This month is the sixteen anniversary of the Srebernica massacre in Bosnia. As a collaborator with FGFM on his Glorious Hitch Hunt, I searched the Hitchens Watch archives for any commentary on the Bosnian War. I knew that Christopher Hitchens had reported extensively on the bloodshed in the former Yugoslavian republic.
To my dismay, I only found an August 2007 link to an appalling article by Brendan O’Neill in The American Conservative. O’Neill argued that Hitchens’s future embrace of neoconservatism stemmed from his principled defense of the Bosnian people, who were predominantly Muslim:
“Many of today’s liberal hawks, who call for war against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, were on the [indent]side of the militants during the Bosnian conflict. Indeed, back then the pro-interventionist Left and al-Qaeda were allies. [indent]Both groups backed the Bosnian Muslim Army and demonized the Bosnian Serbs as savages. Liberal hawks, including [indent]Hitchens, did it with propaganda, al-Qaeda did it by deed. But both the black-and-white worldviews of the Left neocons and the bin Ladenites were forged in the fires of the Bosnian war.”
This is a distortion of the truth, of history, and of Hitchens’s record. O’Neill may leave the reader with the erroneous impression of Bosnia as an artificial spawn of religious fanatics. In fact, Bosnia was an independent state as early as the twelfth century. The Bosnian people, who were European Slavs, slowly embraced Islam once their country fell under the control of Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century. As historian Noel Malcolm observed in Bosnia: A Short History, this gradual pace of conversion indicated the unforced nature of the conversions. Moreover, the Turkish governors were remarkably tolerant of the Orthodox Christian and Jewish minorities there. The Orthodox Christian Serbs, who lived in Bosnia and in neighboring Serbia, belonged to the same ethnic group as the Bosnians, and spoke the same language. Religion was the only essential difference between the Bosnians and the Serbs.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the Austro-Hungarian Empire acquired Bosnia. After the fall of that empire in World War I, Bosnia-Herzegovina joined Serbia, Catholic Croatia and Slovenia form the newly independent nation of Yugoslavia. Following a brutal Nazi occupation, the Bosnians managed to maintain their own territorial integrity within Yugoslavia until the nation collapsed upon the end of the Cold War.
Contrary to claims that Bosnian nationalism created the conflict, Bosnia might have remained an autonomous republic in union with Serbia and Croatia had it not felt profoundly threatened. “There is no return to a united Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs said. “The time has come for the Serbian people to organize itself as a totality, without regard to the administrative borders.” According to military theorist Norman Cigar’s Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of “Ethnic Cleansing”, this meant that Karadzic and his sponsor, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, were conspiring to carve up Bosnia for the sake of a Greater Serbia.
Defeating O’Neill’s point of view, Cigar effectively made the case that Bosnia was far more secular than the putative nation of Bosnian Serbs. The military theorist contrasted the referendum proposal that officially brought Bosnia into independent nationhood, with the one that created Republika Srpsk, or the Bosnian Serb “Republic.” Bosnian Serbs voted to “remain in Yugoslavia together with the Serbs of Serbia, Montenegro, Krajina, Vojvodina, and Kosovo.” In other words, the Serbs sought to create an empire exclusively for Orthodox Christians. Members of the Bosnian community, on the other hand, elected “a sovereign and independent Bosnia-Herzegovina, a state of equal citizens, constituted by the peoples of Bosnia-Herzegovina: the Muslims, Serbs, Croatians, and members of the other peoples who live there.”
In 1992, the war began. The Serbs began a campaign euphemistically known as “ethnic cleansing.” They sought to terrorize Bosnian civilians out of territory they desired for themselves. Ethnic cleansing led to the deaths of 200,000 people, including 12,000 children; the rape of 50,000 women; and the displacement of 2.2 million people from their homes.
At exceptional points in world history, evil literally battles with good. The war between Serbia and Bosnia was not a fair fight. In “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” Samantha Power noted that the Central Intelligence Agency’s conclusion that Serbs were “responsible for the vast majority of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.” Apart from isolated incidents, the Serbian government and its clients in Bosnia bore responsibility for “90 percent” of the war crimes.
