Silently and without warning, a 120-mm mortar shell sailed into the crowd, hitting a table in the open-air market. It exploded with a ferocious blast, tearing heads and limbs from bodies and scattering arcs of blood for yards around. Some corpses were so badly dismembered that they couldn’t be identified as men or women. On one table lay the remains of flowers, shopping bags and a prosthetic leg-a surreal still life. The marketplace shook with a cacophony of grief the shrieks of the injured, the sirens of police cars and ambulances, the sobbing of Bosnian policemen who grabbed each other for comfort. And hour after hour came the odd, scratchy sound of bodies being dragged across broken glass and loaded onto the beds of trucks that sped them off to the city’s hospitals.
Medical teams were quickly overwhelmed-and so were the morgues. At least 66 civilians died in the attack. The wounded, numbering more than 200, lay moaning on stretchers or bled quietly on the floors of hospitals. It was one of the goriest spectacles in Bosnia’s appalling 22-month-old war-but it also had a grisly familiarity. The attack occurred only one block from the infamous May 1992 “bread-line massacre,” which killed 20 people. And just the day before the marketplace assault, 10 people died from a Serbian-fired mortar shell while waiting in line for food in the suburb of Dobrinja. “You must send greetings to all those politicians out there sitting in their armchairs,” screamed a woman who had been shopping at the market when the shell hit. An enraged bystander added: “Thank you, Clinton.”
The president knew he was under pressure to respond. After walking up to, then away from, intervention for more than a year, Clinton was still resisting taking stronger action in Bosnia. But the horror of the marketplace massacre shown on CNN pushed him and his advisers into the Oval Office on Saturday afternoon to review once again what, if anything, America could do to stop the slaughter. “This is awful,” Clinton told Secretary of State Warren Christopher, national-security adviser Anthony Lake and Vice President Al Gore in a 20-minute meeting. Yet once again, the team reached “no conclusions,” according to two aides who were present. The administration would not push for immediate airstrikes against the Serbs, although it did put in motion a plan to evacuate Sarajevo’s latest casualties. The Clinton team seemed gripped by the same paralysis that had seized George Bush and his men over Bosnia-tough talk followed by second thoughts. It was an ambivalence that ran just as deep in the foreign-policy establishment and the American public, both of which remain sharply divided over the question of intervening in Bosnia.
Before the latest tragedy, NEWSWEEK has learned, Christopher spent the week running through yet another review of the administration’s options. Colleagues say the secretary of state is “traumatized” by the West’s failure in Bosnia. Peace talks in Geneva had stalled again. The Europeans were calling once more for greater U.S. involvement in the conflict. But Washington’s options all looked painful:
Lifting the arms embargo against the Muslims wouldn’t wash with the Russians.
Bombing the Serbs risked escalating an open-ended conflict.
Pressuring the Muslims to accept a partition of Bosnia seemed like moral surrender. By Friday, the review team could agree on only one, transparently token, recommendation: upgrading the U.S. envoy to the peace talks.
Then came the slaughter in Sarajevo, which made Clinton’s men realize they had to do something. In the age of TV diplomacy, the medical-evacuation plan at least ensured images of U.S. planes landing in Bosnia. The first American C-130 set off early Sunday morning from the Rhein-Main air base in Germany to assess the injuries. The plan called for other C-130s and C-9s to swoop down into Sarajevo and take the wounded to Zagreb, Croatia, where the U.S. military operates a field hospital for U.N. forces. The most critically ill who could stand the trip would be flown to Landstuhl, which received U.S. rangers shot up in the Oct. 3 raid in Mogadishu. The medevac option seemed quagmire-proof. which Serb would attack a mission of mercy? It also, said a U.S. official, “buys us a little time to think.”
Why has it been so hard to act? The quick answer: because no one has been able to define the goal of military action. The administration a year ago ruled out sending ground troops to roll back Serbian gains or to enforce a peace settlement. NATO resources aren’t the issue; strike aircraft and attack plans have been in place for months. The nagging problem is what to do with them. Pounding the Serbs might satisfy a pent-up urge to get even. But then what especially if the Serbs hit back? “If we bomb, and the Serbs continue fighting, what do we do for an encore?” said a despairing White House aide.
If air power couldn’t persuade the parties to stop fighting, American soldiers probably could. But many Clinton advisers worried that sending 200,000 of them into the Balkans would be political death-just as Vietnam was for Lyndon Johnson. “Bosnia has the potential to destroy this presidency,” former defense secretary Les Aspin said last spring. Back then, administration “hawks,” including Gore, Lake and Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, favored stronger action. Lake still agonizes about Bosnia; on weekends he sometimes goes to his office, locks his door and spends hours pondering the dilemma. But most of the rest of the administration came to oppose intervention. “There is no military solution,” Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. John Shalikashvili reiterated at a dinner last week. “The only way the conflict will stop is if the three parties want to stop it, and agree to a truce.”
Airstrikes remained on the table. “We rule nothing out,” Clinton said after his Saturday meeting. In the following days he planned to consult with allies and reexamine the dwindling options. The six-month-old promise to defend Sarajevo against “strangulation” provided some cover for the president. Last week’s massacre could be seen as throttling the capital-but not enough to trigger a response. “One strike, however horrible, is not a good enough reason to start something we cannot see the end of,” says a senior U.S. official.
The first step before making any decision to intervene was to determine exactly who perpetrated the massacre. Hours after the explosion, U.N. forces reported that the deadly mortar shell originated somewhere northeast of the capital-where both the Serbs and the Bosnian government forces hold positions. The Serbs contended that Sarajevo’s Muslims had attacked themselves, hoping to draw in Western help, but most observers blamed the Serbs. Shell attacks are their signature. “Let’s be honest, it’s all about killing Muslims,” a civilian official in Pale, Bosnian Serb headquarters, told a NEWSWEEK reporter in December. The official had recently served as commander of a Serbian artillery battery overlooking Sarajevo. “We had the coordinates of every playground in the city, every school, every market, every food-distribution center. After that, it’s just a question of mathematics, that’s all it is.”
The mathematics of the Bosnian war get more complex every week. Fighting has intensified over the last couple of months. Thanks to arms that the Pentagon believes come from Turkey, the Muslim-led Bosnian army has made military gains against the Croats in central Bosnia and stood down the Serbs in the north. In response, both Croatia and Serbia have sent thousands of soldiers and heavy artillery into Bosnia. The Muslims, once a ragtag collection of local militias, have grown into a well-trained, if lightly armed, force of some 200,000 men -all of them spoiling for a fight. “We’re not engaged in this for military victory,” says Muhamed Sacirbey, the Bosnian U.N. ambassador. “But we have learned that successful actions on the battlefield are the best diplomacy”
That’s bad news for Clinton-and the Muslims. The longer the Bosnians hold out, the less Washington can hope to shape the outcome. Madeleine Albright’s office was charged with exploring a new diplomatic front. The idea: to find out the Bosnian government’s bottom line in terms of territory so that. Washington can seek a new peace settlement. NEWSWEEK has learned that the Bosnians are demanding sovereign territory linked to the Sava River in the north and the Adriatic Sea, and the return of at least a half-dozen “ethnically cleansed” towns now in Serbian hands. That may be more than Clinton is willing to promise or even able to achieve. But the horrors of last week surely made him more determined to try.
