Pope John Paul II was one of those leaders who provided states with reasons to intervene in Bosnia. He issued a statement after the Mazowiecki report that read in part: “The news and pictures from Bosnia, particularly from Srebrenica and Zepa, testify to how Europe and humanity are still collapsing into the abyss of degradation… They are crimes against humanity [which amount to] a defeat for civilization.”30
Whose job is it to defend civilization, however? States have an interest in protecting the worth and value of civilized life. Achilles' shield depicts, it will be recalled, not only war and the law courts, but also religious ceremonies and wedding feasts. But what motivates states is not the same as what might move an individual or a nongovernmental organization or even a particular group of states, like an alliance, to intervene in an emergency. The case of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait provides an instructive example.
It is frequently remarked that the reason the United States led a coalition of states in a campaign to expel an Iraqi occupation force from the state of Kuwait was because vast oil reserves lay within the territorial domain of Kuwait. Allowing these reserves to fall into hostile hands would have threatened the economic and military security of the West, of which the United States was the leader. If Iraq had invaded a state poor in resources, like the Kurdish section of Iran, the West would have done nothing, as indeed it did nothing during the Iraqi invasion of Iran.
This description of events is a kind of half-truth: it is true that the potential possession of crucial raw materials by an enemy gives a state a good reason to be sensitive to the actual seizure of those raw materials. With the vast new reserves Kuwait would have brought him, Saddam Hussein might have been able to raise oil prices to the economic detriment of many industrialized countries; certainly he was no counsel of oil-price restraint, as the Kuwaitis have been. Absent such a reason, it is quite possible that the United States and other powerful states would not have marshalled the enormous forces that won the Gulf War. But it is not true that the United States would have found such a threat to its prosperity a sufficient reason to intervene. Imagine, for example, what America would have done if, instead of simply invading and annexing Kuwait, Saddam Hussein had fomented a democratic uprising against the notably undemocratic Kuwaiti regime, and later contributed troops to aid a provisional government that had nominally maintained Kuwait's independent status but had overthrown its monarchy. It is highly implausible to imagine that the United States would have sent 400,000 men to the Arabian desert in such circumstances. What proved crucial in the Gulf conflict was the combination of both material reasons for intervention and the threat posed to the foundations of the states system. The Iraqi attack on Kuwait was the first time since the founding of the United Nations that one member state had invaded another, conquered, and annexed it. It was this intersection of interests, strategic and constitutional, that galvanized great power leadership.
Similarly, in Bosnia it was necessary for world leaders to recognize both the strategic reasons for acting and the legal imperatives to do so. Stopping a campaign of ethnic cleansing, which threatened the most basic human norms of decency, could provide one; the recognition of Bosnia as a true European state, with a right to exist, could afford the other.
For this reason, the answers to two apparently quite unconnected questions were both critical to moving the United States and other states to act: first, were the atrocities in Bosnia part of a systematic campaign of ethnic and cultural extermination against the Muslims or were the atrocities simply examples artfully chosen by the media of acts that had been in fact committed by all sides to the conflict? And second, were the borders of the Bosnian state worthy of legal respect or were they merely an arbitrary, anomalous hindrance to the recognition of the principle of self-determination by national groups? Dimitri Simes put these questions powerfully when he wrote, on March 10, 1993:
It is hard to justify U.S. intervention on moral as well as geopolitical grounds. First, all sides in the war in Bosnia have committed atrocities, although the Serbs have committed more than the others, partly because their military advances gave them more opportunities. Paradoxically, because of Western insistence that the Serbian Army stay out of the confrontation, the fighting was assigned to the ill-disciplined Serbian militia in Bosnia, thereby increasing the likelihood for abuses. Second, do we really believe that the administrative borders in the ex-Yugoslavia—set up by Tito's Communist regime and based neither on history nor on current demography—should be treated as sacred?31
Simes may have been misinformed about the role of the Serbian army. In fact we know that Serbian irregulars (many of them members of the JNA who were detached from their regiments) were deliberately deployed in order to confuse the situation legally, disguise the role of Belgrade, and give the appearance of a Bosnian civil war rather than a Serbian invasion. Simes, however, was not alone, and with his customary insight, he had gone right to the heart of the matter: both of his questions had to be answered before a decision to act would be taken.
