A correspondent's view
Tom Gjelten - September 1997
Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict
Whose truth to tell?The competing agendas in Bosnia meant that all the involved parties not just the. Muslims, Serbs, and Croats -- were regularly in conflict. A complete story of the war, for example, has to include an explanation of the antagonism between the UN mission and the Bosnian government in Sarajevo. It is only in the context of that troubled relationship that pronouncements by either side can he fully understood. An analysis of this UN vs. Sarajevo conflict, meanwhile, helps illustrate the challenge of reporting from a war zone in die 1990s.
The UN operation don in Bosnia was directed by military and civilian officials who had served previously in traditional peacekeeping operations, and the outlook they brought to their work reflected their prior experience. They saw their mission generally as one of "keeping the belligerents apart," Maj. Gen. Lewis MacKenzie of Canada, the first UNPROFOR commander in Bosnia, wrote in his memoir. But the humanitarian assignment they were given in Bosnia was unique, because it inevitably favored one party over the other. The discomfort UN officers felt at being active primarily on the Muslim side was deepened by the fact that the Bosnian government did not show much appreciation for the UNPROFOR mission.
Instinctively, many of the UN officers felt more at ease among Serb army commanders, who were career military men and treated them respectfully, than among Muslim commanders, few of whom had professional military training. The UN officers had neither the time, the resources, nor the responsibility to investigate the War S political or historical background and were unprepared to challenge explanations they heard in daily conversations. A Canadian colonel based in Banja Luka in the fall of 1992, for example, told visiting reporters that the Serbs' capture of the town of Jajce a few weeks earlier was understandable, "because it had been a predominately Serb city." when the reporters pointed out that Serbs constituted only 19 percent of the 1991 population in Jajce according to the federal Yugoslav census, tie Canadian officer admitted he was only passing on what the local Serb army commander had told him during a tour of the city.
The Canadian's perspective was not unusual; relatively few senior UN officers in Bosnia bothered to investigate seriously the origins of the conflict. "well, it's springtime in the Balkans," Gen. MacKenzie wrote his friends back in Canada, "and history is repeating itself as the various ethnic groups seek to exterminate each other."
As Bosnian government officials voiced increasing dissatisfaction with the UNPROFOR mission in Sarajevo, relations between the two sides deteriorated. David Owen, the EU peace negotiator, wrote in his memoir that "the prevailing view of the UN military commanders ... was that UNPROFOR's worst problems were with the Muslims." Owen said the UN officers blamed the government forces for most of the ceasefire violations in Bosnia. "These senior UN officers," Owen wrote,
were practical military men dealing with an appallingly difficult problem on the ground, inevitably seeing their role as preserving order and drawing on classic peacekeeping models from previous UN experience. What they had difficulty in appreciating was that order was exactly what the Bosnian Muslims, for perfectly understandable reasons, were against. Disorder and destabilization were essential pans of the Bosnian Muslim strategy.What Owen called a "destabilization" strategy, not surprisingly, was seen quite differently in Sarajevo. Bosnian army commanders were determined to break the siege one way or another, and -- Owen is right -- they were not content to leave their fate in the hands of the UN mission or the Geneva negotiations. Owen was deeply unpopular in Sarajevo, where he was seen as arrogant arid condescending. Loyal Serbs and Croats served in he Bosnian government and Bosnian leaders insisted they were committed to a multiethnic state and society, but Owen insisted on referring to the Sarajevo side simply as "the Muslims." In his memoir, Owen wrote that he "was very conscious of the Muslims' problem and tried to see the issue [of whether and when to negotiate] from their viewpoint," but he expressed much annoyance with the Sarajevo authorities, charging that they waged a "propaganda war" to highlight their suffering and provoke outside military intervention on their behalf.
The international news media in Bosnia were inevitably drawn into these conflicts, and neither the UN nor the government side was entirely happy with the way the Sarajevo story was told. UN officials were especially critical, alleging the media were inclined toward the government viewpoint. General Sir Michael Rose of Britain, UNPROFOR commander in 1994-95, expressed his view in a speech in London in March 1995. "It is of course quite understandable that a government struggling for survival should have a propaganda machine," Rose said. "It is not understandable that the international media should become part of that machine. Mischievous distortion of reality can only undermine the work of those who are pursuing the path towards peace."
