The politics of the former Yugoslavia—from the 1991 secession of Slovenia to the 1992 recognition of Bosnia-Herzegovina to the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords and deployment of NATO’s Implementation Force to the January 1996 crossing of the Sava River bridge into Bosnia (traversed here by Secretary of Defense William Perry, General John Shalikashvili, General George Joulwan, Major General William Nash, and others)—are fast-paced and ever-changing. But to understand the crisis fully, we must delve deeper than today’s headlines and revisit the conflict’s origins and issues.
The peoples of the former Yugoslavia have been pulled one way or the other since the Slavs occupied the region in the 6th and 7th centuries. In 1908, Bosnia was annexed from Hungarian-Croatian rule to Austria by a Centro-European convention. It was the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince by a Bosnian patriot in Sarajevo that led to World War I. Austria, invading Serbia because it claimed Serbia aided the Bosnians, triggered the chain of events leading to world war.
Yugoslavia became a federal state in 1918 following the expulsion of the Turks, the collapse of the Austro- Hungarian empire, and end of World War I. However, the damage had been done. Ethnicity as a result of forced domination ran deep; from the very beginning, Yugoslavia was an unhappy marriage of differing languages, religions, cultures, and creeds. Croat-Serb rivalry became particularly fierce, and the leading political circles were full of corruption, intrigue, and bad faith. The whole situation was a powder keg when the Nazis overran Yugoslavia in 1941.
The various ethnic groups took advantage of the resulting chaos to wage an ethnic civil war between the German-sponsored Croat Ustashe and Moslem factions against Tito’s communist Partisans and Serbia’s monarchist Chetniks. It is notable that the Ustashe and Chetniks were much more interested in killing one another than fighting the Germans. Tito was victorious at the end of World War II, and he exacted a terrible revenge on the defeated factions, further deepening the ethnic hatred between them. Tito prevailed over a population of divided people, holding together the states of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia by the strength of his character and the ruthless use of force. After his death in 1980, the disintegration of Yugoslavia somehow seemed inevitable and was hastened by the widespread deterioration of the economy.
Chain of Secession
The Slovenians started a presidential crisis in spring 1990, objecting to the turn of Croatia to the seat of collective Yugoslav presidency. The central rightist party won the first free elections held in Slovenia. In February 1991, Slovenia sent a declaration of secession to the other federal republics, proposing the division of Yugoslavia into independent republics in a peaceful manner. On 25 June, Slovenia proclaimed its independence, and within two days armed conflict broke out between the Yugoslav Army and the Slovenes.
That Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic used force to prevent secession of states should not be surprising- Days before Slovenia declared independence, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker declared in Belgrade that the United States was committed to a unified Yugoslavia. His words may have been taken by Milosevic as an endorsement for the use of force to maintain the state.1 The European Community (EC) sent diplomats to negotiate for peace. A cease-fire was signed under the supervision of EC representatives on 5 July. Serbia, running out of steam in fighting the distant and resolute Slovenes, announced that Federal Army units would withdraw from Slovenia. Slovenia’s “Ten Day War for Independence" was over, but, in the words of Warren Zimmerman, then-U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia, “ . . . the Slovenes’ understandable desire to be independent condemned the rest of Yugoslavia to war.”2
Croatia also declared its independence on 25 June, in fact, hours before Slovenia; however, the delay in deciding to fight the Serbs resulted in sustaining heavy casualties against the Federal Army. Fighting in Croatia quickly spread, with especially vicious battles in the eastern portion of Croatia known as Eastern Slavonia.
On 23 December, Germany recognized Croatia and Slovenia as independent states. A U.N.-sponsored ceasefire went into effect on 3 January 1992, and by the 15th, the EC had recognized both Croatia and Slovenia. The next month, the United Nations sent a 14,000-strong peacekeeping force to Croatia to monitor the disputed areas until final settlement could be reached.
Steps toward independence also began in Macedonia in spring 1991. Macedonia managed to leave the federal union of Yugoslavia without a single armed conflict on its soil, probably because of a combination of the tough geography and Belgrade’s preoccupation with secessionist states to the north.
Bosnia-Herzegovina follows the secessionists: Bosnia- Herzegovina was the area most caught in the middle of the Serbo-Croat conflict. Certified as a Moslem nation, its fights were secured by the 1974 constitution prepared under Tito. Ethnically, the area was a smaller replica of Yugoslavia: Its 4.5 million population was made up of Moslems, Serbs, and Croats. In the wake of secession by neighbors to the north, rumors appeared that the area might be divided into three parts. The Bosnian Moslems, who felt they held a historical claim to the area, would not accept such a division.
