Reflections

BY FLETCHER M. BURTON

In 1995 a government soldier reads out the names of confirmed survivors or escapees from the fallen city of Srebrenica.
UNICEF

On July 11, 1995, the day Srebrenica fell to the murderous Bosnian Serb army, the Prime Minister of Bosnia called me into his Sarajevo office and told me he was in radio contact with the Bosniak (Muslim) mayor of Srebrenica. The terrified mayor had asked him: “Is my city under a death sentence?”

That afternoon at 1:30, the mayor radioed in again and signed off, “This is my last call. This is the end.”

The end of Srebrenica, a Bosniak enclave under United Nations (UN) protection, led to a rampage by the Bosnian Serbs. They killed more than 8,300 men and boys during the next several days, the worst massacre on European soil since World War II. The head of the Bosnian Serb army, General Ratko Mladić, is now serving a life sentence on criminal charges, including genocide, arising from the atrocity.

This year, the UN marked July 11 as an International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica. As the chargé at U.S. Embassy Sarajevo 30 years ago, I too am reflecting. This chilling anniversary has taken me back to my reporting cables and diary entries.

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The State Department sent me out to Sarajevo in late June 1995 to sub for John Menzies, who had to return to Washington for his ambassadorial hearings at the Senate. His nomination honored his courageous stand on Bosnia throughout the conflict.

On my journey into war-torn Bosnia, I made it as far as Split, Croatia, before orders reached me to stay put. A Bosnian Serb shell, fired from gun emplacements ringing the city, had landed near our embassy in Sarajevo, impelling the State Department to consider a full evacuation.

On July 5, after the all-clear signal, the security team and I proceeded along the dirt road over Mount Igman—the same treacherous route where a few weeks later a crash claimed the lives of three American members of Richard Holbrooke’s negotiating team.

We arrived in the besieged city at dawn the next morning, July 6, the day the Bosnian Serbs started their offensive on Srebrenica, about a hundred miles to the east. In 1993 the UN Security Council had declared Srebrenica a “safe area” and deployed there a contingent of UN blue helmets—the hapless Dutch battalion—numbering a few hundred strong.

Over the next several days starting July 6, slowly at first, then with heart-stopping speed, the news of Srebrenica made its way to Sarajevo.

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Our embassy was housed in a grand old residence. It stood between fortified government offices downtown and battered facilities of the 1984 Winter Olympics. During the war in Bosnia, embassy staffing was skeletal—only a handful of Americans and a few local Bosnians.

The Americans slept in the building, our cots next to our desks. Our neighbors were strategically advantageous: on one side, the headquarters of the UN force (UNPROFOR, the UN Protection Force); on the other, the Bosnian ministry liaising with international partners.

A few other resolute countries had placed diplomatic missions in the city, notably the British, French, and Turks. Our collective task was to maintain links with Bosnian authorities and try, as best we could, to “show the flag” as a boost to popular morale.

Under normal circumstances, diplomats pursue the defined policy of their governments; in this case, we embodied it, with more emphasis on a defined presence than policy.

Foreign diplomats came to admire the spirit of the Sarajevans who remained in the city and who, after three years of surviving the harrowing siege, had extended their natural sardonic attitude to cover not just life but death: “If you run, you hit the sniper’s bullet. If you walk, it hits you.”

At the embassy in Sarajevo, we had only a partial grasp of events in eastern Bosnia. The siege of Sarajevo kept us pinned down. Our movements were restricted and our contacts limited.

But we had a premonition of the outcome as shown by my reporting cables, declassified in 2007. We viewed the Bosnian Serbs under General Mladić, driving on Srebrenica, as “implacable.”

Under normal circumstances, diplomats pursue the defined policy of their governments; in this case, we embodied it, with more emphasis on a defined presence than policy.

My first call as chargé was on the Bosnian prime minister, Haris Silajdžić. The full thrust of the attack on Srebrenica was not yet known. We had a wide-ranging talk about international views of Bosnia at war.

