather than sufficiently ethnic forfeits the society of states' ability to do anything other than partition—which plays into the paradox of self-determination rather than manages it. Such a step invites ethnic cleansing.*

The effect in the third Balkan war was to smudge the clarity of the situation, to make it far less clear that anything had to be done other than to recognize the ultimate demographic outcome of the war. Not only did this give a greater incentive to Serbian and Croatian aggression—and effectively doom the very “cantonizations” it was meant to support—it largely removed the society of states from the action. Doubtless for some statesmen, that is what it was designed to do. (This is perhaps why Gow characterized British policy as “pusillanimous realism.”) ⁵²

Once we are clear of self-serving rationalizations, the true constitutional and political history of Bosnia and the former states of Yugoslavia has some troubling implications for this period in the history of the State, and the national idea of giving civil and political rights to minority groups as such. The coincidence of rights-based claims and ethnic identity is a policy born of the basic elements of the nation-state, and laden with peril for that constitutional form. Like an infection that uses the body's own nuclear material to attack the host, ethnic rights can be wasting, even fatal, to the nation-state. The wars in the Balkans represent the pathological endgame of the nation-state in which the constitution of a state is put into play whenever ethnic groups get on each other's nerves. Perhaps that is the real lesson of Yugoslavia. This conflict did not begin in 1350. It began in 1917 and took its crucial contemporary turn with the constitutional changes in 1974. In an effort to pacify one set of minorities—the Albanians and Hungarians—the 1974 Constitution created a new set of minorities: the Serbs within the Albanian and Hungarian enclaves. This peculiar political topology, the necessary creation of a new threatened group through the constitutional protection of an old one, propelled Milosevic out of the anteroom of Communist party hacks and onto the stadium stage of late twentieth century world political figures. Milosevic was able to capitalize on the techniques of modern media in order to mobilize around a twentieth century idea: because every “people” gets a state, the Serbian state should rightfully rule everywhere there were Serbs. By this means he was able to crush the constitutional position of Albanians within his state because there was a Serb minority within the Albanian minority and at the same time reach into other states like Croatia and Bosnia to aggrandize the Serbian state. The Serbian slogan was: “Why should I be a minority in your state when you can be a minority in mine? Why should I leave to join Serbia, when you can simply leave and Greater Serbia will be the result?” The paradoxes of this topology fractured the confidence of the society of nation-states in a way that even its most senior and respected officials could neither repair nor quite keep from making worse.

In the end it was the sheer weight of horror, coupled with the unique and recent history of the European Holocaust, that persuaded states that action must be taken. The secretary-general of the United Nations never understood this. When asked why he did not return to New York when Mazowiecki resigned over the Srebrenica massacres, Boutros Boutros-Ghali replied, “Because if I do, all the African countries will tell the world that while there is ethnic cleansing in Africa—a million people have died in Rwanda—the Secretary General pays attention only to a village in Europe.” This obtuse yet odious observation also in its way contributed to a stifling of action: after all, if there are genocidal campaigns underway all over the world, how can we act in all of them? Rather the secretary-general ought to have mobilized what public opinion there was for action, instead of lamenting that it was geographically misplaced, as, for example, in his famous harangue of the Security Council for its overattention to Yugoslavia (“a war of the rich,” in Boutros Boutros-Ghali's much-reported outburst). Queens is not a dangerous place, and I imagine that at 3 a.m. there were more horrors underway in other districts of New York besides Kitty Genovese's stabbing.

When Lawrence Eagleburger met Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and chronicler of the Holocaust, in December 1992 the latter pressed him to take some action in the former Yugoslavia where crimes were being committed that he called ethnic cleansing. Eagleburger claimed that the State Department's lawyers* were strongly opposed to characterizing such actions as “ethnic cleansing.” According to Eagleburger:

Wiesel said: “Fine. Call them crimes against humanity then, but whatever you do, America can no longer remain silent about the atrocities being committed”… I relented. [Wiesel] made me look in the mirror and decide… [that we couldn't] stay silent.⁵³

Four days later, Eagleburger spoke to a meeting of European foreign ministers in Geneva and urged a “second Nuremberg” to prosecute crimes committed in former Yugoslavia. “The fact of the matter is [the Serbs] were doing some things that were pretty… awful,” Eagleburger later said. “And we ought to have been saying something about it. And we probably should have been saying something about it a lot sooner. [But] I also knew it wasn't going to produce anything.”⁵⁴

Because once states had decided to act, it still remained for them to determine who should act and what should be done.

