TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/082492/08249930.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 10.9 KB | 223 lines

                                                                                THE BALKANS, Page 46

Rumor & Reality


Whether all the tales of savagery are true or not, people act
as if the worst is yet to come.

By BRUCE W. NELAN -- With reporting by James L. Graff/Trnopolje,
John Moody/Zagreb and William Mader/London


    For those who live there, Bosnia is a child's worst
nightmare, a land where horror is the custom. Fathers disappear.
Friends die. Neighbors flee. Food is short, bombs fall and
suffering is a way of life. The familiar names of cities and
towns have turned into symbols of destruction, siege, massacre,
"ethnic cleansing."

    The stories of savagery have come to define life in what
was Yugoslavia. Whether they are fact or fiction is almost
irrelevant: what people think is happening determines behavior.
Serbs say that they fear the imminent imposition of a scourging
fundamentalist Islamic regime in the heart of Europe, and that
they must defend themselves however they may. Muslims tell tales
of castration and execution at the hands of Serbs, justifying
their imprisonment or expulsion from the small enclaves they
still control. The very fear of brutality has set off a huge
exodus of Bosnia-Herzegovina's population in search of safety.
"Emotions, not rationality, have the upper hand," says Francois
Heisbourg, director of the London-based International Institute
for Strategic Studies.

    Not all the stories are true. But even if truth is the
first casualty in every war, more than enough is real about the
horrors in Bosnia. Some of the atrocity stories are exaggerated
and some of the numbers of victims inflated, but the evidence
of inhumanity and brutality on a staggering scale is there for
everyone to see.

    As they moved through the hinterlands of the former
Yugoslavia last week, TIME correspondents found believable
evidence everywhere. In the northern village of Trnopolje they
visited the "Fraternity" elementary school that Serb militia
forces have turned into a detention camp for 4,000 people,
mostly Muslim men. Half the captives live outdoors in makeshift
lean-tos; they all get the same dirty water and use the same
three toilets. One inmate, Hajudin Zubovic, a 28-year-old miner,
told how a dozen or more prisoners at a ceramics factory in the
area had been forced to stand in the sun all afternoon on July
24 and Serbian guards beat 10 of them to death, then fired
rifles into a room filled with more than 150 men. Says Zubovic:
"Thirteen hundred of us heard their screams."

    Now safe in Croatia, Marijana, 17, stuttered out the
terrible events of last April. After raping her and her mother,
Serb irregulars carried Marijana off to a camp in the forest,
where she and a group of other women were raped repeatedly over
several weeks. They finally freed her when she became pregnant;
she vows, "I will not give birth." But her doctor says she is
in her 20th week and an abortion is out of the question. No one
at the hospital has been brave enough to tell her that.

    Outside the police station in the northwest town of
Prijedor, dozens of Muslims stood in line to apply for
permission to leave. As in most Serb-held territory, the
departing can get exit papers only in exchange for signing a
document relinquishing all claim to their property and
possessions. Serb police chief Simo Drljaca gloated that none
of the 9,000 Muslims he says applied to leave wanted to remain
in the mayhem that is Bosnia.

    Their supposedly voluntary flight is the cynical point of
the madness that has enveloped the country. The overwhelming,
all-pervasive terror, made more frightening by its random
cruelty, has a clear objective: uprooting the Muslim and Croat
population in what has been called ethnic cleansing, a scheme
to turn large chunks of Bosnia into purely Serbian territory.
The apparently casual destruction Serbs have inflicted on towns
and cities with artillery bombardment, including the capital of
Sarajevo, is notification to the occupants to leave. Serbian
radio brazenly delivered that message last week to 70,000
residents of Bihac, warning that shelling would not stop until
every one of them agreed to depart. Snipers firing on civilian
shoppers and mortar shells dropped on the market have made the
same point. Serbian forces have issued a countrywide eviction
order, which they have followed up by seizing at least
two-thirds of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

    Political scientists call such a policy the rational use
of terror -- that is, making a population tractable through
constant fear. The stomach-turning atrocity tales swirling
through Bosnia -- regardless of whether they are true or false
-- serve that purpose. Though they blacken Serbia's name
internationally, they fuel the panic and despair that has swept
over Bosnians as they tell stories of the latest horrors to one
another. They were ready to believe all of them -- and many of
them were true. "Terror has deep roots," says Heisbourg. "There
has been too much of it for people to return to normal life even
if the chance arises."

    Nor is the cleared-earth policy an exclusively Serbian
practice. Croatian forces have jumped into the fight, occupying
almost one-third of Bosnia, expelling the Muslims and Serbs
living there. And Muslim Slavs, left with only four small
segments of the country, have also tried to oust Serbs and
Croats. "No one's hands are clean in this dreadful war," says
Jens Bjorsten, a field officer for the U.N. High Commissioner
for Refugees (U.N.H.C.R.). "All have done horrible things."

