Question 3

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Bosnia has a special place in the post-Cold War landscape ofarmed conflict and international intervention. The 1992–95 warin the former Yugoslav republic became the poster child for “ethnic conflict”—indeed, the term “ethnic cleansing” was popular- ized during the Bosnia experience (although the practice is certainly not new). Bosnia and the other conflicts related to the bloody break- up of Yugoslavia represented the first outbreak of war in Europe since the end of World War II and erased the widespread assumption that war on the continent was unthinkable.1 Bosnia was also the first drawn out humanitarian crisis of the decade, prompting a far more expansive and ambitious interventionist role for the United Nations— and the humbling experience significantly undermined the early enthusiasm for its conflict prevention and resolution capacity. No other war is as closely associated with humanitarian assistance as is the Bosnia conflict. More than 100,000 foreigners, at least a dozen UN agencies, and over 200 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were estimated to be part of the humanitarian relief operation in Bosnia.2

By the middle of 1995, two-thirds of all UN blue-helmeted peacekeepers in the world were deployed in the region, with the number of troops in Bosnia peaking at about 22,500.3

The Bosnian war and the other conflicts in the western Balkans that were part of the breakup of Yugoslavia were largely carried out through a series of large and small sieges by nationalist Serb forces. This included the destruction of Vukovar and the shelling of Dubrovnik

c h a p t e r 1 the longest siege

Andreas, Peter. Blue Helmets and Black Markets : The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo, Cornell University Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3137928. Created from asulib-ebooks on 2018-07-02 10:06:11.

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during the war in neighboring Croatia, the early sacking of towns in eastern Bosnia such as Zvornik, and the fall of Srebrenica and execution of thousands of Muslim men and boys late in the war. Given the siege- style warfare that defined much of the conflict, frontlines tended to run around urban centers and the road networks that linked them.

Sarajevo, the capital and largest city in Bosnia (with a prewar pop- ulation of some 350,000), was the site of the biggest and most promi- nent siege of the war. The fate of Sarajevo was critical: if the city had fallen or been cut in half, the duration and outcome of the conflict would have been radically altered. On April 6, 1992, Serb forces began shelling the city from hillside positions and quickly occupied neigh- borhoods such as Grbavica and Ilidza. With the city surrounded and poorly defended, few could have imagined that the siege would last for some three and a half years.

This book is about the long siege of Sarajevo and the international response. I combine detailed tracing of the micro-mechanisms and processes on the ground with attention to international contexts and conditions. The story of the siege sheds light on much larger issues re- lated to the political economy of contemporary conflict, humanitarian intervention, and its aftermath. The siege provides a laboratory of sorts to study the interaction between local and international actors, playing both formal and informal roles, in creating and sustaining the material conditions for conflict.

In-depth case studies are particularly illuminating when they have puzzling characteristics and defy conventional expectations.4 In the case of Sarajevo, the siege was not supposed to happen: siege warfare in Europe was assumed to be a relic of the past, yet a modern Europe- an city that had hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics was being shelled less than a decade later. It was not supposed to last: given the extreme military power imbalance, many (including the besiegers) thought it would be over quickly and that the Sarajevo government would be forced to capitulate. Alternatively, many expected (and hoped) that in- ternational pressure would force a quick lifting of the siege. Yet the Sarajevo siege not only persisted but set a siege longevity record. A siege formally characterized by intense ethnic-based animosities is not expected to involve cross-ethnic collaboration, yet in the Sarajevo case there was substantial informal economic exchange across the front- lines.5 A siege is defined as a military encirclement, but while Sarajevo

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was surrounded by vastly superior forces and its population terror- ized, the siege was also semi-porous and globally connected. Indeed, paradoxically, Sarajevo became a peculiar type of “global city” pre- cisely because it was under siege.6 A city under military siege by its nature should be a particularly inaccessible and dangerous place for international actors such as UN monitors and negotiators, aid work- ers, and journalists. Sarajevo was certainly violent and dangerous, as one would expect of a besieged city, but it was also the most accessible war zone and viable working environment for international actors in Bosnia—which also helped turn Sarajevo into a global media specta- cle. In this book I interrogate these puzzling features of the siege.

