Genocide by Embargo

By Albert Wohlstetter
The Wall Street Journal, 09 May 1994

Since June 1991, the United States has used its own diplomacy and
the U.N. Security Council in a grim charade of “neutral mediation”
between a Serbian genocidal aggressor and his victims. France and
Britain have done likewise using the Security Council and the
European Community.

They have used the brave efforts of private humanitarian agencies
to excuse their own failure to stop the Serbs, ignoring the fact
that this enormous human catastrophe is not the unintended byproduct
of war: It is ethnic cleansing, the deliberate slaughter of innocent
civilians, the destruction of their private homes and public places
of worship and assembly, and the systematic rape of women to inspire
terror and flight for the strategic purpose of creating Slobodan
Milosevic’s Greater Serbia. Western leaders have sponsored the use
of peacekeeping forces where there is no peace, but only an ongoing
genocidal war.

Such mediation, misuse of relief efforts, and peacekeeping
encouraged Mr. Milosevic’s genocidal war and its continuance. The
U.S. did not bring about such horrors as those in Rwanda, but the
U.S. and the other democracies have played a major role in bringing
on the genocide in the Balkans. They have much to make up for. Most
obviously, they have an obligation to disavow and erase the
persistent effects of their diplomatic moves that first deprived the
victims of recognition and so the right to acquire arms for
self-defense and, second, in a largely covert and totally invalid
maneuver, kept the victims from defending their independence even
after we and the rest of the world recognized it.

Mr. Milosevic started his open war in Slovenia when Western
statesmen told Slovenian and Croatian leaders — and Mr. Milosevic
— they would not recognize the results of an internationally
monitored plebiscite they themselves had asked for in Slovenia and
Croatia. The results were overwhelmingly for independence, or for at
least a looser federation.

By refusing recognition, Western leaders made clear at that point
that they would continue to prevent Croats and Slovenes from getting
the means of defending their independence against Mr. Milosevic’s
heavily armed proxies. Then, in September 1991, the U.N. Security
Council, at Mr. Milosevic’s request and with U.S. backing, put
through an arms embargo to keep Croatia outgunned. After that, much
internal negotiation within the European Community led to a
scheduled European recognition of Slovenia and Croatia on Jan. 10,
1992.

On a mission to Yugoslavia shortly before that, however, the
representative of U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali
simply “told all interlocutors” that the embargo would continue to
apply to all countries formed on the territory of the former
Yugoslavia, even after they became recognized as independent nations
by the international community, including the EC and the U.N. This
was a deliberately obscure maneuver, nowhere overtly visible in the
labyrinth of words in U.N. Security Council Resolution 727, which
was passed on Jan. 8, 1992. Resolution 727, nevertheless, has been
taken as continuing the embargo.

In effect, Resolution 727, coming barely two days before the
European Community recognized Slovenia and Croatia, was a ploy to
empty of any operational meaning the coming world recognition of the
independence of Slovenia and Croatia. Besides violating Article 51
of the U.N. Charter, which acknowledges that the right of individual
and collective self-defense is “inherent,” the ploy violated the
Geneva Convention on Genocide as well. The U.N. mediator had no
authority from the Security Council. And, as many experts on
international law have shown, the Security Council had and has no
authority to change the U.N. Charter.

The U.S. should now simply declare that there is no valid embargo
on the sovereign nations who are the victims of continuing Serbian
genocide. That declaration would not (as has been suggested) even
remotely endanger the operation of the embargo against Iraq. The
embargo against Iraq applies not to its victims but to the genocidal
invader of Kuwait, which was defeated by a U.S.-led coalition of
some willing NATO members and other interested countries. The
embargo resulted from the defeat and surrender of Iraq. It was a
condition of the coalition’s ceasing to fire. Unlike the embargo
against the ex-Yugoslav republics, it is embodied in the explicit
language of a U.N. resolution. The credibility of the U.N. as an
impartial body is threatened by the continuance of the embargo
against former Yugoslav republics under siege.

The U.S. need not and should not condition its declaration on an
agreement by the U.N. Security Council (the General Assembly has
already called for a lifting of the embargo) or even all the members
of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Russia, as a permanent
member of the Security Council, has said it would veto a council
vote to lift the embargo. So have Britain and France, who are both
permanent members of the Security Council and members of NATO.

However, in lifting the embargo, the U.S. will be joined by many
in the General Assembly majority who, like President Clinton, have
long called for lifting it.

One standard argument for continuing the embargo which has been
repeated mindlessly and endlessly is that ending it would lengthen
and widen the war. But depriving Serbia’s victims of the arms that
would have enabled them to stop the aggression has ensured the
continuance of the war for nearly three years, and invited the Serbs
to widen it when they were defeated by Slovenian guerrillas who were
better prepared than the Croats, and especially the Bosnians, for a
Serb onslaught. The Serbs widened the war to Croatia and then to
Bosnia and have already started further widening by their operations
in the Sandjak.

Another argument for allowing the Serbs to continue their
genocide with minimal opposition runs that arming the victims might
endanger humanitarian relief. But in spite of the bravery and
selflessness of the relief workers and of many of the U.N. soldiers,
humanitarian relief is no substitute for stopping the genocidal
assaults on the civilians. It is grotesque to argue that the use of
force to stop the Serbian shelling of hospitals, marketplaces,
churches, homes, etc. must be abandoned because it would put at risk
the convoys of humanitarian aid. A convoy that brought bandages and
anesthetics for surgeons who are forced to amputate the legs of
children can hardly substitute for stopping attacks that continue to
blow off the legs of children.

Nearly three years of craven meddling by the democracies have led
only to continuing disaster. Hopeful claims after the latest
near-ceasefires in Sarajevo and Gorazde that “diplomacy is working”
— like the dashed hopes after each broken ceasefire for three years
— are deadly. But the administration recently helped to broker an
essential alliance between the Croats and Bosnians to resist Serbian
aggression. Let that alliance defend itself. Lift the embargo.

Mr. Wohlstetter, director of Los Angeles-based Pan-Heuristics, is
University Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago.