http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020811-24444994.htm
quoted without permission
August 11, 2002
U.N. intervention too late
By Georgie Anne Geyer
SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES
VUKOVAR, Croatia — The exquisite old baroque Danubian city of
Vukovar seemed almost too perfect for the neighborhood.
It developed centuries ago in a very unusual and delicate manner
for a small city in the Balkans, when traders from the north of Europe
plied the Danube River southward, carrying not only goods to trade on
these unknown peripheries of Europe but carrying the refined music of
"Europe," its arts and architecture to the "wild" southern Serbs.
Vukovar was an outpost — a plains' Salzburg, a little Prague, a
faraway Tallinn. Even two centuries ago, its exquisite Baroque streets
were lined with the best shops, with an impressive opera house and
with a legendary hotel acclaimed across a Europe that always sniffed
at "the Balkans."
In fact, Vukovar was too perfect for the Balkans — and when the
Serbs turned away from the other cities they had left in ruins after
the first four months of the war they began in June 1991, they turned
on this lovely Croatian Roman Catholic city with a special destructive
vehemence.
It was the same vengeance they would wreak on Bosnian Muslim
Sarajevo, another Balkans jewel that, to them, didn't "belong." It was
the special vengeance of the mountain people of the Dinaric Alps,
united under Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic against the
cultured and tolerant "European" elites of the valleys and plains.
Later, historians would define Vukovar that terrible fall as
"Croatia's Stalingrad." The pattern of attack on the Danubian prize
was the common one that the Serbs had been employing in their march
across Bosnia and Croatia and their unsuccessful attempt to take
Slovenia at the beginning of the war.
The Yugoslav army provided the heavy weapons and infantry support
to local Serb paramilitaries and the local Serbs, almost all of whom
immediately turned on their neighbors in what they now grotesquely
called "self-cleaning."
The horrors seemed to grow as the Serbs took town after town,
with no resistance from the unarmed and terrified local populations —
and surely with hardly an outcry from the world, whose representative
spokesmen were flocking sheepishly to conference after conference,
begging the Serbs to tell them what they really wanted in order to
stop fighting — and saying over and over in world forums that the Serb
forces were too strong for them to fight.
In Vukovar, the Serbs offered safe transit to hundreds of Croats
who had, in their terror, taken refuge in a hospital. When on Nov. 9,
1991, the Yugoslav army entered the hospital (after promising U.N.
representatives that they would not) and the Croats emerged, almost
all were murdered or taken away to be executed in quonset huts that
still stand today.
But this is a story about another fall day in Vukovar, this one
eight years later in 1999. This story carries the entire saga of
international governance still a step further, to the morning after
and to what happens to an already victimized people once the war is
over and they supposedly had been "saved."
That beautiful fall day, a small group of foreign journalists had
been driven by bus to the former museum building of Vukovar, courtesy
of the office of the late Croatian President Franjo Tudjman.
Five local officials, four men and one woman, sat at a long
table in a lovely salon of the museum, which was itself filled with
photos of the diabolical destruction of the town that lay in the snow
just outside the windows.
"In 1997, the Croatian government adopted a national
reconciliation program," began Vladimir Stengl, a handsome,
grey-haired man with a perpetually sorrowful look who was Vukovar's
Croatian mayor, "and its main task is to establish trust and
confidence."
But soon the journalists' questions turned to talk of justice for
the thousands of victims there, many of them still buried in
undiscovered mass graves; and at this point, the mayor added sadly,
"Unfortunately, the butchers of Vukovar are walking free on the
streets of Yugoslavia — [Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko]
Mladic, [Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan] Karadjic — because
they are out of our control and the international community is unable
to arrest them."
The leading Serb official at the table, Milos Voinovich, a little
man with darting black eyes, immediately and coldly objected to the
discourse. He did not want any words like "butchers" or "war
criminals" to be used.
