By Sheri Fink (The Washington Post)
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Keeping the peace that the United States and its allies brokered in Bosnia-Herzegovina eight years ago depends in large part on closing the gaps between what Bosnia's various ethnic populations believe happened in the brutal war there. The most gaping perceptual divide concerns the town of Srebrenica, where in 1995 Serb forces carried out Europe's largest massacre in a half-century under the noses of Dutch U.N. forces.

Despite considerable forensic, DNA and documentary evidence of the killing of more than 7,500 Srebrenicans, Bosnia's Serbs -- who represent more than a third of the country's population -- have been in denial about the Srebrenica massacre. Last year a Bosnian Serb governmental bureau reported that the only deaths in Srebrenica were of 2,000 Muslim soldiers who were killed, or killed one another, while fighting their way out of the enclave.

But denial is finally giving way to acknowledgment. This month Bosnian Serb television broadcast details of a leaked government report that is said to confirm the mass slaughter of Muslims at Srebrenica. It follows recent testimony of two senior Bosnian Serb officers involved in organizing the killings, brigade commander Dragan Obrenovic and intelligence chief Momir Nikolic. At the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague, they provided astounding details about the role of Bosnian Serb forces in planning and carrying out war crimes in Srebrenica.

Their testimony begins to lay bare to both Serbs and non-Serbs the truth of what happened in Srebrenica. The implications reach beyond the long-suffering people of Bosnia-Herzegovina to the success of the first post-Cold War experiment in nation-building, which is doubtless being watched by the citizens of Afghanistan and Iraq. Nearly eight years after the Dayton peace accords ended Bosnia's war, the country resembles an international protectorate, overseen by a foreign "high representative" whose decisions trump those of local politicians. Bosnia-Herzegovina is dependent on both an international stabilization force and financial assistance.

Significant obstacles are preventing the tribunal from realizing its full potential in helping cement the peace. Leaders of the former Yugoslavia -- particularly those in the Serb entity of Bosnia, as well as in Serbia and Croatia -- must turn over both the suspected criminals they've harbored and the documents long sought by the tribunal.

A burden also falls on the United States, which, as an initiator of the tribunal, needs to step up to its responsibilities to help uncover the truth and end impunity in the Balkans. International stabilization forces, including U.S. soldiers, should arrest the indictees still believed to be at large in Bosnia, chief among them Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb political leader.

Beyond that is a need to exercise flexibility in the phasing-out of the tribunal that has been ordered by the U.N. Security Council. Ending the tribunal's work too soon could bury the past prematurely, leaving agitated ghosts to haunt Bosnia's future, just as the ghosts of Yugoslavia's civil war of the 1940s helped set the stage for the 1990s genocide.

The Security Council's emphasis on attaching dates to a "completion strategy" has already dampened cooperation from governments in the Balkans, according to chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte. Allowing the recent war's most notorious fugitives -- Karadzic and Ratko Mladic -- to evade justice "would be a joke," Del Ponte said recently in New York.

Most important, when it comes to cooperation, the United States must set a better example. U.S. officials involved in wartime Bosnia should be allowed to testify with maximum transparency about what they knew. The U.S. government needs to release crucial imagery and signals intelligence information it collected during the capture of Srebrenica and the several days afterward, during which Serb forces committed the massacre. Intelligence experts such as Cees Wiebes of the Netherlands, who spent years investigating the fall of Srebrenica for a Dutch government-sponsored report, believe that the United States has such information.

If it is not forthcoming, Congress should order an investigation of what our country knew about the massacre and when. Failure to do so would suggest that the leaders of the world's only superpower in the 1990s fear being held accountable for failing to act to stop the genocide. Indeed, Srebrenica survivors this week announced plans for a lawsuit seeking compensation of nearly $850 million from the United Nations and the Netherlands, whose peacekeepers failed to protect the enclave the U.N. Security Council had declared a "safe area."

"States won't cooperate," Del Ponte said recently. "They don't want the real truth to come out. It's politically disturbing." What's more disturbing is the idea that the truth about Europe's modern genocide will remain hidden. Knowing the full truth will help not only Bosnians but also the rest of the world to prevent future genocides.

Sheri Fink, a physician, is the author of a book on the Srebrenica massacre: "War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival."