War criminals in the former Yugoslavia are getting a free ride from French and American peacekeepers.
Kosovo culture clashWar criminals in the former Yugoslavia are getting a free ride from French and American peacekeepers.
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By Laura RozenDec. 21, 1999 | Among the legions of diplomats, aid workers, journalists and soldiers who came to postwar Sarajevo, Col. Herve Gormillon seemed a benign and unremarkable figure, a man who followed orders. He turned out not to be.
The slightly-built French NATO officer, a regular fixture at NATO's daily press conferences at Sarajevo's Holiday Inn in the months following the end of the Bosnian war, turned out to be the perfect spy -- until he got caught passing NATO's arrest plans to top Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic, the man many hold responsible for the worst crimes of the Bosnian war. Gormillon had apparently been meeting secretly with Karadzic, in his stronghold of Pale, for months, passing secrets.
Gormillon's treachery forced NATO to scrap their arrest plans. Already fearing casualties, NATO commanders killed the plan once they realized Gormillon had destroyed their chief advantage against the heavily-guarded Karadzic: The element of surprise. NATO Commander General Wesley Clark said "he would never trust the French again" after the Gormillon incident, according to one former NATO official who asked not to be named.
To this day, Karadzic remains free, along with some two dozen other Serb war crime suspects. Most reportedly live in the French-controlled sector of southeastern Bosnia.
"The French have a blind spot when Serbs are involved," said Jim Hooper, director of the Balkan Action Council, a Washington advocacy group. "Karadzic moves around their sector openly. The guy has a guard force of 100 people. When you have that many guards, it makes it virtually impossible that the French troops don't know where he is, don't intercept their radio communications. It's very hard to hide 100 people, especially in an area that small. I mean, we're not talking about Alaska."
While British troops stationed in northern and western Bosnia have carried out arrests of 12 war crimes suspects, the latest on Monday of Bosnian Serb general Stanislav Galic in Banja Luka, French troops have attempted only one arrest. That ended in the killing of Dragan Gagavic, a suspect who had moved freely around the southeastern Bosnian Serb city of Foca in plain sight of French troops for months and who was reportedly close to giving himself up. French troops say they shot Gagavic because he looked ready to hit them with his car, which was full of girls he was bringing back from a judo tournament.
The Americans' arrest record has not been much better: U.S. troops have arrested only three war crimes suspects in their sector of eastern Bosnia. But while the Americans' reluctance to carry out arrests seems to be based almost entirely on fear of U.S. casualties, several incidents suggest that French failure to carry out arrests may be based on something else: a larger pattern of tacit French tolerance and sympathy for Serb actions in the Balkans. For one, although the French military recalled Gormillon to Paris after he was caught passing NATO secrets to Karadzic, Gormillon has never been dismissed nor seriously disciplined by the French military, despite the fact that his actions threatened the safety of his fellow NATO soldiers and delivered a severe blow to the cause of Bosnian justice.
A second incident of French spying for Belgrade occurred last year. In October 1998, during the escalation of hostilities in Kosovo, a senior French military officer posted to NATO, Cmdr. Bunel, was discovered to have passed NATO's bombing target list to Belgrade.
A French embassy spokesman said Monday that the French government was treating both spying incidents seriously. "Commander Bunel was indicted on charges of high treason in October 1998, and arraigned before a military court. Gormillon was hastily recalled to Paris, and I don't recall what happened to him after that."http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/12/21/balkans/index1.html
KOSOVO CULTURE CLASH | PAGE 1, 2, 3Foreign policy experts say sympathy for the Serbs runs deep in the French officer corps, in part because of France's historical ties to Serbia. The two countries were allies in both world wars this century.
"The French military is openly pro-Serb. French officers have fathers and grandfathers who were killed fighting side by side with Serbs on the Balkan front in Thessaloniki," said James Lyons, a Balkan expert at the International Crisis Group in Sarajevo.
"The incidents of French complicity with the Serbs are so numerous, it must be defined as something like a trend," said Dominique Moisi, one of France's preeminent foreign policy experts, in a telephone interview Monday. "Clearly, the French as a nation feel we have helped build the Serbian nation, and that a privileged relationship existed between Serbia ... and France. [Former French president Francois] Mitterand said at the outbreak of Yugoslavia's dissolution in 1991 that we would never fight against the Serbs."
Another historical link between the French share with the Serbs, Moisi added, is fear of Islam. "The less obvious factor is the Western Christian logic against Islam. The Serbs and French feel their main adversaries are mainly Muslims -- the Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo and the former Ottoman empire."
But traditional French-Serb affinity has been shaken up in recent months by Bernard Kouchner, the Frenchman who serves as the chief U.N. administrator in Kosovo. Kouchner, who championed military intervention against the Serbs in order to halt mass atrocities against the Kosovo Albanians, has infuriated Belgrade by taking a number of steps that Serbia fears will lead to Kosovo's independence, including the adoption of the German deutsche mark as the official Kosovo currency and refusing to allow even a symbolic number of Serbian police and Yugoslav soldiers to return to Kosovo. Belgrade's fury seems fueled in part because these outrages against its national pride are coming from a Frenchman. Whatever Gormillon and Bunel did to warm Serbs' hearts to the French, Kouchner may have undone.