DETERMINATION: ASSIGNING SOMEONE TO ACT

Once these states had been brought to believe that something had to be done, opinion within the leading Western members of the society of states coalesced around four options as to who should act: it was either up to the parties to the conflict themselves, or a matter for the European powers, or for the U.N, or for the United States. As Darley and Latane might have predicted, each state's evaluation of these options depended upon its factual assessment of the situation. Thus those that believed the conflict was the result of ancient and implacable hatreds tended to conclude that there was little that outsiders could do, whereas those that believed that concerted multilateral diplomacy could effectively mediate the situation and then help monitor whatever settlement emerged, tended to emphasize a role for the U.N. (or the E.U.) unhindered by unilateral initiatives, in contrast to states that believed that decisive action depended upon the use of force. States in this last group were more likely to assign a leading role to the world's largest military power and the leader of NATO, the United States. It took some time, however, before a consensus formed around one of these options, if indeed it ever really did. In the meantime, as in the emergency situations studied by Darley and Latane, the sheer presence of so many potential intervenors tended to ensure that no one would act effectively.

A MATTER FOR THE PARTIES TO THE CONFLICT

Perhaps no characterization of the conflict was more widespread than that describing it as one going back centuries, reviving “ancient hatreds.” In fact, the history of this struggle begins, as noted above, in 1917. The Corfu Declaration on July 20 of that year proposed a new nation-state that was to consist of Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Macedonia, that is, the six provinces that ultimately became the state of Yugoslavia (which would have included the various religious groups of the region, Catholics, Muslims, and Eastern Orthodox).

At this time Croats and Slovenes wished to join Serbia in order to become part of the winning side of World War I. The new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, as it was called, was not simply an artificial creation of the Versailles Conference, as is sometimes erroneously said; it actually embodied the national aspirations of the South Slavs. Like so many model marriages it began to fall apart almost as soon as it was consummated. The ensuing struggles were in sharp contrast to the historic cooperation between the various groups of southern Slavs against their imperial oppressors. Far from being an ancient ethnic conflict, the wars in Yugoslavia are very much a twentieth century nation-state affair.

Nevertheless, diplomats and politicians in the 1990s repeatedly referred to the wars in Yugoslavia as arising from primeval struggles. One French foreign ministry official declared, “They need to fight. They want to fight. They have hated each other for centuries.”⁵⁵ When the Senate Armed Services Committee held hearings on Bosnia, a representative of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff was asked by a member of the committee, “Why is it that they fall upon themselves periodically, and have done this for a thousand years?” The reply, even discounting for the obliging nature of such answers when questions are put to military personnel by senators, was remarkably inane: “Sir,” the officer replied, “I wish I had the answer to your question… but there is certainly a history, going back, at least in my study of the problem, as far back as the 13th century, of constant ethnic and religious fighting among and between these groups.”⁵⁶

This description of the nature of the conflict was not merely an historical observation, however erroneous; rather, for many it became a highly purposeful characterization that compelled the inference that there was little that bystanders could do. As Charles Lane put it in the Washington Monthly:

The most durable canard about the wars in the Balkans is that they are the consequence of ancient ethnic hatred, too complex and too deeply rooted to be fathomed, much less countered, by outside powers. This “analysis,” which sounds sophisticated but is in fact intellectually lazy, became conventional wisdom—a kind of intellectual trump card—among all those who sought to forestall United States military intervention to stop the Serb drive in Bosnia.⁵⁷

Not only officials but the public also made this link. Thus in a poll conducted by the Boston Globe, ⁵⁸ a majority of persons were of the opinion that the United States should not be involved. A typical response: “The people in the Balkans have been killing each other for hundreds and hundreds of years. Putting our troops in there is not going to teach them how to get along with each other. If they are determined to kill each other, they're going to go right on doing it whether we're there or not. I don't want one American kid to die trying to teach them how to get along.”⁵⁹

Seeing the emergency as arising from intractable, atavistic behavior led almost inescapably to the conclusion that action would have to come from the parties themselves before anything else could be done. “Ultimately,” the U.S. president said in 1994, “this conflict still must be settled by the parties themselves. They must choose peace.”* And he asked rhetorically, in June 1995: “Do we have the capacity to impose a settlement on people who want to continue fighting? We cannot do that there.”⁶⁰ Even in July, after some of the worst shelling of Sarajevo and the other “safe areas,” indeed after the fall of Srebrenica, President Clinton's remark that the Bosnian conflict “has roots in the 11th century,” was quoted by a reporter who suggested that such an account of the conflict was designed to ward off pressure for the United States to intervene.⁶¹

This linkage was not hard to detect. As deputy assistant secretary of state Ralph Johnson put it:

Many Americans are asking why we haven't done even more to resolve this crisis. That's an understandable question. It goes against all our instincts to see Yugoslavia descend into violence without stepping in to stop this tragic process. The bottom line in this crisis, however, is that the world community cannot stop Yugoslavs from killing one another so long as they are determined to do so…. [W]e cannot stop the violence or resolve this conflict. Only the peoples of Yugoslavia and their leaders can do that.⁶²