Reporting on the ground in Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, Hitchens eloquently and bravely confirmed the destruction of a cosmopolitan, secular society. “During respites from the fighting, I was able to speak with detachments of Bosnian volunteers,” Hitchens wrote for the September 14, 1992 issue of The Nation magazine. “At every stop they would point with pride and cheerfulness to their own chests and to those of others, saying, ‘I am Muslim, he is Serb, he is Croat’.”
Hitchens celebrated Sarajevo’s cultural diversity: “In the Old City itself, you can find a mosque, a synagogue, a Catholic and an Orthodox church within yards of one another.” As much as Hitchens admired Sarajevo, he could gaze upon that beautiful city with clear eyes: “There is no need to romanticize the Muslim majority in Bosnia. But they have evolved a culture that expressed the plural and tolerant side of the Ottoman tradition…and they have no designs on the territory or identity of others.”
Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic personalized this cosmopolitanism. Izetbegovic was Islamically pious, but when Hitchens asked for his opinion of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, “he gave the defining reply of the ‘moderate’ Muslim, saying that he did not like the book but could not agree to violence against the author.”
For Hitchens, Bosnia represented Islamic culture at its best. I was struck by the journalist’s empathy and respect for Muslim people, sentiments that he has since lost. For the journalist, Bosnia represented Islamic culture at its best. In the December 6, 1993 issue of The Nation, Hitchens reported on the fatalities at a Sarajevo school that had been hit by mortar fire: “I noted the children laid out in slabs and vaguely registered the fact that the small boy in jeans with eyes still open was about the age and weight of my own son.” Does Hitchens prefer to forget that young men the age of his own son have fallen victim to American bombs dropped on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan?
Back in 1993, Hitchens could still write respectfully of Muslim civilization. He lamented the Serbian demolition of Stari Most, or the Old Bridge, in the Bosnian city of Mostar, “a span of perfectly suspended marble, gorgeously engineered in the time of Suleiman the Magnificent.”
Hitchens’s articles were an elegy for a culture as well as a people: “The minarets are gone, the mosques have been profaned and dynamited, and now all the bridges are down. Some of these treasures ranked with those of Venice and Istabnul as cultural heritage. Many of them were even more beautiful than the World Trade Center.” The World Trade Center had been attacked for the first time that year, and would be attacked again in 2001. Certainly, Bosnians were victims of terrorism, too. I do not understand why O’Neill denied this fact.
Besides the brilliance of Hitchens’s reportage, his personal humility also impressed me. Appearing on C-Span in 1994, Hitchens responded to a jeer that he should fight the Serbs himself. “It will sound absurd coming from a pudgy person in his mid-forties such as myself, but I very much admire those who have gone to volunteer their services in Bosnia, of whom there are some thousands now, and I wish there were more of them,” he said. “And I wish I had the nerve to do it myself.”
(24:20)
Since then, his personality had undergone a significant deterioration. When opponents to the wars of George W. Bush recommended Hitchens’s personal enlistment, the journalist could only sneer: “The whole point of the present phase of conflict is that we are faced with tactics that are directed primarily at civilians…It is amazing that this essential element of the crisis should have taken so long to sink into certain skulls.” It would be risible to claim that the average American faced greater danger from al-Qaeda than the average Bosnian faced from Serbian aggression only a few years before.
O’Neill accused Hitchens of demonizing the Serbian people. Actually, Hitchens took pains to acknowledge that individual Serbs had also fallen victim to the evils of Serbian imperialism. In September of 1992, the journalist pointed out that “none of the Bosnian Serbs I met complained of cruelty or discrimination, and where they heard of isolated cases they reminded me that it was the Serbian forces who had stormed across the River Drina,” which served as the boundary between Serbia and Bosnia. As the artillery bombardment of a helpless Sarajevo continued, Hitchens informed his Nation readers on June 15, 1995 that “an unusually large number of Serb civilians in Sarajevo had fallen victim to the renewed assault. The response of the Karadzic regime in (or perhaps beyond the) Pale was to take these pictures, edit them for its own TV station and proclaim that these Serbs were the victims of rape and butchery by Muslim fundamentalists.” If only Hitchens would extend that same humanity to our “enemies” today.
Hitchens did not call for the occupation of Serbia, nor advocate the bombing of its capital city, which President Bill Clinton would later authorize during the Kosovo War. Obviously, Hitchens now has less scruple about targeting areas heavily populated by civilians. During the bombardment of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, for example, Hitchens only complained “the death toll was not nearly high enough…too many [jihadists] have escaped.”
