War in the Balkans, 1991-2002, by R. Craig Nation
Just over twenty years ago, the last Yugoslavian war ended, in Kosovo. I know that nobody cares, but I struggle to understand why.
This was a series of wars that dominated media headlines for years, among accusations of untold atrocities, leaving behind a legacy of division, distrust and revanchism that is far from being dispelled.
It was a conflict that – as Craig Nation, a U.S. Army instructor and historian specializing in Eastern Europe – was marked by Western media manipulation and straightforward political trickery aimed at defeating and humiliating Russia and its allies.
It was also a conflict that ended with a peace deal that was comprehensively violated by the winners, since it contained no provision to create an independent Kosovo – and yet, we have an independent Kosovo today.
If you’ve been following the media headlines about the current war in the Ukraine, perhaps you should care a lot more about what actually happened in Eastern Europe in the 90s, and how western propaganda worked to hide much of it from your sight? Maybe a little, just so you understand why your chances of being nuked are higher than ever?
The country we used to called Yugoslavia was created in 1919 and would still survive after 1999, as a rump of itself, until yet another round of manipulation, deceit and treachery, through 2006. Reading Nation’s comprehensive book about the Yugoslav wars, (until recently available for free download by the Strategic Studies Institute, and still reachable there using the Wayback Machine) I was struck by the enormous influence that foreign forces had on the destruction of that country.
Nation doesn’t absolve Yugoslav themselves from blame. Probably, the number one reason why the country doesn’t exist anymore is that Yugoslavs were unable to make the necessary compromises and arrangements to keep their federation, which was — in summary — a much superior concept to the tiny, powerless countries that we were left with. Still, the overarching message left by Nation’s book is that scheming foreigners have a lot of responsibility for what happened.
First, let’s take the moment in which the breakup of Yugoslavia is commonly understood to start: the Camp Kosovo speech by Slobodan Milosevic.
There actually were two such speeches, which has been a source of confusion for, literally, decades. I was in J-school in the 1990s, during the Yugoslavian war, and it was unusual to find a long story about the war that didn’t include a reference to the infamous “Milosevic speech in Kosovo” that supposedly drove these peaceful, socialist peoples to kill each other from that point on.
It’s worth pointing out that the very first Milosevic-in-Kosovo speech was in 1987. Milosevic was the top dog in Serbian politics since 1986, when he became the leader of the largest section of the Yugoslavian Communist party. In later years, he always claimed that he never favored Serbs, or Serbian nationalism, until 1989, and he was largely right: in his 1987 speech, that one can read here, there’s only Socialist platitudes and boilerplate.
The 1987 speech only became infamous in Serbia (and elsewhere in Yugoslavia) because of what happened after Milosevic spoke: he went to shake hands with locals, and some Serbs complained heatedly of harassment by Kosovo’s Albanian majority. Milosevic, caught in a bind, vowed to protect Kosovar Serbs. Scandal ensued (*).
By 1988, Nation reports (p. 41), several European states (Germany, Austria, Denmark, Hungary, and the Holy See among others) were openly promoting secession, sometimes pledging diplomatic support and arranging for illegal arms transfers to prepare the way for independence. Others waited a little longer.
Milosevic, always interested in ways to keep himself in power, had understood where the wind was blowing from. In his very well known “Gazimestan speech,” (his second Kosovo speech, in 1989) he did embrace Serbian nationalism, ensuring power for himself for the next decade and a half. Working against Yugoslav politicians and military officers whose priority was to keep some sort of federation alive, Milosevic saw (correctly) that Yugoslavia was beyond salvation, given foreign-supported nationalist agitation especially in Slovenia and Croatia, and shifted his priorities towards ensuring Serbs would get as big a piece of the Yugoslavian pie as possible.
The stage was set for disaster by then, but the actors were not yet ready, and many things could have been done to try and stop it. Mostly, the opposite was done. A early example of this, Nation explains (p. 122), is how in 1990 Slovenia “was being assured by friends inside the European Community (EC) that in the event of a military confrontation, European intervention in support of separation would result.”
This scenario, Nation adds, “played out without a hitch.” In the event, there was a extremely short 10-day war in Slovenia, after which the Yugoslav army retired from the secessionist region, following negotiations in which the EC acted as rather bad-faith mediator. As Nation writes (p. 124):
In the midst of the negotiations the flamboyant Italian Foreign Minister Gianni De Michaelis spoke incautiously of the EC’s success in “blocking the spiral of conflict.” Regretfully, the European reaction that De Michaelis encouraged, which as promised awarded Slovenia’s provocations by underwriting its independence, ensured that the spiral of conflict would continue to widen.