Or, as Darley and Latane might have observed, even when bystanders notice a crisis and define it as such, and are persuaded some action must be taken, they will nevertheless assign that action to the parties involved depending on how those parties and their relationship are assessed. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in a passage that makes one wince, wrote at the time, “I don't give two cents about Bosnia. Not two cents. The people there have brought on their own troubles.” The “ancient hatreds” argument implied that the relationship between the parties was one of feuding clans, rather than perpetrator and victim. No one would suggest that a rapist and his victim should be sequestered until they “work things out among themselves.” The “ancient hatreds” gloss on the facts tended to denature the victims, making them more like co-dependents, to use a fashionable word, who could stop the ongoing antisocial behavior that was in crisis if only they would stop abetting it. These false assertions are similar to the ones made about Kitty Genovese. Like the facts about her—that she worked as the manager of a bar, that she was coming home at 3 a.m.—some of these facts about Bosnia were true. Like the implication that she was in part responsible for the attack on her, or at least might have been quarreling with a lover, the conclusions drawn were highly persuasive and prejudicial, though factually false. To the question “Who should act?” this approach implied: the parties themselves. Possibly someone on Austin Street in Queens said something like “I don't give two cents for that girl. She brought it on herself.”

A MATTER FOR EUROPE

States, once they noticed that something was happening, and once they had interpreted that event as a true emergency for the international system, then had to decide what each state's responsibility was. Darley and Latane showed that the more persons who witness an emergency the less likely it becomes that any particular person will intervene. This seems at first paradoxical—isn't there safety in numbers? In fact, it is the diffusion of responsibility that paralyzes everyone. The person who comes upon a crowd standing around a fallen victim thinks, “Surely someone has called an ambulance.” No previous crisis has been so flooded by helpful agencies: the European Union* appointed mediators, offered peace plans, convened conferences; the CSCE deployed its array of dispute resolution institutions; the U.N. was present to a degree that has, I believe, permanently damaged that institution; NATO was involved; and finally there was, of course, the Contact Group of the Great Powers. Rarely have so many institutions collaborated to produce so few satisfactory results, yet as Darley and Latane show, this should not surprise us. When Warren Christopher went to Europe for consultations in 1993, the very sincerity of his mission—that he genuinely sought consultations with our allies rather than trying to press them into line—doomed any conceivable effective action, because such consultations effectively paralyzed leadership by the United States.

This result was not, however, wholly unwelcome in Washington. Like the witnesses to Kitty Genovese's murder who said simply, “I didn't want to get involved,” there were ample reasons for U.S. administrations from 1991 to 1995 to wish not to become parties to the conflict. Foremost among these were the political risks of introducing American ground forces into a shooting war in which American interests were highly attenuated in an election year (1992) and thereafter in a highly partisan atmosphere. Just what vital interest of the bystander is served when he intervenes—especially when there is some other bystander more proximate to the emergency?

Both President Bush⁶³ and President Clinton⁶⁴ referred to the situation in Bosnia as “a European problem.” Deputy assistant secretary of state Johnson stated, “Why are we supporting the EC's efforts rather than taking the lead ourselves? [B]ecause we believe that Europe has the most at stake in this crisis.” In a radio address on February 19, 1994, nearly two and a half years later, President Clinton said: “I want to be clear. Europe must bear most of the responsibility for solving this problem…” The interesting aspect for our study, however, is the way in which assigning the Bosnian emergency to Europe not only tended to remove the United States from taking action, but also diffused responsibility among Europeans so that thwarting intervention from any quarter ultimately became the effective policy of the society of states.

The European position, led by Britain and France, was anchored by three points: the European states would provide personnel for the U.N. force to protect U.N. humanitarian assistance (and in the event the majority of forces under U.N. command were actually European); they would not provide armed ground forces to enforce peace unless the warriing parties agreed to a peace plan⁶⁵ and the United States also provided ground elements; finally, a diplomatic, rather than a military, solution was required. All of these points followed naturally from the premise that Bosnia was a “European” problem: Europe was responsible for providing forces to resolve the problem, and therefore could set the conditions under which these forces would operate, and the ultimate objectives for which they would fight.

