CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE KITTY GENOVESE INCIDENT AND THE WAR IN BOSNIA

 

1. This account is largely taken from A. M. Rosenthal's excellent study of the Kitty Genovese murder, Thirty-Eight Witnesses (McGraw-Hill, 1964). Rosenthal's account draws upon contemporaneous interviews made in the aftermath of the murder.

2. “Calling for Help on the T,” Boston Globe, February 3, 2000, A20.

3. Dave Lieber, “Biggest Mystery Is Why No One Called the Police,” Fort Worth Star Telegram, October 13, 2001, 1.

4. International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights Annual Report 1996; see also U.S. Department of State, Bosnia & Herzegovina Country Report on Human Rights Practices for 1996, January 30, 1997; also Dan Smith, et al., The State of War and Peace Atlas (Penguin, 1997).

5. Janusz Bugajski, “Balkan Tragedy,” Orbis 40 (1996): 638; see also Laura Silber and Alan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (TV Books: Distributed by Penguin USA, 1996).

6. Ibid.

7. Warren Zimmermann, Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and Its Destroyers—America's Last Ambassador Tells What Happened and Why (Times Books, 1996), 157.

8. Brigitte Hipfl, Klaus Hipfl, and Jan Jagodzinski, “Documentary Films and the Bosnia-Herzegovina Conflict: From Production to Reception,” Bosnia by Television, ed. James Gow, Richard Paterson, and Alison Preston (British Films Institute, 1996), 34, 35, 45.

9. James Gow, Triumph of Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War (Hurst, 1997), 304.

10. The Bosnian minister to the U.N. later stated that members of the incoming Clinton administration had suggested that it would be more helpful to Bosnia once in office than had been the Bush administration.

11. Cf. Tyler Marshall, “Nato Issues Ultimatum to Serbs Ringing Enclave: Bosnia; Alliance Threatens Air Strikes Unless Rebels Withdraw 2 Miles from Gorazde's Center by 3 P.M. Today,” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1994, A1.

12. Gwen Ifill, “Clinton Defends Foreign Policy Record,” New York Times, May 4, 1994, A12.

13. Patrick Glynn, “See No Evil: Clinton-Bush and the Truth about Bosnia,” The New Republic, October 25, 1993, 23.

14. Ibid.

15. There was preparation on the Western side for a response to such eventualities, so especially the 2/94–9/95 ones were played up.

16. “The Sacking of Croatia,” New York Times, September 22, 1991, E16.

17. “Erasing Bosnia's Memory,” Washington Post, October 16, 1992, A24.

18. But see the Final Report of the Commission of Experts, published in May 1994.

19. “Crisis in Yugoslavia” (House of Representatives, June 25, 1991), Congressional Record, 1991, H5043.

20. “Spare Bosnia the Postmortems,” Washington Post, October 13, 1993, C6.

21. Henry Kissinger, “Bosnia Has Never Been a Nation and Has No Specific Cultural Identity. Why Are We Intent on Preserving This Balkan No-Man's Land?” Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1993, M2.

22. Noel Malcolm argues that the U.S./E.C. position emboldened Milosevic to attempt to crush the Slovenia and Croatian secession movements with military force. Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (New York University Press, 1994).

23. European expectations seem to have been significantly different from American ones—much more pessimistic and more willing to assume that violence is the natural state of the Balkans.

24. One report described the tarmac lot at Omarska as “a killing yard, the bodies loaded onto trucks by bulldozers. Omarska was a place where cruelty and mass murder had become a form of recreation. The guards were often drunk and singing while they tortured. A prisoner named Fikret Harambasic was castrated by one of his fellow inmates before being beaten to death. One inmate was made to bark like a dog and lap at a puddle of motor oil while a guard… jumped up and down on his back until he was dead. The guards would make, videos of this butchery for their home entertainment.” Dusan Tadic, the Bosnian Serb primarily responsible for this, was convicted of crimes against humanity by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague and sentenced to twenty years in concurrent sentences for the killing and torture of Muslim prisoners. Gillian Sharpe and Bob Edwards, “Bosnian Serb Sentenced. Gillian Sharpe reports from The Hague on the International War Crimes Tribunal's first sentencing of a Bosnian Serb war criminal. Dusan Tadic was sentenced to twenty years in concurrent sentences for the killing and torture of Muslims in prison camps,” NPR Morning Edition, July 14, 1997.

25. Members of the American Jewish community repeatedly spoke out to call attention to the systematic violence against the Muslims in Bosnia. Notable among them for his tenacity and eloquence was Elie Wiesel.

26. Ed Vulliamy, “Middle Managers of Genocide,” The Nation, June 10, 1996, 11.

27. See Final Report of the Commission of Experts.

28. “A Mission of Mercy for Tavnik,” New York Times, December 6, 1992, E18.

29. Final periodic report on the situation of human rights in the territory of the former Yugoslavia submitted by Mr. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, special rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights, pursuant to paragraph 42 of the Commission Resolution 1995/89.

30. “A Defeat for Civilization,” Wall Street Journal, July 17, 1995, A10.