    The International Committee of the Red Cross abandoned its
posture of studied discretion last week and issued a blanket
indictment. After visiting camps run by Serbs, Croats and
Muslims, it found that "innocent civilians" are being held in
inhumane conditions by all of them, part of "a policy of forced
population transfers carried out on a massive scale and marked
by systematic use of brutality," including "harassment, murder,
confiscation of property, deportation and the taking of
hostages." The U.N. Human Rights Commission appointed a special
investigator to assemble evidence of atrocities and build a
record for a possible future war-crimes trial.

    But in the surreal world of Bosnia, Serbs met this torrent
of international opprobrium with little more than a shrug. They
point the finger at others to defend their own actions. "We
realize that the state of our prisons is not ideal," said
Dragan Kalinic, who claims to be health minister of the
Serb-controlled area of Bosnia. "But we shouldn't have any
illusions on the state of the prisons of the Muslims and the
Croats." Foreign journalists arriving in Banja Luka to visit
nearby detention camps are shown a 15-minute video showing
bodies -- purportedly those of Serbs -- that have been shot,
stabbed, castrated, extensively mutilated.

    The Serbs have constructed their own version of reality to
justify their aggression. "There is no ethnic cleansing," said
Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, "but ethnic shifting. We are
doing it to protect people." They have conjured up a phantom
Islamic jihad from which they are saving Europe. "This is not
a civil war," insists Prijedor police chief Drljaca. "It's a
religious war." The operative lie is that Bosnia's Muslim
leader, Alija Izetbegovic, is bent on creating a Muslim
fundamentalist state. Never mind that Bosnia's Muslims are not
fundamentalist, indeed are among the more secular followers of
the Prophet Muhammad. Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, who
shares the Serb ambition to carve up Bosnia, parrots the charge
that "there are tendencies to create an Islamic state." Serbs
claim that an "Islamic Declaration" that Izetbegovic wrote in
the 1970s is proof of his intention to establish a religious
state. "There was nothing in it," says Ivo Banac, a Croat who
is a professor of history at Yale University, "that alluded in
any sense to Bosnia-Herzegovina."

    That hardly matters if the threat works. The excuse has
allowed Serbs and Croats to turn on the Muslims with such
ferocity that many Muslims now conspire in their own flight. So
too do international officials, who have been put in the
excruciating position of aiding the evacuation of endangered
Muslims -- and thereby abetting ethnic cleansing. The Serbs
agreed to safe passage for 300 women and children from Sarajevo
last week for humanitarian reasons, for public relations
advantage, though relief officials believe their motive was
really to depopulate the city. In northern Bosnia, Serbs
announced a plan to push 28,000 Muslims from towns in the
region, after the U.N. aided the expulsion of 7,000 Muslims into
Croatia a week before. This time the U.N. has decided to ward
off a mass exodus by sending in food and medicine. Said
U.N.H.C.R. operations director Tony Land in Zagreb: "We can't
allow ourselves to be drawn into this kind of unwitting
collaboration."

    While the world was recoiling in shock from the visible
inhumanity, Western reaction was more rhetorical than real.
Under pressure to do something -- anything -- the U.N. Security
Council passed a vague resolution that provided for "all
measures necessary" to ensure delivery of relief supplies.
Observers could be forgiven if they somehow got the idea that
the U.N. had authorized the use of force to stop the war and end
the barbarities. That was hardly the case. U.S. Deputy Secretary
of State Lawrence Eagleburger spelled it out carefully: "What
we are talking about is the provision of humanitarian
assistance. We are not talking about going beyond that."

    A NATO contingency plan calling for 100,000 alliance
troops to hold a land corridor from the Adriatic coast was
rejected last week. Britain's Deputy Foreign Minister Douglas
Hogg flew to Sarajevo to tell Bosnian President Izetbegovic
"that there is no cavalry coming over the hill, that there is
no international force coming."

    Western governments seem to hope the mere threat of force
will scare off combatants who have shown no signs of responding
to international dictums. The nominal admission of inspection
teams to some detention camps last week was little more than a
shell game in which cleaned-up camps were opened to outsiders
while prisoners were hustled away to other facilities far from
prying eyes.

    The ultimate reality may be that the war is virtually over
and the Serbs have won."We have everything," declared Serb
leader Karadzic last week. "All we need now is a negotiated
settlement." The Serb irregulars know how hard it will be for
any international body to reclaim what they have taken. And
regardless of the political outcome, the war has already done
damage that cannot be settled at any peace table. A new chapter
of resentment and reprisal has already been written that
promises to keep the Balkans unstable for decades. People who
have seen their parents slaughtered and their children killed
will never forget, let alone forgive.