A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (45 page)

The camps of Bosnia were not extermination camps, though killing was a favorite tool of many of the commanders in charge. Nor could they really be called death camps, though some 10,000 prisoners perished in them. Not every Bosnian Muslim was marked for death as every Jew had been in the Holocaust. Although injury and humiliation were inevitable, death was only possible. Concentration camps is what they were. Forever linked with gas chambers, concentration camps were not a Nazi invention. The Spaniards had used them in Cuba during a local rebellion in 1896, the British in South Africa during the Boer War at the beginning of the twentieth century."

Thanks to its spy satellites, radio and phone communications, and agents on the ground, the United States had known of the Serb camps since May 1992. But midlevel and junior U.S. officials remember the offices above them were a "black hole." "We would send things up and nothing would come back," said Western. "The only time we would get a response was when the press covered a particular event""' U.S. analysts knew that Muslim and Croat men were being incarcerated and abused, but Bush administration officials never publicly condemned the camps or demanded their closure. It would take public outrage to force their hand.

Western journalists heard reports of the camps' atrocities but did not immediately accept them. The first convoy of Muslim and Croat refugees from northern Bosnia crossed into Croatia in June. Laura Pitter, a freelance journalist, remembers her reaction to the horrors described by the first wave of refugees:

They were talking about women being put in rape camps.They were talking about all these killings-some they said they'd seen, others they'd only heard about. They talked about people being thrown off cliffs, men being held and tortured and starved in camps.We stayed up talking to them until 2 a.m. So many different people from different places were describing these incredibly similar experiences. They seemed credible, but I still wondered if they were all just repeating the same rumors. No matter how much I heard, I just found it hard to believe. I couldn't believe. In fact, I didn't believe.

Pitter sat around her colleague's apartment that night debating the veracity of the reports. She filed stories over the course of the next week about the refugee crisis but talked only generally of the refugees"' allegations" of atrocities. A few weeks later she finally chose to file a more detailed story told to her by a man who was able to escape from a Serb-run camp with the help of a Serbian Orthodox priest. The camp, in the northwestern Bosnian town of Brcko, was situated in a slaughterhouse. The same machines formerly used to kill cattle were used to kill his fellow prisoners, the witness said. Pitter's news agency, United Press International, refused to run the story, saying there was not enough proof and citing legal concerns.

One Muslim, Selma Hecimovic, took care of Muslim and Croat women in Bosnia who had been raped at camps the Serbs established specifically for that purpose. She recalled the ways journalists and human rights workers pressed the victims and witnesses of torture:

At the end, I get a bit tired of constantly having to prove. We had to prove genocide, we had to prove that our women are being raped, that our children have been killed. Every time I take a statement from these women, and you journalists want to interview them, I imagine those people, disinterested, sitting in a nice house with a hamburger and beer, switching channels on TV. I really don't know what else has to happen here, what further suffering the Muslims have to undergo ... to make the so-called world react."

The first high-profile press reports of Serb detention camps appeared in July, and American and European journalists flooded to Bosnia. Newsday's Roy Gutman, a British film crew from the Independent Television News (ITN), and the Guardian's Ed Vuillamy led the way. On July 19, 1992, Gutman published an article from the Manjaca camp, where he accompanied representatives of the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC), then performing its first inspection. Supervised at all times by Serb escorts, Gutman was allowed to speak only with eight handpicked prisoners. Still, he managed to piece together-mainly from those inmates who had been recently released-tales of beatings, torture, and mass executions. One seventeen-year-old survivor described being hauled to the camp in a covered truck along with his father, grandfather, brother, and 150 others. He said eighteen people in the six-truck convoy died from asphyxiation.' In a story entitled "There Is No Food, There Is No Air," Gutman relayed a Muslim relief worker's account that six to ten people were dying daily in the Omarska camp near the Serb-held town of Prijedor. On July 21 Gutman's Newsday story,"Like Auschwitz," described the deportation of thousands of Muslim civilians in sweltering, locked freight cars." Gutman, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches on the camps, used terms such as "sealed boxcars" and "deportations," which could only remind readers of events of fifty years before. He quoted a Muslim student who said, "We all felt like Jews in the Third Reich.""