Sarajevo on Center Stage

During the course of the siege, Sarajevo became the centerpiece and most important test case of an expanded UN commitment to hu- manitarian intervention, reflected in an ambitious UN-led relief aid effort for the city that included the longest-lasting airlift ever at- tempted. The siege took place under international supervision and was televised to a global audience, with the UN taking on the role of referee and mediator. The global political and media spotlight was so intense that journalist David Rieff called the besieged city “the most famous place in the world.”7 The siege was formally internationalized through UN monitoring and aid provision, diplomatic initiatives, sanctions and embargoes, an influx of humanitarian workers, and continuous global media coverage. And it was informally internation- alized through smuggling networks and mechanisms used to clandes- tinely supply and finance the opposing sides and evade UN sanctions and embargoes. These formal and informal dimensions were very much interdependent, representing the front-stage and backstage ac- tion in the long siege drama.

The use of theatrical metaphors to characterize the siege dynamics is not meant to belittle the conflict or understate its seriousness. The death toll and physical damage make clear that it was brutally seri- ous.8 Inspired by the work of the sociologist Erving Goffman, the point here is not to belittle or dismiss the siege as “mere theater,” but rather to draw attention to discrepancies between the formal scripts

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and the more informal behavior behind the scenes, the multiple roles that actors can simultaneously play, and the relationship between the visible, audience-directed official “face work” on the front stage and the less visible, unofficial action backstage.9

There were many reasons why Sarajevo was on center stage: it was in Europe, it was a capital city, it was relatively accessible, and it had the basic infrastructure needed for international media coverage.10 This in- cluded access to the city via the UN-controlled airport and airlift, avail- ability of food and lodging for the foreign press corps in the dilapidated but functional Holiday Inn hotel, and a bunker-like television and radio building with modern broadcast equipment and facilities.

Sarajevo’s high visibility and accessibility contrasted sharply, for example, to Mostar, some 130 kilometers from the capital, where the intense close-in fighting and devastation was far less noticed by the outside world. Mostar was simply too dangerous and inaccessible to sustain much of a humanitarian or media presence. As Nik Gowing, an editor for Britain’s Channel Four News, comments, “Because of the logis- tics nightmare, coverage of Mostar was minimal and the city’s predica- ment never grabbed world attention like Sarajevo. Conditions were too dangerous for TV crews to work. Broadcasters could not risk deploying their satellite dishes.” As a result, “there was never the same drip feed of emotive real-time siege stories to catch international sympathy, as happened with Sarajevo.”11 On a rare visit to the besieged town, one re- porter observed: “Conditions here may make those in Sarajevo look like easy living. . . . The Croat siege of Eastern Mostar has made the Serb siege of Sarajevo seem positively porous. Here, there is no street market to buy even a loaf of bread or cigarettes. Nor is there the kind of Serb-fed black market that flourishes in Sarajevo and helps keep people alive there, albeit at high prices in German marks.”12

Sarajevo was besieged yet accessible, and as such it profoundly shaped international engagement with (and perceptions of) the war. As the historian Robert Donia observes in his biography of Sarajevo:

The daily violence was conducted under the scrutiny of interna- tional civil servants, aid workers, ‘peacekeepers,’ journalists, and scholars (including this author) who could travel with rela- tive ease on conveyances not available to the local population. Sarajevo was the lens through which most outsiders viewed the

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conflict; the agony of Sarajevo became the embodiment of the Bosnian war’s savagery and senselessness. At most times, the army of privileged observers could get into and out of the city, stay in relative comfort at the Holiday Inn (the sole hostelry that functioned throughout the war), ride in armored vehicles along the city’s most dangerous routes, and send dispatches to the out- side world using the latest communications technology.13

The Sarajevo story is thus a particularly extreme illustration of what the political scientist Stathis Kalyvas labels “urban bias” in the study of internal wars. He argues that internal wars “tend to be viewed through a heavily urban lens by both scholars and practition- ers” and that “most observers cluster in cities.” The war in Bosnia, he notes, was “mostly covered from Sarajevo.”14 The former U.S. military strategist Ralph Peters bluntly acknowledges the strategic prioritiza- tion of urban areas in the post-Cold War era: “But who cares about Upper Egypt if Cairo is calm? We do not deal with Indonesia—we deal with Jakarta. In our recent evacuation of foreigners from Sierra Leone, Freetown was all that mattered.”15