How come? Nation goes on (p. 126):
These events (after the Slovenian war) established a destructive precedent. Yugoslavia had been shattered without any arrangements in place for resolving the manifold issues that its disappearance as a unified state was bound to create. The instrumentality of violence as a means to affect secession was confirmed. An attempt to shape international attitudes toward the conflict by using stereotypes to manipulate the media proved remarkably successful. The conniving satraps that had inherited power in the Yugoslav republics were embraced as international statesmen and essential interlocutors. A false distinction between the “good Europeans and democrats” of predominantly Catholic Slovenia and the “evil Byzantines and communists” of predominately Orthodox Serbia was adopted as an organizing premise for approaching Balkan affairs. Not least, the ability of secessionist forces to use an appeal to the international community as a mechanism for neutralizing the superior military forces of their adversaries was clearly demonstrated.
Given its “high degree of ethnic homogeneity, relative prosperity, and more developed civil society, Slovenia was able to break free from the Yugoslav federation with a minimum of domestic trauma.” That wouldn’t be the case elsewhere.
Let’s go back to 1990 first. Then, the U.S. Congress also prepared the US Foreign Operations Appropriations law 101-513, eventually passed in 1991 with a section relating specifically to Yugoslavia, stipulating that all loans, aid and credits would be cut off within six months unless elections were held. The actual text of the Foreign Appropriations Law reads:
(The Law) Prohibits, six months after this Act’s enactment, the expenditure of funds made available pursuant to this Act to provide assistance to Yugoslavia. Directs the Secretary of the Treasury to instruct the U.S. executive directors to international financial institutions to oppose any assistance to Yugoslavia. Exempts from such prohibition assistance to support democratic parties or movements and emergency and humanitarian assistance. Makes such prohibition inapplicable if: (1) all the individual republics of Yugoslavia have held free and fair elections and are not engaged in a pattern of human rights violations; or (2) the Secretary of State certifies that Yugoslavia is making significant strides toward complying with the Helsinki Accords and is encouraging any republic which has not held free and fair elections to do so.
That is: Yugoslavia, all but bankrupt, cannot receive assistance. The wording leaves room for the secessionist parties in its constituent republics (“democratic parties or movements”) to receive U.S. assistance if the U.S. finds them friendly enough.
The obvious objection would be that there were great majorities in favor of secession in Slovenia and Croatia, and nothing could be done to stop such popular sentiment. Well, that may apply in the case of Slovenia; and even in this case elites in Ljubljana had to be reassured by friends inside the EC, as we’ve seen.
There was no great majority for secession in Croatia’s case. As late as 1990, the Croat nationalists of the HDZ party had only won just over 40% of votes in a local election there. This was not an overwhelming, unstoppable force, yet.
In November 1991, with open warfare ongoing in Croatia, the Arbitration Commission of the Peace Conference on Yugoslavia, a body set up in 1991 by the Council of Ministers of the European Economic Community (EEC) in response to the conflict that had broken out between separatists in Slovenia and Croatia and the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) earlier that year, determined that Yugoslavia was “in the process of dissolution.”
That is: a foreign body created by the European Union’s forebear declared that Yugoslavia, a recognized member of the United Nations, was no more. It was “in the process of dissolution.” Can you imagine your surprise if the European Union had taken advantage of open warfare against separatists across Eastern Ukraine in 2014 to determine that the Ukraine was “in the process of dissolution” and should no longer exist?
(For a detailed summary of this Commission’s other decisions, check here)
Here, I must clarify again: Craig never says that Yugoslavia was destroyed solely because of nefarious foreign conspirations. The claim throughout is that foreign powers were fuelling the flames instead of trying to help extinguish the fire.
Germany recognized the secession of first Slovenia and Croatia in December 1991, whereupon civil war ensued. It lasted for the next eight years until a three-month NATO air war unleashed against the Serbs, who had refused to acquiesce in the break-up of the federal republic, brought it to an end.
Of course, we all know by heart the preferred Western narrative on the war. It’s been repeated non-stop, for years – the Serbs were guilty. To this, Nation has some caveats. He notes, for example, that mass ethnic discrimination against Serbs in newly-independent Croatia was not a figment of Milosevic’s imagination (p. 114):
(HDZ, the ruling nationalist party in Croatia that had won just almost 40% of votes) instituted obligatory loyalty oaths for ethnic Serbs in public positions, discouraged use of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet and made the Latin script obligatory in official documents and proceedings, purged members of Croatia’s Serb minority (17 percent of the population) from positions in state administration and local police forces, and rewrote the Croatian constitution in such a way as to demote Croatian Serbs from the status of a constituent nation to that of a national minority.
