In
connection with the fact that it has been 10 years since the massacre in
the UN-declared “safe zone” of Srebrenica, mid-June 1995,
Thorvald
Stoltenberg’s ( b. 1931, Norwegian
diplomat and politician, holding several minister posts for the labour
party,
from 1993 UN’s peace mediator in Yugoslavia) role as a peace
mediator has
come into focus.Stoltenberg has
been
given the chance once more to explain what took place and how he
evaluates the
part played by himself during the course of events. And he has asserted
once
more that he finds no reason to blame himself for anything.
Stoltenberg’s
way of mediating for the UN, allows us to see some important
facts about the dominant approach of the Western countries to the
so-called
“civil wars” in the Balkans. As well as representing this
prevailing tendency,
Stoltenberg was personally qualified for the job. He worked at the
Norwegian
embassy in Beograd early in the 1960’s, spoke Serbo-Croatian and
knew people
holding central positions in Tito’s Yugoslavia. Up until the
death of Tito in
1980, Yugoslavia was a favoured
country to visit as well as a political point of reference to many
West-European intellectuals and politicians. The country was seen as
representing a “third path”, and Tito’s independency
from Moscow was held in high
regard. Furthermore, since the days of the Second World War, a bond had
existed
between members of the Norwegian resistance and Serbian prisoners of
war. In
the concentration camp of Jasenovac, ruled by the Nazi-friendly
Croatian
Ustacha-movement, more than 50 000 Serbs, and many Gypsies and
Jews, were
killed during the war. An image of Serbians as victims
was formed in people’s minds – they were seen as victims of
Muslim (Ottoman) invaders since the 1300’s, or of the Nazis.
These historical
events gave rise to life-long personal and ideological bonds between
Norwegian
social democrats and Yugoslavian partisans. It is apparent that
Stoltenberg
remains shaped by these loyalties and this perspective even today.
In
the light of later events, one is able to discern how this historical
ballast became more of a disadvantage than a resource to
Stoltenberg’s
performance as a negotiator. Like the surrounding world in general, he
was
totally unprepared for ethnic conflict of the kind that broke loose in Yugoslavia from 1991 – he
was unprepared for the conflict itself as well as its brutality. Thus,
he saw
the scenario of the 1990’s, which became nothing less than
genocide, through
the lenses of the 1960’s and -70’s.
When
evaluating Stoltenberg’s role today, we must take the general
climate of the 1980’s and -90’s into account. A central key
word is relativism. There are no Truths with a
capital T, nothing is either black or white, rather every phenomenon is
to be
regarded in a non-essentialist way as being ambiguous and complex,
enabling one
to be tolerant and to endure ambivalence. Every event must be subject
to
interpretation, and the diversity and manifoldness of the
interpretations
reflect the particularity of the interpreters, all of whom are coloured
by
their particular point of view and their way of experiencing an event.
Since
there is no Truth, and since everyone has the right to interpret the
world from
his or her specific point of view, everyone affected by a particular
event must
enjoy an equal right to articulate his or her opinion and to be
listened to.
Since there are no privileged points of view (which would imply
oppression,
marginalization and intolerance), no one has the right to judge that
someone
else is mistaken; a signal of Besserwissen
and cockiness of an outdated kind in an age when every established
authority
must be challenged.
During
the Balkan wars,
the relativism I have described in
philosophical-intellectual terms (which – misinterpreted or not
– bears an
unmistakable resemblance to “deconstruction” à la
Derrida) was shown to extend
beyond the limits of the seminar rooms. Relativism was transferred from
the
domain of esoteric theory to the field of applied politics. It became
the
dominant perspective of state leaders such as Clinton, Mitterand and
Major. In
its new suit, relativism amounted to a moral
equalization between the so-called “parties” of a given
conflict, in casu: between Serbs, Croats and
Muslims in Ex-Yugoslavia.
The
implications of these events are deep and extensive,
although a lot has changed dramatically after September 11th 2001; the relativism of Clinton has been replaced
by Bush’s fundamentalism. They are both dangerous, but this fact
will have to
be left aside for now. We find ourselves in the 1990’s. World
famous
intellectuals, as well as American, French and English career
diplomats,
politicians and army officers were discussing the case of Bosnia on the basis of a
shared set of premises. With only a few exceptions (a lonely Susan
Sontag in
the besieged city of Sarajevo), everyone on the left as well as on the
right
thought that a war – that is, a military intervention of a third
party – must
be avoided at any price. War was a non-starter. Given the assumptions
of
political correctness, negotiations were called for. One had to speak
with all
the affected parties at the same table, thus letting them perceive and
understand each other’s interests and points of view, with the
aim of reaching
– if not complete consensus, then the second best alternative
– compromises.
