To win support for a costly, illegal, and often bloody intervention in Yugoslavia, Western leaders had to portray themselves as engaged in a selfless humanitarian crusade against the worst of all evils—as they have done so many times in the past. To accomplish this, they filled the air with charges about brutally depraved Serbian aggressors who perpetrated genocidal atrocities against innocent Croats, Muslims, and ethnic Albanians.
Atrocities such as murder and rape are committed in almost every war (which is not to consider them lightly). Indeed, murder and rape occur with appalling frequency in many peacetime communities, and political leaders who wish to fight such crimes could start by directing their energies closer to home. What should be remembered is that the Serbs were never accused of having committed murder and rape as such, but of (a) perpetrating mass murder and mass rape on a "genocidal" scale, and (b) doing such as part of an officially sanctioned systematic policy.
What evidence we have suggests that serious atrocities indeed were committed by all sides in the Croatian and Bosnian conflicts. But the extent and scope of such crimes is open to question, as is the reportage that cast almost all the blame upon the Serbs while whitewashing the brutalities committed by military and paramilitary units of Croatians and Muslims. Regarding war crimes, British writer Joan Phillips was one of the few to question the media's selective perceptions:
"People on all sides have lost everything; their families, homes, land, possessions, health and dignity. So why do we hear little or nothing about the suffering endured by the Serbs? ... Western journalists go to Bosnia to get a story. But they have just one story in mind.... [T]he Serbs are the bad guys and the Muslims are the victims. Their governments have all declared the Serbs to be the guilty party in Yugoslavia, and journalists, almost without exception, have swallowed this story without question. That's why they see only what they want to see—Serbian atrocities everywhere and Serbian victims nowhere."
The crimes that Croats and Muslims perpetrated against each other or against Serbs made it into the news only infrequently, and were accorded little or no critical attention by commentators, editorialists, and policy makers. Consider this incomplete sampling:
- In November 1991, twenty-seven Serbian villages in Croatia were given forty-eight-hour evacuation notices. Seventeen of these villages were then burned to the ground by Croatian troops.'
- Bosnian Serb women in the town of Novigrad said they were repeatedly gang-raped by local Croatian militia, some of whom were neighbors. One woman, Gordana, age thirty-six, describes her ordeal: "V/hen I screamed, one of them smashed my head against the floor. It all lasted three hours. Afterwards they said I would have an Ustashe [Croatian fascist] child."
- A 1992 BBC filming of an ailing elderly "Bosnian prisonerof-war in a Serb concentration camp" proved, in his later identification by relatives, to be retired Yugoslav Army officer Branko Velec, a Bosnian Serb held in a Muslim detention camp.
- Among the wounded "Muslim toddlers and infants" hit by sniper fire while on a Sarajevo bus in August 1992 were a number of Serb children. This was not revealed until some time later. "Television reporters identified the funeral of one of the victims as Muslim. But the Orthodox cross and other unmistakable Serbian Orthodox funeral rituals told a different story."
- When thousands of Serb civilians in eastern Herzegovina were expelled from their homes in February 1993, the Western media carried not a word about it. Every Serbian home between Metkovic and Konjic in the Neretva valley was burned to the ground. "In contrast to the endless stories about the plight of Muslim civilians in eastern Bosnia, we were not treated to a single story about the plight of Serbs in eastern Herzegovina."
- Also in February 1993, the Associated Press, citing only a Bosnian government source, reported that starving Muslims in eastern Bosnia were resorting to cannibalism. The story earned instant headlines in the United States. Little attention was accorded to the emphatic denial made the following day by UN officials in Bosnia, who hurried to the supposedly starving villagers only to find them in possession of food supplies, including livestock and chickens.
- In early August 1993, a photo caption in the New York Times described a Croat woman from Posusje (Bosnia) grieving for a son killed in Serbian attacks. In fact, Posusje was the scene of bloody fighting between Muslims and Croats, resulting in thirty-four Bosnian Croat deaths, including the son of the woman in the picture. The killings were done by Muslim forces. Serbs were not involved. The Times printed an obscure retraction the following week
- On August 6 1993, the Times ran another picture of a weeping mother, this time accompanied by her two children. The caption read "Bosnian Serb forces demand homes in the Central Bosnian town of Prozor to be vacated by August 4..." In fact, Prozor was controlled by Croat forces. Serb units were nowhere near the town.
