"…My counter-revolutionary confederates, and I at their head, endeavored to murder Lenin's cause, which is being carried on with such tremendous success by Stalin. The logic of this struggle led us step by step into the blackest quagmire. And it has once more been proved that departure from the position of Bolshevism means siding with political counter-revolutionary banditry. Counter-revolutionary banditry has now been smashed, we have been smashed, and we repent our frightful crimes."
Nikolai Bukharin, confession to the Soviet Supreme Court, 1938.
 

Last Monday, Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, released a report on the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995, during the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the report, the Secretary confesses that the United Nations should have sided earlier with the Bosnian Muslims and supported bombing the Bosnian Serbs. The UN's attempt to remain impartial during the war exacerbated the situation at Srebrenica. By "appeasing" the Serbs, the UN abetted their atrocity.

The full text of the report is available at http://www.un.org/News/ossg/srebrenica.htm. The 150-page report contains a balanced narrative history of the events surrounding the massacre, along with a set of conclusions by the Secretary General.

The Secretary's "lessons for the future" include the primary conclusion: negotiation was the wrong tactic for the UN in Bosnia, and that force instead was necessary. More generally, he concludes that the UN has been wrong to try to be neutral and nonviolent in the realm of conflict, and should more readily support military action for the aims it decides are moral.

This is precisely the stand that the United States has long held, in opposition to most other UN members (and until now, the Secretary General as well). Annan clearly knows which way the wind is blowing. He has renounced the United Nation's raison d'être, the prevention of war. What now remains for the United Nations? At best, it will become a marginally independent mouthpiece for America; at worst, it will follow Bukharin to the firing squad.

History of the Srebrenica Massacre

In 1992, Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence from the Yugoslav Federation. The country had three groups, which each viewed itself as quite distinct from the others: the Muslims, the Croats, and the Serbs. The Bosnian President, Alija Izetbegovic, was a Muslim. The Serbs were led to believe by local leaders that they would be subservient to the Muslims, and the three groups went to war with each other (though the Croats and Muslims quickly made peace). The Bosnian Serbs declared their own republic, and wished to join Serbia.

The United Nations instituted an arms embargo on all sides in the conflict. Yugoslavia sent arms to the Serbs, but stopped after international pressure had mounted. The Muslim-Croat Federation continued to fight the Bosnian Serbs, though the latter were better armed and a good deal more successful. Both sides resorted to terrorizing the civilian populations, but the Serbs' attacks were more frequent.

Members of the UN Security Council were eager to protect Bosnian Muslims from the atrocities they'd heard Serbs were committing. To accomplish this, the Security Council set up "safe areas": cities in which the population was to be protected by an armed UN peacekeeping force. One of these safe areas was Srebrenica (pronounced Sre-bre-NEET-sa).

The Srebrenica safe area was established in mid-1993. Although several thousand soldiers from the Bosnian Federation Army were inside the city, most of the population were civilian noncombatants. The Bosnian Serbs wanted control of the city, because they already controlled the surrounding territory. The Bosnians and Serbs fought sporadically, with Bosnian Federation soldiers occasionally leaving the safety of the city to attack Serbs outside, and Serbs occasionally bombarding the city. Nonetheless, compared with other parts of Bosnia, Srebrenica remained relatively peaceful under the presence of lightly armed Dutch peacekeeping troops.

This all collapsed in June, 1995. Bosnian Serb forces, claiming to have had several people killed by attacks from within the city, invaded it. The Dutch were outnumbered, and the Serbs were heavily armed. Though the Dutch requested air support from NATO, through some miscommunication they did not receive it in time. Dutch soldiers were taken hostage, but most were released. Bosnian army troops fled the city and traveled toward Bosnian-held territory, fighting Serb troops on the way.

The Bosnian Serbs then divided the residents of the town by age and gender; the women, children, and elderly were sent out to walk to Bosnian-controlled territory. The men of "fighting age" (roughly 15-70) were taken prisoner. It is not known how many men there were left, or what happened to all of them. However, it is certain that at least several hundred were blindfolded, their hands tied behind their backs, and executed. Their bodies were found in mass graves around the city in 1996, after the Dayton peace settlement.