31. Dimitri Simes, “There's No Oil in Bosnia,” New York Times, March 10, 1993, A1.

32. See U.N. Report S/26765.

33. Tigalrth-Pileser III (745 B.C.-727 B.C.) was the first Assyrian ruler to make forced resettlement a policy; under his reign half the population of a conquered land would be carried off, to be replaced by settlers from other areas.

34. Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, “A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing,” Foreign Affairs 72 (1993): 110.

35. Cf. William Safire, “On Language,” Houston Chronicle, March 14, 1993 (syndicated column).

36. Christopher Hitchens reports that Jose-Maria Mendiluce, the UNHCR envoy, believes he first coined the term. Christopher Hitchens, “Appointment in Sarajevo,” The Nation, 1992, 236.

37. Norman Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of Ethnic Cleansing (Texas A&M University Press, 1995), 18 – 19.

38. Cited in Rabia Ali and Lawrence Lifschultz, “Why Bosnia?,” Monthly Review 45 (March 1994): 1; also in V. P. Gagnon, “Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict: The Case of Serbia,” International Security 19 (1994): 130; and in Wohlstetter, see n. 41 below.

39. See Ali and Lifschultz.

40. Classified State Department report, cited in Ali and Lifschultz; “A Last Chance,” New Yorker, July 27, 1993, 4 (saying U.S. had one “last chance” not to become implicated in an E.C.-U.N. scheme of apartheid).

41. Albert Wohlstetter, “Creating a Greater Serbia,” The New Republic, August 1, 1994, 22.

42. A similar account describes the first stage of operations, before systematic shelling:

A 62-year-old Bosnian Muslim witnessed the willful killing by ethnic Serb paramilitary forces of at least 53 men, women, and children in the village of Prhovo, Bosnia. At about 3 pm on May 30, 1992, a large force of ethnic Serb paramilitary soldiers and three armored personnel carriers entered Prhovo, a village located about 7 kilometers northeast of Kjuc. The village, which contained 45 houses grouped along a main road and several small streets, had more than 150 inhabitants. The soldiers, who wore stocking masks over their faces, went from house to house searching for weapons. After finding some weapons, the soldiers proceeded to ransack the homes, break windows and doors, and pull the residents out into the streets. These men, women, and children were ofdered to fold their hands behind their heads and were herded through the village to a point on the road where they were stopped and lined up. Meanwhile, the soldiers attempted to coax back into the village those residents who had run into the woods when the soldiers arrived. The soldiers announced through megaphones that the residents would not be harmed if they returned. When these people returned, the soldiers beat them severely; about 10 were beaten into unconsciousness. The assembled villagers were then told that they were free, that they need not worry anymore, and that they must place white flags on their homes to indicate the village had surrendered. During the nights of May 30 – 31, some people fled to the woods, while others slept in their cellars. At about 6 pm on June 1, the soldiers returned and again used megaphones to call people in from the forest. They also went from house to house, pulling people out into the streets. The male residents were beaten severely. At about 7 pm, the soldiers began murdering the residents with automatic weapons. They fired single shots, then long bursts of automatic gunfire. After the shooting stopped and the soldiers had departed, the witness, who had fled to the woods when the shooting started, returned to the village. The murdered men, women, and children lay in the streets. Houses were burning, and their roofs were collapsing. Some women and children who had hidden in basements began coming into the street crying and looking for their loved ones.

 

43. David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (Harcourt, Brace, 1995), 355. Roger Cohen savagely commented on this passage: “In other words: to deny a people the right to defend themselves is morally defensible if it enables you to have the satisfaction of feeding them free macaroni.” Roger Cohen, “Balkan Odyssey (Book Reviews),” The New Republic, March 11, 1996, 37.

44. Ali and Lifschultz, 28.

45. “Perisic Calls Journalist's War Crimes Questions ‘Illogical,’” World News Connection, May 9, 2000. But see also the case of Cedomir Mihailovic, a relatively high-ranking intelligence officer, who defected to the Netherlands and presented documents and evidence to the War Crimes Tribunal that he claimed would show that the original orders for ethnic cleansing and the setting up of the camps came directly from the Milosevic regime in Belgrade. They were purported to have been written over a number of months in a variety of different offices, but forensic analysis showed that they were all produced on a single typewriter in a much shorter period of time. Mihailovic was merely trying to ingratiate himself with Western governments. Christopher Hitchens, “Minority Report,” The Nation, June 19, 1995, 875. Dan Fesperman, “Genocide Evidence Proves Elusive: Atrocities: UN Investigators Have Failed So Far to Build a Case against Slobodan Milosevic for War Crimes in Bosnia,” Baltimore Sun, June 10, 1999, A2.

46. “Hearing of the House National Security Committee Regarding the Proposal to Send U.S. Ground Troops to Bosnia,” Federal News Service, November 2, 1995; see also Charles Boyd, “Making Peace with the Guilty: The Truth about Bosnia,” Foreign Affairs 74 (September 1995): 22

47. Gow, 301.

48. Cf. Marlise Simons, “3 Serbs Convicted in Wartime Rapes,” New York Times, February 23, 2001, A1.

49. “I think the world should recognize that the Serbian people do have legitimate interests, especially the right to self-determination for the three million Serbs living outside the borders of Serbia and Montenegro.” Heather Green, “Q&A: Diplomacy and Force in Facing the Balkan Conflict,” International Herald Tribune, March 22, 1993, 2.