ETHNIC CLEANSING
On November 20, four months before Simes's article in the New York Times, Mazowiecki noted that particular attention should be drawn to the “appalling extent of persecution by ‘ethnic cleansing' against those of Muslim ethnic origin [who are] threatened with extermination.”32 By contrast, in Simes's view, there is nothing unique about “ethnic cleansing”: the atrocities committed by the Serbs were no different, though perhaps they were somewhat more numerous, than those committed by all the other parties to the Yugoslav conflict. To the extent that Serbian atrocities were more numerous, according to Simes this was partly because the JNA had not been an active party to the war, forcing Serbia to rely on irregular partisans, and partly a result of the large amounts of Bosnian territory under Serb control. To assess the truth of these observations, we might begin by asking: What is ethnic cleansing? Is it a random affair of irregular militias? Did all the parties to the Yugoslav conflict participate in such campaigns?
The forced resettlement of populations on the basis of their cultural identity is hardly novel or peculiar to the Balkans. Assyrian, 33 Greek, and Roman conquerors—to say nothing of the treatment of the American Indians—all provide precedents for such behavior.34 Even the calculated destruction of an ethnic group and its culture, as was attempted by the Nazis against Jews, by the Turks against Armenians, by Australians against Tasmanian Aborigines, is hardly unique to Bosnia. What makes “ethnic cleansing” so odious is precisely the world's experience with it, especially in this century. The very term, with its eugenic overtones of extermination, repels and chills because it is not new—because, that is, it reminds us of precedents, of other horrors and other places.
The first English use of this term that I have been able to locate35 occurred when a Reuters reporter in Belgrade quoted Croatia's Supreme Council as charging that “the aim of [a particular Serbian expulsion of Croats] is obviously the ‘ethnic cleansing' of the critical areas to be annexed to Serbia.”36 One year later, a reporter writing in the New York Times in the summer of 1992, noted that “the precondition for [the creation of Greater Serbia] lies in the purging—‘ethnic cleansing' in the perpetrators' lexicon—of wide areas of Bosnia of all but like-minded Serbs.” Indeed what partly made the term so shocking was its casual use by the Serbs until the world community seized on this phrase. One scholar, Norman Cigar, has traced the phrase to the original program of the Serbian Chetnik leadership, issued on December 20, 1941. Two of the stated objectives of this program were
to cleanse the state territory of all national minorities and anti-national elements… [and] to create a direct, continuous, border between Serbia and Montenegro, and between Serbia and Slovenia, by cleansing the Sandzak of the Muslim inhabitants and Bosnia of the Muslim and Croatian inhabitants.37
Why was this necessary? Why didn't ethnic dominance suffice in those areas where Serbs were in a majority? To understand the answer to this is to see why ethnic cleansing is a strategic and tactical set of ideas, and not just an emotive name for atrocities; it is also to see why the multiethnic state of Bosnia, unlike the states of Croatia and Serbia, is unlikely to have been a perpetrator of this strategy.
The biologists Stjepkp Golubic, Thomas Golubic, and Susan Campbell have published a demographic study of the Bosnian population that quantitatively demonstrates its essential indivisibility without mass resettlements.38 Working from the 1991 census, they show that the districts in which various groups—Serb, Croatian, Muslim—were dominant prior to the war were neither homogeneous nor contiguous. Each of these areas in which a particular group had a dominant plurality also include a substantial percentage (between 22 percent and 43 percent) of another group. Moreover, each collection of dominant districts that was aggregated by contiguity amounted to only a fraction of the total population of the group, leaving between 35 percent and 68 percent of that group outside the area of its dominance.
Nor did dominance correlate with cultural purity: Bosnian Croats in the north of Bosnia, where they were the dominant group, lived with substantial minorities of Muslims, as they had (peacefully) for centuries. If statistical dominance does not correlate with cultural purity, and if the areas of dominance are not contiguous, then to achieve the dictatorship of one cultural group would require a use of force like ethnic cleansing. Moreover, the cultural patrimony of historic Bosnia would also have to be destroyed:
Architecture… bridges [and] monuments built by the Ottomans were the most visible, most immediately tangible signs of Bosnia's “otherness.” These became targets of relentless artillery bombardment or straightforward demolition. [L]ibraries housing rare books and priceless manuscripts were deliberately destroyed… Hundreds of delicately designed mosques, large and small, that had stood for centuries unharmed, untouched, disappeared overnight.39
One reason why the Vance-Owen Plan, which envisioned ten separate provinces, was criticized as a concession to Milosevic's program was that it was estimated that an additional two million persons would eventually be forced to leave their homes.40
Ethnic cleansing is more than simply a new name for forced resettlement, however. It is a calculated strategy that occurred when the political objectives of the parliamentary nation-states Serbia and Croatia (though they may have been led by communists or fascists) confronted the complex demography of the state of Bosnia.