Kalyvas warns scholars of the pitfalls of such urban bias, which he equates with a top-down, macro-level approach.16 Yet as I stress in the case of Sarajevo, urban bias can also be an integral part of the micro- dynamics of war rather than only a problem that limits and distorts the analysis of war. Far from simply reflecting a top-down approach, urban bias in the case of Sarajevo has important bottom-up consequences— profoundly influencing the strategies and interactions of key actors on the ground. Here, urban bias not only shaped the interpretation of the conflict by outside observers but also the conduct of key participants in the conflict. Thus, rather than simply avoiding urban bias in research and looking elsewhere to understand the logic of organized violence, as Kalyvas advises, the Sarajevo case instead points to the explanatory utility of embracing it, unpacking it, and making it a core part of the study of war dynamics and international responses. While Kalyvas largely brackets and takes for granted international actors and contexts in his own recent work on civil wars,17 bringing outside influences and players more centrally into the story necessarily requires a more urban lens—after all, urban areas are typically the hubs and nodes that link internal conflicts to the external world. Urban landscapes are key sites

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of interaction between “locals” and “internationals.” And nowhere is this more powerfully illustrated than in the case of Bosnia’s besieged capital city of Sarajevo.

The Cast of Characters

The siege of Sarajevo involved a diverse cast of characters playing multiple roles among the besiegers, besieged, and international inter- veners. The key actors among the besieging Serb forces included the na- tionalist political leadership of the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), led by Radovan Karadzib and headquartered in the nearby mountain town of Pale; the Army of the Bosnian Serb Republic (VRS) and its Sarajevo- Romanija Corps; and an assortment of paramilitary units and other ir- regulars (including “weekend warriors” from Belgrade and elsewhere). The besiegers enjoyed geographic advantage and overwhelmingly su- perior firepower (especially in heavy weapons, such as tanks, mortars, artillery, and rocket launchers, inherited from the well-stocked Yugo- slav army). Backed by neighboring Serbia, their political objective was ethnic partition of the ethnically mixed, newly independent state. The siege of Sarajevo was a central component of achieving this objective. The initial military goal was to bisect the city and force the Sarajevo government to capitulate, but when this failed the goal shifted to simply bottling the city up and using it as a hostage and political negotiating card.

Key actors within besieged Sarajevo included the head of the pres- idency, Alija Izetbegovib, and his inner political circle of Party of Democratic Action (SDA) loyalists; the newly formed Army of Bosnia- Herzegovina (ARBiH) and its Sarajevo Corps, with responsibility for defending the siege lines divided among various rag-tag brigades and their unit commanders (some of whom were leaders from the Sarajevo underworld); and a variety of police units. A small part of the siege line was initially manned by Croatian Defense Council (HVO) militia forces until relations with the Sarajevo government deteriorated and eventually collapsed, as Bosnian Croats (backed by Zagreb) pushed their own nationalist ethnic partition agenda in the central and west- ern part of the country. The main political objective of the Sarajevo government was territorial integrity, since Bosnia was internationally

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recognized as an independent sovereign state (which was threatened by Serb and Croat partition plans). The city’s defenders had a man- power advantage over the besieging Serbs, but lacked weapons or even an organized army when the war broke out (and were further handicapped by an international arms embargo, which made it partic- ularly difficult to access heavy weapons). The Sarajevo government therefore repeatedly called for international military intervention and a lifting of the UN arms embargo.

However, the international interveners—the so-called “international community”18—primarily provided humanitarian aid and diplomatic initiatives rather than military support. Their basic objective was to contain the crisis, feed the civilian population, and achieve a negoti- ated settlement. Backed by major Western powers, the United Nations played the lead role on the ground: the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) was designated the lead agency coordinating humanitarian relief operations, including the Sarajevo airlift. The massive aid effort provided the beleaguered agency an opportunity to substantially expand its mandate, increase funding, and enhance its global prestige and profile—turning it into the world’s largest relief agency.19 The United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR), com- posed of “Blue Helmet” soldiers from various nations, was charged with protecting and facilitating the delivery of humanitarian aid.20 The UN force in the Sarajevo area reached nearly 5,000 personnel by early 1995. About two-thirds were French, and the rest were Ukrainian, Egyptian, and Russian (with the Russians based in Serb-held terri- tory).21 An assortment of other UN officials and agency representatives were sent to monitor, mediate, and negotiate. Whether visiting the city for a few days or only a few hours, some international actors made high-visibility cameo appearances (such as French president François Mitterrand and UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali). In the air, NATO enforced a no-fly zone (and in moments of crisis was called on to threaten—and on a few occasions carry out—air strikes against the besiegers). Contributing to the relief effort were hundreds of international non-governmental aid agencies, religious charities, and other organizations (though only a handful had substantial staffing), all loosely working under the umbrella of the UNHCR. The foreign press corps, which both reported on and shaped the siege and the international response, ranged from major print and broadcast

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media outlets with a regular staff to dozens of stringers and freelance journalists.