In fact, however, these three points cannot be understood in isolation from the interplay with the various American proposals regarding Bosnia. The European position was artfully crafted, and withstood four years of assault in the press and by the Americans in NATO, precisely because it had been so carefully designed to fit with American diplomacy and presidential politics. By contributing small numbers of lightly armed troops to the U.N. peacekeeping mission the Europeans could veto any proposals for the use of NATO air power against the Serbs on the rationale that such attacks jeopardized European soldiers. By requiring advance agreement by the parties in Yugoslavia to a peace plan before being willing to commit ground forces, the Europeans effectively scotched any use of American ground forces to win such an agreement—because what U.S. president could justify sending American troops to a battleground in Europe from which European forces were conspicuously absent? Most interestingly, by stymieing any American initiatives, the Europeans thus took pressure off themselves from their publics: they were doing all they could, they said, in the face of vacillating and indecisive American leadership.

For so it did appear as the Americans made proposals that were rejected by the Europeans, which rejection was then made the excuse for withdrawing the proposals (which the Americans had only halfheartedly suggested in the first place). The characterization of the conflict as a “European problem” effectively meant that the least demanding course of action, essentially simply monitoring the war and waiting for a Serb victory to bring partition, became the de facto policy of the West. This also had the virtue, from the European point of view, of insulating European leaders from American criticism for inaction. On several occasions, European leaders made thinly veiled remarks about the right of those states with no forces at risk to criticize those states whose young men were actually in harm's way in Bosnia.

A case study in this exercise is the experience of the “Lift and Strike” policy. In early April 1993, the United States sent Reginald Bartholomew, one of its most experienced and capable diplomats, and Army Lieutenant General Barry McCaffrey, to London to suggest lifting the U.N. arms embargo that had throttled the grossly overmatched Bosnian government. The British rejected the idea, characterizing it as “pouring petrol on the fire”; but they countered with a proposal to launch NATO air strikes on the Serbs' largest artillery emplacements around Sarajevo. In Washington, the Joint Chiefs now balked: what was the “exit strategy”? How were we to know when the bombing should be stopped? More importantly, what if the Serbs retaliated by marching into Sarajevo? National security adviser Anthony Lake then offered a compromise plan, soon called “Lift and Strike.” Lake countered that the arms embargo be lifted and air strikes be launched to hold the Serbs in check until the arms flow to the Bosnian army allowed it to defend its capital. This would provide the exit point and a prospect for relieving the siege.

In early May, Christopher returned to Europe with this plan. One day after his departure, the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic announced that he had agreed to the Vance-Owen peace plan; the only remaining step was approval by the Bosnian Serb assembly. Christopher's mission was neatly thwarted. London and Paris rejected “Lift and Strike” and waited for approval by all parties of the Vance-Owen Plan. Four days into the trip, however, the Serbian assembly rejected the plan. Nevertheless, the Europeans now informed Christopher that “Lift and Strike” was dead as far as they were concerned. It would jeopardize their troops and abort whatever prospects remained for Vance-Owen. In Washington, the White House stuck to “Lift and Strike” but refused to go ahead without the concurrence of the Europeans. Removal of the threat of action against the Bosnian Serbs, however, had the effect of sinking Vance-Owen.

In mid-May Christopher testified that Bosnia was “a European problem” in which the United States could not act unilaterally. In June, to the question “Are people dying because the United States could do a lot more if we wanted to?” the undersecretary of state for political affairs, Peter Tarnoff, responded:

Yes… I am perfectly able to withstand criticism that we are abdicating power on this issue because I believe, and more importantly the President and the Secretary believe, that for major international issues of this sort, where other regional players have a great stake, we should make very clear that we will play a role, we will have a leadership role, but we are not going to be so far out in front as to allow them to defer to the United States when it comes to making the very hard decisions on the commitment of men and women and resources.⁶⁶

The Europeans meanwhile refused to put their own troops in further peril in the absence of American forces.

Thus the states of the West resolved Darley and Latane's question as to who should act by a complicated rondeau in which no one really had to take decisive action, but all were protected from public criticism by pointing at each other as the responsible party.

A MATTER FOR THE UNITED NATIONS

To many, the United Nations appeared to be the appropriate party to resolve the Bosnian emergency. The crimes against humanity perpetrated in Bosnia, the possibility of a wider war, and the flow of refugees fleeing the conflict—more than 500,000 fled to other European countries—provided ample reasons for U.N. action within the terms of the U.N. Charter. Moreover, the transnational consequences of the war did not directly threaten the vital interests of any one particular state outside Yugoslavia; for this reason too the U.N. must have seemed the right institution to act.