Rose's views were apparently widespread in the UN command, though other officers were reluctant to speak for attribution. Nit Cowing, a British journalist who studied Bosnia news coverage while on fellowship at Harvard University, reported that many of the UN officials he interviewed "questioned the picture painted by the media" in Sarajevo. In another anonymously offered commentary, a "senior UN official with significant responsibility in die former Yugoslavia" wrote in response to Foreign Policy's critique of Bosnia news coverage that "Most international personnel in the former Yugoslavia have been well aware" of a pattern of press partisanship in coverage. The press corps in Sarajevo, the "UN official" wrote, "developed its own momentum and esprit. Much of it set out to invoke international military intervention against the Serb aggressors -- a principal strategy, also of the Bosnian government. ... [The] collective political fury of the Sarajevo-based press corps became legendary among all who had to deal with them."
Such an accusation is not easily refuted, but it is important to note that most of the professional journalists assigned to Bosnia were veteran foreign correspondents with years of reporting in war zones around the world. Their prior experience -- in Southeast Asia, Africa, Afghanistan, Central America, the Persian Gulf, and elsewhere -- hardly left them sentimental or easy to manipulate. It undeniable that relations between the UNPROFOR command and die international press were often adversarial. At the daily briefings at UNPROFOR headquarters, reporters aggressively challenged the mission spokesman to be more forthright in his description of events on the ground and in his explanation of why UNPROFOR took the actions it took. UN officers in turn were often hostile towards the reporters.
But there was an explanation for this antagonism: The news media and the UN command had different, sometimes conflicting, responsibilities in Bosnia. The UNPROFOR staff were there to oversee The delivery of humanitarian assistance and promote a negotiated settlement of the war. They were soldiers, diplomats, and aid workers. Their work would not lye judged on the basis of how well they understood the Bosnian conflict and explained it to the outside world, as our reporting would be.
The news media and the UN command both claimed to be impartial in their work, but that principle meant different things to each side. The UNPROFOR commanders, practical in their orientation, generally defined impartiality by reference to the opposing players in the conflict. With this approach, the UN mission needed to position itself in the middle between the adversaries and focus on maintaining the consent of both sides for whatever needed to be done. Journalists, with no aid to deliver or roads to keep open, had a more abstract notion of impartiality, based on facts and principles. For us, reporting impartially meant telling the truth, without regard for who was most affected by our reporting or who would be most angered by it.
This was the same approach Justice Goldstone followed in his war crimes prosecutions. "Being evenhanded in my opinion doesn't mean 'one for you and one for you and one for you,'" Goldstone said in a November 1995 interview. "Being evenhanded means treating similar atrocities in a similar way." Using that guideline, the tribunal prosecutors indicted far more Serbs than Muslims or Croats, but they denied emphatically that they showed bias in the process.
The meaning of "impartiality" has also been debated in peacekeeping circles. Oxford University's Adam Roberts argued in a recent article that impartiality in UN peacekeeping "is no longer interpreted to mean, in every case, impartiality between the parties to a conflict. In some cases, the UN may, and perhaps should, be tougher with one party than another or give more aid to one side than another." Roberts suggested that another standard might be followed, based on " ... the idea that the UN represents a set of interests, values, and tasks that are distinct in some respects from those of any one belligerent party. In some peacekeeping operations, impartiality ,may mean hoc impartiality/try between the belligerents, but impartiality in carrying out UN Security Council decisions."
Disagreement over which of these two approaches was proper in Bosnia was one of the factors contributing to tensions between the UNPROFOR command and the US government. Susan Woodward, a former political adviser to UN envoy Yasushi Akashi, expressed the UNPROFOR view in a paper published in May 1996, six months after the end of the UN peacekeeping operation in Bosnia. "UNPROFOR unraveled," she wrote, "when it was required by Washington and NATO to act contrary to its mandate of impartiality and consent by taking sides with the Bosnian government and its army as the legitimate government and against the Bosnian Serbs."
