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.
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?