On June 15, 1993, at a news conference, President Clinton said, “Let me tell you something about Bosnia. On Bosnia I made a decision. The United Nations controls what happens in Bosnia.” On July 6 he conceded “[w]hen it became obvious that I could not prevail upon the United Nations because of the opposition of some of the European nations, that's when things began to deteriorate again instead of move toward peace… [But] I have a policy.”⁶⁷

It is tempting to conclude that the decisions of the secretary-general and his appointees in Bosnia—the United Nations Protection Force (Unprofor) commanders, and the special political representative—were largely responsible for the debacle in that country because the U.N. was the institution that the society of states selected as the principal manager in the Third Yugoslav War. In March 1992, 14,000 troops—Unprofor, one of the largest U.N. peacekeeping forces ever constituted—arrived to monitor the Serbian and Croatian soldiers. Whatever the world may think now, it was once widely thought that this force was to protect civilians. The inability of Unprofor to defend the U.N.-declared “safe areas”—despite a Security Council resolution ordering them to do so with all necessary means—U.N. complicity in ethnic cleansing in the Serb depopulation of Muslim villages (even to the point of providing the transport),* the failure to arrest war criminals even when these were indicted by a War Crimes Tribunal set up pursuant to a U.N. Security Council resolution, the refusal of the U.N. to permit NATO to enforce no-fly zones (also declared by the Security Council)—all provide a long list of failures for which critics will indict the United Nations.

Should we be persuaded by this indictment? It is true that all NATO air strikes had to be requested by U.N commanders and then approved by the political counselor representing the secretary-general before NATO could act, and that on many occasions the world witnessed awful slaughter because the responsible officials* could not be made to sign off on such strikes.⁶⁸ But who set up these rules? Not the secretary-general himself. In the Gulf War, although the Coalition was fighting with the authority of Security Council resolutions, there was never a suggestion that local commanders had to get the approval of U.N. personnel before acting to protect their troops. And why were Messrs. Akashi and Boutros-Ghali and generals Rose and Janvier so reluctant to use air strikes? Partly it was because, as they said at the time, ⁶⁹ they were doubtful such air strikes would be effective. Partly it was also, I am inclined to believe, because the governments to whom the secretary-general reported did not really want air strikes if they were effective because these governments believed a weakened Serbian offensive would only prolong the war that was causing them such political embarrassment at home and presenting them with such difficult and risky choices abroad. Successful air strikes would only stiffen the spine of the Bosnian government to resist when the problem, as Boutros Boutros-Ghali repeatedly said, was that the parties did not “show the political will to end this terrible war.”⁷⁰

True, the local U.N. commanders were reluctant to risk retaliation against their own forces;† but who was responsible for the declaration of the “safe areas” policy in the first place—which accelerated ethnic cleansing by promising the fleeing Muslims safe refuge if they abandoned the countryside and their threatened villages—and for permitting artillery encirclements and sieges once the Muslims had been crowded into these city-camps? And who studiedly refused to provide enough troops and arms to carry out missions in Bosnia that were announced with such fanfare and resolve in New York? This was perhaps the most cynical of all the moves made in Yugoslavia because the European sponsors of Unprofor knew that once these troops were on the ground, they would effectively prevent any further action by the West. Because they were lightly armed and had no heavy armor, they could not protect themselves, and because they were vulnerable and present in so many dispersed locations, any forceful moves on their behalf threatened their lives. In effect, they were sent as hostages although they were dressed as peacekeepers.

The U.N. might have served as an open forum in which member states put the question of “Who is to act” to a public debate. Something like this was contemplated by the White House in June 1993 but rejected on the grounds that it would have embarrassed Allied leaders. “Christopher came back and the issue was, do we roll them and just say, ‘OK, by God, we're going to the U.N. We're going to introduce a resolution. Veto it if you will,’” a senior White House official told reporters from six leading American newspapers. “European leaders called the White House after the visit by Mr. Christopher and argued that their reluctance to support air strikes and lift the arms embargo [Lift and Strike] was based on domestic political concerns.” He said that “they pleaded that there be no destructive public recriminations. We concluded that then was not the moment to bring this into [an open debate].”⁷¹

Instead the U.N. was used by all parties as a cover for their own policies. The apparent answer to the question “Who is to act?” was the U.N., but this was only apparent. The actual answer was no one.

IMPLEMENTATION: WHAT IS TO BE DONE

The various policy options facing bystander states once they had decided to act can be grouped into several courses of action: (a) military responses; (b) neutrality; (c) economic sanctions; (d) humanitarian aid; and (e) political settlement. These courses of action were not mutually exclusive alternatives; they could be combined in different ways. Because each of these approaches also concealed various options—for example, precisely what military responses were appropriate: air strikes? ground attacks? monitoring by lightly armed observers?—they could be recombined in countless variations. Moreover, within each option the fundamental difference persisted between those who wished to intervene on behalf of the Muslims and those who did not. The result was that until one state actor, the United States, threatened to act unilaterally, the requirement of consensus largely frustrated any decisive action to bring the merciless suffering in Bosnia to a halt.

MILITARY RESPONSES

Consideration of the military option went through four phases that, like the more comprehensive Darley-Latane decision process, constantly recycled themselves, as decision makers searched restlessly for effective options, returning again and again to those that had been discarded when the ones that were chosen—usually various forms of inaction—proved disastrous.