Gutman relied on refugee testimony to give readers a glimpse of Omarska, the worst of the Serbs' camps, where several thousand Muslim and Croat civilians, including the entire leadership of the town of Prijedor, were held in metal cages and killed in groups of ten to fifteen every few days. A former inmate, Alija Lujinovic, a fifty-three-year-old electrical engineer, had been held in a northeastern Bosnian facility where he said some 1,350 people were slaughtered between mid-May and mid June. Not surprisingly, just like the Khmer Rouge and the Iraqi government, the Serbs denied access to relief officials and journalists who wanted to investigate. On August 2, 1992, Gutman filed a story in which Lujinovic, the survivor, offered grim details of Serbs slitting the throats of Muslim prisoners, stripping them, and throwing them into the Sava River or grinding them into animal feed.

The following day U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher finally confirmed that the United States possessed evidence of the camps. He admitted that the administration knew "that the Serbian forces are maintaining what they call detention centers" and that "abuses and torture and killings are taking place." But he insisted that the Serbs were not alone, adding, "I should also note that we have reports that Bosnians and Croatians also maintain detention centers."The United States did not have evidence that similar atrocities had occurred in the other camps, but Boucher still broadened the appeal for access. "All parties must allow international authorities immediate and unhindered access to all the detention centers," he said. "We've made clear right from the beginning of this that there were various parties involved in the fighting; that there were people on all sides ... that were doing bad things..""

Even Boucher's diluted condemnation proved too much for his bosses. The following day, on instructions from Eagleburger, Assistant Secretary of State for Europe Tom Niles backtracked, testifying on Capitol Hill that the administration in fact did not have "thus far substantiated informa tion that would confirm the existence of these camps.."" Boucher's admissions had caused a spike in elite pressure for intervention. A senior State Department official said at the time, "Our intention was to move the ball forward one step, and the [news] reports moved it forward two steps."" With Niles's retreat, the Washington-based journalists became furious. The Washington Post's veteran correspondent Don Oberdorfer wrote in his journal, "I had rarely seen the State Department press corps-or what was left of it in August-so agitated."" From then on, the reporters assumed the administration was obfuscating or lying outright. Congressman Tom Lantos, the Holocaust survivor who had found the Bush administration's response to Iraqi atrocities "nauseating," was again enraged. He confronted Niles by grabbing the morning's New York Times, which led with the headline about the camps. "You remember the old excuse that while the gas chambers were in full blast killing innocent people, we could say, not very honestly, `we don't know,"' Lantos challenged Niles. "Now, either Mr. Boucher is lying or you are lying, but you are both working for [Secretary of State] Jim Baker, and we are not going to read Boucher's statement in the New York Times and listen to you testify to the exact opposite"34 Since no reporter had yet visited the Omarska death camp, the Bush administration could still claim that the refugee claims were unconfirmed.

On August 5 Boucher said Red Cross officials had visited nine camps and reported "very difficult conditions of detention." But he said, "they have not found any evidence of death camps"The Holocaust standard, he implied, had not been met. Boucher went on to note that the Red Cross had not yet been allowed to visit the most notorious camps. Asked what the United States would do when evidence had been gathered against those responsible, Boucher said he did not know of any plans for a war crimes tribunal. And no, he stressed, the administration was not considering using force."'

President Bush remained immobile on the question of U.S. intervention. In an interview published the same day, he was quoted as saying that military force "is an option that I haven't thought of yet." He met the objections of critics by falling back on the Powell-Weinberger doctrine. "Now we have some people coming at me saying, `Commit American forces,"' Bush said. "Before I'd commit forces to a battle, I want to know what's the beginning, what's the objective, how's the objective going to be achieved and what's the end"" These were of course reasonable questions, but there was no indication that anyone at the upper levels of the U.S. government was trying to supply answers.

