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President Clinton and Human Rights. President Clinton's first Secretary of State Warren Christopher reaffirmed that Christmas warning in both February and July 1993. More importantly, Clinton added humanitarian goals to U.S. policy, extended the "red line" from Kosovo to Bosnia, and deployed troops there in a multilateral NATO peacekeeping force. Srebrenica in 1995 was the turning point. Albright, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., had pushed for international peacekeepers to provide safe havens for Bosnia's Muslims. Serbian forces systematically executed 7,000 Muslims the U.N. had promised to protect at Srebrenica. From 1991 to 1995 ethnic cleansing had repeatedly followed a similar pattern:
1. Concentration: Surround the area to be cleansed after warning the resident Serbs. Often they are urged to leave or are at least told to mark their houses with white flags. Intimidate the target population with artillery fire and arbitrary executions and then bring them out into the streets.
2. Decapitation: Execute political leaders and those capable of taking their places: lawyers, judges, public officials, writers, professors.
3. Separation: Divide women, children, and old men from men of "fighting age"--sixteen years to sixty years old.
4. Evacuation: Transport women, children, and old men to the border, expelling them into a neighboring territory or country.
5. Liquidation: Execute "fighting age" men, dispose of bodies.4
By 1994 an estimated 250,000 people had been killed and two million made homeless, many seeking refuge elsewhere in Europe.
The U.N. enforced an economic and arms embargo on the combatants. Clinton approved NATO air strikes, but vetoed legislation authorizing military assistance to Bosnian Muslims. The U.N. war crimes tribunal took into custody soldiers indicted for committing atrocities. Croatians with U.S. arms recaptured Krajina, expelling 150,000 Serbs; freshly armed Bosnian forces began to reclaim territory the Serbs had cleansed. As NATO air sorties increased in frequency, Milosevic consented in the Dayton Peace Accords to peacekeeping troops. In order to reach a swift agreement on Bonsia, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke never put Kosovo on the Dayton negotiating table in 1995. The U.S. contributed 20,000 of the 60,000 peacekeepers who effectively partitioned Bosnia creating a U.N. approved protectorate. By 1997 Clinton removed all deadlines to the U.S. deployment and made an official visit to Bosnia.