In autumn 1991, the EC countries decided to recognize new countries requesting recognition. The parliament of Bosnia-Herzegovina promptly made an application in January 1992. The EC Arbitration Committee recommended a referendum in Bosnia-Herzegovina as a prerequisite. Bosnian Moslems and Croats voted together in favor of independence in the referendum of February 1992, while many of the Bosnian Serbs boycotted what they saw as an attempt to legitimize an illegal secession from Yugoslavia. For the Bosnian Serbs, secession meant becoming a minority in a new country politically dominated by their historical enemies. Given that many Serbs were raised on their parents’ stories of Serbs slaughtered by Croats and Moslems only 50 years ago, this was a frightening proposition.
Disregarding the Bosnia Serbs’ perspective and seeing the result of the referendum, on 7 April 1992 the EC countries, the United States, and other countries recognized Bosnian & Herzegovina—its government led by the Moslems—as an independent state. At this stage, Serbia opposed this recognition as yet another illegal secession and attacked what they viewed as a rebellious Bosnia- Herzegovina to capture the capital of Sarajevo and establish access corridors to major Serbian enclaves. The Croats also attacked Moslem-held areas to capture Mostar and its surroundings in central Bosnia.
Ultimately, with strong economic sanctions applied on Serbia, the Serbian Army pulled out of Bosnia, but by then the Bosnian Serbs had been well armed and were effectively fighting the war on their own. For more than three years, the fighting took the lives of scores of thousands of Bosnian Serbs, Moslems, and Croats with perhaps more than two million displaced persons and countless rapes, tortures, and other atrocities.
The Bosnian Federation: Moslems and Croats in Bosnia reached a cease-fire agreement on 23 February 1994 and signed an accord on 18 March to create a Moslem-Croat Federation. Stopping the fighting between Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Moslems came with a framework agreement that declared a Federation between the two parties and recognized a cease-fire in the region. Support from both sides was limited, but each saw in the agreements more to be gained, even if it only allowed them to stop fighting each other and focus their effort on the Bosnian Serbs. Ushered in under the steady hand of retired U.S. Army General John Galvin, the Moslem-Croat Federation was the best chance for a diplomatic solution to the war in Bosnia in 1994.
The Moslems and Croats had common interest in ceasing the fighting between each other, but their territorial and constitutional goals were less aligned. The Bosniacs (an emerging name for the Bosnian Moslems) wanted control of all of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina, while the Bosnian Croats had more limited territorial ambitions.
The United States sent another retired Army officer. Major General John Sewall, to the region in May 1995 to assess the continued viability of the Federation. General Sewall maintained a low-profile in efforts to stand behind the Federation, without giving an impression that the United States somehow was training the warring factions.3 Ultimately, however, as the end of 1995 approached, the Federation existed less in substance than on paper or in the minds of its Western champions.
The Players in 1995: With the fall of the Krajina Serbs to the Croats in spring 1995, the war became isolated to the territory of Bosnian & Herzegovina itself, with the three warring factions—Moslems, Croats, and Serbs—competing for territory, media attention, and power. The Bosnian Moslems, led by President Alija Izetbegovic, fought to preserve Bosnia-Herzegovina as a multi-ethnic (but Moslem-dominated) state. Their strategy was to strike indirectly at the Bosnia Serbs, while continuing to assemble a military force that ultimately could seize the Serbian land that they felt rightfully comprised the Bosnian state. The Moslem government has been particularly adept at exploiting the media, portraying themselves as victims while emphasizing the extent of their suffering. Indeed, early in the war, the Moslems hired the U.S. public relations firm of Ruder-Finn and Hill and Knowlton to promote its policies worldwide and ensure that its image would garner international advocacy.4
Since the inception of the supposed Federation, the Bosnian Croats, under the leadership of their President Kresimir Zubak, worked with the Moslems to take Serbian-held territory, but they knew that if the Moslems were defeated, they could assimilate with Croatia.
The Bosnian Serbs aimed to possess a contiguous territory occupied by ethnic Serbs in an independent Bosnian Serb state comprised of areas in Bosnia traditionally inhabited by Serbs. It was most important for the Bosnian Serbs not to become a minority in a state ruled predominantly by Moslems. Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic pushed for international recognition of Republik Serpska but failed. This was the situation when U.S. negotiator Richard Holbrooke began the string of diplomatic events that led to the Dayton Peace Proximity Talks and deployment of NATO’s Implementation Force (IFOR).