Belgrade has retaliated against Paris for sending the freethinking Kouchner to Kosovo with a recent string of vicious anti-French propaganda. Serbia's information minister Goran Matic recently revealed that Serbian police had arrested five Serbian paramilitaries who were members of the "Spider" gang, which Matic said was controlled by the French intelligence service and committed atrocities in Srebrenica, Kosovo and Zaire.
In fact, French and Balkans analysts concede that there may be more truth to these allegations than most proclamations of Serbia's information ministry: Western sources have confirmed that Serb paramilitaries were recruited by the French intelligence service to fight with Zaire's former dictator Mobutu Sesi Seko against the American-backed Laurent Kabila.
"This propaganda about the Spider gang is a message for domestic consumption to the Serbs: We are not guilty," explained French journalist Florence Hartmann. "The people committing atrocities in the name of the Serbs were being run by foreign intelligence services."http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/12/21/balkans/index2.html
KOSOVO CULTURE CLASH | PAGE 1, 2, 3Other analysts suggest that French support for Belgrade is part of a larger strategy by Paris to counter American power in the world. In conflict after conflict, from Bosnia to Iraq to Zaire, the French government stubbornly supports whoever Washington opposes.
"France does feel this paranoia that America is a hegemonic power in the Balkans," said Jacques Rupnik of France's Center for International Affairs. "France feels that the U.S. has established itself as the dominant power in the Balkans, and that the French position in the Balkans has been weakened."
"France took part in the NATO intervention against" Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, Rupnik continued. "But on the other hand, France doesn't want Serbia to be completely annihilated. France is very concerned that the complete implosion of Serbia will lead to a destabilization of the entire Balkans region."
Since NATO ended 78 days of air strikes against Serbia six months ago, Washington and London have advocated withholding any reconstruction assistance and maintaining an air and oil embargo on Belgrade until Milosevic, who was indicted for war crimes in May, is removed. France has urged lifting sanctions and offering more generous humanitarian and reconstruction assistance to Serbs even while Milosevic remains in power.
France advocated a similarly soft and anti-American position last week in regards to Iraq, when it voted with Russia and China and against the United States and Britain in a U.N. Security Council decision on weapons inspections and when sanctions should be lifted on Iraq.
"France is an old and proud country, and it's not happy to see America, a country with no culture, tell everyone what to do," explained the French journalist Hartmann, summing up French policy in the Balkans.
According to Balkans-based historian Stan Markotich, there may be a link between France taking a soft line on Iraq and Serbia -- oil.
"It's plain and simple oil," Markotich said from Sarajevo Tuesday. "Maybe warming up to Slobo [Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic] is some kind of bid to use him to support secular alternatives in the Middle East. A twisted version of Tito's non-aligned movement might fit Paris' interests in places like Iraq and other Arab countries, where the French have not only strong political ties, but cultural and colonial as well. But because of colonialism they need to distance themselves by working through an intermediary ... enter Slobo and Mira," the ruling couple of Belgrade.
Hartmann said unofficial French policy in the Balkans is largely driven by the French desire to foil American power. It has become so silly that it seems that the French and the Americans are trying to damage each other's credibility in the press. For instance, a month ago, unnamed French intelligence sources were quoted in a British newspaper as suggesting that the United States deliberately bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade last spring. Then, a few weeks later, American press reports criticized lack of French will to arrest war crimes suspects, a report sourced by the Pentagon.
Jean-Marie Guehenno, a French military expert at the Institute of Military Studies in Paris, said key questions about the future of the Balkans remain unresolved, and those questions lie at the heart of French hesitation to arrest Bosnian Serb war crimes suspects. It may even explain why the French have repeatedly favored a policy of not rocking the Serbs over taking hard-line measures favored by the Americans and British.
"The real issue is that NATO countries have not reached consensus on how they interpret the Dayton peace accords on Bosnia," Guehenno said in a telephone interview. "Until those issues are resolved, there is a hesitation to really build a military protectorate in Bosnia. You can't isolate the issue of the arrest of war criminals. It is part of a different posture than the one that's been adopted for Bosnia to date.
"The Europeans are more prepared to stay in Bosnia for the long term," Guehenno continued. "There is an awareness in London, Berlin and Paris that there is no way you can rebuild Bosnia quickly. And once you accept that, you have to decide how far you are prepared to go."
Until the decision is made to commit troops to Bosnia indefinitely, Western countries, with the exception of the British, are reluctant to take decisive steps such as arresting prominent war crimes suspects and taking other measures to force Bosnians back into a single multiethnic state. That is because Western governments with troops on the ground fear that those steps may increase instability in the short run, even if in the long run they are necessary to help lay the foundation for a more stable, multiethnic Bosnia.
For once, Serbian paranoia that the country's problems are the fault of someone else may seem to have some justification.salon.com | Dec. 21, 1999
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About the writer
Laura Rozen is covering the Balkans crisis for Salon News.
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