Many US State Department officials countered that ii was UNPROFOR that was failing to act impartially, because it did nor follow a single standard in its political dealings with die rival sides. They pointed, for example, to an agreement UN commanders negotiated with the Bosnian Sects leadership in June 1992. under which the United Nations agreed to provide the Serb side 23 percent of all relief commodities flown to Sarajevo, regardless of whether the humanitarian needs on the Serb side justified that share. The same agreement gave Serb authorities the right to inspect each cargo delivered to Sarajevo by air or road and to approve or disapprove the shipments. The Bosnian government had no comparable rights with respect to aid delivered to Serb-held areas. An internal State Department report, leaked to the New York Times, accused the UN command in Sarajevo of seeking "to appease the Serb militias" in this manner. "Within Serb-controlled territories, it is the Serb 'authorities,' not the UN, who decide how and to whom relief will be distributed," the report said.
To the news media in Bosnia, with no professional obligation to satisfy one side or another, it sometimes appeared that UNPROFOR commanders were misrepresenting reality in their eagerness to maintain good relations with the Serb side. A good example was the effort by UNPROFOR commanders to promote the notion that Sarajevo was not actually besieged, because the Serb forces that encircled the city occasionally let UN convoys proceed through their lines. "There is no humanitarian siege," declared Brigadier Vere Hayes, chief of staff to the UNPROFOR commander in Bosnia, speaking in Sarajevo in August 1993.
Sarajevo-based reporters, astonished at the claim, badgered the UNPROFOR spokesman, Commander Barry Frewer of Canada, at a subsequent press briefing. Some reporters brought dictionaries to the briefing and read from the definition of "siege," challenging Frewer to explain how Sarajevo did not fit the criteria. But Frewer defended his superiors' choice of words. "The Serbs have encircled the city," he acknowledged at one point. "They are in a position to bring force to bear on the city. You call it a siege. We say they are deployed in a tactically advantageous position." The Sarajevo representative of the UN High commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), seated next to Frewer at the briefing promptly disagreed with the UNPROFOR assessment, announcing that his agency certainly did consider Sarajevo to be under siege, as did the Sarajevo representative of flit International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the recognized international authority on humanitarian law.
So why were the UNPROFOR commanders anxious, to downplay Sarajevo's problems? At the time, the United States was pushing for NATO air strikes against Serb positions if moves by the Serb forces around Sarajevo threatened the "strangulation" of the city. The UNPROFOR commanders were opposed to air strikes, believing they would complicate their work and expose the UNPROFOR troops to Serb retaliation Blocking the NATO strikes was a top UNPROFOR priority, and in their eagerness to pursue that objective, UNPROFOR officials were apparently willing to paint a distorted view of Sarajevo conditions.
Similarly, international mediators responsible for promoting peace in Bosnia had reason occasionally to shade the truth about developments in the country, or to keep them secret, if such an approach made negotiations easier. Typically, the main international players in the Bosnian conflict had responsibilities above and beyond their obligation to report accurately and completely what was happening in Bosnia. This was understandable, but it also meant that peacekeepers and diplomats were not necessarily credible news sources, a point that should be kept in mind while considering instances when UN officials and international journalists have provided conflicting accounts of the same events. Reporters could not assume that UN officials in Bosnia knew better or were more trustworthy as sources than were the representatives of non-governmental organizations active there.
Among the UN officers whose declarations proved unreliable was Maj. Gen. Lewis MacKenzie, the first UNPROFOR commander in Bosnia. MacKenzie was a respected UN officer, admired by his colleagues and countrymen, but he was not well informed about the conflict in which he found himself. In his Sarajevo memoirs, MacKenzie reported that" 60-65 percent" of Bosnia. belonged to the Serb side before the war, "since many of them are farmers with relatively large tracts of land. This was a oft-repeated Serb propaganda claim, but it had no basis in fact, as enterprising reporters-quickly discovered. MacKenzie went on to declare, "There was a lack of conclusive evidence that President [Slobodan] Milo evic' in Belgrade was providing [Bosnian Serb leader Radovan] Karadzic' with significant military support." At the time (April 1992), paramilitary units under Milo evic' control were terrorizing Muslim communities in eastern Bosnia, and the Bosnian Serb army was being supplied from Belgrade and directed by Belgrade-based officers. The evidence of Milo evic''s involvement in Bosnia was overwhelming and available to any reporter who bothered to track it down, and many did.