In a delicious note, Nation adds that the Croatians immediately rescued the old Nazi-era flag adopted by the regime of the Hitler-loving Croatian wartime leader Ante Pavelic, the sahovnica. Still, they made concessions to Serb sensibilities, given that the Croatian fascists had killed hundreds of thousands of them in World War II (that is, just four decades before all of this happened):
The use of the šahovnica as a state symbol was particularly resented. Croatian officials demonstrated sensitivity, of a particularly ineffective sort, to minority opinion by reversing the shield’s red-white checkerboard alignment in order to differentiate it from the emblem used by the Pavelić regime.
So, the Nazis return to power in Germany, they restore the swastika, but it’s upside down, so it doesn’t count, Jews! Nothing to worry about.
Nation stresses (p. 118) that Milosevic, joined by his protégé Momir Bulatovic of Montenegro (a country that later split from Serbia in a fascinating, separate process outside of the scope of this book and review), was increasingly committed to support for the emerging Serb entities inside Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. “This decision to prioritize the creation of a “greater Serbia” would eventually be singled out as the root cause of the entire Yugoslav tragedy, though in fact the unambiguous orientation of the western republics toward secession left the Serbian leadership with little choice but to see to its own interests,” he adds. He follows up:
On March 16, 1991, as the crisis of federal institutions climaxed, Milošević remarked on Belgrade television that “Yugoslavia has entered into the final phase of its agony.” ... Such statements outlined a program, to accept the dismantlement of Yugoslavia and use force to assemble an enlarged Serbia from the ruins. Ljubljana and Zagreb viewed confederation as a kind of halfway house that would buy them time to prepare for independence, and the Slovenes in particular pushed hard to provoke a break as soon as possible. Sarajevo and Skopje feared the breakup of Yugoslavia, but they were not willing to accept incorporation in a rump state where the western republics were not on hand to balance Serbia.
It's absolutely remarkable that Nation, an American, is so shocked by all of this that he actually (p. 129) criticizes the Yugoslav military for not staging a coup, arguing that – in these circumstances – such action would have been within the military’s purview, and possibly a better option than the bloodbath that was to follow:
The high command at the outset of the conflict was what several generations of indoctrination in Titoist Yugoslavia had prepared it to be, a professionally competent and ethnically diverse group of officers committed to the preservation of the Yugoslav idea. Tito had repeatedly referred to the Yugoslav armed forces as the ultimate guarantor of national unity, and in the confused circumstances of 1990-91 the JNA would have been acting within its prerogative had it seized the initiative, declared a state of emergency as a pretext for dismissing nationalist leaders in Ljubljana, Zagreb, and Belgrade, and imposed federal elections and association between republics on a new foundation. Pretexts for intervention were not lacking. On January 25, 1991, a secretly filmed video was shown on national television documenting the illegal arming of Croatian paramilitaries in Slavonia. The video featured (Croatian) defense minister Špegelj, his back to a hidden camera, instructing fellow officers on techniques for murdering their Serb colleagues in the context of a national rising. The “Špegelj Affair” created a sensation, but a majority of the Federal Presidency refused to sanction a military response, and the army balked at acting without a political mandate. Following the May 6, 1991, demonstrations protesting efforts to disarm the Croatian territorial militia outside the Yugoslav naval headquarters in Split, during which a young Macedonian conscript was killed, Yugoslav Defense Minister Kadijević spoke publicly of a “state of civil war,” but his rhetoric was not backed up by action. The decision by Milošević’s Serb bloc to veto the accession of Mesić as chair of the Federal Presidency in May 1991 has also been represented as a possible occasion for the declaration of a state of emergency and military crackdown, which was not exploited for lack of political support.
Why was there no coup? Well, nobody wanted to run the risk of being immediately identified as the bad guy in the movie. They were all triangulating, and the Americans were also going around, making less-than-veiled threats (p. 130):
On January 17, U.S. Ambassador William Zimmermann instructed Milošević confidant Jović that although America supported Yugoslav unity, it would not tolerate the use of force by the federal army in Slovenia and Croatia. The EC offered the same contradictory council--simultaneous opposition to secession and to the only effective means to combat secession—in June 1991 on the eve of the Slovenian and Croatian declarations of disassociation.
Late in 1991, foreign pressure again forced everyone’s hands. As Nation explains (p. 138), Germany – the EC’s most powerful member, and one that was flexing diplomatic muscles for the first time since its reunification earlier that year – drove the European bloc to recognize the secessionist republics by January 15, 1992.
