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The
life of Hiba Mehmedovic, a Bosnian Muslim, came apart on May 31,
1992, soon after the war in Bosnia began. Three Serbs armed with
automatic weapons broke into her home and took away her two sons,
Kemal and Nedzad, whom she never saw again. A few weeks later, she
herself was forced at gunpoint onto a bus, driven to the front line
west of her home town of Vlasenica, and abandoned.
She trudged into government-held territory. When I found her, sprawled
on the floor of a kindergarten in the town of Kladanj, she was a
broken figure emblematic of the war: tearful and terrified, part
of a dark tide of Muslims driven from their homes, human flotsam
scattered across the floors of empty buildings. Her unseeing eyes
spoke of an existence emptied. There were 18,699 Muslims in Vlasenica
before the war, about 60 percent of the population; there are none
today.
Ethnic cleansing—the use of force or intimidation to remove
people of
a certain ethnic or religious group from an area—was the central
fact of the wars of Yugoslavia's destruction. The practice has a
method: terror. It has a smell: the fetid misery of refugees. It
has an appearance: the ruins of ravaged homes. Its purpose is to
ensure—through killing, destruction, threat, and humiliation—that
no return is possible.
Yugoslavia, and its Bosnian heart, were bridges. But over four years
of war, places of mingling became places of bleak ethnic homogeneity
as more than 1.5 million people were shifted in the name of racist
ideologies. The single most devastating burst of violence, between
April and August 1992, saw Serbs driving more than 700,000 Muslims
from an area covering 70 percent of Bosnia.
Such mass deportation was not new
in this century of ethnic engineering. Greeks out of Turkey; Turks
out of Greece; Serbs out of the Fascist Croatia of 1941–1945;
Jews out of Hitler's Europe; ethnic Germans out of postwar Czechoslovakia;
Palestinians from occupied territories. The waves of forced evictions
of ethnic and religious groups have been repetitive, often combining
physical removal with devastating violence, or, as in the case of
the Jews, genocide.
Ethnic cleansing is a blanket term, and no specific crime goes by
that name, but the practice covers a host of criminal offenses.
The United Nations Commission of Experts, in a January 1993 report
to the Security Council, defined “ethnic cleansing” as
“rendering an area ethnically homogenous by using force or
intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.”
It said ethnic cleansing was carried out in the former Yugoslavia
by means of murder, torture, arbitrary
arrest and detention, extrajudicial
executions, rape and
sexual assault, confinement of the civilian population, deliberate
military attacks or threats of attacks on civilians and civilian
areas, and wanton destruction of property. The Commission’s
final report in May 1994 added these crimes: mass murder, mistreatment
of civilian prisoners and prisoners or war, use of civilians as
human shields, destruction of cultural
property, robbery of personal property, and attacks on hospitals,
medical personnel, and locations
with the Red Cross/Red Crescent emblem.
Perpetrators of such crimes are subject to individual criminal responsibility,
and military and political leaders who participated in making and
implementing the policy “are also susceptible to charges of
genocide and crimes
against humanity, in addition to grave breaches of the Geneva
Conventions and other violations of international humanitarian law,”
the 1994 report said.
International law took up the question of the systematic expulsion
of civilians, and the barbaric practices associated with it, after
World War II. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949
forbids "individual or mass forcible transfers,
as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory
to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other
country." The actions are grave breaches of the Fourth Convention—war
crimes of particular seriousness.
Only the security of the civilian population or “imperative
military reasons” may justify evacuation
of civilians in occupied territory, according to the Fourth Geneva
Convention. Additional Protocol II of 1977 extends this rule to
civilians in internal armed conflicts. In Bosnia, where the Serbs
initially enjoyed overwhelming military superiority, there is no
evidence that the forced movement of Muslim men, women, and children
was driven by such a consideration. As Pero Popovic, a Serb guard
at the Susica concentration camp in Vlasenica once told me, "Our
aim was simply to get rid of the Muslims."
Article 49 applies to international conflict. I traveled with enough
Serb forces crossing Serbia's border with Bosnia to have no doubt
that this was a war organized, financed, and directed from Belgrade.
But even if the Bosnian War is viewed as a civil war between Serbs,
Muslims, and Croats of the country, the forced expulsions contravene
Article 3 common to the four Geneva Conventions, which applies to
"conflict not of an international character."
This article states that "people taking no active part in the
hostilities" shall always "be treated humanely, without
any adverse distinction founded on race, color, religion or faith,
birth or wealth." It prohibits "humiliating and degrading
treatment" and "violence to life and person, in particular
murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment, and torture."
There is also the Nuremberg Charter to consider. Article 6 defined
"crimes against humanity" as including "murder, extermination,
enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against
any civilian population, before or during a war." And Nuremberg
made it clear that population transfer is a war crime.
Mrs. Mehmedovic's most precious possession was two photographs of
her sons, aged twenty-seven and twenty-five when they were dragged
from her house. I took the photographs to Popovic, the Serb guard
in Vlasenica, who had recanted. His look of recognition was unmistakable.
He told me the two boys had been executed at the Susica camp.
(See Bosnia; internal
displacement; refugees;
siege; starvation.)
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