The Issues
Understanding the war in the former Yugoslavia requires acquaintance with the essential issues underlying the human drama. These issues are not necessarily new, but the tragedy in the former Yugoslavia has served to magnify them above the din of the war.
Self-determination versus inviolability of borders: Two key principals of the war are “national self-determination” and “respect for borders.” The first implies that Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia all had a right to secede after consulting their people; the second suggests that Yugoslavia should have stayed whole, and that respect for historical borders is a prerequisite to preventing the dissolution of world order. A choice between the inviolability of borders of right to self-determination cannot be based on moral grounds—there are compelling points to be made for each. When applied consistently, inviolability of borders is the safest approach from the standpoint of stability. Unfortunately, this was not done toward the former Yugoslavia.
As Yugoslavia moved toward disintegration in 1990. the position of the international community (and the United States) was that Yugoslavia should remain a single state—thus supporting the inviolability of borders. When Germany recognized Croatia and Slovenia in 1991, that position began to unravel, and with it, regional stability. When the United States and the world community recognized Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina along previous republic borders by April 1992, the concept of self-determination was endorsed.
Within the borders of Croatia and Bosnia lived significant numbers of Serbs, who presumably had just as much right to self-determination as the majority Croats and Moslems. The endorsement of the right to self-determination for the majorities fixed significant Serbian minorities inside Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, an unacceptable situation to Serbia and the minority Serbs.
The international community, led by the United States, having accepted the concept of the right of self-determination, then returned to inviolability of borders to preclude the fragmentation of Croatia and Bosnia along ethnic lines. The struggle between these concepts is difficult. One ethnic Serb put it this way:
In international law, secession is neither legal nor illegal, but the international community seldom approves of it, because to encourage secession is to encourage instability. In the case or Yugoslavia, unfortunately, secessionist movements received every kind of external support. . . . The Serbs, like the Jews, remember their holocaust, and they refused to become minorities living precariously under hostile regimes in these newly created states. All they wished was to exercise their right to national self- determination and to stay in Yugoslavia. But this fundamental right was denied to them since the world was hell-bent to destroy Yugoslavia. The country was indeed destroyed, but the Serbs refused to surrender.
That Radovan Karadzic wrote these words may make them particularly distasteful to supporters of the Moslem government. But that fact does not lessen their validity.
Civil war versus war of aggression: The dilemma between borders versus the right to self-determination is inextricably linked to how the war is viewed. If the conflict is seen in the context of self-determination—that part of an existing state has the natural right to secede from the whole and form a new nation state—the Bosniacs and Bosnian Croats were justified in their succession, and the Bosnian Serbs have had no right to prevent such suction by force. The war is one of Serbian aggression.
If secession is not legal—inviolability of borders being dominant concept—the Serbs have been justified in their attempts to prevent Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina from secession. The war is a civil war.
But as at least one author has pointed out, "Supporters of the Bosnian government rejected the label 'civil war' outright, knowing that no Western power would want to intercede in an internal affair. So the conflict had to be depicted as an outside aggression. . . ."5
What many see as ironic is the support the breakaway (or secessionist) states have received from the West, and particularly from the United States. These juxtaposed concepts were tested on U.S. battlefields 130 years ago . . . and Americans came down firmly against the right to secede. Now the Western international community has supported secession of Bosnia-Herzegovina, only to turn around and denounce Bosnian Serb attempts at secession from Bosnia. Again, quoting Radovan Karadzic, “President Lincoln would have disapproved. . . ,”6
U.S. national interests and involvement: Senior U.S. leaders continually state that military force will be used to defend crucial U.S. national security interest throughout the world. But determining where those interests lie, and at what point military intervention is appropriate, has been nowhere more difficult to discern in recent years than in the former Yugoslavia.
Certainly there are moral reasons to support one side or the other in the conflict, and the United States has—rightly or wrongly—come down morally on the side of the Bosniacs. But even many Americans who most vociferously support the Bosnian Government are reluctant to send U.S. military forces into the Balkan cauldron.
Those opposing U.S. military involvement argue that the Bosnian conflict does not pose an immediate threat to U.S. security. Short of sparking a major war between Greece and Turkey or drawing in the Russians in support of the Serbs, the United States has no vital interest at stake. Nevertheless, the U.S. government acknowledges certain important interests that justify limited involvement in the region: to prevent the spread of fighting into a broader European war and to achieve a political settlement that upholds the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Conduct versus causes of the war. In Bosnia, who is victim and who is villain? The answer lies in when you enter the stream of Yugoslav history.