Just in case the Serbs didn’t get the message, Germany then “embarrassed its allies by moving to recognize Slovenia and Croatia unilaterally.” Bosnia-Herzegovina, a republic with a tenuous Muslim (Bosniak) plurality, and massive Serb and Croatian minorities, received encouraging messages too:
Bosnia-Herzegovina was urged to conduct a referendum on independence as a condition for eligibility. The rulings were legally disputable, but at this point political motives had become decisive… Macedonia, in deference to Greek protests (including threats from Athens to veto EC initiatives should its will be defied) was left in limbo.
Attempts to explain German haste rest upon a number of contradictory hypotheses, Nation writes: “aspirations to win advantage in an emerging central European economic zone, to assert a more dynamic foreign policy in the wake of unification, to make up for diplomatic passivity during the Gulf War and assume a stronger leadership role in Europe, to pursue a policy of revenge against an historic enemy, to respond to domestic pressures emerging from Catholic, Bavarian, and Croatian interest groups, or to stand up to destabilizing violence on Germany’s post-cold war eastern marches.” Regardless, Nation adds (p. 106):
Some combination of these factors will have to serve — what matters are the consequences of Bonn’s, and the EC’s, miscalculations. Slovenia and Croatia were recognized as sovereign states, and the dissolution of Yugoslavia sanctioned, without any provision being made to address the status of Croatia’s Serb minority, the prospects of the other constituent peoples of the Yugoslav federation, the legitimacy of federal instances, or the consequences for the Balkan region of Yugoslavia’s precipitous fragmentation. The decade of war that followed was at least in part a consequence of these miscalculations.
This mess was facilitated by the absence of any diplomatic counter-balance. The Soviet Union was in an accelerated process of dissolution of its own, with some countries later to star in international dramas of their own, like the Ukraine, holding referenda to gain independence in the latter half of 1991. In fact, as Nation notes (p. 144), the well-known coup of August that year against Mikhail Gorbachev, a last-ditch Communist attempt to revert the disintegration, “was informed by sympathy toward Serbia as Russia’s historic ally in the Balkans, but it ended as a fiasco.”
Luckily for the West, there was a pathological drunk they were able to push all the way to the presidency of the new Russian Federation: Boris Yeltsin, who worked with his Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev to align Russian Balkan policy with that of the Western democracies (p. 121):
In May 1992 Kozyrev visited all of the former Yugoslav republics, and signed accords establishing full diplomatic relations with Slovenia and Croatia. He also publicly asserted that responsibility for the conflict fell upon the “national-communist” leadership in Belgrade. The Russian Federation voted in favor of economic sanctions against Belgrade on May 30, 1992, on July 10 it approved Yugoslavia’s exclusion from the CSCE, and on September 22 supported UN Resolution No. 777 denying Belgrade the status of legal successor of Tito’s federation.
Yup, all of this from the supposed historical ally of Serbia. Nation keeps hammering on a point that should be more popular among Americans, given that they live in a country that stamped out a wildly popular secessionist movement by killing pretty much anyone who took up arms against the Federal government (p. 146):
The original justification for recognizing Slovenia and Croatia was the right of self-determination, but it was a dubious premise about which no one seemed to agree. The concept was coined by Woodrow Wilson as a means for coordinating the selective dismantling of the defeated European empires of World War I, but it has never been incorporated into the code of international law. There is no consensus in place over what the conditions that qualify any one of the more than 3,000 national communities that can be identified worldwide for such a privilege might be, or whether the principle of self-determination necessarily implies a right to independence and national sovereignty. In the case of Yugoslavia, the right of self-determination was often invoked but never consistently applied. The denial of an option for self-determination to the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia, the Croats of Herzegovina, the Kosovar Albanians, and the Albanian population of Macedonia lay at the root of much of the violence that accompanied the country’s break-up. The sovereignty of the individual republics, and of inherited republican borders, was often cited as a limitation upon self-determination, but the most outspoken proponents of such perspectives were usually those with the most to gain.
Croatia was a very particular case: with a third of the national territory under occupation by the Serbs who lived there, who descended from people who had lived there for centuries, and who wanted no part of the new Croatian state, the argument put forward by Croatian diplomats was that boundaries between the Yugoslav republics were historically sanctioned, legal lines of division between sovereign entities. Nation points out (still p. 146), however:
In fact, however, administrative expediency accounted for much of the logic of the Yugoslav republican boundaries drawn up after the Second World War, which were never intended to serve as state frontiers. There was some incongruity in an international legal regime that sanctioned the dismemberment of Yugoslavia itself, while simultaneously holding up its internal boundaries as inviolable. “The country’s external borders were made of cotton, its internal and regional frontiers of cement,” as one disillusioned critic (Slobodan Despot in the postface to Vjekoslav Radovic's Spectres de la guerre: Chose vue par un Yougoslave privé de son pays, Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1992, p. 216.) put it.