Misstating the facts in Bosnia could get a professional journalist in trouble, but MacKenzie had loftier concerns." I'm not particularly interested in the long and complex history of this region," MacKenzie told Francois Mitterand in June 1992. "All that does is complicate the discussions I have with both sides. Our job is to try and achieve some semblance of a ceasefire, so we can deliver food and medicine." In MacKenzie's view, he needed to establish roughly equal distance from all the "warring factions." As if to compensate for his assistance to the government side, Mackenzie fell obliged at times to disassociate himself from the Sarajevo authorities, according to his associates.
One incident MacKenzie mentioned repeatedly in private conversations with reporters, diplomats, and other military officials was the "Breadline Massacre" of May 27, 1992, when 22 people died and more than a hundred were injured after two shells exploded in the midst of about 150 people queuing for bread on Vasa Miskin street a pedestrian walkway in the Sarajevo city center. A Sarajevo television crew arrived on the scene moments after the attack and filmed the carnage. The pictures were broadcast by CNN and other television networks around the world and brought the war in Sarajevo to the immediate attention of the international community, with most of the outrage directed at the Bosnian Serbs.
Serb commanders, however, denied they were responsible for the massacre and suggested that the Bosnian army was slaughtering its own civilian population for propaganda purposes. They had made similar claims earlier, but the breadline massacre was the bloodiest event of the war to that point, and the Serb leadership was especial]y anxious to blame it on their Muslim enemies. The Belgrade newspaper Politika, a tool of the Milo evic' regime, quoted an "expert in explosives" from the Yugoslav air force, as saying his analysis of televised reports from the massacre scene convinced him that the explosion was caused by a land mine triggered remotely. The "expert" responded that there was no trace of mortar craters on the scene or signs of shrapnel damage on nearby walls, and that victims pictured in the television tapes were all injured below the waist -- a pattern consistent, he argued, with a mine explosion but not a mortar blast. Other Serbian officials noted the "on the spot" appearance of the television crew and suggested that they had been standing by, waiting for the massacre to happen.
Journalists who pursued the story soon learned that much of the "evidence" of a remotely body and head wounds, and not just leg injuries as the Serbs had reported. There were two distinct craters on the sidewalk where people had been lined up for bread, and the bakery walls showed clear signs of shrapnel damage. The Sarajevo TV crew had not been waiting on the sidelines for the blast to occur; they were filming an interview in an office about a block away from Vasa Miskin and rushed to the scene only after hearing die explosion.
Gen. MacKenzie, however, told visitors that he found the Serb claims believable, as he made clear later in his Sarajevo memoir. In August 1992, MacKenzie left Bosnia, his tour of peacekeeping duty finished. On his way home, he stopped to brief US officials in Washington and UN colleagues in New York. Shortly thereafter, a story headlined "Muslims 'Slaughter Their Own People'" ran on the front page of The Independent in London, written by Leonard Doyle, the newspaper's New York-based UN correspondent. Doyle quoted a "UN official" as believing that the bombing of the breadline was "a command-detonated explosion, probably in a can." Colleagues of Doyle's later said he told them Mackenzie was his principal source.
In fact, Gen. MacKenzie was in Belgrade at the time of the bombing, having led most UN personnel out of Sarajevo eleven days earlier in response to safety concerns. The UN mission in Sarajevo on May 27 was under the command of Col. John Wilson of New Zealand, MacKenzie's deputy, assisted by political officer Adnan Abdel Razek, a civilian. In separate interviews, both men denied having made any report suggesting that the Bosnian army might have been responsible." We couldn't have," Wilson said. "We did no investigation and had no information about it." At the time, the UN mission in Sarajevo had no military observers. No witnesses or survivors were interviewed, and there was no analysis of he craters.