Clearly, the moral dimensions of the crisis have been catastrophic; equally clearly, it has been the Serbs who have committed the majority of heinous acts since war began in 1991. Current estimates for Moslem dead range between 25,000 and 250,000, although more realistic numbers are between 70,000 and 100,000 dead.7 Equally horrible war crimes also have been committed by Croats and Moslems, even if not in the same quantity.
Looking back 50 years, however, reveals a surprisingly different picture. The Serbs, allied with the United States during World War II, were slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands. Estimates range between 300,000 and 1 million Serbs slaughtered by the Croat-Moslem alliance between 1941 and 1945.8
With numbers such as these, the concepts of moral superiority become irrelevant. The dominant variable in the equation of the war’s conduct becomes capability, not morality, and since 1991 it has been the Serbs who have had the greatest capability to fight—and to conduct atrocities. For this reason, using the conduct of the war as a method of determining whose side to support is a very risky proposition. For the United States, it is all the more important to determine the degree of involvement from the perspective of national interest, not from national sentiment, as so many have been willing to do.
U.N. command of U.S. troops and PDD-25: For Americans, U.S. participation in U.N. peacekeeping is an emotionally and politically charged issue. From the beginning of U.N. involvement in the former Yugoslavia, the United States kept its distance when it came to providing soldiers to wear pale blue berets. Indeed, the only U.S. soldiers to come under U.N. command (or control) have been the U.S. hospital in Croatia, the battalion task force monitoring the border in Macedonia, and a handful of liaison officers at headquarters and U.N. outposts within Bosnia.
To clarify its position, the Clinton administration issued Presidential Decision Directive 25 (PDD-25) on 3 May 1994:
…the President will never relinquish command of U.S. forces. However, as Commander-in-Chief, the President has the authority to place U.S. forces under the operational control of a foreign commander when doing so serves American security interests. . . . The greater the anticipated U.S. military role, the less likely it will be that the U.S. will agree to have a U.N. commander exercise overall operational control over U.S. forces.9
As strong and clear as these words may have appeared to the authors of PDD-25, the controversy was not defused. U.N. flag-burning rallies took place in the United States in 1994, protesting what many saw as creeping U.N. influence over the United States and its foreign policy. One of the first bills introduced by the new Republican- dominated Congress in 1995 was H.R. 7, “The National Security Revitalization Act,” which was intended to restrict the President’s ability to place U.S. forces under command or operational control of foreign nationals acting on behalf on the United Nations.
Future Hopes and Fears
After four years of war in the former Yugoslavia, there developed signs that not only the warring factions but also the peacekeepers and donors were fatigued and becoming disinterested. As the end of 1995 approached, negotiators led by Richard Holbrooke attempted to get the warring factions to stop Fighting and engage in dialog. This garnered some optimism for the future of Bosnia and resulted in the single biggest change to the situation since 1991: the deployment of IFOR.
Dark clouds remain over the region. The NATO deployment is to be terminated after one year, and U.S. election-year politics most likely will assure this time-limit- based end state will be honored. Whether the international community will have established a stable social order in that time is questionable.
If not, reignition of the war is likely once IFOR departs, and if that happens, one could predict that the U.S. politicians and the public likely will be ready to write-off the region with a flippant remark such as that made by Otto von Bismarck in the 1880s: that . . the whole of the Balkans is not worth the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian musketeer.”
1 Anthony Lewis, "War Crimes," The New Republic, 20 March 1995, P. 33.
2Warren Zimmerman, "The Last Ambassador," Foreign Affairs, vol. 74, no. 2, March-April 1995.
3 "U.S. Seen Advising Bosnian Military," Washington Times, 19 June 1995. P. 13.
4 Wes Jonasson, "The One-Sided Media War Against the Serbs: Part II," New Europe, 17-23 September 1995, p. 2.
5 Ljiljana Smajlovic, "From the Heart of the Heart of the Former Yugoslavia," Washington Quarterly, Summer 1995, p. 103.
6 Radovan Karaclzic, The Washington Times, 12 June 1994.
7 Charles G. Boyd, "Making Peace with the Guilty," Foreign Affairs, September October 1995, p. 27.
8 Christopher Spencer, "The Former Yugoslavia: Background to Crisis,3, Canadian Institute of International Affairs, vol. 50, no. 4, summer 199 p. 7.
9 "Presidential Decision Directive 25: The Clinton Administration's Policy on Reforming Multilateral Peace Operations, May 1994," p. 2.
Commander Hamilton is the Prospective Commanding Officer the USS John Paul Jones (DDG-53). He spent the past two years at Headquarters, United States European Command, Stuttgart, Germany, as the Policy Desk Officer for Bosnia-Herzegovina, and frequently traveled in the former Yugoslavia.