'You don't go to war with people unless you demonize them first,' President Clinton’s former Defense Secretary William Perry observed recently on a trip to North Korea, but he might as well have been talking about Bosnia, where the US missed few opportunities to portray Bosnian Serbs as aggressors and Bosnian Muslims as wholly innocent victims. Lord David Owen, European Community envoy to Bosnia, arrived in Sarajevo in December 1992 a hardliner, believing the worst about the Serbs, but soon realized that the black and white picture promoted by the Clinton administration had little to do with the facts on the ground where all sides committed abuses. By January of 1993, Owen learned “the UN had clear evidence that Muslim forces would from time to time shell the airport [which they controlled] to stop the relief flights and refocus world attention on the siege of Sarajevo.” Former NATO Deputy Commander Charles Boyd wrote that “no seasoned observer in Sarajevo doubts for a moment that Muslim forces have found it in their interest to shell friendly targets,” but noted “the press and some governments, including that of the United States, usually attribute all such fire to the Serbs.”
The same month Owen arrived in Sarjevo, in an interview with “Today Show” host Katie Couric, Bosnia’s Muslim Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic sounded the alarm that “forty to fifty thousand women were raped and are being raped even as we speak” at the hands of Bosnian Serb soldiers, prompting weeks of sensational headlines. Silajdizic’s hugely inflated claims were echoed by the incoming Clinton administration, particularly UN Representative Madeleine Albright who sponsored numerous resolutions criticizing the Serbs during the course of the war, but repeatedly used her threat of veto to block or water down resolutions critical of serious human rights abuses by Muslim and Croat forces.
After months of delay following Silajdizic’s bombshell interview, the Bosnian government finally turned in its evidence to the UN. On January 29, 1994 UN Secretary Boutros Boutros Ghali released a report by the War Crimes Commission of Experts noting that the Bosnian government submitted only 126 documented cases of rape, rather than the 40,000 to 50,000 cases it claimed in an effort to gain US military support against the Serbs. US adherence to the black and white characterizations of the propaganda war made compromise between the warring Serb, Croat and Muslim factions that much more difficult and no doubt lengthened the conflict in Bosnia.
Hillary Clinton’s biographer Gail Sheehy revealed her critical role in convincing her husband to press for NATO bombing of Kosovo four years later. The Clinton administration thereafter provided a lesson for the Bush administration in manipulating public opinion to win public support for military intevention. “Preventing genocide” in Kosovo was invoked as a reason to drop cluster bombs from 18,000 feet. Yet the reality that preceded the NATO bombing was not genocide, but a low-intensity conflict initiated by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which US envoy Robert Gelbard had accurately called a “terrorist” organization, one deeply involved in protecting the drug trade which supplies 90 percent of the heroin to Europe. This reputation did not prevent the Clinton administration from using the CIA to train and equip the KLA whose former leaders now control Kosovo.
Before NATO intervention, some 2,000 people had been killed as Serbian soldiers and police battled KLA guerillas whose campaign of assassinations was directed against not only the Kosovo Serbian minority, but Albanian civilians (postal workers, park rangers) who worked for the government. Contrary to Clinton administration assertions about Serbia’s pre-war culpability , Britain’s Defense Minister George Robertson frankly acknowledged to Parliament on March 24, 1999 the day NATO’s 78 day bombing campaign began, that in the previous year, “the KLA were responsible for more deaths in Kosovo than the Yugoslavia authorities had been.” The BBC documentary “Moral Combat” later revealed that NATO leaders chose to keep secret the minutes of a meeting at their headquarters that determined the KLA was the “main initiator of the violence” in a “deliberate campaign of provocation.”
Both the Clinton administration and the Bush administration have kept the public in the dark about these deceptions. As George Orwell once wrote: "Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth." Whether in Iraq, where our soldiers and Iraqis continue to pay a heavy price, or in the Balkans where instability is mounting once again, the connection between government deceit and the misguided policies it produces, will haunt us for many years after Hillary Clinton’s fanciful tale of snipers at the Tuzla airport is conveniently forgotten.