Just as the Krajina region of Croatia, for example, is now 91% Serb, though it was only half Serb before it was seized by Serbian military and paramilitary forces in 1991, so too in Bosnia, connecting a Greater Serbia called for cleaning non-Serbs from areas of Bosnia such as Prijedor, Srebrenica, Foca, Gorazde, and Brcko where Serbs had been a minority, as well as from Banja Luka, where they had been a majority. In Zvornik, where Muslims once constituted 65% of the population, now… they are just a handful. In Prijedor, by September 1992… Serb radio announced that the Serbs were now a majority and were ready for a referendum.41
Nor is ethnic cleansing only a strategy. It is also a well-defined system of military tactics, coordinating JNA and militia forces, involving a particular set of military maneuvers including artillery bombardment, encirclement, terrorism, and the maintenance of detention camps.
The tactics of ethnic cleansing are by now well known, though not always well appreciated. In the first stage, an operation commences with isolated terrorist attacks by Serb irregulars on rural populations of Muslims.* Thereafter, the role of armor and systematic shelling by heavy weapons is integral to its operations. The U.S. submission to the War Crimes Tribunal gives numerous accounts, of which I will excerpt an example:
A 27-year-old Bosnian Muslim witnessed the Bosnian Serb artillery bombardment of Biscani at about noon on July 20, 1992. Biscani was one of many Muslim villages in the Prijedor area and had a population of about 1,000 Muslims. Since May 1992, there had been Bosnian Serb soldiers and other officials in the town. From May to July, their activities had been limited to provoking the population by insults, residential searches, and general harassment. The primary targets of the provocations appeared to be the wealthier and more prominent citizens of the town, including doctors, lawyers, and business owners. Sometime between 2 pm and 3 pm on July 20, the artillery bombardment was lifted, and the town was assaulted by a force of Bosnian Serb infantry supported by one tank and one armored personnel carrier. Members of the attacking unit were Bosnian Serbs from the Prijedor area and from areas in the vicinity, such as Sanski Most and Banja Luka. The witness recognized several of the attacking soldiers as residents of the Prijedor area. All wore camouflage uniforms, red berets, and had the Serbian flag on one sleeve of their uniforms. Small groups of soldiers quickly occupied virtually every house in the village. After they had secured each house, they shot and killed most of the male residents in or immediately outside their homes. The women and children were rounded up and placed in a small number of houses so that they would be easier to watch. The witness observed the shooting through a window from inside one of the houses. He saw two soldiers kill Vehid Duratovic and Sadik Causevic as they attempted to run away. He also saw seven Bosnian Serb soldiers assemble five male residents of the village in front of a wall of a house across the street where one of the Bosnian Serb soldiers shot and killed them. Four of the five victims were: Rifet Duratovic, Mirsad Kadiric, Ifed Karagic, and Ibrahim Kadiric. From July 20 to 27, the surviving local residents, mostly women and children, buried the victims' bodies in the local cemetery. On July 27, about 35 women and children and about 15 men were rounded up by Bosnian Serb soldiers. The witness believed that this group constituted all the remaining survivors of the village. This group was forced to walk to an unknown location near the entrance to the city of Prijedor where Serb soldiers had set up a roadblock. At about 8 pm, a bus arrived and transported the entire group to the Trnopolje detention camp. (Department of State).42
These tactics drove unarmed farmers and the residents of small villages away from their homes seeking protection. The refugees flooded into towns that swelled with their numbers. The “safe area” concept was actually quite consistent with the Serbian campaign of ethnic cleansing. It made towns like Tuzla and Zepa into concentration camps full of hungry and defenseless people without sanitation, without medicine, without effective weapons. And that brings us to the second stage of ethnic cleansing, the siege of cities that have been engorged by the arrival of rural refugees.
