JUSTICE DENIED: MEANDERS OF THE BALKAN DIPLOMACY - June 30, 2008

It is now over a decade that international officials have not accounted for their actions surrounding the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995. There have been numerous efforts to keep secret most of the information, which would enable the survivors of the Srebrenica genocide, and the international public in general, to fully understand all the facts and implications relating to the betrayal of Srebrenica. Back in July 1995, the population of Srebrenica believed (justly) that under international law, the United Nations and NATO undertook the obligation to ensure safety of Srebrenica, which was awarded by the U.N. a special status of a so-called “safe area”.

The Western powers responsible for defending Srebrenica admitted their failure in doing so but refused to acknowledge that their negligence was deliberate and intentional. On July 11, 1995, a horror unfolded in Srebrenica, when this “safe area” was militarily overrun by Bosnian Serb forces under Gen. Ratko Mladic, who ordered extermination of local population of 8,000 boys and adult men of Bosnian Muslim origin (Bosniaks). This tragedy will haunt us as well as the question why the United States, the whole Europe and the United Nations stood aside when the “safe area” of Srebrenica was falling? Now, thirteen years after, the full evidence still has not been gathered and there is a worry that some of it may completely disappear.

The above question can be partly answered through analysis of diplomatic negotiations, which were conducted a few months prior to the final attack on Srebrenica. In spring 1995, all cease fires/peace initiatives stalled and collapsed and a vicious war was continuing in Bosnia, where ethnic cleansing was taking place on a daily basis (an euphemism to describe the physical elimination of one ethnic group from a territory controlled by another ethnic group). Over the three years between 1992-1995, the war in Bosnia claimed lives of dozens of thousands of civilians and resulted in displacing a couple of millions more. The situation on the ground was seriosuly deteriorating. The Western powers, which around that time became pretty desperate, did not really know how to successfully address the situation. However, Slobodan Milosevic, the president of the neighbouring Serbia, together with the Bosnian Serb leadership under Radovan Karadzic, already had a plan in play: they wanted the statelet they had established since 1992 through mass violence on a 3/4 of Bosnia’s territory and had ethnically cleansed from any non-Serb element to be internationally recognized as a precondition of starting any peace negotiations.

Since 1992, the United States and Europe, rather than deploying military force to stop genocide and crimes against humanity in Bosnia, started sending their peacekeepers to provide humanitarian aid and dispatched diplomats to explore a possibility of saving Bosnia’s integrity through diplomacy and negotiations. Such an approach produced no tangible result. In 1994, the Western powers decided to slice up the multiethnic Bosnia into two separate entities. The Bosniaks and the Croats, former allies who had been fighting each other in the previous months, agreed to live together in one entity, which would cover 51% of Bosnia’s territory, while the Serbs would be given a separate entity under the condition that they withdrew to the 49% of the territory.

Milosevic welcomed the initiative because it offered the legalization of the majority of the Bosnian Serb territorial gains (achieved through ethnical cleansing), what was his “ultimate goal” as he acknowledged in the mid of 1994 in front of his associates in Belgrade. But Milosevic wanted a compact entity contiguous to Serbia, what would enable him to achieve his goal of creation of a Greater Serbia.

For that reason, Milosevic opposed the peace map produced soon thereafter by the so-called “Contact Group” (a diplomatic body created in 1994 by four of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, excluding China, plus Germany and Italy) in which the future Bosnian Serb entity stretched over 49% of Bosnia but was not fully compact in terms of the awarded territory. A part of the Bosniak-Croat Federation stuck out into the future Bosnian Serb entity in the eastern part of Bosnia - a region neighbouring Serbia, which was almost entirely ethnically cleansed of its non-Serb population in 1992. Nonetheless, the mentioned territory still contained three spots, which had not been ethnically cleansed so far and were inhabited by an overwhelmingly non-Serbian population. These three enclaves were: Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde. All of them and their populations, who were besieged by the Bosnian Serbs’ forces since 1993, were placed under official and militarily protection of the United Nations and NATO by a formal resolution adopted by the U.N. Security Council back in 1993.