- In October 1993, masked Croat soldiers killed an estimated eighty Muslims in the central Bosnian village of Stupni Do. Survivors reported witnessing the Croats throwing the corpses of children, women and elderly civilians into the burning buildings. Despite threats from Croatian troops, a Swedish UN military unit managed to reach the village to determine what exactly happened. As reported in the New York Times, they witnessed the aftermath of "the wrath of the Croatian nationalist soldiers who came to rape, to cut throats, to smash children's skulls, to machine-gun whole Brigadier Angus Ramsay of Britain, chief of staff of the UN's Bosnia command, called it "a disgusting war crime," and named the perpetrators as the Bobovac Brigade of the Croatian nationalist army in Bosnia, known as the HVO.
- In early November 1993, Bosnian Muslim troops stormed through an isolated Croatian district north of Sarajevo, sending thousands of civilians fleeing into the countryside and leaving others cowering in cellars. There were widespread reports of rapes, beatings, and looting. Some 2,000 Croats found temporary safety in Serbian-held territory southeast of Varres (north of Sarajevo). The Serbs expected a total of 15,000 refugees whom they were making efforts to transport to the port city of Split in Croatia.
- In August 1995, Croatian troops, fully backed by the US military, rampaged through Serbian Krajina, massacring hundreds of civilians. UN patrols disinterred numerous fresh unmarked graves containing bodies of villagers. The European Union reported, "Evidence of atrocities, an average of six corpses per day, continues to emerge...Many have been shot in the back of the head or had throats slit, others have been mutilated...Serb lands continue to be torched and looted."
- In January 1996 Croatian forces slaughtered 181 Serb civilians who lived in Mrkonic Grad, a town in northwest Bosnia near the Croatian border. The murderers left fascist graffiti over the entire town. The graves were subsequently exhumed and all the victims were identified by name. This story went almost completely unreported.
- Once the Sarajevo suburb of Ilidza was turned over to the Muslim-Croat Federation in March 1996, "hundreds of Muslim thugs"—as the New York Times called them—"armed with guns, knives and grenades," swaggered through the streets, preying upon the 3,000 or so Serbs, mostly elderly or ill, still living there. The gangs "hang signs of ownership on homes they never saw before and cart off people's belongings while the owners are out shopping for eggs.... The anarchy officials feared from the transfer of Serb-held suburbs has come true here."
- In its first case focusing exclusively on rape, the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) prosecuted not a Serb but a Bosnian Groat paramilitary chief, sentencing him to ten years in prison for failing to stop subordinates' 1993 rape of a Bosnian Muslim woman.
The key story that set much of world opinion against the Serbs was the siege of Sarajevo which lasted, on and off, from April 1992 to February 1994. It was described as "the worst single crime against a community in Europe since Auschwitz," by one British commentator. On-the-scene observers were of a different opinion. Former deputy commander of the US European command, Charles Boyd reported: "[T]he image of Sarajevo, starved, battered and besieged [by the Bosnian Serb army], is a precious tool for Bosnia's [Muslim] government. As the government was commemorating the 1,000th day of the siege, local markets were selling oranges, lemons and bananas at prices only slightly higher than in Western Europe. Gasoline was 35 per cent cheaper than in Germany."
Bosnian Muslim forces at Sarajevo, UN observers noted, were often the first to begin the daily artillery barrages, firing on Serb targets and Serb neighborhoods in order to provoke a response and trigger Western military intervention. A failure to make any distinction as to who was firing at whom implied that the Serbs were the sole culprits.