At this second stage, the Serbs, using JNA artillery, fired round after round into the surrounded city. When one sees the now familiar CNN film clip of a multistory apartment house in Sarajevo crashing down, one mustn't think that that is the result of isolated mortar fire. Rather, it is the result of artillery and heavy tanks in stable emplacements firing heavy caliber shells into the steel and concrete of the targeted building in a sustained bombardment.
In the third stage, the besieged city surrendered. When this occurred, the Serbs culled the men of military age. These were taken out of town and machine-gunned, and buried in mass graves. Then the tactical focus shifted to the remaining women. One element of ethnic cleansing has to do with the calculated policy of rape. This wasn't so much to eliminate the genes of Muslims (a kind of genocide), however, as it was to humiliate Muslim women so that they and their husbands would never want to return. Only when the men had been murdered and the women defiled did the buses arrive to take the remaining refugees to the humanitarian centers manned by the U.N. outside Serb territory. This explains the peculiar demographics of the refugee population, in which only the very old and the very young appear to be surviving when these are in fact the most vulnerable populations among refugees.
Ethnic cleansing is thus not merely a political goal. It is a coordinated set of tactics in service of a well-thought-out military strategy. Its success depended in part upon the nonenforcement of the U.N. Security Council resolutions that established the no-fly zone and banned JNA logistical support, upon the luring of refugees into the “safe areas” declared by the U.N. Security Council and upon the U.N. arms embargo that kept the Bosnians from effectively returning the fire that rained down upon them from artillery positions around their towns. Which is to say that “ethnic cleansing” depended upon the tacit cooperation of the U.N. Security Council, which studiedly and repeatedly confirmed all three of those supporting elements.
According to a Pentagon official, “[w]hen the Serbs began to move [against Sarajevo], we saw them executing the same strategy they had employed against other enclaves. They do not conduct a direct assault but surround the area and create an increasingly dire humanitarian situation.” By using their control over access to the surrounded enclave, the Serbs could negotiate with the U.N., allowing humanitarian aid only to the extent that such negotiations enhanced the Serbian military position and compelled the U.N. forces (Unprofor) to become voluntary hostages. David Owen reflects this role as unwitting accomplice in his autobiographical memoir. “Living with the arms embargo,” he writes, “for all its inconsistencies and evasions, was never an immoral position for it ensured the continuation of Unprofor's humanitarian mandate for the first few years, when it saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”43 He has a point, of course—but that point is enfolded within the Serbian tactics of ethnic cleansing, which carefully manipulated the “humanitarian mandate” to achieve its military goals.
One final element of this strategy must be touched upon.
The aim is not only to expel the ethnically “unclean” population from the desired territory but also to destroy all possibilities for their return—completely to dismantle the spiritual and material structure of the civilization of the unwanted population… [T]he expelled populations will stay away because they have no homes, mosques, schools, etc.—literally nothing to go back to…. [T]he real guarantee is fear: the knowledge that their neighbors remain in wait, should they try to go back. According to numerous testimonies, special military expeditions from Serbia and Montenegro have sought not only to slaughter and expel but also to inspire or force the indigenous Serbs to do the same….44
Thus the strategy of ethnic cleansing is hardly a random affair managed by uncoordinated bands of irregulars. General Momcilo Perisic of the JNA has openly acknowledged the commanding role played by his army in the conquest of Bosnia.45 Many facts, including logistical ones, support this finding of coordination, but some of the most telling of these facts are the most humble. International observers were at first puzzled to see rows of shoes neatly lined up on the edge of roadsides or forests where it was later determined that mass executions had taken place. Apparently the victims were instructed to remove their shoes before they were marched off to their execution sites. This small detail suggests a coordinated tactical plan that Serb commanders were instructed to follow, for it is unlikely that this would occur coincidentally at different sites.
All of this information was of course available to the states of the West—the United States and her European colleagues on the Security Council. What blurred these facts—just as Darley and Latane had predicted—was the introduction of a crucial ambiguity by the Serbs and others. High-ranking officials in the West repeatedly stated that all parties to the conflict were at fault, and implied that Muslims, Serbs, and Croats had all participated in such campaigns of “ethnic cleansing.”
