Appease with Dishonor: Faulty History

General Charles G. Boyd (ret.) is Director of the International Legislators Project at the Congressional Institute. He served as the Deputy Commander in Chief, U.S. European Command, until July 1995.

General Charles G. Boyd complains that the "conventional wisdom" on the war in Bosnia is "stunted by . . . a tragic ignorance or disregard of history" ("Making Peace with the Guilty," September/October 1995). But his own article is far from an accurate analysis of the origins, history, or nature of the conflict. To establish his credentials, the general assures us he has visited the region on several occasions and has benefited from speaking to U.N. personnel, including soldiers serving with U.N. deployments in Croatia and Macedonia. This is akin to someone telling us that he understood the political conflict in Nicaragua because he had spoken to American soldiers in Haiti.

Boyd's claim that "the Serbs are not trying to conquer new territory, but merely to hold on to what was already theirs" is doubly false--first concerning the facts about land ownership and second as an account of what happened when those territories were seized by military means. The correct figures for the private ownership of farmland in Bosnia, drawn from the last set of land registers before the war, are as follows: 44.8 percent was owned by Muslims, 42.6 percent by Serbs, and 12.6 percent by Croats. Moreover, more than 50 percent of Bosnia's surface area--mountains, forests, lakes, rivers, and much urban and industrial land--was not owned by individuals at all but belonged instead to the state authorities. The claim that roughly 60 percent of Bosnia was owned by Serbs has been repeated so often by Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzi'c and his spokesmen, and has been so welcome to U.N. officials eager to even the balance of conflicting claims, that it has become part of the United Nations' own conventional wisdom. But that does not make it true.

When in April 1992 artillery began bombarding Muslim-majority cities such as Zvornik in eastern Bosnia, the local Serbs were not "trying . . . merely to hold on to what was already theirs." Nobody was trying to deprive them of their property; nor, indeed, were the local Serb farmers firing the heavy artillery. It was, rather, the Yugoslav People's Army (jna), acting on instructions from Belgrade and executing a large-scale and carefully planned military operation. On the role of the jna in launching this war against the Bosnian state Boyd says astonishingly little.

Boyd's account of the early phases of the war is also incorrect. He asserts that the conflict began with local Serbs taking up arms "to secure their communities from real and imagined threats." Once this was "accomplished," they "moved to connect Serb areas with secure lines of communication through locations in which other ethnic groups were dominant"; during this stage, non-Serbs were expelled because they were viewed as "security threats." The truth is that large-scale military preparations were made by the jna more than six months before the outbreak of the war. Places of strategic importance were included in these plans from the outset, whether or not they were in Serb-majority areas, and were in many cases either occupied or ringed by jna forces before the war began. Some, such as the town of Bijeljina, which controls a crucial stretch of road, were taken over by paramilitary forces from Serbia several days before the general outbreak of hostilities.

Boyd's statement that non-Serbs were subjected to ethnic cleansing because they were "viewed as security threats" comes extraordinarily close to an endorsement of Serb propaganda claims. His contention indicates a lack of awareness of the numerous detailed reports compiled by organizations such as Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, Helsinki Watch, and the Society for Threatened Peoples; no correlation between security concerns and the expulsion of non-Serbs emerges from these studies. Does Boyd not know that in many cases local Muslim leaders called on their people to surrender whatever firearms they possessed--hunting rifles and shotguns--naively believing Serb promises that they would not be harmed if they ceased to pose a potential security threat, and that as soon as the Muslims had given up their arms they were subjected to imprisonment, beatings, rape, and murder in concentration camps? A mass of evidence, much of it presented and carefully analyzed in Norman Cigar's 1995 Genocide in Bosnia, demonstrates that the creation of an ethnically pure Serb state has been a central element in the doctrine of the Serb political and ideological leadership in Belgrade and Pale.

This brings us to the fundamental error in Boyd's article. According to Boyd, both the rebel Serb leaders and those of the Bosnian Muslims have been concerned only with "avoiding minority status in Yugoslavia or any successor state." But as Boyd himself admits a few sentences later, the Bosnian Muslims were a minority in Bosnia. Thus their commitment to the preservation of Bosnia as a sovereign state cannot be described as an attempt to avoid minority status. The rebel Serbs have been trying to create an ethnically pure state; the Bosnian government has been trying to defend a multiethnic country and society. While Bosnian government forces have engaged in some local incidents of ethnic cleansing (mainly during the Muslim-Croat conflict of 1993-94, a byproduct of the Serb war against the Bosnian state), the Bosnian government has never pursued a systematic policy of ethnic cleansing. Rather, Serbs have continued to live unmolested in Bosnian government territory and to hold positions in the Bosnian administration, army, and media.