The first phase was the consideration by the Pentagon of military action in the fall of 1991 when Dubrovnik was bombarded and Vukovar overrun. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, expressed the view that nothing short of a massive deployment of ground troops for an indefinite period would be able to end the conflict. His view was by no means unanimously shared. Intelligence reports at the time disparaged the Serbian forces as undisciplined, poorly trained, and easily routed if confronted by regular armies. General John Galvin, at that time Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR), urged the approval of air strikes that he believed would dispirit the Serbs, disrupt their steady supply of war materiel from Serbia, and remove the threat of heavy bombardment from Sarajevo. Powell's views, however, were far more sensitive to the political need, felt by all the member states of NATO in varying degrees, to avoid an open-ended commitment to a theatre of marginal political and strategic significance. Air power had been frequently oversold in the past; most governments realized that true pacification could come only with ground forces. Every government faced the same dilemma: the publics of the West were outraged by the horrific crimes in Bosnia but were united in opposition to sending ground troops to halt those crimes. As late as July 1995, Malcolm Rifkind, the British foreign secretary who succeeded Douglas Hurd, put it: “Britain hoped that the threat [of air strikes] would never have to be carried out. No one wishes to use air power, no one believes that that by itself will conclude the war in Bosnia.”⁷²

Moreover, the option of air strikes was intertwined with other, nonmilitary choices: the delivery of humanitarian aid to the besieged cities, for example, depended upon Serb cooperation. Once air strikes began, this cooperation ceased. Air strikes prejudiced the policy of neutrality toward all parties that was the posture of Unprofor, and it thus also jeopardized the safety of Unprofor forces who might be seized (as occurred in Pale after the air strikes in 1995) or fired upon.⁷³ When U.N resolutions authorized air strikes, the United States, Britain, France, and the Netherlands all sent planes to the region but no strikes occurred. Supported by the French, the U.N. secretary-general stipulated that strikes should be employed only if Serb tanks or artillery fired upon U.N. troops, and that the strikes should be limited to the sites from which the Serbs had fired. Only when U.N. peacekeepers were withdrawn and the secretary-general removed from the chain of command were effective air strikes really an option.

NEUTRALITY

One source of the paralysis that affected the assessment of options for action was the insistence of U.N. personnel that they remain neutral in the conflict. On such grounds, in September 1992, the secretary-general actually opposed enforcement of the no-fly zone despite a U.N. Security Council resolution to the contrary. In the spring of 1993, he reiterated instructions that U.N. peacekeepers were to remain neutral even when civilians were shelled inside U.N.-protected enclaves. In April of that year, he effected the recall of French General Philippe Morillon, who had personally led a convoy through Serb lines to relieve Srebrenica. In the fall of 1994, Boutros Boutros-Ghali requested the recall of a second French commander, General Jean Cot, who, he felt, had pressed too hard for air cover for his forces. Other U.N. officials said that strict neutrality should be maintained because the Serbs were no more guilty of aggression than the Croats and Muslims. In retrospect it can now be seen that the U.N. attempted to bolster its position of neutrality through the questionable suppression of information unfavorable to the Serbs: although the first press reports of Serbian concentration camps in Bosnia were published on August 2, 1992, U.N. relief officials in Sarajevo admitted to having known about the camps for at least a month but having decided not to report this fact officially to New York. In any event, U.N. refugee officials in New York stated that action on the camps was an issue for the Red Cross, not for the U.N. David Owen points out in his memoir of this period that he “often stressed that the U.N. must not be seen as being at war with the Serbs.”⁷⁴

The difficulty with this position is that it was absurd in the Bosnian context: action (or inaction) by the U.N. inevitably helped one side in the war or the other. As James Steinberg has observed:

The effort to maintain the U.N.'s “neutrality” in Bosnia face[d] an inherent contradiction: any effort to bring in humanitarian aid help[ed] the Bosnian forces in the struggle with the Serbs since the Serbs [were] attempting to use starvation and exposure to force the Bosnian government to capitulate. On the other hand, if Unprofor decline[d] to use force to overcome Serb barriers to the delivery of humanitarian aid, the U.N. [was] capitulating to the Serbs' strategy [and effectively aiding them because], in the guise of neutrality, the U.N. [would] neither guarantee the delivery of humanitarian aid nor allow the Bosnians to take their own effective measures.⁷⁵

ECONOMIC SANCTIONS

Economic sanctions were widely applied in the Yugoslav conflict. Perhaps their most creative employment was the conditional sanctioning by the E.U., which offered relief from economic sanctions following compliance with the human rights and other constitutional recommendations of the Badinter Commission. Sanctions were also applied to Serbia by the U.N. Security Council, initially in an effort to persuade Serbia to cease aiding the Bosnian Serbs. These sanctions seem to have had some effect: they are widely considered to have been the reason for the public distancing of Milosevic from the Pale government (the Bosnian Serbs), and for igniting anti-Milosevic opposition in Belgrade. The most controversial economic sanction, however, and the most far-reaching in its consequences, was the imposition and maintenance of an arms embargo on all the former states of Yugoslavia.