On May 18, 1993, Secretary Christopher, in preparation for testimony that day before Congress, asked the Balkan desk of the State Department to come up with examples of Muslim atrocities in the war in Bosnia. The desk officers angrily declined: they said that though there had been Muslim atrocities, they paled in comparison with those committed by the Serbs. Later that day, Christopher nevertheless stated in his testimony: “It's easy to analogize [Bosnia] to the Holocaust. But I never heard of any ethnic cleansing by the Jews against the German people.” The acting assistant secretary for human rights later reminded Christopher, in a memo since disclosed, that, of the documented atrocities, only a handful (6 percent) could be attributed to Muslims, and that, in contrast with the Serbian and Croatian campaigns of ethnic cleansing, no evidence linked these isolated incidents to the central Bosnian army command or to the Bosnian government. In fact, the New York Times later reported, the State Department had for more than a year been reporting “complicity by the Milosevic regime and the Government of Croatia in atrocities of both regular and paramilitary forces.”
Nevertheless, other officials testified before the House National Security Committee as late as November 1995 that all sides in the conflict shared the blame. “There are no white hats there” became something of a cliché among officials.46 Similar sentiments were voiced by the U.N. secretary-general, who lamented that the conflict had “spared no one in its violence.”
Indeed at the time one often heard, at first sotto voce, from senior officials that there was “evidence” that the Bosnians had shelled themselves on at least one occasion—the deadly mortar attack on the Sarajevo market on February 5, 1994—in an effort to kindle foreign intervention. Owen repeats this in his memoirs, unfortunately citing Tanjug news agency, a Belgrade government source; there is supposedly at least one U.N. report that attempted to make this claim, though later studies have been unable to confirm this. The most experienced and respected diplomats in the United States and the United Kingdom—Lawrence Eagleburger, a former ambassador to Yugoslavia and subsequently U.S. secretary of state, and Lord Carrington, a World War II veteran and former British foreign secretary—both quietly let it be known that to knowledgeable observers of the region all sides had a share in the responsibility for atrocities.
These perceptions, perhaps more than any other fact, introduced a pervasive ambiguity into the situation and slowed Western response. They are vaguely analogous to the perceptions on the part of the bystanders in Queens that Kitty Genovese was somehow mixed up in something that had led to the attack on her. Those who actually knew her (though slightly) were the very ones who knew that she worked in a bar, often came home late, was vivacious and outgoing.
This perception that “all sides are implicated” also fed the strict neutrality observed by the U.N. peacekeeping force. Observance of this neutrality had the perverse effect of making the Bosnians a constant irritant to the U.N. officials. Owen observes that the “prevailing view” of U.N. commanders was that “Unprofor's [United Nations Protection Force] worst problems were with the Muslims.” When food convoys came to deliver humanitarian supplies to the enclaves, desperate crowds of Muslims would gather and try to keep the U.N. trucks from leaving. The British foreign secretary complained that the Bosnian Muslims were using Unprofor forces as a shield, as when Bosnian government forces would fire out from one of the “protected” but surrounded enclaves. General Rose repeatedly told observers that his governing rule was not to cross “the Mogadishu Line”—a phrase alluding to the U.N. experience in Somalia, when a mission that began as neutral peacekeeping led to involvement in a factional war, including a punitive search for a particular Somali warlord. The U.N. representative of the secretary-general, Yasushi Akashi, resolutely refused to authorize NATO air support when he believed this would amount to a partisan contribution to one side, exceeding the “mandate” provided by resolutions of the Security Council.*
Why did such experienced and distinguished diplomats as Eagleburger and Carrington, Owen and Douglas Hurd contribute so thoroughly to muddying the waters, and clouding the otherwise clear perceptions of emergency and the necessity to act? And why did not the Muslims succumb to the sort of tactics that worked so effectively for the Croats and Serbs? Why didn't “all sides do it”? I think the answer to both questions is the same, and I hope it justifies the time spent on the description of ethnic cleansing in a book about the history and future of the modern State.