According to Abdel Razek, details of the Serb claim that the massacre was staged were relayed to MacKenzie and other UN officials in Belgrade after Yugoslav army officers laid out the theory during a visit to the UN headquarters in Sarajevo. Upon his return to Sarajevo, MacKenzie told his fellow UN officers that in his view the Serb claim of a Muslim set-up "made sense." At least one UN officer cautioned MacKenzie later that the Serb story was not supported by the evidence, but MacKenzie clung to his suspicions.
The Independent report on the breadline bombing became one of the best known articles of the Bosnian war, particularly among people sympathetic to the Serb cause. The theory that he Muslims were responsible for the massacre, having been spread within UN circles by Gen. MacKenzie, persisted after his departure. Some UN officials believe it to this day, even in the absence of evidence.
The failure of the Sarajevo-based press corps to report the story of UN officers blaming the Bosnian army for the breadline massacre has been cited repeatedly as evidence that the news media were prejudiced against the Serb side. But the opposite argument could also be made, that the story revealed a biased perspective on the part of the UNPROFOR commander. A UN official who served with him in Bosnia said MacKenzie was prepared to believe the Serb charge of Muslim responsibility for the May 27 Vasa Miskin shelling because at the time lie was looking for something he could pin on the Bosnian government. "Psychologically, he needed it1" the UN officer said "We had been blaming the Serbs for everything, and it was uncomfortable for MacKenzie. He felt this need to balance it."
Such experiences led journalists in Bosnia to regard unproven UNPROFOR claims with a healthy skepticism. UN officials, we learned, were not above spreading hearsay allegations or rumors, some of which made it back to their home countries and were recirculated there by domestic reporters. As professional journalists, we believed we were able to report developments in Bosnia more objectively and accurately than many military officers could, because we were trained to do so and because we did not have competing responsibilities. We had no aid to deliver across front lines nor discussions" to maintain. Unlike Gen. MacKenzie, we did not worry whether oar reports might "complicate" our relations with the opposing sides.
Journalists in Bosnia needed to challenge any interpretation of events there that reflected the agenda of an interested party rather than the reality on the ground. We were obliged, for example, to report that the United States and other western governments routinely exaggerated the importance of "ancient hatreds" in Bosnia in an effort to portray the conflict as beyond resolution and thus to deflect pressure to intervene there. As a presidential candidate, Bill Clinton argued that the Serbs in Bosnia were engaged in "what appears to be a deliberate and systematic extermination of human beings based on their ethnic origins," and that the United States could not afford to ignore it But as President, Clinton apparently became convinced that the Pentagon, the US Congress, and the American public would not support a military intervention in Bosnia, and his characterization of the war then changed.
Thomas Friedman of the New York Times called attention to the shift in an April 1993 article headlined "Bosnia reconsidered; Clinton Administration Recasts a Conflict From a Historic Crime to an Ancient Feud." Administration officials, Friedman noted, "concede that they have begun to talk about Bosnia differently, to cast the problem there less as a moral tragedy -- which would make American inaction immoral -- and more as a tribal feud that no outsider could hope to settle." In fact, interethnic tensions in Bosnia bad dissipated considerably since World War II. In 1991, one year before the war broke out, one out of four new marriages in Bosnia were between partners of different ethnic background, the highest rate ever recorded. US diplomats based in the former Yugoslavia readily acknowledged that the Administration's characterization of the war as driven by ancient hatreds reflected political considerations rather than the analysis offered from the field.
In June 1995, when the UN operation was in serious jeopardy and the United States was under intense pressure from European allies to send American troops to Bosnia either to bolster the UN peacekeepers or to assist in their withdrawal, President Clinton declared that conflict between Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in Bosnia dated "at least, at least, going back to the 11th century." In fact, there were no Muslims in Bosnia until the late 15th century, and no ethnic or religious warfare in the country until the 19th century. When challenged to explain the President's statement, national security adviser Anthony Lake told NPR that the President was merely trying to point out "that this is indeed an intractable conflict with deep historical roots. ...What the President is saying is, 'Just understand this doesn't get settled overnight.'"
