Buying the Night Flight (55 page)

I had always believed in scouring around in the peripheries and borderlands of nations and ideologies, for that is where it is frequently far easier to find the truth about the centers (it is the equivalent of never, for instance, seeking out the nature of a man in his respectable home; rather look to his mistress). And so it was not surprising to me that I was thus able to write the first columns that fall of 1988 on these stunning declarations of independence from Moscow.

Meanwhile, with the great ideological and military hold of Moscow so suddenly dissolved, unquestionably the newly freed peoples would now be forced to search elsewhere for faith, for sustenance, for reasons for living. Indeed, they had to, because mankind never chooses to live very long without purpose, real, invented, or imagined. It seemed clear to me that, with no ideological or power "center" any more, all those peoples, suddenly freed from Moscow's sway, would either fall back on their ancient religions, contorted ethnic roots, or clans and tribes -- and that, by the way, they would get plenty of "help."

For that reason, by the fall 1989, my attention shifted swiftly to Yugoslavia as the country tailor-made for yet the newest type of disintegration. In 1975, the country's powerful Marshal Tito had died, which was the impetus for a morally debilitating economic depression as well as the election to power of ambitious "Old Communist" leaders. With a cynicism remarkable even for the Marxist world, they immediately and deliberately began reawakening, re-creating, and orchestrating the centuries-old ethnic hatreds that had, however, been largely quiescent since the end of World War II.

Only two weeks before the Berlin Wall came down, I left East Berlin and went directly by Yugoslav Airlines (one had to want desperately to go somewhere to travel by Yugoslav Airlines) to Belgrade. I will always remember those gray, early winter days in the Yugoslav capital as among the most stimulating of my life. Stimulating, because I could see before my very eyes how the unscrupulous Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was already forming the Serb militias, arming and fanaticizing them, and fueling his violent propaganda for a "Greater Serbia!" They were also depressing, however, because anyone with eyes could certainly foresee the inexorable result.

For the next four years, diplomats and analysts repeated like a sacred chant that these new wars were paradigmatic "ethnic wars" -
- "spontaneous" and "inevitable." In fact, these wars were being deliberately planned on behalf of the most ancient evil of all--to win and hold onto total power over men.

From the time the Serbs really started the wars in late June 1991, that handful of Western journalists who were there began to realize that we were witnessing the eeriest mismatch of power since the Children's Crusades in the thirteenth century. On the one side were the vicious "mountain Serbs" or "wild Serbs" of the Dinaric Alps, whose names had long stood for all the killing, torturing, and looting that we had vowed never again to let happen -- surely not in Europe, surely not during the twentieth century! On the other side, one was supposed to find the "best" and most "civilized" forces of the modern world -- in particular, the Western European democracies and the
UN
. In fact, in the aftermath of the cold war -- in a world whose confused and contradictory inner spirit we little grasped, these "good" forces were espousing a weird mix of rigid moral neutralism and the non use of force to replace traditional military engagement.

Could such idiocies really be taken seriously? Actually, it was worse, as they were becoming increasingly the mode of engagement in the world following the cold war. Soon the "good" side -- the
UN
, the European Community, the humanitarian organizations--put in "neutral" troops with the unrewarding cry to everyone to "just stop fighting!" And so, finally, two hundred fifty thousand mostly innocents died because of these "good" people's unwillingness even to make judgments about whether mass murder was worthy of critical moral judgment.

One morning in the spring of 1993, for instance, I walked into the offices of Cedric Thornberry, then the civilian director of
UN
operations in Zagreb, Croatia, and the first thing this dedicated former human rights lawyer from Northern Ireland told me, in a voice that seemed strangely excited, yet relieved at the same time, was, "Georgie Anne, we know now ... the atrocities are balanced."

Since anyone with reports to read knew that the Serbs were responsible for at least 90 percent of the worst atrocities in Europe since the Nazis (even the
UN
reports would finally admit this), I sat down, fixed my eyes on him and said simply, "Are you serious?"

The next day, for instance, while sitting in the office of our charge in the American embassy in Zagreb, I recalled this experience to him, and we discussed the mindset of so many in the
UN
and in the Western armies in Bosnia. "They've been Stockholm-syndromized," he finally explained sadly.

This man, deputy chief of mission at the embassy, then referred to the early 1970s when several young Swedish women in Stockholm were taken hostage by Middle East terrorists, and everyone correctly feared for their lives. When they were released several days later, however, observers were even more distressed because these educated young women came out of captivity "in love with their captors." Such a psychological syndrome came to define dependent people who became enamored of oppressive power.

Soon, it was popularly known as the "Stockholm Syndrome." Essentially, it meant that the power that the captors were able to wield made their captors feel that even their oppressors must somehow be worthy people -- the dependent prisoners had to "fall in love" with their captors, if only to explain their captivity to themselves and to expunge their humiliation.

Indeed, the
UN
officials and military -- by virtue of the "mission" and "mandate" of being neutral and never even defending themselves -- had been themselves passively "held hostage" by the Serbs in Bosnia. Worse, they had even effectively
given themselves up as hostages.

In earlier years, my instinct had impelled me to write about the new forms of warfare that I saw gaining ascendancy world-wide-- guerrillas, militias, terrorists, liberation movements, liquidation squads,
comites para la defensa de la revolución
.... But in the former Yugoslavia, I became convinced, we were dealing with a mingling of new factors: the Third World "anti-imperialist" neutralism bred in many former colonial countries, an ideological one-world "brother" neutralism in the
UN
charter, and a matching and parallel permissive/therapeutic attitude on the part of the Clinton administration.