The arguments on this issue were partly strategic, partly legal, and partly moral. In military terms, it was clear that JNA weapons had made the material difference in the early seizure of 70 percent of Bosnian territory by Serb forces, but it was less clear that the Bosnian government would be able to hold on long enough to train its forces and equip them even if the embargo were lifted. Legally, the Bosnian government argued, the U.N. Security Council could neither institute a blockade (such as the one in the Adriatic that enforced the arms embargo) against, nor deny Article 51 rights of self-defense guaranteed under the U.N. Charter to, a member state that was plainly not an aggressor. The crucial argument, however, was moral: were the states of the West simply prolonging the suffering of the people of Bosnia by allowing arms to be brought in, or were they only giving the Bosnian government a fair chance to defend itself? To this last question the answer had to be “neither”—the words “simply” and “only” were not applicable in such a complex moral environment.

HUMANITARIAN AID

There was some shock in August 1992 when the former diplomat and columnist Leslie H. Gelb wrote in the New York Times that Western officials had told him their policy was to feed the Bosnian Muslims while “prompting them to surrender.” “Let me be chillingly blunt about what Western officials told me regarding the Balkan crisis,” he wrote. “They said that nothing they are doing or plan to do is at all likely to compel the Serbs to stop killing Muslims.” Prior to this time it was not widely appreciated that the humanitarian mission to Bosnian Muslims was consistent with Serbian political objectives. In retrospect we can see that it couldn't have been any other way.

The supply of humanitarian assistance was made necessary in the first place by the Serb interdiction of utilities, water, medicine, and food to cities swollen with refugees fleeing Serbian attacks. These surrounded cities could not be resupplied by the U.N. without Serbian cooperation, which would be jeopardized by any Serb/U.N. confrontation. U.N. and U.S. analysts have concluded that in any case only about one-quarter of the needed humanitarian supplies were reaching the target populations.⁷⁶ What did get through, however, depended upon negotiations with the Serbs who controlled access to the Muslim enclaves. This had the effect of pitting the officials of the humanitarian mission against any use of force against the Serbs, lest their relief routes be cut entirely. A senior U.N. officer in Sarajevo was quoted by the New York Times as acknowledging that a newly proposed U.N. humanitarian relief plan for Sarajevo was not appreciably different than previous plans, all of which had failed. “But we felt we had to do something,” said the officer with a Bridge on the River Kwai sort of logic, “or there would be no alternative to air strikes.” Thus, despite a Security Council ban on all Serbian and other military flights in order to ensure “the safety of the delivery of humanitarian assistance,” the U.N. actually resisted enforcement of the ban and limited itself to stationing monitors to observe infractions.⁷⁷

Humanitarian aid provided a kind of camouflage to disguise inaction on other fronts. In 1992, the secretary-general stated, “I know that international public opinion is frustrated, they want to see quick results. But we believe it's important to avoid an escalation…. [The situation in former Yugoslavia] is not as difficult as it appears,” he was reported as saying, pointing to the distribution of humanitarian aid.⁷⁸ By January 1994, Warren Zimmermann, the former U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia who was running the refugee relief effort for the United States, quit in protest. “I had reached the conclusion,” he said candidly, “that the humanitarian element for which I was responsible was being used as a cover for the lack of a real policy toward Bosnia.”*

POLITICAL SETTLEMENT

Because the Serbs had been so successful in the Third Yugoslav War, any political settlement had to come to terms with their occupation of more than two-thirds of Bosnia, despite the fact that they constituted less than one-third of the population. This fact led to a series of proposed redivi-sions of the Bosnian state. Lord Carrington had initially suggested “cantonization” on the Swiss model. This was succeeded by the Vance-Owen Plan, which divided Bosnia into seven to ten largely autonomous regions with a limited central government. Owen himself worked hard to win acceptance of a Muslim mini-state on about a third of the territory of Bosnia. The Contact Group map, which was similar to the Dayton Agreement, provided for a Bosnia divided between Serbs and a Muslim-Croat federation.⁷⁹

The difficulty with these various plans was that they violated the Statement of Principles agreed to by all parties at the London Conference in August 1992, which explicitly provided for the nonrecognition of territorial gains achieved by force and the restoration of the rights of persons driven from their homes. It may be, of course, that such objectives were simply unachievable in the face of a successful military conquest such as that by the Serbs, and that the authors of these plans were merely trying to put the best face on an unpleasant fact. But these proposed settlements, such as the Vance-Owen Plan, also were the product of the haunting notion that the Bosnian Serbs have some right, other than that earned by violence, to their own self-determination. If Bosnia had been allowed to secede from Yugoslavia with the consequence that its borders became the subject of international recognition and protection, then why wasn't this right also accorded to the Serbs within Bosnia, who had never wished to secede in the first place?