The critical supporting cast for this large and diverse international presence was the small army of Sarajevans hired as translators, assis- tants, drivers, cooks, photographers, secretaries, guides, and so on. This local support staff (typically English speaking) not only played a key mediating role between the international interveners and the local environment,22 but many of them also enjoyed some of the priv- ileges of the internationals, such as access to hard currency, imported food and other basic supplies, and transportation across the frontlines (including foreign travel). These privileges, in turn, helped to support local extended families.

Front Stage and Backstage: Formal and Informal Roles

International and local actors played both formal and informal roles during the course of the siege. While their front-stage behavior was often carefully staged and choreographed for various audiences, sticking closely to the official script and engaging in what Goffman calls the “art of impression management,” backstage there was greater room for improvisation and deviation. Thus, for example, while the Bosnian Serb leadership played the front-stage role of or- chestrating the siege of the city under the official banner of ethnic grievance and animosity, backstage they profited from the siege through clandestine business dealings that included cross-ethnic eco- nomic exchange across the frontlines. Similarly, some of the city’s key defenders played the formal role of repelling Serb military incursions while also engaging in illicit trading with their counterparts. While on the front stage they protected Sarajevo, backstage they engaged in theft and looting (a “siege within the siege”). This was particularly true of Sarajevo’s combatants with criminal backgrounds and their charismatic leaders who became overnight heroes during the city’s initial defense. Some of them sought the limelight, basking in their new celebrity status, while others hid from the light. Many of these local actors on both sides of the frontlines can be characterized as “vi- olent entrepreneurs,” fighting for turf and turning the siege into a profitable protection racket.23

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The international interveners also played multiple roles. For instance, in their formal roles, UNPROFOR soldiers secured the Sara- jevo airport for the delivery of humanitarian aid and became siege gate- keepers by not allowing Sarajevans to enter or leave the city across the airport grounds. But some UN soldiers also informally helped turn the airport into a conduit for smuggling—at times simply taking bribes to look the other way and at other times becoming more active participants by moving black market goods into the city and smug- gling people out. UNHCR personnel ran the Sarajevo airlift, but in order to officially move the goods into the city they also unofficially bribed Serb checkpoint guards (preferring to think of such bribes as “gifts”). And the favored items used for bribes—such as whiskey and cigarettes—had to be quietly smuggled in via the airlift (never ap- pearing on cargo manifests, which were checked by Serb authorities).

Members of the press corps also performed both front-stage and backstage roles. They formally covered the siege, keeping the global media spotlight on the city and participating in the public ritual of the daily UN press briefings. But informally they were also important contributors to the siege economy—ranging from buying black mar- ket fuel discretely supplied by the Ukrainian contingent of UNPRO- FOR (siphoned off from their Armored Personnel Carriers) to smug- gling in money-filled letters for local residents (sent from friends and relatives abroad), who in turn would use the desperately needed cash to purchase food and other items on the black market.

Finally, the locals working for the internationals were actively en- gaged on both the front stage and the backstage: formally, they pro- vided a major part of the support structure for both the UN-directed humanitarian relief effort and global media reporting. At the same time many of them informally took advantage of their privileged po- sition and access to smuggle goods and money into the city, and their wages in hard currency also helped their extended families to pur- chase essential black market supplies. Understandably, some eventu- ally used their position to permanently exit the city—joining the growing Bosnian diaspora abroad, which itself became a source of ex- ternal support for the city’s population and defense effort.24

Some might object to this characterization of the roles of the various siege actors, arguing that their informal backstage behavior was a sideshow compared to the formal front-stage action. However, focusing

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on the front stage—which is the standard, conventional approach— overlooks too much and explains too little. On its own, the front-stage action cannot fully account for how the city survived and defended it- self for such a remarkably long period of time. For instance, humani- tarian aid supplied through formal channels was essential but was also woefully inadequate. Black market supplies—albeit at highly in- flated prices—provided a crucial supplement. It was not only the hu- manitarian effort that sustained the city, but also the opportunities that the UN aid and presence created for black marketeering and mainte- nance of a criminalized war economy. Officially, humanitarian aid helped feed Sarajevo’s civilian population; unofficially, it also fed sol- diers on both sides of the line through skimming and diversion. While UNHCR officials publicly denounced or denied the use of aid to feed combatants, privately they awkwardly acknowledged that this was unavoidable—part of the price paid to access the city.

