Report, Serbs Guilty for at Least 90% of War Crimes in Bosnia

8/8/2019 Report, Serbs Guilty for at Least 90% of War Crimes in Bosnia

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CIA. Report on Bosnia Blames Serbs for 90% of the

War Crimes

By Roger Cohen

Published: March 9, 1995

WASHINGTON, March 8 In what is believed to be the most comprehensive United States

assessment of atrocities in Bosnia, the Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that 90

percent of the acts of "ethnic cleansing" were carried out by Serbs and that leading Serbian

politicians almost certainly played a role in the crimes.

The C.I.A. report, based on aerial photography and what one senior official called "anenormous amount of precise technical analysis," also concludes that while war crimes were by

no means committed exclusively by Serbs, they were the only party involved in a systematic

attempt to eliminate all traces of other ethnic groups from their territory.

The report, which is so sensitive one official said it was classified at "an obscene level," was

completed early this year. One reason for the highly secret classification may be that it comes

as the United States and its European allies have embraced the Serbian President, Slobodan

Milosevic, as a potential peacemaker. The Administration may fear that wide dissemination of

the report could cause Mr. Milosevic to cease his cooperation, since the C.I.A.'s conclusions

suggest that he is extremely ill-fitted for the role of peacemaker.

The report's contents were made available to The New York Times by three American officials

-- one in Europe and two in Washington -- whose accounts of it coincided. Two expressed

unhappiness with the way American policy has evolved.

Mark Mansfield, a spokesman for the C.I.A., said, "We do not comment on classified reports."

But people close to the agency said the report has been submitted to senior officials at the

Pentagon, the State Department and the National Security Council.

One official, reading from notes he took from the report, quoted it as saying, "Serbs carried out

at least 90 percent of the ethnic cleansings in Bosnia." Ethnic cleansing generally describes the

practice, common in the Bosnian war, of killing, forcibly evicting and persecuting ethnic

groups other than one's own.

The report, the official said, continued by saying no "conclusive evidence" had been found of

the direct involvement of Serbian leaders in the planning and execution of large-scale ethnic

cleansing.

"But," the report added, "the systematic nature of the Serbian actions strongly suggests that

Pale and perhaps Belgrade exercised a carefully veiled role in the purposeful destruction and

dispersal of non-Serb populations." The Bosnian Serb headquarters is in Pale.


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The report, the officials said, also contains specific evidence that some Bosnian Serb leaders --

including Radovan Karadzic -- knew of the concentration camps through which many Muslims

and Croats who had been evicted from their homes in 1992 were processed.

Mr. Milosevic and Dr. Karadzic have consistently denied responsibility for the killing and

imprisonment of Muslims in the 70 percent of Bosnia now held by Serbs. In an interview in

December, Dr. Karadzic attributed the departure of nearly three-quarters of a million Muslimsfrom this area to "chaos and fear" in an uncontrollable war.

The ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Croats cited in the report took place throughout the area

now controlled by Serbs. It was particularly intense in towns, including Prijedor, Banja Luka,

Zvornik, Bijeljina, Vlasenica, Foca and Trebinje.

The report makes nonsense of the view -- now consistently put forward by western European

governments and intermittently by the Clinton Administration -- that the Bosnian conflict is a

civil war for which guilt should be divided between Serbs, Croats and Muslims.

This argument has increasingly been used by countries -- particularly Britain and France -- that

have been opposed to any Western military intervention in the Bosnian conflict. The

Administration has also made the argument as it has backed away from its initial proposals to

counter "Serbian aggression."

"To those who think the parties are equally guilty, this report is pretty devastating," one official

said. "The scale of what the Serbs did is so different. But more than that, it makes clear with

concrete evidence that there was a conscious, coherent and systematic Serbian policy to get rid

of Muslims, through murders, torture and imprisonment."

The Administration has veered back and forth on the degree of Serbian guilt. In 1993, Secretary

of State Warren Christopher suggested that all three sides shared responsibility, telling theHouse Foreign Affairs Committee, "You'll find indications of atrocities by all three of the major

parties against each other."

But more recently, the Administration has guardedly returned to the argument that the war is

rooted in a premeditated Serbian attack on Bosnia's Muslim population.

The officials said the report had prompted what one called "a quiet mini-firestorm of negative

reaction in the Pentagon among people who see it as an effort to bring Americans into the

conflict."

One official described the report as "very objective and straightforward" and argued that a

"sanitized version," from which some aerial photographs and other indications of the C.I.A.'smethods had been removed, should be made public.

The report, an attempt to collate and analyze all the evidence on the war known to the

intelligence agency, says Muslims and Croats also committed atrocities, some of them of great


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ferocity. But it concludes that these actions "lack the intensity, sustained orchestration and scale

of what the Bosnian Serbs did."

During the fighting between Bosnian Muslims and Croats in 1993, both sides engaged in ethnic

cleansing, and the Croats opened several concentration camps for Muslims, mainly around

Mostar. Bosnian Serbs have also been hounded from their homes, mainly in central Bosnian

towns like Zenica.

Richard Goldstone, the judge leading the investigations of the International Criminal Tribunal

for the Former Yugoslavia, has said two conditions must be met for political leaders to be

indicted for war crimes: Did they know about the crimes? Did they have the ability to stop

them?

Two officials said that, on the basis of these criteria, the report suggested virtually conclusively

that Serbian leaders could be indicted.

Documents

Report, Serbs Guilty for at Least 90% of War Crimes in Bosnia