As we have seen, “ethnic cleansing” is more than simply the aggregate of countless individual atrocities. It encompasses a set of military tactics carefully designed to exploit the deep weaknesses in the nation-state. When Eagleburger and Carrington spoke about Yugoslavia, they spoke from broad experience and knowledge about the Serb-Croat nationalist struggles that, since the early part of this century, were saturated in the very sort of ethnic fanaticism that led to policies of “cleansing” territory of other ethnic groups. When these policies were deployed by former communist leaders like Tudjman and Milosevic to consolidate their own power in the aftermath of the collapse of communism, they led inevitably to the atrocities of the Bosnian theatre; the very intermixture of groups there insured that. Thus the war seemed merely like a continuation of the Serb-Croat struggle, which was the focus of their experience and insight. But it was also a brutal assault on Bosnian Muslims, and the media, which these statesmen so distrusted and despised, were making this assault into a defining hour for the society of nation-states. Could that society set legal standards for admission and defend those states that met those standards? Or was the conundrum of self-determination—when does an ethnic minority get its own state, thereby creating a new minority from the now-detached remnants of the formerly majority group—somehow bound up with the nation-state? Could tumors of nationalism grow and attack a modern state with a strategy, ethnic cleansing, that specifically arose from this conundrum, thus paralyzing the rest of the members of the society of states? To see the conflict as one that necessarily implicated “all sides” was to miss what was unique and defining—and yet seeing the parties in this way reflected how trapped these statesmen were in the paradigms of the nation-state. Experienced statesmen were slow to appreciate that action needed to be taken because they did not understand that the policy of ethnic cleansing posed a mortal, moral threat to the society of nation-states. Thus when these men were discredited by the horrors they did not prevent, the society of nation-states that they represented (as appointees of the U.N., the E.U., the OSCE*) was discredited also.
The Muslims were emphatically not the architects or perpetrators of ethnic cleansing because they did not see themselves as a separate national entity (rather more as a religious one) and few initially wished to have a state whose legitimacy depended upon its championing a particular national or cultural group. This was dramatically demonstrated when an attempt by some Muslim elements to sequester Sarajevo Serbs in a football stadium was swiftly halted and roundly denounced. Bosnia was a multicultural state. Thus the helpful efforts of outside diplomats to partition the state (as was done in Ireland, India, and Cyprus) were perceived by the Bosnian government as an effort to destroy the fabric of their state, not simply take away territory. As Gow noted:
The E.C. effort was essentially based on the adoption of an idea—ethnic territories or “cantons”—propounded by the Serbian camp. Understood by the E.C. negotiators as a means to propitiate the Serbs and avoid war, it was in reality a charter for “ethnic cleansing”: ethnically designated cantons created the basis for ethnically pure territories.47
It is estimated that about a third of the marriages in Sarajevo are “mixed” —that is, multiethnic. Approximately one-third of the Bosnian government army is Serb. While there can be no doubt that Muslims have perpetrated atrocities (indeed, have been indicted by the War Crimes Tribunal48), the strategy of ethnic cleansing would have been antithetical to the constitutional ethos of their state when war broke out, though this ethos was sorely tested by events in the war, and there is at present a strong Muslim nationalist party.
ARBITRARY BORDERS
One other muddying characterization was offered up by Western statesmen. Whether or not they were able to persuade their publics that all parties to the conflict were equally culpable, there remained the idea that Bosnia's borders were essentially arbitrary (“set up by Tito… and based neither on history nor on current demography”) and thus that the terrible events in Bosnia were part of a necessary adjustment: an event worth noticing, of course, an emergency even, but not an event that required any action by others. Thus, as U.S. Ambassador John Scanlan put it, “Two thousand years of imperial invasion and subjugation of the indigenous populations have imposed artificial borders which have left three million Serbs outside Serbia, two million Albanians outside of Albania, three million Hungarians outside of Hungary.”49 This makes any violation of Bosnian borders seem understandable and less reprehensible. It implies that certain adjustments ought to be made to correct territorial oversights on the political cartographer's map. In fact, the borders of Bosnia-Herzegovina have been virtually unchanged for almost five centuries.
The “stranded” Albanians, and Hungarians, and Serbs, and others have been in the provinces they currently inhabit for similar periods of time, much longer, it must be observed, than the Poles in what was once Germany, or the Russians in what was once Poland, borders that are perhaps better denominated as “artificial,” but that few American ambassadors, I think, would suggest need adjustment.
In his memoir, Owen denigrates the “internal borders” of Yugoslavia that formed the state of Bosnia. “The unwarranted insistence on ruling out changes to what had been internal administrative borders within a sovereign state was a fatal flaw.”50 These borders were “arbitrary,” conceived by Tito's commanders “during a march” at the end of World War II. If Croatia and Bosnia had the right to secede, Owen argues, then surely the same right to self-determination should be extended to the Serb minorities living in those countries, and the borders adjusted accordingly.
