TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081792/08179925.000

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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 20

Atrocity And Outrage


Specters of barbarism in Bosnia compel the U.S. and Europe to
ponder: Is it time to intervene?

By J.F.O. MCALLISTER/WASHINGTON -- With reporting by Jasmina
Kuzmanovic/Zagreb, William Rademaekers/Vienna and Bruce van
Voorst/Washington


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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