Moreover, in the context of an international arms embargo and ane- mic local military production, only by taking into account informal backstage behavior can we explain how the Sarajevo government managed to generate and sustain a covert trickle of weapons and am- munition into the city—sometimes with the behind-the-scenes com- plicity of international actors formally committed to upholding the UN weapons ban.

Meanwhile, even as the front-stage activities of the foreign press corps kept the media spotlight on Sarajevo, backstage activities were essential in keeping the show going—ranging from feeding the for- eign journalists with smuggled food and drinks at the Holiday Inn (Sarajevo’s only functional hotel) to powering their satellite dishes and laptops with generators running on black market fuel. So while the siege of Sarajevo played out on center stage in the glare of the global media spotlight, some of the most important action took place backstage, away from the cameras. And much of this backstage activ- ity sustained the action on the front stage.

Conflict Narratives

The story line of the siege of Sarajevo and the broader conflict in Bosnia can take various forms, directing attention to some actors and

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activities and not to others. The dominant conflict narratives draw at- tention to the front-stage action. Paying closer attention to backstage dynamics, as I emphasize throughout this book, provides a necessary corrective. These dominant narratives—evident in distinct scripts fa- vored by different local and international actors—defined much of the play on the front stage. For example, the narrative of ethnic ani- mosity was strategically promoted by the besieging Serbs, and was perpetuated in media accounts and resonated in many Western policy circles. It provided a seductively simple narrative of the conflict and conveniently offered a ready-made script for those who argued against more forceful external intervention to stop the carnage. In the most extreme variant, the conflict was depicted as a reflection of irra- tional Balkan barbarism and “ancient ethnic hatreds” beyond external control.25 Bosnia was even characterized as a fault-line war in a plane- tary cultural “clash of civilizations.”26

Although ethnicity certainly mattered, the popularity of the ethnic hatreds storyline masked far more complex and ambiguous realities on the ground. The focus on ethnic grievances explained too little and obscured too much, particularly the material conditions that enabled and sustained the conflict. It also conveniently overlooked the fact that, while interethnic relations were historically often uneasy and far from harmonious, they were largely peaceful and involved increasing levels of intermarriage (especially in urban areas such as Sarajevo). A singular focus on primordial ethnic animosities also ignored and could not explain the substantial amount of wartime interethnic eco- nomic cooperation in the form of clandestine trading. Indeed, dense interethnic social ties in prewar Sarajevo provided the social capital to facilitate wartime black marketeering and smuggling across ethni- cally divided frontlines.27 And in the postwar period, the ability to transcend ethnic divisions was nowhere more advanced than in the expansive smuggling economy. A narrow focus on ethnic-based ha- treds misses and cannot account for such high levels of clandestine cross-ethnic collusion.

For the Sarajevo government and many sympathetic international observers, the favored public script was a narrative of victimization, which contained some important truths. The Bosnian Serb leadership and their Belgrade sponsors were the main aggressors, bearing dispro- portionate responsibility for the war, and Sarajevans were indisputably

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victims—given that they were on the receiving end of regular shelling and sniper fire. Indeed, the high visibility of this victimization was a crucial weapon for the Sarajevo government in cultivating interna- tional support—and was an unstated reason for why it imposed tough restrictions on Sarajevo citizens wishing to leave the city.28 The main limitation of the victim narrative, however, is that it is more about outrage and condemnation than explanation and understand- ing.29 The victim narrative is particularly prevalent in media report- ing, which “encourages the production of short, unambiguous, neatly scripted stories, replete with villains and heroes.”30 Nowhere was this more evident than in Sarajevo, where foreign camera crews were con- centrated and could count on capturing graphic, close-in images of the victims of sniper fire and shelling.31 Yet as Kalyvas argues, “Repet- itive descriptions of violence stressing its most grotesque aspects substitute emotion for coherent political analysis.”32 The common tendency to simply denounce such violence as “senseless,” whether in Sarajevo or elsewhere, inhibits efforts to actually make sense of it.

