A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (46 page)

ITN broadcast the first television pictures from Trnopolje on August 6, 1992. The images of wilting Muslims behind barbed wire concentrated grassroots and elite attention and inflamed public outrage about the war like no postwar genocide. In July 45 percent of Americans had disapproved of U.S. air strikes and 35 percent approved. Now, without any guidance from their leaders, 53 percent of Americans approved, whereas 33 percent disapproved. Roughly the same percentage supported contributing U.S. forces to a humanitarian or peacekeeping mission.' While the Bush administration had portrayed the "Bosnia mess" as insoluble, editorialists now met the administration head-on. "It is not merely an `ethnic conflict,"' the New Republic editors wrote. "It is a campaign in which a discrete faction of Serbian nationalists has manipulated ethnic sentiment in order to seize power and territory.... There have been too many platitudes about the responsibility of `all factions' for the war. This lazy language is an escape hatch through which outside powers flee their responsibilities.""

Even Jon Western, the intelligence officer who had been dutifully documenting the horrors, was stunned when he first came face to (televised) face with the Muslim prisoners he had long been monitoring from afar. "There is an enormous difference between reading about atrocities and seeing those images," Western says. "We had all the documentation we needed before. We knew all we needed to know. But the one thing we didn't have was videotape. We had never seen the men emaciated behind barbed wire. That was entirely new." As had occurred when television reporters gained access to the frozen, bluish remains of Kurdish victims in Halabja, popular interest and sympathy were aroused by pictures far more than they had been by words. Between August 2 and August 14, the three major networks broadcast forty-eight news stories on atrocities in Bosnia, compared to just ten in the previous twelve days.4°

Even with the camps exposed, the tales of the refugees were still difficult to confirm, and the stories, as always, sounded far-fetched. Newsweek's Joel Brand visited the Manjaca camp and interviewed a gaunt prisoner in the presence of the camp commandant. Brand asked the man how he had lost so much weight.The prisoner's voice shook as he eyed the forbidding Serb commander. He blamed his condition on hospital confinement and not starvation. Only when the prisoner turned his head did Brand see that his left ear had been seared off. The interview was abruptly terminated."'

Reporters and television producers followed ITN's lead, relaying images that evoked heightened Holocaust sensitivity among viewers. Television producers often accompanied their daily Bosnia coverage with scenes from Holocaust newsreels. Vulliamy, who gave some fifty-four radio interviews the day he broke the camp story in the Guardian, was himself frustrated by the tendency to make linkages to the Holocaust. When one radio station led into his interview by playing Hitler thundering at the Nuremberg ral- lies,Vulliamy hung up the phone. "I had to spend as much time saying, `This is not Auschwitz,' as I did saying, `This is unacceptably awful,"' Vulliamy recalls. Two years later, when he met Holocaust Museum Director Walter Reich, Vulliamy asked Reich if he thought the phrase "echoes of the Holocaust" was appropriate. "Yes," Reich said, "very loud echoes"

In newspapers around the country, the analogy recurred. The Cincinnati Enquirer's Jim Borgman depicted Croat and Muslims skeletons walking from the "Serbian concentration camp" through a door labeled "SHOWERS" and into a room with one showerhead.5' U.S. News and World Report described "locked trains ... once again carrying human cargoes across Europe," noting that "the West's response to this new holocaust has been as timid as its reactions to the beginnings of Hitler's genocide."52 An August Washington Post editorial declared: "Images like these have not come out of Europe since a war whose depredations and atrocities-it has been agreed again and again-would never be allowed to recur."53 The New York Times editorial the next day read: "The chilling reports from Bosnia evoke this century's greatest nightmare, Hitler's genocide against Jews, Gypsies and Slavs." The Chicago Tribune editorial asked: "Are Nazi-era death camps being reprised in the Balkans? Unthinkable, you say?" and answered, "Think again.... The ghost of World War II genocide is abroad in Bosnia"5d However disturbing viewers and readers found images from prior genocides, there was nothing quite like their discomfort that such horrors could occur again in Europe.