The answer to this is a complicated one. “Peoples” are entitled to self-determination, which is not the same thing as an entitlement to a state. Where there are adequate protections for minorities and fair and free electoral processes, a “people” has no right to secede absent the consent of the people with whom they share the right of citizenship. Bosnia was driven from a federation it wished to preserve by the violent transformation of that state into a Greater Serbia. There is no evidence that a similar fate awaited the Bosnian Serbs at the hands of the Sarajevo government.

Nevertheless, the recognition of Bosnian secession from Yugoslavia— pressed by Germany in the hope that recognition would provide some protection for Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia from Serbia—was unwelcome to most European states (and to the United States). In light of the breakup of the Soviet Union and secessionist movements in Spain, Northern Ireland, Italy, and elsewhere it is not hard to see why. Once the society of states accepted secession as a viable means of self-determination, something like “cantonization” became inevitable. Ironically, it was the military situation, which was presumed to have dictated this solution, that rendered the “solution” so objectionable. Whatever the advertising, most observers came to recognize that there would be no return for the displaced Muslims and that the Serbs had achieved by violence essentially what they sought.

The point isn't simply that deciding what action to take in Bosnia posed some hard questions. Security decisions that put lives at risk involve difficult choices. Rather it is that the difficulties arising from the Bosnian emergency are deep and problematic because their source lies in the origin of the nation-state in violence and ethnicity, and because the arrival of a new form, the market-state, with its universal media presence, exposes these deep conflicts to great and novel stress. Notice that the option of a military response was intimately connected to the provision of humanitarian assistance, which was also connected to institutional neutrality, which dictated the nature of both the economic sanctions imposed and the political solutions proposed.

In summary, as with the Darley-Latane description of bystander behavior in emergencies, it is the ambiguity of assessment that paralyzes action. Why didn't the great powers, and the United States, which purports to lead them, do more to stop the horrors in Bosnia? In Yugoslavia it was some time before the world noticed that something awful was happening; long before the massacres at Vukovar and Mostar the Serbian Communist leadership had embarked on a constitutional transformation of Yugoslavia that was accompanied by police terrorism and violent ethnic rhetoric. Once the world did notice, it wasn't altogether clear that the event was an emergency. There were many ambiguous interpretations that could be placed on events. Once the media had persuaded us that a true emergency was underway, it was very difficult to decide what to do as a consequence.⁸⁰

These ambiguities went directly to the legitimacy of the nation-state. For example, is the war in Yugoslavia a civil war between a central government in Belgrade and breakaway secessionist states with capitals in Ljubljana, Zagreb, and Sarajevo? Or is it a series of civil wars between the Bosnian state and its Serbian and Croatian minorities and the Croatian state and its Serbian minority? Or is the entire affair simply the latest eruption of an intractable ancient conflict that was temporarily kept in check by the authoritarian regime that collapsed along with the other Communist states of Europe? Is what happened in Bosnia an example of ethnic cleansing or something else— a forced migration of the kind we have seen countless times before when new states are born?

V.

Of course the murder of Kitty Genovese under her blood-stained stairway in Queens is not the same, legally or strategically, as the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from the blood-soaked villages of Bosnia. If it were, then armed intervention (a strategic act) to protect the Muslims would be like police work (a law-governed act): that is, there would be no debate as to whether the benefit of enforcing the rules justifies the cost of their enforcement. Some international lawyers and diplomats behave as though there is a world order of nation-states that is analogous to the civil order of a society, and they argue that the international community must respond in the way that a domestic government responds to criminal behavior. This makes armed intervention into a kind of police work. If anyone still believed in this vision of world order in 1992, I don't see how that person could maintain such a view after Yugoslavia. One might say that the lifespan of the “New World Order” can be dated from its beginning in Kuwait City to its demise in Srebrenica. It would be more accurate to say that the society of nation-states that was forged in the Long War acted swiftly and with assuredness in Kuwait, where it offered a classic nation-state answer to a classic state problem of aggression to acquire resources; and that this sure-footedness vanished when that same society was faced with a more puzzling conundrum arising from its own identity: when does a “nation” get a state? What made this failure so significant—for it is hardly the first time this question has arisen—is that it occurred in the context of the emergence of the new market-states.