Analogy and Advocacy

Bill Clinton, the Democratic challenger in the upcoming presidential election, was clocking miles and racking up promises as he toured the country. On August 5, 1992, the day after Niles stammered his way through his House hearings, Clinton told an audience of black teenagers at a school in East St. Louis, Illinois, with regard to Serb concentration camps, "We may have to use military force. I would begin with air power against the Serbs to try to restore the basic conditions of humanity."" Clinton was a committed multilateralist. He said the UN demands that Serb camps be closed and aggression halted "should be backed by collective action, including the use of force, if necessary." The United States, he said, should "be prepared to lend appropriate support, including military, to such an operation"a`

Clinton was more of a hawk than Bush on Bosnia, but one could see signs that the former antiwar protester was deeply uncomfortable with the idea of American military action. Even as Clinton delivered his sternest warnings to Serb forces, he also sounded nervous that Yugoslavia might steal center stage from the domestic agenda that was far dearer to him. Both his faith in the United Nations and his privileging of the home front were evident in his remarks to the Illinois children:

I want us to be focused on the problems of people at home. I'm worried about kids being killed on the streets here at home. I think we'll have more people killed in America today than there are killed in Yugoslavia, or what used to be Yugoslavia, probably.

But I think that we cannot afford to ignore what appears to be a deliberate, systematic extermination of human beings based on their ethnic origin.The United Nations was set up to stop things like that, and we ought to stop it."

Like many liberal internationalists, Clinton referred to the United Nations as if it might someday become an institution with a mind, a body, and a bank account of its own. But the UN was dependent on the United States for one-quarter of its budget, on the Security Council for authorization and financing of its missions, and on member states for peacekeepers.

Still, Clinton, the challenger, slashed at what he saw was a Bush Achilles' heel. Whatever his squeamishness about force, with all of the media attention suddenly focused on Serb atrocities, Clinton was not going to pass up a chance to criticize the incumbent for his idleness. Clinton campaigned on an interventionist plank, criticizing Bush in a written statement for his inaction on the grounds that "if the horrors of the Holocaust taught us anything, it is the high cost of remaining silent and paralyzed in the face of genocide..";' Clinton advocated tightening economic sanctions, using force to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid and to open Serb camps to inspections, and bombing the Serb units that were pummeling Sarajevo.

Clinton's pressure was reinforced by shocking revelations from Bosnia, where Penny Marshall and Ian Williams of British Independent Television News and Ed Vulliamy of the Guardian finally managed to reach Omarska. Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic had visited London in late July. At a press conference he had denied the atrocity allegations and challenged journalists "to come and see for themselves." He was sure he could empty the worst of the camps before the television crews arrived, but he miscalculated, and the British journalists beat him to northern Bosnia.

Initially, local Serb officials blocked the ITN and Guardian reporters' visit by denying permission. Then the Bosnian Serbs stationed soldiers in the woods near the camps who began firing at the journalists' car. The Serbs claimed that "Muslim mujahideen" were doing the firing, making the visit too dangerous. But finally, on August 5, Marshall, Williams, and Vulliamy were granted limited access to what was rumored to be a death camp. Allowed into the canteen, the journalists saw wafer-thin men with shaven heads eating watery bean stew. From across a courtyard, they spotted rows of men being drilled by harsh Serb taskmasters. But they were not allowed to visit the prisoners' sleeping quarters or the notorious "White House," which they had heard was a veritable human abattoir. Disappointed to have been so limited in their access, the journalists were bundled into the car and out of the camp. As they departed, however, they drove past another canmp,Trnopolje, where they happened to spot a group of prisoners who had just arrived from the camp of Keraterm, which had a reputation similar to Omarska's. The new arrivals were in terrible shape, and ITN's Williams and Marshall leaped out of the car and began filming the ghastly scene. The ITN news producer who met his camera team in Hungary deliberately chose the footage most reminiscent of the Holocaust. "After viewing their ten tapes, I advised that the image that would shake the world was of skeletal men behind barbed wire," he said. "They sparked thoughts of Auschwitz and Belsen " 46