The news media did not have to worry about the consequences of readers or listeners underestimating the difficulty of ending the Bosnian war. Our concern was to report truthfully, and to have exaggerated the intractability of the conflict or twisted its history, for whatever reason, would have been irresponsible. it was the conclusion of most experienced war correspondents in Bosnia that the conflict there was rooted in the political and economic crisis that befell Yugoslavia in the late 1980s and early 19905, that it could have been prevented were it not for nationalist demagogues such as Slobodan Milo evic' in Serbia and Franjo Tudjman in Croatia, that much of the fighting was directed from outside Bosnia, and that the Bosnian Serb forces were responsible for the greatest share of war crimes and human rights violations, most of them committed in the course of efforts to "cleanse" their territory of the non-Serb population. We reported the "ethnic cleansing" story, with the associated massacres and detention camps, without any obligation to say what the world should do about the situation we described.
The allegation that we were reporting, as the Foreign Policy critic claimed, so as "to force governments to intervene militarily" in Bosnia was made many times, usually by people opposed to intervention. It is true that we did not report the war the way some critics of intervention wanted it described: We generally did not present it as a civil war between ethnic "factions" that had fought each other for centuries and were equally responsible for atrocities... because that analysis was objectively false. It is also true that many, probably most, of the experienced foreign correspondents in Bosnia came to believe personally that outside military intervention of some kind was warranted. But this fact did not mean that their reporting was scripted to make the case for intervention, any more than personal political opinions among Capitol Hill reporters necessarily bias their reports on the workings of the US Congress.
A key test of objectivity was whether the Bosnia-based press corps reported stories that undermined arguments for intervention or that cast the Bosnian government (the principal advocate of intervention) in an uncomplimentary light. We were obliged to report, for example, that Bosnian government officials occasionally misled the US Congress and other institutions in an effort to win western support for intervention. In interviews and speeches, Bosnian Vice President Ejup Ganic insisted that his government wanted nothing more from the West than the right to import arms for its own defense, even if it meant an end to the UN operation in Bosnia. Republican Sen. Robert Dole, one of Bosnia's best friends in the US Congress, called attention to the Ganic promise in a 1994 Senate floor speech. "All they want us to do is lift the embargo," Dole said. "No American troops, no air strikes, nothing, nothing, nothing but lifting the embargo."
The Ganic assurances were disingenuous, however. Behind the scenes, the Bosnian government would not allow western governments to lift the arms embargo and then walk away from Bosnia. Bosnia's ambassador to the United Nations, Mohamed Sacirbey, acknowledged the point in an interview." They can't try to drop it back on our lap," Sacirbey said. "I think they have to continue to carry the responsibility of maintaining at least some level of security for the most exposed civilian centers."
Similarly, Bosnian Muslim leaders exaggerated their determination to preserve a unitary Bosnian state where people of all nationalities would be treated alike. They argued that supporting their struggle was the best way to oppose apartheid and fascism in the heart of Europe. But while making those arguments abroad, Muslim authorities in Sarajevo and other parts of Bosnia were systematically discriminating against citizens of Serb and Croat background, and they were building a state in which Muslim interests would be paramount. They established close ties with Iran and other Islamic states and invited Islamic mujahideen fighters to join Bosnian army units The international news media in Sarajevo needed to report these stories as aggressively as we highlighted UNPROFOR cowardice, diplomatic dithering, and Serb or Croat war crimes.
The goal in all these cases was for us to report disinterestedly. It should have been irrelevant whether the effect of our stories was to make the case for intervention or weaken it, facilitate humanitarian work or complicate it, soften negotiating positions or harden them. Ml the other players in the Bosnia story had their own agendas to advance, but we needed to maintain our independence. Richard Goldstone, as chief prosecutor of the international war crimes tribunal, suggested a model in his description of his role vis a vis that of peace mediators. Many analysts warned Goldstone his prosecutions could undermine negotiations to end the war in Bosnia, but he insisted that a peace agreement was not his concern. "Of course it's my business as a world citizen and as a concerned human being," Goldstone said, "but as a prosecutor I've been given a job and a duty by the Security Council, and it's not for me to decide to do it in a half-hearted manner or to suspend it or not to do it." Ideally, journalists will adopt the same disciplined perspective in their own work.