Journalists generally reported stories that they hoped would move Western policymakers, but pundits and advocates openly clamored for force. Jewish survivors and organizations put aside Israel's feud with Muslims in the Middle East and were particularly forceful in their criticism of U.S. idleness. In a private meeting with National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, American Jewish leaders pressed for military action. The American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League published a joint advertisement in the New York Times headlined, "Stop the Death Camps."The ad declared:

To the blood-chilling names of Auschwitz,Treblinka, and other Nazi death camps there seem now to have been added the names of Omarska and Brcko. . . . Is it possible that fifty years after the Holocaust, the nations of the world, including our own, will stand by and do nothing, pretending we are helpless? ... We must make it clear that we will take every necessary step, including the use of force, to put a stop to this madness and bloodshed."

On August 10, 1992, President Bush met with Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who also likened the camps to those of the Nazis.The same day thousands of Jewish American protesters marched on the White House.

The Holocaust analogy was also invoked with regard to the allies' handling of the crisis. The interminable and seemingly fruitless Vance-Owen peace process caused many to draw comparisons between the Western "appeasers" of 1992 and those who had kowtowed to Hitler in Munich in 1938. For example, Time magazine wrote, "The ghastly images in newspapers and on television screens conjured up another discomfiting memory, the world sitting by, eager for peace at any price, as Adolf Hitler marched into Austria, carved up Czechoslovakia""' Anthony Lewis of the New York Times called President Bush a "veritable Neville Chamberlain. "57

This public commentary aided dissenters within the bureaucracy. They began filtering much of what they read and saw through the prism of the Holocaust. Fox rec ills:

It was the shock of recognition of those images. It was the visual memory that n- ost of us had through documentaries. It was the likeness of the thing. It didn't add anything to our knowledge to know about the camps in August. There was much more death after they were revealed than before. . . . But we had all sat through 500 documentaries on tie Holocaust. I had been to Auschwitz. We had all experienced the college curriculum.The Holocaust was part of the equipment that one brought to the job.

Jim Hooper had delved into the history of the State Department's weak response to the Holocaust. He pressed his government colleagues to read British historian Martin Gilbert's Auschwitz and the Allies and supplied them with a stream of facts about parallels with the Holocaust that they could use internally. Twining, Solarz, Galbraith, and other advocates of an interventionist, humanitarian policy had invoked the Holocaust before, but neither Cambodia nor Iraq had resonated like Bosnia. The Bosnian war brought both a coincidence of European geography and imagery.

"We Will Not Rest Until... "

The association of the television imagery with the Holocaust and the outrage of elite opinion-makers forced President Bush to speak out. Three months before an election, with Clinton snapping at his heels, he had to confront the possibility of intervening. Bush held a press conference on Friday, August 7. Fox vividly recalls the moment when Bush made his remarks: "I remember hearing Bush say, `We will not rest.' And I thought to myself, `How on earth is he going to finish this sentence?'Will he say, `We will not rest until we liberate the camps'? `We will not rest until we close the camps'? `We will not rest until we rest'? I knew he didn't want to do anything, so I wondered what on earth he could say." In fact, Bush himself made the Holocaust link:

The pictures of the prisoners rounded up by the Serbian forces and being held in these detention camps are stark evidence of the need to deal with this problem effectively. And the world cannot shed its horror at the prospect of concentration camps.The shocking brutality of genocide in World War II, in those concentration camps, are burning memories for all of us, and that can't happen again. And we will not rest until the international community has gained access to any and all detention camps.s"

Bush's pledge not to rest until the international community gained access to the camps left the administration ample room for maneuver. Would the access demand be satisfied by a single international visit? Would it entail stationing foreign observers in or near the enclosed premises? Even if helped in the short term, would prisoners be punished more in the long term?

The camp story had sent shock waves through Foggy Bottom. But many of the midlevel officials within the State Department who lobbied for intervention were concerned that all the attention paid to the camps risked drowning out the larger truth: The Serbs were killing or expelling nonSerbs from any territory they controlled or conquered. Still, in a parallel to Peter Galbraith's decision to tap American outrage over chemical weapons' use in Iraq, the Bosnia hawks within the department opted to take what they could get.They reasoned that attention to the concentration camps and the Holocaust parallels might succeed in drawing attention to the wider campaign of genocide.

