Westerners ‘Sacrificed’ Srebrenica

It took 20 years to establish the truth in all its cruelty. But now we know what happened: The fall of the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, which led to the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian men and boys, was not the fruit of errors and rare instances of clumsiness committed by the West. The reality of Srebenica was accepted as such by the three principle powers present: the United States, France and Great Britain. Consciously, with full awareness of the reasons why, the fall of Srebenica was integrated into the plans of the West, which saw it as the best way to bring an end to the interminable war that was ravaging Bosnia. According to their calculations, Srebrenica was a lesser evil.

The U.N. had declared the Bosnian enclave a “protected zone.” NATO forces had received authorization and were even obligated to defend it by any means necessary. Additionally, it was under the protection of a battalion of Dutch peacekeepers. This did not prevent the irruption of Bosnian Serbian militias, which arrived in single file by the only route possible. For four days, within the impassive sights of the peacekeepers and in the absence of the slightest reaction from NATO, women and men were sorted and separated, before the latter were systematically slaughtered during an operation later qualified as genocide by [courts of] international justice.

One of the innumerable additional horrors that punctuated these events was this: Dutch Gen. Onna van der Wind has now confirmed that even if it was indeed the Serbs who took it upon themselves to transport the men to be executed in cars, the U.N. provided them with 30,000 liters (approximately 8,000 gallons) of gas to carry this out, and to fuel the bulldozers that would dig the mass graves afterward.

Florence Hartmann is the author of the book, “The Srebrenica Affair: The Blood of Realpolitik,” that forces us to start facing reality. A former special correspondent sent by Le Monde to cover the ex-Yugoslavian wars, she later became the spokeswoman for Swiss ex-attorney Carla Del Ponte in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY, also TPIY). Rare are the people with such an intimate knowledge of all the specifics of this conflict.

Today, Hartmann relies on her personal experience, the interviews she has accumulated and the testimonies gathered within the TPIY, but also on documents newly declassified by the United States and the United Nations. What she has discovered, she noted over the telephone, allowed her to shed light on innumerable mu rky areas in the official version.

A key date: On May 27, 1995, American President Bill Clinton, French President Jacques Chirac and British Prime Minister John Major are having a phone conference. The news isn’t good: Some 400 peacekeepers have been taken hostage by the Serbs in reprisal against NATO airstrikes. The record of this summit discussion is not available. But the next day, according to documents made public, Washington made the decision to suspend all NATO strikes until further notice. This was the beginning of what was to befall Srebrenica.

The field had been prepared. Robert Frasure, the region’s American official, had already warned that Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milošević would never agree to share Bosnia according to the terms envisaged by the Westerners (that is, 49 percent of the territory for the Serbs), unless the Muslim enclaves (that is to say, Srebrenica, as well as Goražde and Žepa) did not go to the Serbs. Anthony Lake, his superior, had already defended abandoning these same enclaves before the Principals Committee, which was the highest level in decision-making under the Clinton administration.

In a secret memo addressed to Clinton at the end of May, the same Anthony Lake assured: “Privately, we will accept a pause on further air strikes, but make no public statement to that effect.” [This was] a note compromising enough, the author noted, to be withheld from distribution within the U.S. administration, contrary to the protocol of the time.

“The equation that Western leaders had to solve was particularly complex,” underlines Hartmann, who does not wish to “give a caricature of a version of the facts.”

Some of the elements of this equation were as follows. The “safe zones,” a mix between humanitarian mission and war zone, had become “indefensible” in the eyes of decision makers. What about the evacuation of the populations in these zones? For the Westerners, that would have meant accepting the logic of “ethnic cleansing” that was supported by the Serbian power and the death squadrons in Bosnia. Finally, pulling the peacekeepers out, as the British now openly wished to do, was equivalent to launching an extremely risky military operation within a hostile region, which would have inevitably led to the dispatch of thousands of supporting U.S. soldiers, soon to be caught in a quagmire.

The future of NATO was a stake. A decision had to be made. And the sacrifice of Srebrenica was the price to pay so that the war could finally end, while allowing the great powers, relatively speaking, to “save face” and for the West to minimize its overall losses.

Who was aware of this cynical calculation? Certainly not the Dutch peacekeepers at the end of their mission — exhausted and left to themselves. Faced with the killers’ advance, U.N. official Yasushi Akashi could not be reached at his office, the form submitted by the peacekeepers’ commander to demand a NATO intervention was not the right one and the fax machine was broken. “All these fumbles may well have occurred just as they are so commonly described, but they cannot be the ultimate explanation,” Hartmann affirms.

In making their decision, were the Western officials conscious of “Directive 7,” which had been adopted in March by Radovan Karadžić, the director of the Bosnian Serbians, who had clearly stipulated that there would be “no hope of survival for the inhabitants of Srebrenica”? Did they know (and how could they not?) that even before the war, the “cleansing” of a vast corridor around the Drina River was part of the strategic objective proclaimed by the Serbs? Were they conscious of the fact that the enclave of Srebrenica was included in this area? With the approaching commemoration this Saturday that will mark the 20th anniversary of the massacre, Great Britain has promised to contribute 1.2 million pounds sterling (approximately $1.8 million) to Srebrenica so that, says Prime Minister David Cameron, “the events of that day are not forgotten.”