Stay the Hand of Vengeance by Bass Gary Jonathan

Author:Bass, Gary Jonathan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Protecting Soldiers

NATO had the troops. In all of The Hague’s early difficulties, the fundamental hurdle was the West’s refusal to take military action against war criminals in ex-Yugoslavia.

A dread of Serb reprisals against UNPROFOR lay at the root of French and British fears of being seen as less than impartial.72 UNPROFOR’s guidelines made it perfectly clear that humanitarianism yielded pride of place to self-protection: “The execution of the mandate is secondary to the security of UN personnel.”73 David Owen later wrote, “I believe Mladic knew that UN troops were his ultimate safeguard against NATO air power.”74

To the frustration of its NATO allies, America refused to send troops into Bosnia. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Bush and then Clinton, later wrote: “No American President could defend to the American people the heavy sacrifice of lives it would cost to resolve this baffling conflict.”75 In 1993, Clinton’s choice of a lift-and-strike policy had the advantage of not embroiling American soldiers in ground combat. But it risked UNPROFOR troops, so the Europeans scotched the idea.76 America’s reluctance to risk troops overseas was only strengthened in October 1993, when eighteen American soldiers were killed in Somalia while trying to catch faction leader Muhammad Farah Aideed.

Such American reticence complicated the tribunal’s work, as for instance in the excavation of a mass grave in a field at Ovcara, near Vukovar, where some 260 Croats from Vukovar hospital had allegedly been executed by Milosevic’s Yugoslav National Army in 1991. The forensic investigators at Ovcara were led by Physicians for Human Rights, a Boston-based organization. But when the group asked for military engineers, in June 1993, the State Department and the Pentagon—to Albright’s chagrin—refused, fearing Serb attacks.77 (Britain, according to Kalshoven, never even replied to a similar request.)78 “If you want us to deploy soldiers,” said James Rubin, Albright’s spokesman and confidant, “you need more soldiers to protect them, a whole ’nother level of commitment which the United States government has not reached.”

The investigators had to settle for about 150 Dutch army volunteers. According to Eric Stover of the UN team, they had to beg permission from the local Serb authorities, who demanded the exhumation of a mass grave with dead Serbs. In October 1993, the UN team set out, and eerily found itself being housed in barracks that backed onto a training ground for Arkan’s Tigers, a savage Serb paramilitary group. The UN team was only able to clear away the overgrowth at Ovcara before the local Serb general, Milan Milovanovic, sitting beneath a picture of Milosevic, ordered them out.79

As the war dragged on, both Britain and France lost all stomach for the UNPROFOR mission. Most of Major’s cabinet wanted Britain’s 5,500 troops out of Bosnia before the winter of 1995–96, and France warned that it would bring its 5,000 UNPROFOR soldiers home if America did not make a military commitment in Bosnia.80

America was no more enthusiastic. Clinton resented the media’s focus on war crimes in Bosnia. “They keep trying to force me to get America into a war,” Clinton once said.

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