Richard Holbrooke, who had served as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs under President Carter, was a board member of the International. Rescue Committee, America's largest nongovernmental relief organization. He decided to visit Bosnia just after the camp story broke. There he encountered an angry British aid worker, Tony Land, who expressed his amazement at the sudden attention to the camps. "For six months, we have seen Sarajevo systematically being destroyed without the world getting very upset," Land told Holbrooke. "Now a few pictures of people being held behind barbed wire. and the world goes crazy."'" Holbrooke videotaped the results of Serb ethnic cleansing, filming house upon house that had been blown up by Serb soldiers and militia. He saw petrified Muslims handing over their property deeds to the local Serb authorities in exchange for bus passage out of the country. And he interviewed refugees who recounted the abduction and disappearance of Muslim men. When he returned to the United States, Holbrooke wrote an article in Newsweek that urged lifting the arms embargo against the Muslims and bombing Serb bridges and military facilities. He also asked rhetorically, "What would the West be doing now if the religious convictions of the combatants were reversed, and a Muslim force was now trying to destroy two million beleaguered Christians and/or Jews?""' Knowing that Clinton had spoken out on Bosnia and sensing an opening, Holbrooke wrote a memo to Clinton and vice presidential candidate Al Gore in which he stressed: "This is not a choice between Vietnam and doing nothing, as the Bush Administration has portrayed it.... Doing nothing now risks a far greater and more costly involvement later.""'

Although President Bush's statement resolved little on the ground in Bosnia, it did require U.S. bureaucrats to begin a high-level intelligence scramble to gather all available data on the camps.` Within six weeks of Bush's pledge, the intelligence community had compiled a list of more than 200 camps that included the names of commanders. Because of America's top-flight technical intelligence-gathering capabilities, this information had been available to any interested party all along. But before the August public "shaming," senior Bush administration officials had placed no premium on knowing. There was no point in receiving details about crimes that they did not intend to confront. When Jon Western had conducted his investigation, he had done so juggling a portfolio that included Poland, Croatia, and Bosnia. Nobody above him had ordered-or much welcomed-his July 4 weekend intelligence scramble. But now the president had commissioned a well-staffed search. The sequencing was quite typical. As Fox notes: "The intelligence community is responsive to what the bosses want to know. You could say `I'm deeply interested in a green-eyed abominable snowman,' and you'd get all the briefings you could ever want. But when the higher-ups are blaming the killings on the victims, you aren't going to get much intelligence."

U.S. Policy: Diplomacy, Charity, Futility, Perversity, jeopardy

The United States did not couple its new public commitment to document Serb aggression with a plan to stop it. As a way of defusing the pressure stirred up by the camp images, U.S. and European officials pointed optimistically to a UN-EU peace conference scheduled for late August in London. There "the parties" would be convinced to stop fighting. Eagleburger pledged $40 million of U.S. humanitarian aid and said he expected the London agreements to produce "a substantial diminution" in the shelling of Sarajevo.

Under public fire the Bush administration made another move that seemed more consequential. On August 13, 1992, the United States and its allies passed a Security Council resolution authorizing "all necessary measures" to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid. Many believed that this was a precursor to military intervention against the Serbs. But in fact it only paved the way for reinforcing a small UN contingent that had been positioned in Bosnia since the beginning of the war in April 1992. On top of 100 UN monitors already on the ground, an addtitional 6,000 peacekeepers, including some 1,800 British troops, deployed. U.S. public support for contributing its share of peacekeepers was high (80 percent), and the U.S. Senate even approved money for U.S. participation in a UN military force. But the Bush team refused requests for troops, choosing instead to finance relief and transport missions carried out by others.''' The Security Council resolution, which implied a willingness to use force, was intended to frighten the Serbs into ceasing the slaughter. But even the deterrent value of the threat was undermined when assistant secretary Niles admitted, "The hope is that the adoption of the resolution would obviate the need for force..""' When asked about the concentration camps, President Bush said the United States would use relief to address "these tremendous humanitarian problems.""' Events, Americans were told, constituted civil war or a humanitarian "nightmare," but not a genocide.