About ninety thousand Serbs chose to remain in Sarajevo during the siege. Bosnian Serb forces had offered safe passage to all civilians. With noncombatants out of the way, especially women and children, the Serbs would be able to treat Sarajevo as a purely military target. Izetbegovic dismissed the offer for the same reason, stating that without children Sarajevo would be wide open to Serb attack. Furthermore, civilian suffering was an important propaganda theme. So Muslim troops prevented anyone from leaving the Muslim-controlled part of Sarajevo, in effect, creating a siege within the siege. "This fact does not diminish the guilt of the Serbs, but it undermines the alleged innocence of Muslim authorities regarding the suffering and dying of civilians."
French general Philippe Morillon, former commander of UNPROFOR, emphatically blamed the Bosnian Muslim government for failing to lift the siege of Sarajevo. In an interview with Lidove Noviny, a Prague daily, Morillon charged that the Bosnian government repeatedly refused to let UNPROFOR establish a ceasefire because it wanted to keep Sarajevo a focal point for world sympathy. A British general, Sir Michael Rose, came to the same conclusion, noting in his memoir that the Muslim deputy commander was reluctant to sign the ceasefire even though "the Serbs had agreed to all of his government's ceasefire demands."
The Serbs were repeatedly pilloried in the media for the infamous breadline and marketplace massacres in Sarajevo, in 1992, 1994, and 1995. In all three incidents, internal UN investigations revealed that Bosnian Muslim forces were responsible. According to the report leaked on French TV, Western intelligence knew that it was Muslim operatives who had bombed Bosnian civilians in the 1994 incident in order to induce NATO involvement. General Rose came to a similar conclusion after the first UN examination of the site .14 International negotiator David Owen, who worked with Cyrus Vance, admitted in his memoir that the NATO powers knew all along that Muslim forces repeatedly hit neutral targets in order to stop relief flights and refocus world attention on Sarajevo. While all such fire was usually attributed to the Serbs, "no seasoned observer in Sarajevo doubts for a moment that Muslim forces have found it in their interest to shell friendly targets." On more than one occasion, French troops at Sarajevo caught Muslim snipers shooting at Muslim civilians in attempts to blame Serbian attackers.
An eye-witness stated on Muslim television in Sarajevo that the Serbs must have devised a new type of shell that made no noise when fired, for nobody heard the "shell" that hit the marketplace in 1994. A correspondent of the Danish daily Information also maintained that there was no artillery firing that day. An American physician, appearing on CNN, noted that the wounds on victims brought to her were not "fresh." Other physicians went on record saying that some of the bodies found in the Sarajevo marketplace had already been dead for some time. The British periodical Defence and Foreign Affairs learned that, just a day before, the Croats and Muslims had carried out an exchange of the dead.
At a later press conference, UN spokesman Bill Aikmann reported that the Muslim militia sealed off the Sarajevo marketplace immediately after the explosion, denying UN personnel access for several hours. Later it was not possible to find any shrapnel from the shell that would have allowed identification of its origin. Moreover, the Muslim Bosnian government resisted setting up a mixed commission of inquiry as demanded by the Serbs, giving as their reason that they would not cooperate with murderers. In an official communiqué published in Zagreb, the United Nations spoke of the "impossibility of ascribing the shell of February 5 to either of the two sides..."
No matter. The well-timed, well-staged incidents served their purpose; the outraged denials by Bosnian Serb officials were to no avail. Given sensational play in the Western media, the "Serbian massacre of innocent civilians" caused an international outcry, inducing the United Nations to go along with the US-sponsored sanctions against Yugoslavia in 1992, the beginning of NATO's air attacks on Bosnian Serb military units in 1994, and the carpet bombing of all territory held by Bosnian Serbs in 1995.
While press coverage focused on the Serbian siege of Sarajevo, the much heavier and "nearly incessant bombardment of Mostar" by Croatian forces, causing "far greater human and physical damage than Sarajevo," according to Susan Woodward, received almost no world attention, and demonstrated how thoroughly the media could be managed.3° Referring to Mostar seven years later, even Christopher Hitchens, who vigorously promotes the demonized view of the Serbs, was moved to write: "The wreckage of an entire city and the ruins of an entire society is still open to view. The bridges are down, the minarets are amputated, many parts of town are total rubble. All this done by Croatian government forces in plain view of NATO."
