Lessons of Srebrenica

July 11, 2005
Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112104981990581905,00.html?mod=opinion&ojcontent=otep
Ten years ago today, Bosnian Serb forces under the command of General Ratko Mladic entered the Bosnian Muslim town of Srebrenica, then being defended by Dutch peacekeepers. General Mladic made three demands: that the townsmen surrender their weapons; that all males between the ages of 12 and 77 be separated out for questioning; and that the rest of the population be expelled to Muslim areas. Within two days, 23,000 women and children had been deported. Another 5,000 Muslim men and boys who had taken refuge on a nearby Dutch base were also delivered to the Mladic forces.
As we now know, most of the people surrendered by the Dutch to the Serbs were slaughtered, as were more than 2,000 others, bringing the estimated tally of the Srebrenica massacre to 7,200. Yet the scale of the atrocity alone is not why we remember it. We remember because the men of Srebrenica were betrayed by their ostensible protectors, and that carries some lessons for today.
The first concerns the effectiveness of the United Nations. The U.N. began its involvement in the Balkans with an arms embargo that was supposed to apply to all sides equally, but which effectively left Bosnia's Muslims ill-defended against better equipped Serbs, who had the backing of the Belgrade government run by Slobodan Milosevic.
That was followed by the U.N.'s disastrous decision to establish safe areas around several threatened ethnic enclaves, including Sarajevo and Srebrenica. According to a 1993 U.N. Secretariat report, safe areas would have the benefits of limiting loss of life and property, deterring aggression, demonstrating international concern and involvement, setting the stage for political negotiations and facilitating the delivery of humanitarian aide.
From the start, however, it was unclear where the U.N. soldiers to protect the enclaves would come from; then-President Clinton had ruled out the deployment of U.S. ground troops. It was also unclear whether the U.N. soldiers in safe areas were actually authorized to use force to defend the people in their care. Worst of all, the price Muslims paid for U.N. protection was to abandon their weapons, which they did within a week of the safe areas' creation.
There was also the role played by the Europeans. As the Balkans crisis took hold in the early 1990s, the foreign representative of the European Community, a man named Jacques Poos, declared that the hour of Europe has come. This was supposed to be a new and decisive Europe, unshackled from its Cold War subservience to the U.S.
Instead, Europeans alternated between half-measures and attempts at negotiation with the Serbs, even as they exposed thousands of their own soldiers to risk in futile operations. When Margaret Thatcher, by then a former prime minister, called Serb atrocities evil and said humanitarian aid is not enough, her views were dismissed by British Defense Minister Malcolm Rifkind as emotional nonsense.
Finally, there was the Clinton Administration, which had come to office pledging to reverse the first Bush Administration's appeasement of the butchers of Belgrade. Today, most people remember the successful diplomatic efforts to end the Bosnian war with the 1995 Dayton Accord, as well as its successful military intervention in Kosovo in 1999.
But Mr. Clinton allowed the Balkans to bleed for three years before he did something. He let the U.N. and Europe take the lead and was frequently heard musing about the ancient roots of the Balkans conflict, which supposedly made it intractable and beyond the reach of the United States to repair. What's remarkable is that, when the U.S. did intervene -- for example, with a limited bombing campaign in 1995 -- it achieved fast and decisive results. Had Mr. Clinton honored his campaign pledges, he could have saved thousands of Bosnian lives and almost certainly averted the massacre at Srebrenica.
If American policy makers want to avoid facing another Srebrenica on their watch, they must never let the U.N. determine the mission. Allowing the Europeans to take the lead is also a bad idea. Above all, Srebrenica is what happens when Western policy makers reject taking pre-emptive measures against gathering dangers, so that by the time the dangers are obvious it is too late to do something.
It has become trendy in certain circles to speak of No More Srebrenicas, as well as No More Rwandas and No More Darfurs. If these people really believe the slogan, then the policy to make it work already has a name. It's called the Bush Doctrine.