Mass Atrocities and the Police by Christian Axboe Nielsen;

Author:Christian Axboe Nielsen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Chapter 4

OF RED BERETS AND PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY: SERBIA’S SUPPORT FOR THE RS MUP

Although there was no ethnic majority in Yugoslavia, the Serbs constituted the largest group. Political developments between November 1990 and April 1992 demonstrated that most Bosnian Serbs strongly desired to remain part of Yugoslavia and hence opposed the secession of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The shrill propagandistic exploitation of Second World War era atrocities and genocide against Serbs created and nurtured an existential fear of imminent demise if Serbs were to be relegated to the position of a minority in a new state dominated by other ethnicities. At the same time, these fears provided essential oxygen to the regime of Serbian President Slobodan Milošević, who in the midst of economic and state crisis positioned himself as the great leader who alone could save the nation from humiliation and possible extinction.1

Milošević could in Croatia and Bosnia to a significant extent rely upon the Yugoslav People’s Army to enforce the borders of the country and combat secession. Yet though the JNA from 1990 to 1992 slowly shed its Yugoslav ideology in favour of a new Serbian nationalist mission, Milošević, like the Bosnian Serbs, did not fully trust the JNA.2 Moreover, keen to avoid accusations of stoking warfare in neighbouring republics, Milošević’s strategy relied on portraying Croatia in particular as an aggressive (and fascist) separatist, and Serbia as the defensive preserver of Yugoslav statehood and sovereignty. At the same time, Milošević needed to ensure that Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia could seize and hold large portions of – preferably contiguous – territory before Croatia and Bosnia could assert their own sovereignty. If successful, these new Serb-controlled entities could at some future point merge with Serbia (including of course both Kosovo and Vojvodina, stripped of their autonomy in 1990) and a docile Montenegro. Maintaining this poise required plausible deniability with respect to the instigation and spread of violence and atrocities in Croatia and Bosnia. For Milošević and his most trusted advisors, this was a job for the State Security Service of Serbia.

This chapter will focus on the assistance provided by Serbia to the Bosnian Serbs before and after the establishment of the RS MUP. This assistance took as its point of departure the precedent established by the Serbian State Security’s role in organizing and mobilizing the Croatian Serbs in 1990 and 1991. Already in July 1990, a number of Serb police officers from Knin sent an open letter to Petar Gračanin, the Yugoslav federal secretary for internal affairs, informing him that they did not wish to serve in the police of Croatia.3 As part of the model of the Serb Autonomous Areas, Croatia provided the successful test case of a template subsequently deployed in Bosnia – and in the case of select elements of policing and use of paramilitary forces, also years later in Kosovo. The chapter hence starts with a brief overview of the role of the Serbian State Security Service in Croatia. Thereafter, the narrative will move to an analysis of Serbia’s role with respect to policing in Bosnia from 1991 until the end of 1992.

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