There is some reason to doubt the factual basis for this argument. Historians generally agree that Bosnia was considered a distinct entity that maintained its identity throughout long periods in the Middle Ages until its conquest by the Ottoman Turks in 1463; the border between Croatia and Bosnia roughly corresponds with the extent of Ottoman penetration into Europe, and the border between Serbia and Bosnia, the Drina River, has not been breached since 1919. For our purposes, however, the greater significance of Owen's argument lies in his invocation of the paradox of self-determination. Why indeed should not the Serbs in Bosnia be allowed to secede? And then why not the majority Muslim populations in border towns along the Drina like Visegrad and Zvornik, whose peoples were slaughtered or made refugees? Why should not these have been allowed to remain and simply secede from the seceding Serbs? If, as Owen suggests, borders are arbitrary that do not correspond to the ethnic demographics of the local community, what precisely qualifies as the defining community? The IRA has long argued, for example, that the referendum to which the United Kingdom has agreed for the determination of the future of Northern Ireland must be based on an island-wide, rather than six-county, franchise. If they are wrong because Northern Ireland is in some way demographically distinct (“Protestant,” for example), then what of the minority Catholics in the six counties? Shouldn't they be allowed to have a referendum limited to themselves on the same theory that allowed the Northern Irish to confine their referendum and exclude the Southern Irish?
This paradox of self-determination bedevils the nation-state. It is the original sin of this constitutional order, present at the creation of the American nation-state in 1861 and the German nation-state in 1871, the two first models of this archetypal form. The nation-state's “sin,” if that is the way to put it, is that it promises to deploy a state on behalf of a nation when nations as such (cultural and ethnic groups) are a distinct categorical entity from states (legal and strategic structures). “All nations are entitled to their own states” is really a way of saying “all states must define and locate their nations,” a lesson that Slobodan Milosevic, among others, clearly learned in his post-communist phase. The society of nation-states has no more significant responsibility than to manage this paradox. If every nation gets its own state, then who decides the territorial extent of the state when a national group is unevenly spread over many countries, dwelling within other national groups and encompassing other groups that dwell within it? Each nation-state develops its form of the State for strategic purposes—that is, it selects a legitimate form of the State that will serve as an effective military instrument to resist coercion; but if every nation gets its own state, then the strategic imperative of the State turns inward, to civil war, as each ethnic and cultural group attempts to assert itself, and the State endlessly divides and redivides along smaller and smaller sociological lines—or the strategic imperative of the State turns outward, to conquest, as each State collects its nationals and those territories important to their welfare, adding new members, subsuming them and then asserting their right to exist within a single state. This is more than a problem, it is a paradox because every nation-state also defines its “nation” for constitutional purposes—that is, it determines which cultural group on behalf of whose welfare the resources of the state will be deployed. But how can every nation get its own state when every state must choose its nation? Because of this paradox, the society of nation-states, rather than the single nation-state itself, sets limits on how a state may define its nation (representative democracy and human rights) and how the nation may define its state (the inviolability of borders).