Back then, he did not even insist on Washington’s right to regime change in Belgrade, as deplorable as the Milosevic government may have been. Hitchens only called for lifting of the 1991 arms embargo that the United Nations had imposed against all the former Yugoslavian republics. A local political scientist told Hitchens in September of 1992: “The arms embargo to ‘both sides’ is pure hypocrisy. The Bosnians need arms to defend themselves…” Hitchens concurred: “This, by the way, echoed the street opinion in Sarajevo, which roundly opposed the idea of foreign troops fighting their battles but bitterly recalled that the lavishly accoutered People’s Army had been paid out of the historic tax levies of Croats, Bosnians and Macedonians, and witheringly criticized the moral equivalence that the great powers are using as a hand-washing alibi.” Since Belgrade had been the capital of the former Yugoslavia, the Serbs had simply helped themselves to the weapons of the old Communist regime.
Remarkably, Bosnian Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic requested the withdrawal of all U.N. personnel in the spring of 1993. In the June 7, 1993 issue of The Nation, Hitchens praised this request:
“A nation that is fighting for survival actually demands to be left alone to fight its own battles. Though certainly [indent]prompted by the hypocrisy of the NATO powers, which in another historic ‘first’ have announced that the defense of Bosnia is unthinkable because there are foreign troops already there, it sharply distinguishes the Bosnians from, say, the Kuwaiti monarchy or the South Vietnamese junta, and many other clients who were not too proud to clamor for dependent status.”
Unlike Kuwait, of course, Bosnia lacked oil. While the Clinton administration inherited the fear of a Bosnian quagmire from Bush the First, it is important to understand why the United States encountered the Vietnamese version. Americans were the unwanted aggressors in the final phase of Vietnam’s war for independence. The Vietnam War was not a tragedy that happened for Americans; the Americans inflicted the tragedy on Vietnam as well as on themselves. In the case of Bosnia, the Serbs were the aggressors whom the international community should have driven out. “These days, the worst anyone can find to say about the racist devastation and murder and rape of Vietnam is that poor old ‘we’ somehow got ‘bogged down’ in it,” Hitchens pointed out. “Nobody cares to remember that the Milosevic role was played by LBJ.” Obviously, we should not forget the roles of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon.
Rightly, Hitchens condemned the weakness to the U.N. response to the Serbian onslaught. Readers of the June 15, 1995 issue of The Nation learned that “control over Sarajevo airport had been ceded to the Serbs by its U.N. guards, who allowed the Serbs to determine how many flights landed and when, and which civilians might board or not board the planes.” Not only did the U.N. deprive Bosnian forces of the means of self-defense, the international organization tried to prevent them from fighting at all. Sarajevo remained trapped by the Serbian siege because “the NATO-proclaimed ‘exclusion zone’ around the city, which forbade even the stationing of heavy artillery, had become used as a platform for bombardment of civilians, the city itself being held hostage for the good behavior of Bosnian forces elsewhere.” [indent]The indifference of the Western world made the massacre at Srebernica inevitable in July of 1995. Although the UN had made Srebernica a safe haven for Bosnian refugees, Bosnian Serb forces under the command of General Ratko Mladic seized the city. The Bosnian Serbs divided the relatively young men from the others, who then were bussed to the “safe haven” of Tuzla. In her chapter on Srebernica, Samantha Power provided a terrifying account of what happened next:
“On the two-and-a-half hour drive, many pressed their faces up to the glass of the bus windows in the hopes of spotting their men. Bodies were strewn along the roadside, some mutilated, many with their throats slit. Trembling young Muslim men were coerced into giving the three-finger Serb salute. Large clusters of men, hands tied behind their backs, heads between their knees, sat awaiting instructions. The buses were frequently stopped along the way so that Serbian gunmen could select the young, attractive women for a roadside rape.”
Meanwhile, Mladic’s forces butchered nearly 8,000 men. One Bosnian man who miraculously survived recounted his experience:
“They took us off a truck in twos and led us out into some kind of meadow. People started taking off blindfolds and yelling in fear because the meadow was littered with corpses. I was put in the front row, but I fell over to the left before the first shots were fired so that bodies fell on top of me. They were shooting at us…from all different directions. About an hour later I looked up and saw bodies everywhere. There were bringing in more trucks with more people to be executed. After a bulldozer driver walked away, I crawled over the dead bodies and into the forest.”