The massacre at Srebrenica, and at nearby towns such as Zepa, where similar events unfolded, was undoubtedly the most horrible crime committed during the Bosnian civil war. For their roles in it, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic were indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia. (They remain at large in the Bosnian Serb republic.)

Kofi Annan's Conclusions

Yet there are difficulties in assessing the causes of the massacre, and especially in determining actions which could have prevented it. Clearly the main problem was that the city had been declared a "safe area," when in fact the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) was not actually capable of defending the city from an attack.

Annan's conclusion is that UNPROFOR should have been a full military force, and that NATO should have attacked the Serbs outside the city earlier. The UN should have explicitly committed itself to the defense of the Bosnian Muslims, rather than try to maintain "an institutional ideology of impartiality even when confronted with attempted genocide."

This is the first problem: the Srebrenica massacre was not genocide. The Bosnian Serbs had no intention of killing the women, children, or elderly. The intention was to relocate the population of the city, but not to destroy it entirely.

This ethnic cleansing is still a horrible crime, but it is not genocide. When Srebrenica was first declared a "safe area," UNPROFOR, fearing the area wasn't actually safe, attempted to evacuate the civilian population to a safer area. However, this attempt was short-lived: the UN and the Bosnian government did not want to be seen as supporting ethnic cleansing. So only a few thousand escaped. Had the civilian population actually been evacuated, more lives might have been saved.

This brings us to the second point: why did Izetbegovic demand that Bosnian civilians remain in the city? Although one can understand his desire not to exacerbate the ethnic cleansing at the time, even he has since admitted that the civilians should have been allowed to escape.

But there is more to this. Izetbegovic wanted NATO air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs from the beginning. Lt. Gen. Sir Michael Rose, UNPROFOR Commander in Bosnia until 1995, wrote in Fighting for Peace, "the underlying strategy of the government army was simple: (1) attack on all fronts, (2) retreat amid signs of appalling suffering, (3) call on the UN and NATO to bomb the Serbs."

There is thus a suspicion that Izetbegovic wanted a massacre, which would justify bombing the Serbs. According to the UN report, "Some surviving members of the Srebrenica delegation have stated that President Izetbegovic also told them he had learned that a NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina was possible, but could only occur if the Serbs were to break into Srebrenica, killing at least 5,000 of its people. President Izetbegovic has flatly denied making such a statement." Did the Bosnian government set the conditions for the Srebrenica tragedy?

This argument is meant not to divert blame from where it belongs, with the Bosnian Serb army, but rather to illustrate the problems with choosing sides. There was always more to the Bosnian war than "Serb villains" and "Muslim victims." This is not to equivocate between the sides: the Serb side clearly, especially in Srebrenica, committed the more atrocious crimes. Yet the Bosnians were guilty of war crimes as well: they had their own camps, their own terrorism of civilians, and their own military campaign.

Also, the Croats at almost the same time had begun "Operation Storm," a drive to eliminate all the Serb inhabitants of Croatia. This ethnic cleansing operation, the most successful of all the Yugoslav wars, was supported by the United States, and is whitewashed in Kofi Annan's report. To condemn Serb aggression but praise Croat aggression and ignore Bosnian aggression, is to forsake the respect of the international community.

The Secretary General says Bosnia was a moral cause, one in which the UN could not remain neutral. This is false: taking sides requires a far greater compromise of integrity, because one inevitably ignores the crimes of one's friend and condemns the crimes of one's enemy. The moral high ground would have been to condemn all aggression, and continue to seek a negotiated settlement.

The United Nations cannot expect to solve every conflict. It should exist as a truly neutral mediator: one which respects international sovereignty, keeps the peace when the parties cease fire, and concentrates on providing humanitarian aid. It was always intended to prevent or mitigate war, not to engage in war. For it to renounce negotiation (even if only in certain cases) and to advocate military aggression is disgraceful. It means we are no further ahead than we were 50 years ago.