When a conflict has come into being, the only realistic solution is
that each
of the parties must give and take. It is the task of the
internationally
appointed mediators to achieve such compromises, where no party feels
treated
unfairly, slighted or neglected. In the opposite case, violence will
escalate
once more, and the replacement of the conflict by a state of peace and
reconciliation
will be postponed.
There
are several causes
of the marriage of intellectual relativism to the
international diplomacy, which cannot be addressed here. Yet there is
one
central element that must be mentioned – the traditional
diplomatic fixation on impartiality and neutrality, the
credo
of the mediators being “as
mediators we must always talk to all of the parties; the small progress
we are
able to make in this manner is preferable to the losses a military
intervention
would bring about”. The logic common to diplomats, officers and
intellectuals
is persuasively simple and apparently unassailable: A one-sided and
decisive
intervention by means of force is necessarily directed against the
party whose
actions one aims to stop. Thus directed against one particular party,
against
this party’s consent, the intervention amounts to taking a stand,
against one
party and for the other or others. Hence one’s impartiality has
been abandoned,
and one loses the party one positions oneself against as a future party
for
cooperation and consent, and for further humanitarian work to which the
UN as a
neutral organ, is obligated.
As
I see it, the
approach of the West to the course of events in Bosnia up to, and
including the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, represents a double
moral
failure. This failure was articulated particularly clearly by the head
of the
UN in Bosnia, the diplomat
Asushi Akashi, the mediator for the EU, David Owen, and the mediator
for the
UN, Thorvald Stoltenberg. Well documented, illegal and genocidal
encroachments
were allowed in the sense of not being prevented by use of the
political and
military means available, while simultaneously the legal and
internationally
recognized right to self defence in cases of genocide was denied to
Bosnia-Herzegovina,
a state recognized as independent since May 1992. Furthermore, the
UN-enforced
weapon embargo dating from the same year froze a grotesque
disproportion in
military power between the Serbian “party” one the one hand
and the
Bosnian-Muslim (Bosniak) “party” on the other. Treating
parties equally makes
no sense when the parties de facto
stand in a dramatically asymmetrical relation of power to one another.
The
equalization on the part of the mediators and other representatives of
“the
international community” serves as a smoke screen over the fact
that the
situation on the ground was one of crude encroachments. Stated in
principal
terms: If neutrality is interpreted as being irreconcilable with
military
intervention towards one party – be it in cases of systematic
genocide – third
party neutrality is the best attitude assailants may wish for, and the
attitude
to be most feared by their victims.
What
does the case of Bosnia in general and Srebrenica in particular
teach us? Firstly, while impartiality and neutrality are being praised
as
diplomatic virtues, like complexity and ambiguity are praised as
intellectual
ones, all these virtues are – at least potential – vices in
situations of being
faced with, and being responsible for judging, the phenomenon of
genocide.
Genocide – the attempt to extinguish a particular group of
individuals, defined
by their race, nationality, gender, religious beliefs or ethnicity
– is the
absolute crime, the immoral action par
excellence, and it demands a reply which corresponds to the
absoluteness of
the acts and intentions of the aggressor. The only reply that would
have had
such a corresponding, and effectively preventive, effect in the case of
Srebrenica would have been a military intervention towards the
aggressor to save
the victims from the fate they would suffer if left in the hands of the
aggressor.
General
Ratko Mladic knew
what he was doing when he planned and carried
out the massacre of Bosnian-Muslim boys and men in Srebrenica. He had
more than
three years of experience (from negotiations with Stoltenberg amongst
others –
even while Srebrenica was being attacked) to base his calculations on
– that he
would succeed in taking the UN-declared «safe zone» without being
countered by the military of the third parties on the ground or from
the
air.He calculated that he would manage
to separate, in Auschwitz fashion, men from women, that he would get
all the
days he needed transport the 8 000 selected victims in trucks and
buses
out of the centre of Srebrenica, partially by using Dutchbat’s fuel and
by
dressing his own forces in Dutch UN uniforms and equipping them with
speaking-trumpets, so that those who tried to escape into the forest
could be
brought to surrender themselves to UN «safety». He calculated that he
would succeed in accomplishing exactly what he had come for – the
greatest
massacre on European soil since the Second World War – without
being stopped on
his way and without being arrested and punished in the aftermath, that
he would
be given free scope to humiliate the UN, the EU, NATO – the
international
community – in the most impudent and hideous way. In brief, that
his genocidal
act would succeed with impunity and that the entire world would be
passive
bystanders, on the spot as well as in the intelligence and the media.
Thus
far I have discussed the course of events from a principled point of
view. But how should we evaluate the part played by Stoltenberg?
When Stoltenberg
and I discussed Srebrenica ten years after the event, on the 11th
of
July 2005, on Dagsnytt Atten (Norwegian
news programme), he said: «Since the UN allowed Bosniak bases
inside
the zone, it was a reasonable assumption that there would be shootings
towards
the zone once it was possible to shoot out of it» (quoted from memory).