The argument that internal borders separating Yugoslav republics were sacrosanct and the basis for all future arrangement was particularly beloved by the only Yugoslav republican leader during the wars of the 1990s without a Communist background, the Muslim Alija Izetbegovic. He was briefly imprisoned in 1946 for his opposition to Titoist policies toward Bosnia’s Muslim community, and later became a respected lawyer and leader of the political opposition. In 1983 he was tried, together with twelve associates, for a purported attempt to transform Bosnia-Herzegovina into an Islamic Republic, and sentenced to a 14-year term, only 2 years of which were served.
Izetbegovic was terrified of a possible arrangement between the two largest ethnicities of Yugoslavia, Serbs and Croats, to divide Bosnia between themselves. He wasn’t paranoid: Tudjman and Milosevic, two former Communists with similar interests and views, had met several times and, in March 1991, they had outlined a common strategy based upon the partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina by exchanging multiple chunks of land with hard-to-spell names, leaving a small Bosniak state in the middle, as residue (p. 154):
Obsessed with his role in history, Tudjman kept a nearly complete file of recordings of confidential conversations with colleagues conducted in the presidential office. The portions of these tapes that have been made public reveal that the Croatian President repeatedly made reference to schemes for partitioning Bosnia-Herzegovina, notably in conversation with Mate Boban and Gojko Šušak on November 28, 1993, where he speaks of trading occupied areas along the Sava for territory in western Bosnia, and as late as April 1999, when Tudjman suggested exchanging the Prevlaka Peninsula and a point of access to the Adriatic to the Serbs in exchange for Banja Luka and the Bosanska Krajina.
In typical fashion, this revealing tapes have locally been described as “Croatia’s Watergate Tapes.” The existence of the tapes – a massive piece of evidence showing that Tudjman was more willing to negotiate than his Western partners and backers – was revealed following the HDZ’s electoral defeat in 1999, but only small excerpts have been published.
The Tudjman family unsuccessfully sued to have the tapes returned; in the summer of 2002, under pressure to surrender the tapes to the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, the Croatian government made the decision to restrict all access to the documents for a period of 30 years.
\*
You may be wondering why I care so much about the travails of this wild peoples who murdered themselves with so much abandon. After all, like I wrote before, this was mostly their fault. They had a little fire going on and all foreigners did was pour petrol on it. Yes, that didn’t help, but you definitely needed the fire to get the conflagration going.
I care because this was my first experience as a journalist. In the summer of 1994, on holidays from J-School, I talked a few friends into doing a Eurorail train trip, dirt cheap, on a 300 euro budget that covered a whole month worth of accommodation, travel and food. The war in Yugoslavia was a big deal in the news, and I wanted to have a peek, so I took them into Croatia, telling them that, yes, the country was technically at war, but it wasn’t really.
That Croatia wasn’t really at war was a small exaggeration.
We spent a few eventful hours in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, where you could feel the war staring at you, and see the soldiers all over the place, blue UN vehicles and tents for displaced peoples. The kind owner of a establishment full of grizzled war veterans – who obviously were getting some rest before they were sent to the front – convinced us to take the first train to neighboring Slovenia, where there really was no war.
We ended up in a ramshackle, but pretty, beachfront hotel in Pula, close to Italy. The place was crammed with Croatian refugees from Mostar, an ethnically-divided Bosnian city where all sorts of horrors had occurred, before and after UN Spanish troops (members of the so-called UNPROFOR forces patrolling Bosnian enclaves) had arrived to separate the contending Croat and Muslim minorities.
When the refugees learned that me and my friends were Spanish, well, that wasn’t pretty. We were all in our early 20s, short-haired, in reasonable shape: we looked a lot like UN soldiers on vacation, and some of the refugees didn’t believe us when we explained – through a helpful translator – that we weren’t. One afternoon, as I was staring at the sea, bored, one of the refugees came close to physically attack me; luckily, the translator was nearby. He explained that these people had suffered much in Mostar and blamed the Spanish soldiers, fairly or unfairly, for siding with the Muslims.