In April 1995, Washington decided to revive the stalled peace process. U.S. diplomat Robert Frasure held in Belgrade a series of secret meetings with Milosevic that in mid-May resulted in a draft agreement. Milosevic confirmed that he would recognize the independence and sovereignty of Bosnia-Herzegovina in exchange for the legalization of a Bosnian Serb entity on the half of Bosnia’s territory. If this pre-condition was met, he would persuade the otherwise reluctant Bosnian Serb leadership to accept the deal and accordingly to give up part of the Serb held territory. However, Milosevic refused to compromise on Eastern Bosnia. He made it clear to his entourage and to the Western diplomats, that the recognition of a Bosnian Serb entity in BiH amounted to an offer extended to Serbia to expand its own territory. Thus the three enclaves had to be a part of the Bosnian Serb entity, what would enable to facilitate his vision of a Greater Serbia within contiguous boundaries.

Milosevic made no secret of his ultimate goals. But theWestern powers were too desperate to bring an end to the bloodshed by diplomatic means to reject Belgrade’s requests. Their initial peace plan created in the mid of1994, known as “Plan A” had failed so they started working along the lines of the draft agreement obtained by Frasure in Belgrade, which was named “Plan B” by the members of the Contact Group. The U.S. and the European negotiators tried to push a deal offering a large autonomy to both BiH’s new entities so that those entities could establish in the future separate ties or even confederations with, respectively, neighbouring Serbia and Croatia. The Western diplomats favoured also Milosevic’s request regarding the three mentioned enclaves and immediately started pressing the Bosniaks’ leadership to trade Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde for some Serb held territories.

In late May 1995, the Europeans appointed Carl Bildt as their Special Representative to the Former Yugoslavia with the task to move the “Plan B” forward with Milosevic, Bosnian Croats and the Bosniak leadership. The Swedish diplomat arrived in Sarajevo in June, 1995, after a trip to Belgrade and encouraged the Bosnian Government to trade the eastern enclaves for parts of Sarajevo and its suburbs, which were under the Serb control since the beginning of the war.

Milosevic was all but naïve. Earlier in 1995, he admitted to his associates in Belgrade that “if there had not been our military victory [in Bosnia], international community would have never proposed that the territory of Bosnia and Herzevovina be devided fifty-fifty, on a territory where historically there never have been a Serb state.” He knew that with no military victory in the eastern Bosnian enclaves, he might never get an offer on the compact map that was of such a vital interest for the Serb nationalists. He was, thus, ready to create on the ground the facts necessary to achieve this additional step in the realization of his Greater Serbia project. Srebrenica was decided to face a deliberate attempt to exterminate its entire non-Serb population. In the meantime, the international community was not ready, or not interested, to confront these attempts by any decisive action. Despite the U.N. Security Council's resolution and NATO’s military commitment to protect Srebrenica - a “safe area” under international law - no endeavour was undertaken to perform the responsibility to defend.

According to the intelligence reports already in our possession it is evident that since, at least, the end of May 1995, the key Western capitals were aware of a possible assault being planned on Srebrenica. The CIA had established and equipped two secret operation centres in Croatia from where all phone conversations from the most of the Former Yugoslavia’s territory could have been intercepted. Several transcripts of these intercepted conversions, presently in Croatia’s possession, clearly indicate that the U.S. intelligence was listening and recording conversations between Serbia’s officials and the Bosnian Serb leadership during which an assault on Srebrenica was being discussed and planned. In late June 1995, U.N. military observers deployed in eastern Bosnia reported unambiguous signs of an imminent attack to be conducted on the “safe area” of Srebrenica. Eventually, the Bosnian Serb forces ignoring the U.N. Security Council's resolution launched a military attack on July 6, easily pushed aside the U.N. troops stationed at the location and overran Srebrenica with ease on July 11. On that very same day, as Srebrenica was overrun, Carl Bildt informed Mo Sacirbey, a Bosnian foreign minister at that time, during their meeting in Strasbourg, that the “Western powers will not save Srebrenica and will not defend Zepa and Gorazde”. Indeed, no decisive and forceful military or diplomatic action was undertaken to prevent the unfolding horror in Srebrenica, and in Zepa 10 days later.
  