One day in New York during the spring of 1994, when it seemed that Bosnia could not get worse, but still would and did, I sat in the elegant Sutton Place East River townhouse of
UN
Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. He began to explain the concept behind the moral confusion (my term), saying, "Our whole philosophy is based on talk -- negotiate -- and then talk again. To use force is an expression of failure. Our job is diplomacy, the peaceful resolution of problems.... " He paused. "If we have to use force, we have failed," he summed up.

Shortly afterward, that same summer, I was interviewing Boutros-Ghali's "Special Representative," Yasushi Akashi, in Zagreb. I asked the cool-eyed, distant little Japanese diplomat, who had lived his entire adult professional life within the hothouse bureaucracies of the
UN
, whether there had not perhaps been some "gigantic mistake over human nature" (I was being polite) underlying the policy the
UN
had pursued in Bosnia.

"Your question is a haunting one," he replied, "and it might lead to the conclusion that people might fight a bit more to have a better moment to make peace. But we
UN
people have a professional stake in stopping bloodshed." The
UN
could not use force, he went on, because "we would be perceived as the enemy and that would endanger our carefully constructed relations with the parties. We are impartial; we are in a war but we are not at war. Once we became a party to the war, we would have to liquidate our efforts -- withdraw or cut down."

Later that same week, as I puzzled over this incredibly naive new self-imposed relinquishment of power and self-imposition of impotence, I was sitting in the
UN
offices in Zagreb with some of the information officers. I was puzzling over the fact that, despite these motivating sentiments, they had actually finally brought
NATO
in, although still for very restricted purposes, to threaten the Serbs.

I kept asking them "But if you won't use force, why did you bring
NATO
in? Why...?" Each time, they only hung their heads and looked down at the table. Suddenly I realized what was going on. "You ... you never intended to use
NATO
, did you?" I blurted out. Again, they looked down at the table in silence. Then, finally they admitted that the entire "strategy" had been "a bluff." Because they had not wanted to use force under virtually any circumstances, these "good" men of the era after the cold war, ultimately ruled by their Utopian illusions and by a bureaucratic fear of change, had finally become accomplices to mass murder.

In those days, too, just before his untimely death from cancer, it was the NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner, the respected former German defense minister who always gave me welcome refuge when I stopped by Brussels. From the very beginning, Woerner argued for a realistic and sure use of force against the Serbs, something that we now know would have easily stopped them from the first day onward.

When I saw him during the summer of 1994 in his spartan NATO office in Brussels, that handsome, black-haired, intelligent man burst into the room, sat down with a small flourish, then said angrily, "Miss Geyer, I am fed up! What we are doing is simply a cover-up for letting the Serbs win," he said. Before I left that day, Woerner told me a personal story that has stayed with me always. "I was ten years old when the war ended," he said disbelievingly. "I saw pictures of the concentration camps for the first time, and I physically attacked my parents... and they were not even political, they were religious people. Still, I vowed that that must never happen again." He fixed that steely gaze on me. "Now I am head of the most powerful military organization in world history," he went on, "and I can do nothing."

Like Woerner and many Americans as well, I simply could not believe that we would behave as disgracefully as we did in Bosnia. At least in 1939, in a darkening Europe, the British and Americans were still there, waiting behind the stage curtains of the theater of war. Now, both were standing aside, new and terrifying nonjudgmental "observers" of the carnage. And I was once again covering people torn from their tribes, their clans, their monarchies, and their traditions, as they roamed and roved back and forth in "virtual" centuries they vaguely "remembered," as though history were only a mere therapist's couch and time had no meaning.

Then, finally, in the fall of 1995, President Bill Clinton had had enough, NATO did really bomb the Serbs, and the Dayton peace conference was assembled in Ohio. The night of the signing, on November 21, 1995, I happened to be at a lively party at the
Los
Angeles Times
bureau in Washington, and it was perhaps not surprising that eventually President Clinton actually appeared there, too. Only when the crowd around him thinned out did I go over to him and say, "Good evening, Mr. President, I'm Georgie Anne Geyer."

"I know," he said, for some reason not looking at all pleased at the prospect of spending a few minutes in my company.

"Congratulations on the peace accord," I went on, undaunted by the "strained" reception, "but let me ask you only one question: 'If American troops go to Bosnia, will they be able to defend themselves if they are in danger?'"

"Not only if they are in danger," he answered, with some vehemence, "but even if they
think
they are in danger." Then the president paused, looked me squarely in the eye, and said, unsmiling,
"You ought to like that!"

"I do," I said. "Thank you." (And if at that moment I sounded a little like a prissy schoolmarm, well, what is one to do?)

***

The saga did not, however, end there. In June 1996, I made a six-week trip through Europe, Russia and Bosnia, and by then one could already begin to see the next phase of the post-cold war world.

In Brussels, NATO had now been rejuvenated by the changes wrought by the Dayton Accords -- NATO, with at least temporary American leadership, now had taken over from the military anarchy in Bosnia and twenty thousand American Troops were soon on their way. Walking again through the utilitarian corridors of NATO, I could surely feel the change since the desperate days of the late and noble Manfred Woerner; now there was a renewal of old energies.

In Russia for the presidential elections of June 16 -- the first real election of a leader in a thousand years of Russian history -- I was again invigorated when Boris Yeltsin won. This was not because Yeltsin was such a terrific president, because surely he was not! Not an alcoholic, but a man prone to drinking binges; he was sometimes coherent, many times, not. He would rise to specific challenges, then sink into weeks of torpor, surrounded at his countryside dacha by old KGB generals and corrupt drinking buddies, who by then were in effect running the country and commanding their own increasingly powerful militia of forty thousand men.