More than ten years later, the International Court of Justice classified the Srebernica massacre as an act of genocide.
The Serbs may not have planned to kill every Bosnian in sight, but the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defined the crime as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, or religious group.”
Reflecting in the November 20, 1995 issue of The Nation, Hitchens accused the Clinton administration of possessing foreknowledge of the genocide at Srebernica:
“In the past few days, it has been said that there was no warning of the massacre and that the CIA spy-in-the-sky satellites (which only disgorged their information after the inhabitants had been killed and buried) were therefore not asked the [indent]right questions until it was too late…Everybody knew what was intended, and everybody knew on past form what would happen at least to the males of military age.”
Under international law, the Genocide Convention had obligated the United States prevent the genocide. Yet, the signatory nation did nothing. Why? In addition to the supremely logical explanation that Bosnia possessed no valuable natural resources, Hitchens offered another insight into the apathy of the United States and its western allies:
“Now, what were the roots of this incredible cultural, intellectual, moral philistinism? ...One motive is obviously anti-Muslim prejudice…If Christian churches, whether Orthodox or Catholic, were being burned, and if Christian civilians were being burned by Muslim irregulars with…definite support from a neighboring Muslim power in Europe, who is there here who thinks that Western Europe would have regarded it as a matter of indifference, or it as proof that the Balkan people are incorrigible, or as another proof that the warring factions of the Balkans are at it again? I don’t think so.”
The Dayton Accords substantiate that the Clinton administration did not regard justice for a Muslim people as a priority. The Bosnian Serbs, who only comprised one-third of the population of Bosnia, won half of its territory. In effect, the Dayton accords rewarded Serbian aggression.
Since then, Hitchens has distorted the history of the Bosnian War as badly as Brendan O’Neill. Writing on the tenth anniversary of the Srebernica genocide, Hitchens claimed that “the neoconservatives, to their great honor, mostly supported an effort to prevent genocide being inflicted on Muslims.”
Tellingly, Hitchens did not bother to list these neoconservative heroes. I doubt that he refrained from compiling such a list because he feared that it would be too long. The most diabolical neoconservative of all, the future Vice-President Richard Cheney, had little in interest in Bosnia. Samantha Power recorded Cheney’s ignorant dismissal of the slaughter. Late in his tenure as secretary of defense in the administration of Bush the First, Cheney claimed: “It’s tragic, but the Balkans have been a hotbed of conflict…for centuries.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell was equally craven. As secretary of state more than ten years later, the civilian Powell would deceptively make the case before the United Nations for Hitchens’s beloved Iraq War. The secretary of state functioned as a neoconservative in fact if not in name. With the most profound irony, the still-uniformed Powell had joined Cheney more than a decade before to persuade “the President that the risks of military engagement were far too high – even to use U.S. airpower to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to Bosnia’s hungry civilians.”
Military intervention against genocide should only be an extremely last resort. Historically, it would have been possible for Washington to prevent acts of genocide in number of ways. In case of the case of Vietnam, Americans simply could have stopped committing genocide by withdrawing. In the case of East Timor, Americans simply could have stopped supporting the occupying power of Indonesia. In case of Bosnia, Americans simply could have given the persecuted nation a chance to fight the Serbian forces. In the case of Iraq in 2003, however, no intervention was necessary. Saddam Hussein, whose military power had been contained by the international community, had lost access to his Kurdish victims. In truth, the Iraqi leader would never have had the opportunity to kill the Kurds without American support in the first place. Now, the American occupation of Iraq has become a genocide in itself.
Nevertheless, Hitchens has insisted on learning the wrong historical lessons:
“I reflect on what was not done at Srebernica, and what ought to have been [indent]done in Rwanda, and on what was put off long with the Taliban and the Baathists, and I think what an honor it is to [indent]have such enemies. Co-existence with them is not possible, which is good, because it is not desirable or tolerable, either.”
His best writing on the Bosnian tragedy is long behind him.
While we wait to see how late Our Boy will be with his latest Slate essay, let us revisit happier times when The Great Man was beating that ticking clock metaphor like a dead horse. Be prepared to lose a town a week!
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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