For over a decade and in direct contradiction to all the new evidence which has emerged since then, the Western officials have been denying that they could have reasonably foreseen the attack on these enclaves, which resulted in extermination of 8,000 innocent people. Srebrenica was the largest mass murder in Europe since the end of the World War II and the Holocaust. Both the ICTY and the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the two highest, relevant international courts, have ruled that Srebrenica and its people have been the victims of genocide in violation of the December 1948 Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Despite the compelling evidence, the Western officials of that time, keep denying that they supported Milosevic’s demands to give the Bosnian Serbs the three mentioned enclaves of Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde. The hard evidence includes many intercepted conversations or even the recent statement made by the French General Hervé Gobillard, who headed the U.N. peacekeeping forces in Bosnia in July 1995 (Cités n°32, Paris, PUF, 2007, pages 93-100) . Gen. Gobillard acknowledged that at the very beginning of the attack he reported in writing and by phone to the U.N. headquarters and the Western capitals that the Serb forces were planning to militarily take over Srebrenica. It therefore seems very curious that the Western officials keep saying that they did not even have a slightest idea that the Bosnian Serb assault in July 1995 was aimed at militarily overrunning the enclave. Those officials object to the notion that these facts clearly show that they acquiesced to the fall of Srebrenica and Zepa; that they betrayed and sacrificed these enclaves for a political convenience. It is therefore no wonder, that until present day the details of the secret talks between Robert Frasure (the U.S. diplomat) and Milosevic have not been publicly disclosed by the U.S. government or by any other member of the Contact Group; neither was disclosed the text of the draft agreement negotiated in May 1995 by Robert Frasure with Slobodan Milosevic. There is only silence surrounding the negotiations with Milosevic to move the “Plan B” forward, which were held in a couple of weeks prior to the fall of Srebrenica and Zepa.

Soon after Srebrenica and Zepa were overrun and the evidence of a large scale massacres began to emerge, the U.S. chief mediator Richard Holbrooke tried to persuade the Bosniak leadership to “trade” away Gorazde as well (the last remaining enclave with overwhelming non-Serb population in the eastern Bosnia). The European diplomats joined the effort and tried to convince the Bosniak leadership to accept a peace deal that would also enable the future Bosnian Serb entity to hold a referendum, after a transitional period of 5 years, so that it could decide whether to secede from BiH and establish a confederation with Serbia.

In November 1995, when the final peace talks started in Dayton, Ohio, an estimated number of 7000 boys and adult men from Srebrenica were reported missing, while the photographs taken by a satellite revealed mass graves in the area. But at no point, did the key Western capitals contemplate returning Srebrenica to a pre-genocide status. Instead, they pressed the Bosnian government to accept the “new reality”. Gorazde remained eventually in the Bosniak-Croat entity, while Srebrenica and Zepa were handed over to the newly created Bosnian Serb entity. On the eve of the 13 anniversary of the genocide, Srebrenica is still under the authority of many of those who carried out those killings. Additionally, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic - the Bosnian Serb political and military leaders who instigated, planned and executed the Srebrenica genocide, in concert with Slobodan Milosevic’s Belgrade - are still free despite international arrest warrants issued by the ICTY, which indicted both of them for genocide and crimes against humanity in 1995. Srebrenica’s genocide survivors are still fighting for justice in many courts around the world and for the truth of their betrayal by the international community to fully emerge.
    

Florence Hartmann

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Author of the article is a French journalist and writer. Mrs. Hartmann served as a spokesperson for the Prosecutor's Office of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague.

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