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From
a distance, the line of cars and buses that snaked along the rural
stretch of northwest Bosnian roadway looked like a traffic jam on
that languid August afternoon, as girls in summer white bicycled
past fields of cornflower blue. Up close, the terror in the eyes
of the people of Sanski Most, the belongings stuffed into satchels
and plastic bags, and the police riding shotgun told the real story.
More than fifteen hundred Slavic Muslims were being forced from
their homes that day in mid-August 1992 by ethnic Serbs trying to
purge northern Bosnia of their neighbor-turned-enemy. The Serbs
had even provided city buses to transport those without cars, though
the generosity was soon to degrade into a terrifying all-night trek
over blood, body parts, and across the front lines. Four months
into the war, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees had begun to
realize that the mass movement of civilians in Bosnia was not the
chaotic happenstance of war, but rather a calculated, orchestrated
transfer of populations aimed at creating ethnically pure areas.
Europe had not seen this kind of mass expulsion of civilians since
World War II. Hitler’s atrocities across the continent had
given rise to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which include specific
protections for civilians. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention
declares that “individual or mass forcible transfers . . .
are prohibited, regardless of their motive.”
Those in the Sanski Most convoy, by virtue of being moved to another
location in the same country, are regarded under international humanitarian
law as internally displaced persons (IDPs). If sent across an international
border, it would be a deportation
and they would be treated as refugees.
Additional Protocol II of 1977, which applies in internal conflicts,
provides that forced civilian displacement may be undertaken legally
only when civilians’ very safety or “imperative military
reasons” require it. In addition, Article 17 says that civilians
cannot be forced from their “whole territory” for reasons
connected with the conflict. The article does not say unambiguously
what is meant by “territory.” The International Committee
of the Red Cross (ICRC) Commentary to the Additional Protocols states
that the intent here is to minimize civilian displacement that is
politically motivated.
The standard is the same for international or internal conflicts:
if civilians have to be moved for either of those two reasons—safety
or military imperatives—their evacuations are to be under protected,
hygienic, and humane conditions, and as short-lived as possible.
None of that applied in the case of Sanski Most, which fell under
Bosnian Serb control in the earliest days of the war and saw no
fighting for three years until autumn 1995.
International law, therefore, was unambiguous. Article 49 of the
Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the mass transfer of Bosnia’s
civilians and Article 17 of Additional Protocol II prohibits the
expulsions.
Despite IHL, here they were. The daylong journey had descended into
the heart of darkness as the convoy turned from the main road onto
isolated country paths and made its way through an increasingly
hostile gauntlet of Serb soldiers and civilians shouting, “Butcher
them, butcher them!” As the sun set, the worst was yet to come.
With guns stuck in their faces, the people of Sanski Most were ordered
from the buses and their cars, most of which were seized. With what
belongings they could carry, they were sent on foot into the darkness
through a no-man’s land separating two armies. I went with
them.
Old and young, fit and feeble, we trekked along a mountain road
that was cratered by mortar impacts, mined on one side, and covered
by snipers. In places, the blood was so thick our shoes stuck momentarily
to the road, and we stumbled onto chunks of human flesh and other
remnants—teddy bears, backpacks, slippers—of those who
had gone before. At the front line—a high wall of boulders
dynamited from the mountainside—a crippled man was carried
over, his wheelchair passed after him. Babies were handed to their
mothers. Old men and women, stooped with age, struggled over the
rocks to the government-controlled side. The foot journey lasted
six hours and covered twelve miles.
By December 1995, just after the Dayton peace accord, at least 1.2
million Bosnians had been internally displaced. Three years later,
only a fraction had returned home. “Civilians, not soldiers,
were the principal and often intentional victims in the Bosnian
conflict. Forced displacement was not just a by-product but an objective
of military action and persecution,” Sadako Ogata, the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees, said at the time.
But three years later, it happened again in the Serbian province
of Kosovo, where Serb troops spent much of 1998 crushing an uprising
by the 90 percent ethnic Albanian population. As many as 350,000
people had been displaced by September 1998. The majority were women
and children.
Not all internal displacements are ethnic
cleansing. In Colombia, both sides
in the government-rebel conflict have forcibly relocated civilian
populations to gain political or economic advantage. Worldwide,
there were an estimated 20 to 25 million IDPs in 1998, compared
to about 13 million refugees, that is, those forced across international
borders.
Legal and humanitarian experts concede existing law is insufficient
and weakened by a lack of political will. Interpretations of “imperative
military reasons” vary widely, and governments also worry about
getting involved in what may be considered the internal affairs
of another State. According to Francis Deng, the UN’s top representative
on IDPs, “Lack of political will is ultimately the issue. Even
if you had fine principles, fine laws, but you don’t have the
will to enforce them, then it’s as good as a dead letter.”
(See evacuation of civilians.)
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