50. Owen, 342 – 343.

51. “Declaration on the ‘Guidelines on the Recognition of New States in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union,’” December 16, 1991, reprinted in International Legal Materials 31 (1992): 1487.

52. Gow, 8.

53. Stephen Hedges, Peter Cary, Bruce Auster, and Tim Zimmerman, “The Road to Ruin: Bosnia Policy and the Many Causes of Failure,” U.S. News and World Report, December 12, 1994, 59.

54. Ibid.

55. Quoted in Leslie H. Gelb, “Euro-Bosnian Games,” New York Times, January 31, 1993, E7.

56. See also Secretary Christopher's frequent statements that “these people have hated each other for hundreds of years.” Also see General Charles Boyd's testimony, cited at n. 45, that the Serbs may at present appear more culpable than Muslims or Croats, but this is only because we are witnessing a small slice of the bigger picture involving a “centuries old conflict.” Hearing of the House National Security Committee Regarding the Proposal to Send U.S. Ground Troops to Bosnia, November 2, 1995.

57. Charles Lane, “The Death of Yugoslavia,” Washington Monthly, April 1996, 48.

58. “Reader Feedback, What Do You Think about U.S. Intervention in Bosnia?” Boston Globe, May 7, 1993, 10.

59. Ibid.

60. Jeff Jacoby, “A Recipe for a Debacle,” Boston Globe, November 30, 1995, 23.

61. Transcript, report by Tom Gjelten, “Morning Edition,” National Public Radio, July 17, 1995. In this the president was only following his predecessor President Bush who said, on August 10, 1992, “Now the war in Bosnia… is a complex, convoluted conflict that grows out [of] age-old animosities…. Those who understand the nature of this conflict understand that an enduring solution cannot be imposed by force from outside on unwilling participants.”

62. “US efforts to promote a peaceful settlement in Yugoslavia. (Statement by Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Ralph Johnson) (Transcript).” U.S. Department of State Dispatch, vol. 2, October 21, 1991, 782.

63. Quoted by Saul Friedman, “U.S. Joins Aid Effort,” Newsday, July 2, 1992.

64. “Clinton Mulls New Bosnia Steps,” USA Today, May 13, 1993, A1 (“calling the crisis a ‘European issue'…”)

65. This eventually became the demand that the Vance-Owen Plan be accepted.

66. Heinz A. J. Kern, “The Clinton Doctrine: A New Foreign Policy: The White House Bosnia Retreat Shows a New Approach to the U.S. World Role—Balancing U.S. Power and Commitment. The New Doctrine Is a Mixed Blessing,” Christian Science Monitor, June 18, 1993.

67. This remark made on CNN, Larry King Live, July 31, 1993.

68. At Srebrenica one desperate request by the local U.N. commander for air strikes was rebuffed on the grounds that the wrong form had been submitted.

69. Any possible air strikes may do nothing to deter Serbian aggression. ‘Will it be enough to… stop the shelling of Sarajevo, to bring parties to the peace table?’” Boutros-Ghali said. Johanna Neuman, “Cautious Clinton Tiptoes Nearer to Bosnia Commitment,” USA Today, July 29, 1993, A7.

70. “A ‘Terrible War' Rages On” U.N. Chronicle 31 (March 1994): 62.

71. Frank Murray, “Clinton Turned Down U.S. Plan for Air Strikes,” Times of London, June 14, 1993, Overseas News.

72. Craig Whitney, “Conflict in the Balkans; the Strategy; NATO Diplomats Question Details of Plan for Air Raids,” New York Times, July 23, 1995, A1.

73. “NATO military officers pointed out that Britain had often agreed to threaten NATO air strikes against the Serbs in principle but had balked at launching them for fear of provoking retaliation against British soldiers in the United Nations peacekeeping force in Bosnia.” Ibid. See also, “The Crossing of the Mogadishu Line,” Economist, January 13, 1996, 51.

74. Owen, 355.

75. James B. Steinberg, “International Involvement in the Yugoslavia Conflict,” in Enforcing Restraint: Collective Intervention in Internal Conflicts, ed. Lori Fisler Damrosch (Council on Foreign Relations, 1993), 64.

76. Steinberg, 44; Leslie H. Gelb, “False Humanitarianism,” New York Times, August 6, 1992, A23.

77. John F. Burns, “Serbs Hedging on Vows to Ease Siege in Bosnia,” New York Times, August 7, 1993, A1.

78. “Kozyrev, U.N. Chief Oppose Armed Intervention in Ex-Yugoslavia,” Agence France-Presse, December 26, 1992.

79. The Dayton Agreement also gives rights to Bosnian Croats and Serbs for political affiliation with Croatia and Serbia respectively.

80. “To understand the failure of international efforts and the conditions for success, it is necessary to analyse in detail what the initiatives taken actually were.” (Gow, 6.)