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Bosnia's Ethnic Cleansing In Bosnia & Herzegovina, Germany’s push for the recognition of Slovenia and Croatia was seen as a clear sign that the two republics would soon achieve independence. With the Damocles’ sword of a spillover of the Croatian conflict hanging over them, and in the hope that Bosnia’s secession might yet allow the preventive deployment of peacekeepers, Bosnia’s leaders applied to the European Community for recognition in December 1991. In January 1992, they were told that Bosnia would first have to hold a referendum under international supervision. Just before the referendum took place, the European Community sponsored peace conference met in Lisbon in a last-ditch attempt to cobble together an agreement that would prevent a vote for independence from sparking conflict by providing a power-sharing formula. Led by Lord Carrington of Britain and Ambassador Cutileiro of Portugal, the talks focused on the decentralization of power to clusters of Serb, Croat and Muslim cantons in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Given Bosnia-Herzegovina’s inextricably mixed population, the proposal was seen by some as encouraging the creation of ethnic enclaves and by others as leaving large minorities stranded under alien authority. The talks ended without agreement.
The referendum was held in the last week of February 1992, and resulted in an overwhelming vote in favor of independence, but only two-thirds of Bosnia’s population participated in it. Bosnian Serbs boycotted it. Within days of the referendum, violence broke out in Bosnian Serb districts on the Croat border. As UN troops entered the UN Protected Areas in Croatia, Serb paramilitary crossed over into Bosnia & Herzegovina. The first conflicts began on the northeastern border, and were spearheaded by the radical Serbian paramilitary, Arkan’s Tigers, who crossed over from Eastern Slavonia and drove west and south. Serb strategy, which remained constant through the four years’ of war that followed, was to create contiguous Serbian territories in a spreading arc from the northwest to the southeast of Bosnia by driving Muslims and Croats out, and widening the corridor linking northwestern and southeastern Serb-held territories. In April 1992, at the same time as the European Community recognized Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbian paramilitary and Yugoslav national army troops — many of which joined the rebel “Army of Republika Srpska” - took a central junction town in the north from where they moved east to the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica. Here they encountered their first resistance and were routed by the Bosnian militia. While the fighting spread Serbian forces began to shell the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, demanding that the Bosnian government agree to partition Sarajevo in order to create a Serb capital city. The push for a two-level partition, of the cities and the country, was to characterize the war for the next three and a half years. By the end of spring 1992 Serbian forces had widened the east-west corridor, and set up “Bureaus for Population Exchange” all over northern Bosnia. Muslims and Croats who had not been forced to flee at the barrel of a gun were forced to pay for their own ethnic cleansing. Refugees were packed into sealed trains and sent to Croatia’s capital, Zagreb. In the summer of 1992 Croatian paramilitary groups moved to create their own ethnic territories in the mixed Muslim-Croat regions of Bosnia & Herzegovina. With the aid of Croatian troops that had originally entered Bosnia in pursuit of the war in Croatia, they took control of Mostar city, and surrounding areas in western Herzegovina. The Croatian nationalists dismissed Muslims from public office in areas under their control, and mounted roadblocks around Mostar to curtail Muslim movement both into and out of the city. The first small steps towards Herzegovina’s integration with Croatia had already been taken in 1991, during the war between Croatia and Yugoslavia, when thousands of Bosnian Croats joined the Croatian army, and the Croatian Dinar replaced the Yugoslav currency in some parts of Herzegovina. (Independent Croatia’s first defense minister, Gojko Susak, was a Bosnian Croat from western Herzegovina). By autumn 1992, the war in Bosnia was being fought on two fronts: in the west between Croats and Muslims, and in the north and east between Serbs and Muslims. Facing superior weaponry on both sides, Bosnia’s rag tag army could do little but hold small enclaves of territory. A notable feature of the four-year war was its almost total absence of combat. In the rural areas, Serb and Croat forces simply swept through Muslim villages, killing or driving out their inhabitants and destroying their houses; the cities they put under siege and let their artillery do the work. Mostar was partitioned into a Croatian west and a Muslim east, while the Serbs controlled a small chunk of Sarajevo. There were over a million refugees in Croatia, Serbia, Austria, Germany, and further afield; by early 1993, the figures were to cross two million. As a hapless Europe encountered the biggest flow of refugees since World War II, the European Community sponsored peace conference made another attempt to find a formula to end the war. In January 1993, the international mediators who took over from Lord Carrington, Cyrus Vance and David Owen, presented a plan they had been working on for four months. The plan proposed a loose federation of ten Serb, Croat and Muslim provinces. It offered the Serbs less territory than they controlled, severely reduced Muslim territories, and gave the Croats more territory than they had dreamed of. But it did not allow contiguous Serb territories, and it did provide for a central government, however weak, and in March the Bosnian government reluctantly accepted it.
However, as far as the Serbian leaders were concerned, the Vance-Owen Peace Plan demanded large territorial concessions at a time when the only remaining obstacles to their ambitions were the eastern Muslim enclaves of Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde. Under the Vance-Owen plan all three were in the Muslim majority Tuzla province, which thus extended all around the Serb majority Pale province. Pale comprised three pieces dotting eastern Bosnia. Serb acquiescence to the plan would mean effectively giving up Greater Serbia, the goal of the Serbian Democratic Party. Instead, Serbian forces moved to conquer the eastern enclaves, starting with Srebrenica. In March 1993, Serbian forces surrounded and blockaded Srebrenica. Srebrenica began slowly to starve. Though there were several sympathetic Muslim countries ready to come to Bosnia’s aid, among them Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the Western arms embargo that had been imposed on Yugoslavia after the outbreak of war in 1991 prevented them from sending arms to Bosnia. But Srebrenica’s starvation and Sarajevo’s siege, together with electrifying reports of Serbian concentration camps and use of rape as a weapon of war, outraged public opinion the world over and led to growing domestic pressure for action within the Atlantic alliance. In the U.S. there were calls for a more proactive policy of protection for Bosnian civilians, including for limited air strikes to deter Serb forces. But the U.S. was busy with presidential elections, and the war was allowed to drag on. | |
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Text written by Radha Kumar and David Pacheco. Copyright, Radha Kumar, 2007. |
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