I understood then. I understand even more now. It wasn’t even necessary that that poor man had personally been the victim of Bosniak violence: war propaganda, fuelled in the West to portray the Serbs as monsters (with the Muslims as sidekick monsters in Croatia), and directed in Serbia against Bosniaks and Croats, was all over European media. In Yugoslavia itself, as Nation writes, it was overwhelming. This is from p. 147:
It quickly became clear that all parties to the conflict were in the business of using atrocity rumors instrumentally in order to win the sympathy of a wider audience. Sorting out fact from fiction in the volatile circumstances of armed conflict is never easy. In the Yugoslav case, where efforts to demonize the enemy became a strategy of war pursued by professional public relations firms such as Ruder Finn Global Public Affairs, the challenge was particularly severe.
In p. 156, Nation recalls a Serbian acquaintance of his, the widow of a former Yugoslav diplomat from Croatia and owner of a home in Split and flat in Belgrade, who reported viewing a news broadcast in Belgrade during the autumn of 1991, including graphic images of mutilated cadavers, described as the Serb victims of Croat terror:
Upon returning to Split, she viewed the identical images on Croatian television, with the cadavers described as the Croat victims of Chetnik (Serb) terror. Such abusive use of the pornography of death for political purposes, without regard to circumstance or fact, was widespread.
Widely publicized images of the picturesque touristic town of Dubrovnik under assault (“to some extent engineered by Croatian defenders who used the city’s medieval towers as gun placements and allegedly burnt piles of tires to create photogenic smoke effects for the international media”) were also used to good effect to convey the impression of a barbaric Serb invader (p. 158). I recall they were all over the news reports, all the time.
The bombing of the Croat presidential palace in the heart of Zagreb’s old city, an action devoid of any apparent strategic logic, likewise cast discredit upon government forces (also p. 158). The destruction in Vukovar was much more representative (and a real enough example of Serbian brutality), but the quiet Slavonian city lacked the media appeal of an international tourist resort or the national capital.
In the midst of this mess, UNPROFOR troops like the ones the Mostar refugees hated became a byword for mission creep (p. 189). They had extremely limited mandates at first, including the monitoring of cease fires and the like, but big, foreign dreams.
When UNPROFOR commander Phillippe Morillon of France was temporarily detained by outraged citizens demanding protection during a visit to the Bosniak enclave of Srebrenica on March 11, 1993, he took the personal initiative of declaring the city a UN “Safe Area.” This meant that the whole UN now had, because of Morillon’s whim, responsibility to protect a thickly-populated town notorious among Serbs as a homebase for armed, murderous incursions by Muslim militias – including foreign jihadis that had been streaming into Bosnia for years, and would later form the backbone of European branches of Al Qaida (**) and the Islamic State.
In June, with UN approval, the designation was extended to Sarajevo, Gorazde, Srebrenica, Tuzla, Zepa, and Bihac, all Bosniak-controlled areas. Nation explains (still p. 189): “Unfortunately, the term safe area was a euphemism, used to describe what were in fact encircled and indefensible enclaves, teeming with displaced persons and with a combined population of over 1.2 million. In direct contravention of the safe area concept, several of the enclaves were used by Muslim forces as sanctuaries for launching raids against Serb-held territories.”
By assuming responsibility for their protection, Nation concludes, “UNPROFOR had saddled itself with a responsibility it was not prepared to honor and extended its mandate to the breaking point.”
Here one would be justified to stop and wonder: well, yes, this is a review of Craig Nation’s book, and you came up with all these direct quotations discussing stuff few people ever discuss about the war in Yugoslavia. But, how can we tell that he’s not a looney Serb-lover who is twisting facts to benefit, say, his secret Serb girlfriend with an axe to grind?
I’ve put the same question to myself, but the truth is that the published literature about the conflict mostly agrees with Nation’s interpretations. The problem here is not one of scholarly consensus versus looney Serb-lover, is one of “well, this was a long time ago anyway and nobody cares,” which is the most common response I come across when I point these facts out.
Take the memoirs of Richard Holbrooke, the top U.S. negotiator in Yugoslavia. There, we can read a detailed account of the negotiations leading up to the Dayton Agreement, the 1995 deal that ended the Bosnian war after the NATO air bombing campaign.
He makes it clear that the Bosniaks were the most obstinate party to the talks, and came closest to blowing up the negotiations for peace in Bosnia, while Serbia’s Milosevic made the most dramatic concessions. Holbrooke’s biographer, George Packer, concurs in his 2019 book “Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century”:
Packer reveals that Holbrooke had all but given up towards the end of Dayton and it was Milosevic, desperate for a deal, who saved him by making last-minute concessions and selling out his Bosnian Serb allies.
Surprised? You shouldn’t be. In 1992, in very publicized talks, Bosnian leader Izetbegovic had foiled an earlier attempt to a treaty in Bosnia. The so-called “Lisbon Agreement,” a tri-ethnic solution partitioning the country into cantons, had been brokered by Portuguese diplomat José Cutileiro on behalf of the Conference of Europe.
The Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats signed the federalization scheme in Lisbon but, as this article ponts out, after meeting in Sarajevo with U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmerman, Izetbegovic reneged. He rightly concluded that time (and the U.S.) would deliver a better deal — even if it was only a slightly better deal.
“The Lisbon Agreement and the Dayton Accords are so similar,” observed Gordon Bardos, “the main difference is the death of over 100,000 people” between 1992 and 1995.
As Nation notes (p. 191), the Vance-Owen Peace Plan of 1993 was another missed chance. Nobody was ecstatic about it, but the Bosniaks quickly saw that the argument that it rewarded “Serbian aggression” was much appreciated by the U.S. administration, which was then in the process of trying new toys:
The alternative offered by the Clinton administration, still in the process of defining its approach to the Bosnian problem and torn by conflicting motives, became known as “Lift and Strike” — lifting the arms embargo against the Muslim party in order to allow it to organize a more effective defence (a policy that demanded collaboration with Croatia to ensure access for arms transfers) and selective air strikes under NATO auspices to punish Serb violations.
In his memoir of the war (“Balkan Odyssey,” 1996), the British peace envoy David Owen lambasted what he called a U.S. policy of “lift and pray” as “outrageous” and a “nightmare” intended to sabotage the mediation effort in order to cater to domestic interest groups.
Nation (p. 199) provides a specific example of this policy: in February-March 1994, building on the momentum of a Serb withdrawal from the outskirts of Sarajevo (the result, in part, of a massive media campaign involving the likes of Susan Sontag), Western pressure achieved the reopening of Tuzla Airport, with Russian observers brought in to monitor compliance:
Though justified as a means to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid, the gesture also had strategic significance — Tuzla was a bastion of support for a unified, multinational Bosnia-Herzegovina, and it would eventually become the focus of the U.S. military presence in the region. On February 27, in line with the strategic reappraisal underway, two NATO aircraft shot down four Yugoslav Jastreb jet fighters that had trespassed the no-fly zone near Banja Luka. This was the first combat action undertaken by the Alliance since its establishment in 1949, and a harbinger of things to come.
The same points are repeated and amplified in intelligence cables transmitted by UNPROFOR Canadian peacekeepers, declassified in 2022 and reviewed here by The Grayzone. As they put it, “received wisdom dictates the Americans were concerned that Brussels’ leading role in negotiations would weaken Washington’s international prestige, and assist in the soon-to-be European Union emerging as an independent power bloc following the collapse of Communism,” but the reality is much worse: “the UNPROFOR cables expose a much darker agenda at work. Washington wanted Yugoslavia reduced to rubble, and planned to bring the Serbs violently to heel by prolonging the war as long as possible. To the US, the Serbs were the ethnic group most determined to preserve the troublesome independent republic’s existence.”
And more: “These aims were very effectively served by Washington’s absolutist assistance to the Bosniaks. It was an article of faith in the Western mainstream at the time, and remains so today, that Serb intransigence in negotiations blocked the path to peace in Bosnia. Yet, the UNPROFOR cables make repeatedly clear this was not the case.”
By 1993, it was clear to Canadian peacekeepers that the US was encouraging Izetbegovic to provoke the Serbs into military escalation, so that the US could increase assistance to the Bosniaks and comprehensively defeat the Serbs. One cable explains: “Serious talks in Geneva will not occur as long as Izetbegovic believes that airstrikes will be flown against the Serbs. These airstrikes will greatly strengthen his position and likely make him less cooperative in negotiations.”
To support the Bosniaks, the US resorted — as the cables denounce — to its old tried-and-tested tactic of relying on jihadists. Same as in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s and in Syria now, jihadists had joined the fight of their own volition and DC policymakers observed that they could be used against the American enemy of the day, the Serbs. This is has been known for a long time, but it’s another of those things that many prefer to forget. The use of Mujahedeen also helped to set up false flag incidents in which they fired against or shelled Muslim civilians to blame the Serbs.
A particularly beloved tactic of the Bosniak side was triggering such false flag incidents in Sarajevo, in full view of international media: “We know that the Muslims have fired on their own civilians and the airfield in the past in order to gain media attention,” a memo concluded. A later memo observes, “Muslim forces outside of Sarajevo have, in the past, planted high explosives in their own positions and then detonated them under the gaze of the media, claiming Serb bombardment. This has then been used as a pretext for Muslim ‘counter-fire’ and attacks on the Serbs.”
