A victim from Srebrenica, the worst massacre in Europe since World War II. Dept. of History Srebrenica, 20 years later A day of darkness and slaughter, when Europe betrayed its very own values.

“The Community is now perceived as a major power, and not just an economic one. Much is expected of it. We must remember this and … shoulder our responsibilities.” — Jacques Delors, former President of the European Commission, 23 January 1991

“Each of your officers and soldiers, just like yourself, has just one life. And I don’t believe you want to lose it here.” — General Ratko Mladic to Lt. Col Thom Karremans, head of Dutchbat, UN forces, Srebrenica, 11 July 1995

The path from Jacques Delors’ high-minded speech to Ratko Mladic’s villainous threat and the Serbs’ massacre of 8,000 unarmed men and boys was straight if not true. Twenty years on, it is worth re-examining Srebrenica to see what lessons Europe has learned.

The Road to Death

The entire international community carries blame and shame for Srebrenica. But the trailhead to the small town in the mountains of eastern Bosnia begins in Brussels, in what was still, in 1991, only a club of 12 nations called the European Community — not that Europe’s political leaders even knew they were starting down the road to genocide.

Consider the state of Europe on the night Delors delivered his speech.

Germany had just re-unified (a prospect Europe had been fighting one way or another since the Napoleonic Wars). The Warsaw Pact was unraveling at alarming speed. Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, and Britain, France and Italy were about to join the U.S. in waging war to force him out. The European Community and Commission were negotiating what would become the Maastricht Treaty — and having to spend many sleepless nights dealing with a Conservative British government’s demands for opt-outs from its mandates for open borders and a single currency.

So perhaps it was understandable that the European Community decided to put managing the disintegration of Yugoslavia at the bottom of its to-do list, even though it was likely that it would be violent.

But just because managing the crisis was not a priority didn’t mean that the European rhetoric was turned down. Quite the opposite. Luxembourg’s Jacques Poos declared “the hour of Europe” in June 1991. Around the same time Delors reportedly said, “We do not interfere in American affairs. We hope that they will have enough respect not to interfere in ours.”

America’s Secretary of State, James Baker, was happy to oblige. “We do not have a dog in this fight.”

* * *

So began a game of pass-the-Yugoslavia-parcel — duly reported by journalists like myself. We reported on this commission and that debate. I even interviewed Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia, born in London’s Claridge’s Hotel at the end of World War II; the room in which he entered the world declared by the British government, temporarily, Yugoslav soil, so that after the war he could return to lead his country. The Prince was preparing to return to Yugoslavia to work for democracy.

By autumn Dubrovnik was being shelled. By December the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.

And still nothing substantial was done. “Europe” didn’t speak with one voice. Germany recognized Croatia and Slovenia, effectively marking the end of Yugoslavia. Everyone knew what would happen next — war in Bosnia. And so in 1992 it happened.

Sarajevo — eight years earlier an Olympic city — was besieged. Civilians were shelled and murdered by sniper fire. Thousands died. In the countryside atrocities out of Breughel — with Kalashnikovs added to the mix — took place.

“The hour of Europe” brought forth commissions to create plans, but no diplomatic or military intervention to stop the killing. The war went on. Reporters under fire filed hair-raising dispatches. They were plastered across front pages. Public opinion was duly outraged, to no avail. More commissions, more plans, more parcel-passing. The EU was bypassed as the UN organized troops to observe but not intervene.

An arms embargo was imposed. Except that Croatia and Serbia were breaking it, and arming their cousins in Bosnia. No interdiction.

The Bosnian Muslim population — the majority in the country — was begging for the embargo to be lifted so they could defend themselves. Here European policy crystallized: no arms. The concern was to stop the conflagration from spreading.

By 1993, Britain was effectively running policy. The Foreign Secretary was Douglas Hurd, an old Etonian, an unflappable man, perfect for explaining a policy that allowed rape hotels and concentration camps to flourish in Western Europe as the end of its bloodiest century drew to a close.

American correspondents were invited to his office for an interview session. He explained the policy calmly: no arming of the Bosniaks. In essence it was hard on Bosnia, he knew, but it was better than what might happen if more weapons got into former Yugoslavia.

I asked about intervention. He listed a dozen other violent crises around the world and asked rhetorically whether I thought we could intervene in all of them. In one of those moments of life I would like to have back, I failed to ask the obvious follow-up question, “Yes, Foreign Secretary, but this is the only one taking place in a country circumscribed by the borders of the European Union and NATO.” (I made repeated attempts to interview Lord Hurd, as he now is, for this article. I still want to ask him that question.)

The path Europe embarked on in 1991 reached its inevitable destination on July 11, 1995, in Srebrenica.

And so the war went on. The hour of Europe passed. The hour of Serbia arrived. It was a bloody hour. Serbian clients Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, emboldened, turned a civil war into a personal reign of terror, and the path Europe embarked on in 1991 reached its inevitable destination on July 11, 1995, in Srebrenica. Unarmed, half-starving, abandoned by UN forces and European politicians, 8,000 men and boys were massacred. In the forests, in a factory, in a school gym, in any place Mladic’s “soldiers” could find them. Their bodies were hastily disposed of.