"I am a lawyer," he proclaimed to the group, "a member of the
judiciary. That is why I avoid using such words. This must be proven
by a court."
Since in the ferocity of the siege, more explosive devices fell
on Vukovar in three months than during the entire Second World War —
and since so many of the defenders of the historic city were young
boys and girls, who fought as young people do, heroically — most of
the city lay by then in shards and pieces. But one plot of land was
spanking clean and neat: the Serb cemetery built by the attackers for
their fallen. The monuments of marble graves have atop them, in stone,
the hats of the hated World War II Serb Chetnik fighters.
But despite the Serb destruction and despite the fact that the
Serbs blew up a group of Croat houses to build the cemetery, the
Croats, who won the area back in 1995, were not permitted to remove
the monuments.
In that same spirit, the Serbs changed the name of one of
Vukovar's lovely old avenues from the name of a Croatian leader to the
name of his assassin. That could not be changed, either, because the
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe declared it could
not. The OSCE had immediately decreed that nothing should be changed
for at least five years because it would hurt the Serbs' pride and
might damage the reconciliation process they so insisted upon.
Later, back in Zagreb, I discovered that one of the reasons for
the considerable tension that bleak day in the museum was because the
Serb official so offended by talk of "war criminals" was indeed a
lawyer. In fact, he was the head of the Supreme Court in Vukovar, and
it was he, during the siege, who was first in charge of choosing those
to be taken to concentration camps and those to be killed.
The international organizations would not even allow the Croats
to look for the lost bodies of those still-missing young men and women
— that would set back the process of "reconciliation" because telling
the truth about the war would "remind the Serbs of the war" and make
them more recalcitrant about "reconciling."
"Two thousand people killed in Vukovar," a top aide to President
Tudjman said afterwards, sadly, voicing typically what many Croats
felt, "and you are faced with huge emotions growing up from the
graves. And nobody's punished. How can I reconcile people when we do
not have the satisfaction that somebody is punished for it all?"
But this new free-floating international mentality prided itself
on being, above all, "non-judgmental," talking constantly of
"reconciliation" instead of "justice," as though reconciliation were
as simple as saying that everybody is guilty, so let's just get on
with it and have the right thoughts.
Thoughtful psychological analysts like Prof. Slavin Letica, the
respected Croatian writer and intellectual, argued that these
supposedly well-meaning foreigners, who were by then setting down the
principles for international governance in foreign crises from Croatia
to Indonesia to Rwanda, with their alphabet soup of organizations, had
become "post-national" human beings, "ciphers with no emotions."
To them, he went on, "people who still have emotions and who
still talk in terms of right and wrong, good and evil, nation and
patriotism" are "tribal."
"Emotions and patriotism are [seen as] retrograde," he said.
"Borders like these historically fearsome ones in the Balkans are
unfashionable and simply must be changed, attitudes must be purified.
These are the men and women of a borderless world."
I personally remember, in 1992 in Zagreb, being told by the
deputy Croatian defense minister, "If you take away a people's right
to defend themselves, then you're morally responsible to defend them."
But the international governance world did not feel this way, and
neither did the European and American militaries, even though even the
U.N. Charter's Article 51 guarantees every people the right to defend
itself.
Yet when the rebuilt and reinvigorated Croatian army struck out
in the summer of 1995, stunning the world by retaking the
Serb-occupied Krajina and then heading toward the north to retake East
Slavonia, the first response from the United Nations and from
virtually all the Western world capitals was that they could simply
never do it.
The Clinton administration, which had predicted the Krajina would
not fall, stopped Croat forces from taking East Slavonia, which most
probably would have successfully ended the war.
"With hindsight," the author and historian William Shawcross
writes, "Vukovar can be seen as the last moment at which NATO forces
might have intervened to stop the fighting and to halt Yugoslavia's
fall into the abyss. But — there was no political will to undertake
such difficult action. Instead the paths of diplomacy and
humanitarianism were followed."