Please note that a Serb general was convicted in 2003 by an international tribunal, as responsible for the massacre cited in this cable as a false flag incident.
In 1999, the remaining rump of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) was again on the receiving end of Western rage. Amid increasing tensions in Muslim-majority Kovoso, a region within the supposedly inviolable boundaries of Yugoslav republics, the local Kosovar mafia gained dominance.
The local separatist movement was but a very thin fig-leaf covering an organized crime takeover, as Danilo Mandic wrote in his 2021 book “Gangsters and other statesmen: Mafias, separatists, and torn states in a globalized world.” In Kosovo, Mandic added, this mafia “assumed the role of a divider and ruler” during the turbulent 1990s and then during an insurrection that he describes as a “narco-funded armed liberation.” What was the West’s response to this? Belgrade was presented with the Rambouillet deal, a NATO plan that essentially represented a western takeover of the country.
This is, for example, the opinion of the brilliant Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who nobody will mistake for a Serbian apologist (he ran for Slovenian president in 1991, and remains a remarkably noisy anti-Serb and anti-Russian to this day). Zizek wrote thus about Rambouillet in “From Myth to Symptom – The Case of Kosovo” (2013):
At the Rambouillet negotiations early in the Spring of 1999, the Western proposal put Yugoslavia in an untenable position, effectively stripping it of its sovereignty. It demanded that NATO have free access to the military facilities in ALL of Yugoslavia – not just in Kosovo – the free use of all transport facilities, exemption from being prosecuted by Yugoslav authorities for any crimes committed, etc.etc. In short, an effective occupation of Yugoslavia. Does this not raise the suspicion that, at least for the USA, the Rambouillet meeting was from the very beginning not considered a serious negotiation? It raises the idea that perhaps the goal was from, the very beginning, to place Serbs in a position of having to reject the non-negotiable Western proposal, thus providing latitude for the bombing, by putting the blame on the Milošević’s “stubborn rejection of the peace proposal.”
This was the meeting in which the Kosovar Albanians – the West’s ostensible allies – showed up with such a unsophisticated negotiating team, basically a group of rural criminals out of The Godfather Part II, that its members mistook U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright for a cleaning lady (I also read this anecdote in the Spanish press at the time, but the correspondent falsely claimed it was the Serbs who made the mistake, obviously). Here’s Henry Kissinger, writing in The Daily Telegraph (1998) about the U.S. proposal presented during the event:
The Rambouillet text, which called on Serbia to admit NATO troops throughout Yugoslavia, was a provocation, an excuse to start bombing. Rambouillet is not a document that an angelic Serb could have accepted. It was a terrible diplomatic document that should never have been presented in that form.
About 2,000 Serbs were killed in NATO’s “surgical strikes” over the next few months. Over 200,000 Serbs were expelled from their homes in Kosovo, never to return.
This not coincidental, have a quick look of any map of the former Yugoslavia, and find out the places where the population that was ethnically cleansed during the wars of 1991-99 has never been allowed back.
There are only two such regions: Krajina, the Serb-majority region east of Zagreb, the Croatian capital, from which Serbs were forever expelled in 1995(***); and almost all of Kosovo, except for the northern enclaves around (parts of) Mitrovica, from where Serbs were pushed out in 1999 by the victorious, NATO-supported Albanians.
This makes perfect sense, considering that number one driver for foreign (German-led) hostility to the continued existence of Yugoslavia was anti-Serbian sentiment. Serbia, Czarist Russia’s closest ally for decades and a key reason for a series of wars that led to Germany losing its dominant position in Europe, had to be punished, and it was. Russia’s ally had to be shown how things stand now that Russia won’t protect you anymore.
Throughout Bosnia, where Muslims and Croats were often cleansed by Serbs, hundreds of thousands have been allowed to return to their former homes. In the Serbian Republic (the Serbian region of Bosnia) there are well over 100,000 Muslim residents as of the last census of 2013, out of a population of scarcely over one million. In Sarajevo, the Bosniak capital, finding beer in hotels and restaurants is becoming harder every day.
*The full exchange is shown at the very beginning of this wonderful, very comprehensive, four-and-a-half hour BBC documentary on the War in Yugoslavia.
**Amer Azizi, one such veteran who later joined Al Qaida, remains the main suspect for the role of organizer of the Madrid bombings of 2004, the largest terror attack in European history: https://www.urjc.es/todas-las-noticias-de-actualidad/7235-fernando-reinares-premiado-por-la-asociacion-11-m-afectados-del-terrorismo
***Serbs consistently represented well over 10% of Croatia’s population for centuries (17% of the population in 1900), and were 12% of the census in 1991; they are less than 5% now.