And then the Americans, not the Europeans arrived. First by air, bombing the Serbs to a cease-fire. Then, the leaders of Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia were sequestered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, and forced to reach an agreement.

What might have happened if, in 1991, European leaders had flown the heads of Yugoslavia’s constituent Republics to an island in the Baltic sea and said, forcefully, in a Holbrooke-ian manner, “We are not having war on this continent and you will now figure out how to reconfigure your country peacefully … and you aren’t leaving until you do.”

The cost of failure

Policy failures and political pusillanimity have a smell. The Tuzla morgue is where the remains of Srebrenica’s dead ended up. Twenty years on, they are still identifying the bodies. When I made a radio documentary in 2000, looking at how Bosnia was doing five years after the Dayton Agreement that ended the war, I recorded sound at the Tuzla morgue. You could smell the place from a distance.

I was shown into a huge refrigerated store room with stainless steel shelving stacked floor to ceiling. On the shelves were hundreds of brown paper bags containing human remains. All unidentified. They had been sorted as best as possible in the field to help with identification at some point in the future. Then I was taken into another room and watched a couple of forensic anthropologists as they tried to piece together the contents of a bag. They were making detailed physical notes about the remains to help with the identification process. A partial skeleton was laid out on the examining table. I remember bits of clothing, maybe a sock, clung to the bones of a foot.

One of the pathologists told me the work was slow but they had had a success story recently. The skeleton of a boy had been pieced together and the spine showed signs of serious deformity. Near where the body had been dug up, a pair of sneakers had been found. The mother of a 12-year-old with spina bifida had described her son wearing shoes like that the last time she had seen him. It was a positive match. Now she could bury him properly.

With the fundraising help of U.S. Senator Bob Dole, a DNA database was being established to help speed up the identification process. In recent years, around 500 sets of remains are positively identified each year.

Shortly after my visit to Tuzla I interviewed Richard Holbrooke, architect of the Dayton negotiations, who had been appointed Ambassador to the UN by President Bill Clinton. He was frank about the failures of the Dayton Agreement and harshly critical of the UN’s performance in Bosnia.

But he had this to say about the European Union: “Sometimes you confront leaders who just do evil things. I heard European negotiators say it [Bosnia] was complicated and there were a lot of gray areas. Well, it was. One side wasn’t very attractive but the other side was pure evil.”

Then Holbrooke added, “Once we came to terms with that — evil — and were willing to use air power, NATO and American air power, against the morally unacceptable acts, then things began to move in the right direction.”

* * *

Gray is what Europe does best. The EU likes to dress itself up in golden words: solidarity, democracy, liberty and human dignity. But when dealing with crises, gray is the EU’s true color, the color of vagueness and muddle.

Today there is a High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, but the rules for handling a crisis haven’t changed much. In dealing with the Ukraine crisis, “Germany and France made the Minsk agreement not the EU,” says Alexandra Stiglmayer of the European Stability Initiative.

Stiglmayer covered the Bosnian War for Time Magazine and later worked for the EU’s High Representative in Sarajevo during the first phase of post-war reconstruction.

She looks at the Balkans today in dismay. There are EU diplomatic missions throughout the region and the carrot of EU membership is perpetually dangled, but the criteria for joining are severe. This means another war is unlikely but regeneration is unlikely as well.

"EU policy has turned the Balkans into countries stuck in poverty" — Alexandra Stiglmayer, European Stability Initiative

Stiglmayer estimates there are more than 70 different steps that Bosnia has to go through before membership is extended and the completion of each step has to be ratified by a unanimous vote of the 28 EU members. “EU policy has turned the Balkans into countries stuck in poverty,” she says. “Then what happens is you have a brain drain and these countries become even more poor and hopeless places.”

Sead Numanovic, former editor of Dnevni Avaz, Bosnia’s largest circulation newspaper, echoed the view that nothing much has changed. “The EU continues to make mistakes,” he says. “They cannot understand the mentality of Balkan people whether they are in the EU, like Greece, or outside of EU, like in Bosnia.”

One thing that has changed is there is greater nationalism in Europe, says Numanovic. “Nationalism is still the best tool for manipulation of people, and not just in the Balkans.” He mentions the rise of the National Front in France and Fidesz in Hungary. “We are seeing the Balkanization of Europe not the Europeanization of the Balkans.”

Nothing is likely to change that trend, Stiglmayer notes. “Member states don’t want to give any more sovereignty to the EU,” particularly when it comes to a unified foreign policy.

Jacques Delors was always more idealist than technocrat. The unique European federalism he hoped to build included a single foreign policy to match the single currency. Without one, Delors said, the “European dream will fade.”

In the case of Srebrenica, the “European dream” was a nightmare.