The amount of destruction wreaked upon the lovely city of Dubrovnik by the Yugoslav army was greatly exaggerated in press reports. Most of the old city survived undamaged. But Croat defense forces bear a share of the responsibility for the shelling that did take place. As even a strongly anti-Milosevic writer observed: "They were returning fire from gun and small artillery positions on the old town walls, goading the JNA [Yugoslav National Army] into firing upon them. They were cunningly exploiting international outrage for military purposes. When one photographer attempted to record the [gunner] nests on the old town walls, his camera was confiscated by the Groat National Guard and the film destroyed."
Regarding the deaths of Serbs in Krajina and elsewhere during the Croatian war, an ICTY report stated that, "at least 150 Serb civilians were summarily executed, and many hundreds disappeared." The crimes included looting, burning, and indiscriminate shelling of civilian populations. "In a widespread and systematic manner," the report goes on, "Croatian troops committed murder and other inhumane acts upon and against Croatian Serbs." But where were US and British leaders—and their faithful television crews—when these atrocities were being committed?
The massive ethnic cleansing of Krajina Serbs by Croat forces earned hardly a cluck of disapproval from Western leaders. Indeed, as Raymond Bonner notes, "Questions still remain about the full extent of United States involvement. In the course of the three-year investigation into the [Krajina] assault, the United States has failed to provide critical evidence requested by the tribunal, according to tribunal documents and officials, adding to suspicion among some there that Washington is uneasy about the investigation.
To be sure, there also were Serb atrocities. Serb and Yugoslav forces bear major responsibility for the destruction wreaked upon Vukovar and much of the responsibility for Sarajevo. Serb paramilitaries and "special units," including ones that sported nationalist "Chetnik" insignia, were guilty of summary killings around Srebrenica. In the small village of Lovinac five Croat civilians, including a man in his seventies, were killed. A Chetnik operation in Northern Kordun left dozens of bodies of Croatian villagers rotting, according to Misha Glenny. Twenty-four elderly people in Vocin and Hum, two villages in western Slavonia, were killed by retreating Chetniks. Some Croats who stayed in Stara Tenja were reportedly murdered by Arkan's paramilitary, "provoking bitter protests from the local Serbs." Later on, Serbian attacks on a KLA stronghold in the central Drenica region of Kosovo reportedly killed forty-six people, including eleven children. Dozens were killed in Bela Crkva, one of six reported massacres by Serb paramilitaries in Kosovo. Serb reservists set fire to a beautiful Catholic monastery in Croatia, near the Montenegrin border, and no doubt other structures in other places. Military operations conducted by many of these units were often beyond the control of their superiors.
Violations of the Geneva convention can be ascribed to Serb forces, especially Chetnik paramilitary units and irregulars. What we might question is the publicized size, scope, and frequency of Serbian crimes, the unreliable nature of so many reports, and the one-sided spin that Western leaders and media commentators put on the issue so persistently that evidence of atrocities committed by Croats and Bosnian Muslims never enter the equation, even if occasionally publicized.
Lieutenant-General Satish Nambiar, former deputy chief of staff of the Indian army and head of UN forces deployed in Yugoslavia 1992-93 offered this observation: "Portraying the Serbs as evil and everybody else as good was not only counterproductive but also dishonest. According to my experience all sides were guilty but only the Serbs would admit that they were no angels while the others would insist that they were." With twenty-eight thousand UN military personnel under his field command, and with "constant contacts with UNHCR and the International Red Cross officials," Nambiar and his officers still did not witness anything resembling genocide, although summary killings and massacres were perpetrated "on all sides" as is "typical of such conflict conditions." He concludes, "I believe none of my successors and their forces saw anything on the scale claimed by the media.
The moderated truths enunciated by observers like Lieutenant-General Nambiar, US Deputy Commander Boyd, General Morillon, General Rose, negotiator Owen, and various UN administrators and eyewitnesses cited above went largely unnoticed in the mass of Nazi-imaged, Serb-bashing stories broadcast unceasingly around the world.