The society of nation-states decides, either in peace conferences like those at Versailles and San Francisco, or in the ongoing institutions set up by these peace congresses—like the U.N.—what elements are required for self-determination. This could not have been clearer than in the example of Bosnia because the E.U. set up a special tribunal—the Badinter Commission—to set the criteria for international recognition of the new states being formed from the former communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe. Bosnia was recognized by the E.U. only after it had specifically satisfied the Badinter criteria, which included respect for the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations and the Charter of Paris, especially with regard to the rule of law, representative democracy, and human rights; guarantees for the rights of minorities; and respect for the inviolability of frontiers.51
By contrast, recognition of statehood on the basis of the criterion of nationality alone puts the ball in the court of the State itself. Nationality is very much a creation of culture and demographics, and therefore it is to some degree manipulable by the State, as Hitler showed. Thus to permit the transgression of Bosnia's borders by charging that they were merely “administrative” rather than sufficiently ethnic forfeits the society of states' ability to do anything other than partition—which plays into the paradox of self-determination rather than manages it. Such a step invites ethnic cleansing.*
The effect in the third Balkan war was to smudge the clarity of the situation, to make it far less clear that anything had to be done other than to recognize the ultimate demographic outcome of the war. Not only did this give a greater incentive to Serbian and Croatian aggression—and effectively doom the very “cantonizations” it was meant to support—it largely removed the society of states from the action. Doubtless for some statesmen, that is what it was designed to do. (This is perhaps why Gow characterized British policy as “pusillanimous realism.”) 52
Once we are clear of self-serving rationalizations, the true constitutional and political history of Bosnia and the former states of Yugoslavia has some troubling implications for this period in the history of the State, and the national idea of giving civil and political rights to minority groups as such. The coincidence of rights-based claims and ethnic identity is a policy born of the basic elements of the nation-state, and laden with peril for that constitutional form. Like an infection that uses the body's own nuclear material to attack the host, ethnic rights can be wasting, even fatal, to the nation-state. The wars in the Balkans represent the pathological endgame of the nation-state in which the constitution of a state is put into play whenever ethnic groups get on each other's nerves. Perhaps that is the real lesson of Yugoslavia. This conflict did not begin in 1350. It began in 1917 and took its crucial contemporary turn with the constitutional changes in 1974. In an effort to pacify one set of minorities—the Albanians and Hungarians—the 1974 Constitution created a new set of minorities: the Serbs within the Albanian and Hungarian enclaves. This peculiar political topology, the necessary creation of a new threatened group through the constitutional protection of an old one, propelled Milosevic out of the anteroom of Communist party hacks and onto the stadium stage of late twentieth century world political figures. Milosevic was able to capitalize on the techniques of modern media in order to mobilize around a twentieth century idea: because every “people” gets a state, the Serbian state should rightfully rule everywhere there were Serbs. By this means he was able to crush the constitutional position of Albanians within his state because there was a Serb minority within the Albanian minority and at the same time reach into other states like Croatia and Bosnia to aggrandize the Serbian state. The Serbian slogan was: “Why should I be a minority in your state when you can be a minority in mine? Why should I leave to join Serbia, when you can simply leave and Greater Serbia will be the result?” The paradoxes of this topology fractured the confidence of the society of nation-states in a way that even its most senior and respected officials could neither repair nor quite keep from making worse.
In the end it was the sheer weight of horror, coupled with the unique and recent history of the European Holocaust, that persuaded states that action must be taken. The secretary-general of the United Nations never understood this. When asked why he did not return to New York when Mazowiecki resigned over the Srebrenica massacres, Boutros Boutros-Ghali replied, “Because if I do, all the African countries will tell the world that while there is ethnic cleansing in Africa—a million people have died in Rwanda—the Secretary General pays attention only to a village in Europe.” This obtuse yet odious observation also in its way contributed to a stifling of action: after all, if there are genocidal campaigns underway all over the world, how can we act in all of them? Rather the secretary-general ought to have mobilized what public opinion there was for action, instead of lamenting that it was geographically misplaced, as, for example, in his famous harangue of the Security Council for its overattention to Yugoslavia (“a war of the rich,” in Boutros Boutros-Ghali's much-reported outburst). Queens is not a dangerous place, and I imagine that at 3 a.m. there were more horrors underway in other districts of New York besides Kitty Genovese's stabbing.
When Lawrence Eagleburger met Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and chronicler of the Holocaust, in December 1992 the latter pressed him to take some action in the former Yugoslavia where crimes were being committed that he called ethnic cleansing. Eagleburger claimed that the State Department's lawyers* were strongly opposed to characterizing such actions as “ethnic cleansing.” According to Eagleburger:
Wiesel said: “Fine. Call them crimes against humanity then, but whatever you do, America can no longer remain silent about the atrocities being committed”… I relented. [Wiesel] made me look in the mirror and decide… [that we couldn't] stay silent.53
Four days later, Eagleburger spoke to a meeting of European foreign ministers in Geneva and urged a “second Nuremberg” to prosecute crimes committed in former Yugoslavia. “The fact of the matter is [the Serbs] were doing some things that were pretty… awful,” Eagleburger later said. “And we ought to have been saying something about it. And we probably should have been saying something about it a lot sooner. [But] I also knew it wasn't going to produce anything.”54
Because once states had decided to act, it still remained for them to determine who should act and what should be done.