I'm news in Sarajevo again'
OTTAWA — It's the war that won't end. Maj.-Gen. Lewis MacKenzie is once again making headlines in Sarajevo, where, 18 years ago, he led a United Nations peacekeeping operation that attempted to keep Bosnian Muslims and Serbs from killing each other.
"I'm news in Sarajevo again," the now retired officer said Wednesday. "I'm very sensitive to the fact that in Sarajevo today they're reading that MacKenzie said 'Muslims were killing Muslims.' "
MacKenzie is news because Sarajevo papers published remarks attributed to him by Peter Robinson, the American lawyer leading the legal team defending Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader being tried on war crimes charges before a tribunal in The Hague. The lawyer was in Ottawa this week to interview MacKenzie and others in preparation for Karadzic's defence. In an interview Tuesday, Robinson praised MacKenzie for being "courageous enough to say that, in fact, the Muslims were involved in killing their own people."
However, in an interview with the Citizen Wednesday, MacKenzie said the statements attributed to him were "incomplete" in that they did not reflect his equal denunciation of the Serb forces under Karadzic's command for their indiscriminate shelling of Sarajevo in the spring and summer of 1992.
"There's more than enough blame to go around for all sides," he said, adding that if he was called to testify in the Karadzic case, he would not hesitate to lay blame at the former Bosnian leader's feet. "Of the most serious accusations against Karadzic, I do consider the use of heavy artillery against civilian targets in Sarajevo ... to strike fear into the heart of the population to be a war crime."
MacKenzie and his small UN command arrived in Sarajevo in April 1992. By the time he left on July 31 — and despite his best efforts and those of his under-armed command — much of Sarajevo had been shelled into rubble, hundreds had died, and he was persona non grata with the Bosnian Muslims for not blaming only the Serbs.
But MacKenzie suggested that if fault lies anywhere for sparking Bosnia's descent into civil war, it lies with the United States.
In 1992, under the auspices of the European Community, the Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats signed a peace agreement, the Lisbon Agreement, in which Bosnia would be carved into ethnic cantons. But according to some accounts, former U.S. ambassador Warren Zimmermann met the Bosnian Muslim president Alija Izetbegovic and told him that if he withdrew from the agreement and unilaterally declared independence, the United States would support him. In effect, Izetbegovic was encouraged to think he would be establishing the first Muslim nation in the heart of Europe.
However, as far as the Bosnian Serbs were concerned, they weren't going to be ruled by Muslims, who, the Serbs believed, were intent on creating an Islamic fundamentalist state. War was the only alternative once the Bosnian Muslims withdrew from the Lisbon Agreement.
The problem for the Muslims was that the Serbs had the stronger military, and unless they could win international support and intervention, they would likely be defeated.
MacKenzie recalled a meeting with Izetbegovic in which the president said, " 'Look, Gen. MacKenzie, I've been told that when I have 10,000 dead, I'll get intervention. How am I doing?' he was asking me every day, sarcastically." Izetbegovic would never reveal who promised the intervention, MacKenzie said, except that it was a "senior diplomat."
MacKenzie also recalled meeting U.S. congressmen, who told him then president George Bush Sr., "didn't want to touch Bosnia with a 10-foot pole."
Only after Bill Clinton, the Democrat's presidential candidate in 1992, promised to intervene if he was elected, did the Bush administration involve itself in the conflict.
Does MacKenzie hold the Americans responsible for the civil war?
"Let's put it this way, if the EC's plan had been agreed to, and agreed to by Izetbegovic, my personal opinion is there wouldn't have been a conflict Bosnia."
But that didn't happen, of course.
The Bosnian Serbs soon started shelling Sarajevo and, as it seems, the Muslims tried to gain the world's sympathy and U.S. intervention by supposedly staging atrocities against their own people.
"It wasn't a black or white situation," MacKenzie said. "The Serbs were 60 per cent to blame and the Bosnian Muslims 40 per cent.
"To achieve international sympathy there was circumstantial evidence that mortar rounds landing amongst Bosnian Muslim civilians were fired from Bosnian Muslim territory and not from the Bosnian Serb side," MacKenzie said, adding, however, that it was possible at least some of those attacks were perpetuated by "criminal elements" who wanted to keep the fighting going so they could make profits on the black market.
As for the Serbs, while they had "legitimate concerns" regarding the Muslims' political motives and intentions, their means of opposition were, as MacKenzie put it, "disproportionate" to those concerns. "They had a first-world army at their disposal, but you don't just sit back and use heavy weapons" on civilians.
The Serbs, in effect, lost the public relations war. When a few dozen members of the international media were watching every move the Serbs made, reporting every shell that hit a marketplace, it was "stupid" to use heavy artillery on civilian populations.
MacKenzie said he would like to put the issues and recriminations behind him, but that luxury has not been granted. Indeed, over the last decade he's been asked half-a-dozen times in one war crimes case or another. He expects he will be again.
"It seems I'm in it for life."
Robert Sibley is a senior writer for the Citizen.
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