Death has two faces. One is non-being; the other is the terrifying material being that is the corpse.
—Milan Kundera
1.
Only now, more than three years after he recorded the interview with CNN’s World Report, can one see subtle signs of Richard Holbrooke’s discomfort and unease. It was July 16, 1995, a Sunday, and even as the bloody catastrophe of Srebrenica was playing itself out four thousand miles to the east, the assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs managed to answer Jeanne Meserve’s questions about Bosnia with precision and aplomb. Yet look more closely now at the videotape, study it frame by frame, and you will see that this Sunday afternoon finds Holbrooke pale, unsettled, distracted; for it is five days after Bosnian Serb troops shelled and strafed and finally overwhelmed the “safe area” of Srebrenica, humiliated its several hundred Dutch peacekeepers, and seized its forty thousand or so underfed, sickly, and bedraggled Muslims; and though CNN’s producers had announced for that afternoon a typically self-regarding theme focused on the future—“The Bosnia Quagmire: How close is the United States to being pulled into the mess in Bosnia?”—their guest Richard Holbrooke could not help but be preoccupied with an all-too-painful present.
Even on that Sunday afternoon, as he sat answering the reporter’s questions, Holbrooke tells us in his memoirs,
precise details of what was happening [in Srebrenica] were not known…, but there was no question that something truly horrible was going on.
This Issue
September 24, 1998
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1
The transcripts of Serb radio communications are drawn from Roy Gutman, “The UN’s Deadly Deal: How troop-hostage talks led to slaughter of Srebrenica,” Newsday, May 29, 1996.
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2
As Charles Lane and Thom Shanker wrote in these pages, “During the late spring and early summer of 1992, some three thousand Muslims in the northern town of Brcko were herded by Serb troops into an abandoned warehouse, tortured, and put to death. A US intelligence satellite orbiting over the former Yugoslavia photographed part of the slaughter. ‘They have photos of trucks going into Brcko with bodies standing upright, and pictures of trucks coming out of Brcko carrying bodies lying horizontally, stacked like cordwood,’ an investigator working outside the US government who has seen the pictures told us . The photographs of the bloodbath in Brcko remain unpublished to this day.” See The New York Review, May 9, 1996, p. 10.
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3
See David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (Harcourt Brace, 1995), pp. 134-135. For the story of Bratunac and the history of the war around Srebrenica, see my earlier article, “Clinton, the UN, and the Bosnian Disaster,” The New York Review, December 18, 1997. This was the third article in the present series in these pages, which began with “The US and the Yugoslav Catastrophe,” November 20, 1997; “America and the Bosnia Genocide,” December 4, 1997; “Bosnia: The Turning Point,” February 5, 1998; “Bosnia: Breaking the Machine,” February 19, 1998; “Bosnia: The Great Betrayal,” March 26, 1998; and “Slouching Toward Dayton,” April 23, 1998.
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4
Mr. J.J.C. Voorhoeve, the present Dutch minister of defense, who held that office at the time Srebrenica fell in 1995, took strong issue with Holbrooke’s description of the Dutch role in a letter to the secretary dated June 3, 1998, a copy of which the minister sent to this author. Holbrooke, who had just been named US representative to the United Nations, said he would revise this statement in future editions of his book and that he would now say that “European governments” refused to authorize air strikes until the Dutch forces had left Bosnia.
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5
“We don’t know how many people were killed,” according to a senior Dutch officer quoted by a British journalist. “They were hanging onto the tracks and the wheel arches, like Indians on a train. It could be 10 or 15, maybe more. No one knows.” See John Sweeny, “And We Are All Guilty,” The Observer, December 8, 1996.
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6
See Roy Gutman, “UN’s Deadly Deal.”
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7
For an account of the attack in Kravica, see my article “Clinton, the UN and the Bosnian Disaster.”
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8
See The Independent on Sunday, July 23, 1995; quoted in Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime, p. 37.
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9
See Report Based on the Debriefing on Srebrenica, p. 51.
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10
See, for example, Chris Hedges, “Serb Forces Fight Dutch UN Troops in Eastern Bosnia,” The New York Times, July 10, 1995. “But senior United Nations officials also said the Bosnian Serbs may not take the town, filled with refugees as it is .”
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11
Like many of the details of this event, the degree of cooperation between Mladic’s forces and the Yugoslav National Army remains a matter of dispute. I discuss some of the specific evidence, including the movements of Mladic and Perisic during the weeks before the attack and intercepted transcripts of radio calls between them, in “Bosnia: The Great Betrayal.” See also the words of a man whom the producers of the British television documentary series describe as a “highly placed NATO officer”: “The Bosnian Serb Army couldn’t plan an attack like this without the Yugoslav National Army, much less survive without them. The Bosnian Serb Army was only supported by the Yugoslav National Army logistically, but you have to look at their command and control [and] communications. The Bosnian Serb Army communications were all networked with the Yugoslav National Army, just like the Sam-6 missiles aimed at our planes.” See Dispatches, June 17, 1996.
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12
See Roy Gutman, “Dutch Reveal Horrors of Mission Impossible,” Newsday, July 24, 1995.
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13
See Report Based on the Debriefing on Srebrenica, p. 57.
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14
Lane and Shanker, in their New York Review piece cited above, attribute this information to an unnamed “intelligence official.”
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15
See the so-called “Petrovic video,” shot by Serb cameraman Zoran Petrovic-Pirocanac, in and around Srebrenica from July 11 to July 16, 1995.
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16
For a description of this “Trek Through the Forest,” see my article, “Bosnia: The Great Betrayal.”
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17
See Anthony Lloyd, “Srebrenica’s Exiles Tell Grimly Familiar Stories of Murder,” The London Times, July 15, 1995.
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18
See Michael Dobbs and R. Jeffrey Smith, “New Proof Offered of Serb Atrocities,” The Washington Post, October 28, 1995.
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19
The words are Dr. Ilijas Pilav’s, quoted in Honig and Both, Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime, pp. 52-55.
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20
Although the initial images of Nova Kasaba were identified, when USRepresentative Madeleine Albright unveiled them to the United Nations Security Council, only as “aerial photographs,” it seems generally agreed that they were drawn from satellite imagery. According to William E. Burrows, for example, “On July 13 or 14 a US reconnaissance satellite downlinked imagery showing several hundred people gathered at a soccer field in the area.” See “Imaging Space Reconnaissance Operations during the Cold War: Cause, Effect and Legacy,” on the Cold War Forum Website (www.fas.org). Both The New York Times and The Washington Post agree with this, though Honig andBoth, whose sources tend to be very solid, claim the photographs were taken by an “American U-2 spy plane.”
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21
See Michael Dobbs and R. Jeffrey Smith, “Proof Offered of Serb Atrocities,” October 28, 1995.
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22
Drawn from an interview in the “Petrovic video,” cited above.
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23
See Human Rights Watch/Helsinki, The Fall of Srebrenica and the Future of UN Peacekeeping (October 1995). This and the accounts of other survivors below are drawn from this report, pp. 36-45.
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24
“On 15 July, [Dutch] military personnel saw ‘clean-up teams’ (these people were wearing rubber gloves) as well as tipper trucks and lorries carrying corpses.” See Report Based on the Debriefing on Srebrenica, p. 51.
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