Silajdžić had a radio link with the Srebrenica mayor and good contacts with the outside world, including with Senator Bob Dole (R-Kan.) in Washington. As the attack on Srebrenica mounted, he would first call me in and then tell the media that he had, in our talk, underlined the urgency of international action. He tried to rouse the world’s conscience.

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The terrible truth, the realization that Mladić had ordered mass executions, dawned over the days following July 11. The fear in Sarajevo concerning the fate of Srebrenica had a specific edge. The capital city was also a UN “safe area”—it, too, a threatened enclave.

The nightmare was that Mladić would rub out all the Bosniak enclaves starting with Srebrenica and then, for his next act of ethnic cleansing, focus his ferocity on Sarajevo. Indeed, one of the other eastern enclaves, Žepa, fell later in July. Only Sarajevo and Goražde survived until the peace settlement forged by Richard Holbrooke at Dayton in November.

In the July 10 message (Sarajevo 315), I characterized the “panic-driven” reaction of Bosnian officials to Mladić’s advance on Srebrenica, citing Silajdžić’s call for urgent international assistance.

The prime minister even invoked the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, saying Bosnia might have no other option but to invite friendly countries to send in arms and volunteers to join his fight against “fascism.”

My concluding comment reflected the mood of Bosnian officials, “who seem horrified by the prospect of a catastrophic ending to the [Srebrenica] enclave and worried that the international response would be too little, too late.”

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At the embassy we gathered in dark spirits for the evening news on July 11. Earlier that day Mladić had entered Srebrenica and then the village of Potočari, on the northeastern edge of the enclave. As we sat glued to the television, the Bosniak staff members turned ashen at the sight of Mladić patting the head of a Bosniak boy and promising lenient treatment. They were not fooled. They knew Mladić was the Grim Reaper.

My reporting on the day Srebrenica fell was equally somber. An excerpt from the cable (Sarajevo 324) appeared in Samantha Power’s book on genocides in the 20th century, A Problem from Hell. She includes my comment: “No consensus has formed among government and diplomatic contacts here as to the ultimate Serb military strategy, but most think it is interactive—that is, the BSA [Bosnian Serb Army] probes resistance and pushes until it locates opportunity. GOBH [Government of Bosnia and Herzegovina] officials now fear the Serb aim in Srebrenica is to ‘expel and occupy,’ the former being pursued with brutality. … Another contact summed up the Serbs’ objective: ‘They want it all.’”

“All” included Sarajevo. That explains the heightened desperation, verging on panic, in the Bosnian government during July 1995. As it turned out, the war had several more months to run. Ultimately, Sarajevo survived the siege, a deadly vise that lasted almost four years and claimed more than 10,000 lives.

Srebrenica did not pull through. Mladić inflicted a catastrophic fate on the enclave. “The unimageable is taking place,” Silajdžić told me. The subject line of my July 11 cable was stark: “PM Silajdžić: Srebrenica Doomed, ‘Betrayal Complete.’”

His notion of betrayal encompassed not only UNPROFOR (the “Protection Force,” how bitter in his eyes!) but Western policy in general.

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In 2011 Mladić went on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, accused of multiple charges relating to both the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre at Srebrenica.

Determined to see him face justice, I visited The Hague courtroom and peered at the defendant through the thick plate of glass erected in front of the public gallery.

My diary records the scene at the session: “Throughout he yawned, looked bored, stared at me and the spectators, chewed his vitamin pills, buried himself in note-writing and, several times, blurted out protests. These outbursts brought down the displeasure of the Judge, who eventually stopped the trial and ordered Mladic out.”

In 2017 the court found him guilty on 10 charges, including the Srebrenica genocide. He is now serving a life sentence.

As Richard Holbrooke wrote in his memoir of the Dayton negotiations, To End a War, the name of Srebrenica “would become part of the language of the horrors of modern war, alongside Lidice, Oradour, Babi Yar, and the Katyn Forest.” His historic diplomacy, which ultimately did end the war in 1995, had been galvanized by the genocidal killing in Srebrenica.

Fletcher Burton, a retired Foreign Service officer, served at U.S. Embassy Sarajevo from 1995 to 1997, then returned to the city for his last Foreign Service posting as ambassador and head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) mission from 2011 to 2014.