This
is a remarkable way to describe the course of events – although not to
Stoltenberg. For he remains faithful to his own perspective and his own
way of
acting, regardless, it seems,of the
years going by, of the number of other actors who criticize themselves
in
public (more or less convincingly). After having witnessed countless
interviews
on NRK (Norwegian stately owned TV
channel) and in the newspapers and two memoir books, I still
haven’t seen
one single of Stoltenberg’s sentences containing critique of the
Serbian
encroachments that is not immediately followed by another containing
negative
characteristics of Bosniaks or Muslims. Even when he is talking about
Srebrenica, he hurriedly «enlightens» the listener by emphasizing the
way in which the victims contributed to their own misfortune. Hence
when the
aggressor is Serbian, this fact is never allowed to remain in focus.
According
to him, one should always remember that everyone
committed some cruelties no one was
innocent. Stoltenberg still remains uninfluenced by the evidence
(coming from
the not particularly Bosniak-friendly CIA, among others) showing that
90
percent of the cruelties were committed by Bosnian Serbs led by
Milosevic,
Karadzic and Mladic; the cognitive dissonance is simply too great, as
well as
the prestige he attaches to defending of his own role. In his case
– even more
than with his colleagues Akashi and Owens – the
problem cannot be thought to be of a principal kind, pertaining to the
problematic character of impartiality and neutrality as diplomatic
virtues –
the virtues that were perverted when faced with the acts and intentions
of
Mladic. As far as I can see, we must in the case of Stoltenberg, given
his
biographical equipment mentioned above, discuss the problems of
partiality rather
than those of impartiality, although these were less clearly
distinguished in Bosnia than a written
account is able to convey. I have argued that when the parties are in
fact unequal in terms of force and power, a
«principled» impartiality may become the best ally the strong party
may have and the second most dangerous enemy of the weaker party. This
analysis
fits Asushi and Owen, as well as leading officers such as Bernard
Janvier and
Michael Rose. Stoltenberg, to the contrary, appears to be unable
– or unwilling
– to see the course of events in Bosnia from 1991 to 1995
from any other point of view than the officially Serbian, that is
Milosevic-tainted, one. Thus, it will be hard work to see that
Stoltenberg’s
analysis in his speech to the Norwegian refugee council on the 31th of May 1995 (six weeks before
Mladic enters Srebrenica) departs
from the point of view voiced from Beograd at the time.
In
this speech
– a speech for which (unnoticed in Norway) Stoltenberg was
awarded the «useful idiot-price» in The Spectator – Stoltenberg
states: «The following is absolutely crucial: You cannot force people
to
live together.» Thus he turns the facts upside down. No power in
multi-ethnic Bosnia was trying to force
people to live together. The three
ethnic groups that were separated into «parties» overnight from
1991–92, rhetorically at first, and then physically and
geographically, lived together until «ethnic
cleansing» started in Bosnia in the spring of
1992. What they were forced to do, through expulsions, mass rapes and
killings
and led by Bosnian-Serbian extremists and «conflict entrepreneurs»
(Espen Barth Eide) (head of the
department of international politics at NUPI, Norwegian Institute of
Foreign
Politics) was to live separately,
in ethnically homogenous mini states, drawn out by the «peace plans»
of Owen and Stoltenberg. Thus Milosevic’s and Karadzic’s aim of ethnic
separation was realized without great troubles, while Stoltenberg
contributed
to forcing weaker party – the Bosniaks led by Izetbegovic –
to accept the plan
as the only possible solution.
Finally, in claiming that the peace
plans he recommended to the Bosniaks would
have saved many human lives, including the victims of Srebrenica, and
that the
Dayton-agreement of December 1995 is not very different from (where
territorial
division is concerned) his and Owens’ rejected proposal, Stoltenberg
overlooks
the fact that his model is far from being legitimate according tomorality and international law. To sum up,
following Wilhelm Agrell and Jesus Alcala:
The Dayton agreement
is equivalent with an
acceptance of the political result of horrid and systematic violations
of
international law. The precedence since the Second World War has been
replaced
by another, one that is not changed by processes against singular war
criminals
in the Hague. The
agreements shows that both the
original architects of the war and the organs of power responsible for
the
terror can survive by making themselves indispensable contracting
parties.
Stoltenberg’s
co-responsibility for Srebrenica boils down to the fact that he –
despite
having no responsibility for commanding the military of political
authorities
that enabled Mladic to get his hands on the enclave, through his three
years as
a central mediator contributed to the formation of a diplomatic,
political and
(indirectly) a military climate – of such a kind that Mladic was
right in
assuming he could do exactly what he wanted with the Muslim population
of
Srebrenica.