Moreover, the murkier reality on the ground in Sarajevo included a less visible internal siege (made possible by the external siege conditions)—ranging from theft and looting by criminals-turned- combatants within the city, to profiteering by unit commanders on the frontline, to the political power grab by the SDA leadership in sacking competent officials and replacing them with party loyalists. The vic- tim narrative, however accurate, discouraged critical scrutiny of the siege within. As one American journalist candidly acknowledges:

Those of us [among the foreign press corps in Sarajevo] who were convinced of the rightness of the Bosnian cause tended to underplay the corruption of Bosnian political elites, who, throughout the war, even in Sarajevo, were making fortunes off the conflict, doing private deals with the Serbs, and placing fam- ily members, friends, and mistresses in cushy jobs abroad. We also wrote less than we should have about the relation between war and crime on the front line, where the black market flour- ished even in the worst moments of the fighting.33

The UN interveners and their Western government backers, mean- while, read from the official humanitarian script—drawing attention

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to the flurry of formal diplomatic initiatives and an unprecedented re- lief effort as an indicator of international concern and determination. This narrative highlighted the delivery of food and other supplies to besieged populations, projected an apolitical image of humanitarian- ism and a commitment to impartiality,34 and pushed for a negotiated peace between the “warring factions” through diplomatic pressure and engagement.35

The massive UN-directed aid operation in Bosnia was indeed impressive—with the Sarajevo airlift the much-celebrated centerpiece— signaling that the West was “doing something.” But the insistence on sticking to the humanitarian script, as critics have rightly pointed out, conveniently substituted for more direct and forceful action by the Western governments underwriting the relief operation. As one senior UNHCR official commented, “Every time the question of settling the conflict came up, the donors responded by saying that they were going to give more money to the humanitarian effort.”36 The particular form of humanitarianism in Bosnia served the strategic objective of avoiding more direct and risky military engagement, with profound political repercussions on the ground.37 In Sarajevo, it made the siege manage- able and thus internationally tolerable—even as it was ritualistically condemned.

The official humanitarian script also obscured the ways in which the relief effort itself was unofficially helping to sustain the war econ- omy, both feeding soldiers and enriching black marketeers. Most im- portant, it overlooked the fact that, on its own, humanitarian aid was far from sufficient to sustain the city’s population. According to one estimate, the UN-directed relief operation supplied an average of only 159 grams (about 0.35 lbs.) of food per person per day in Sarajevo dur- ing the siege.38 In early 1993, the weekly humanitarian ration was re- portedly merely 870 grams per person, which is sufficient for only a day and a half of basic sustenance.39 During the twenty-month period between November 1993 and the end of August 1995, the UNHCR calculated that it was able to fully meet its monthly food aid target/need for Sarajevo only six times.40 Clandestine commercial flows into the city thus played an essential role in keeping the popu- lation supplied,41 indicating that we should pay much greater at- tention to the siege’s backstage dynamics, including its criminalized component.

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Criminalized Conflict Narratives

In this book, I develop a narrative of the siege that draws greater at- tention to the backstage action (and its relation to the front-stage play), including the local and international mechanisms that created and sustained a criminalized war economy. Smuggling networks and quasi-private criminal actors are essential in helping to explain key aspects of the siege. This includes the unexpected ability of the city to defend and supply itself with the help of criminals-turned- combatants and underground trading networks; the role of black market food and fuel in enabling journalists to cover the siege (and thus keeping Sarajevo in the global media spotlight); and the eventual shift in the military balance on the ground in the wider Bosnian war facilitated by clandestine evasion of the arms embargo, which helped to establish the conditions for a diplomatic settlement.

Although there is a massive literature on the war in Bosnia, much of which contains valuable information on clandestine trading, crimi- nal combatants, and manipulation and diversion of humanitarian aid, these topics tend not to be the central analytical focus and are not gen- erally highlighted as part of a causal argument. Many observers have commented that the UN-led humanitarian approach contributed to the prolongation of the siege and wider war, yet the on-the-ground micro-mechanisms that made this particular international response both viable and sustainable over such an extended period of time have not been sufficiently explained and traced in detail. Equally im- portant, most accounts focus largely on the formal, front-stage side of the conflict and its internationalization, paying far too little attention to the informal, backstage side and the interaction between the two.

Rather than providing a comprehensive examination of the siege and the wider war, the more focused and limited purpose here is to show the analytical mileage that can be gained by a detailed tracing of the interaction between the formal and informal dimensions of the siege, particularly between humanitarian assistance and a criminal- ized war economy. In developing this narrative, I build on and bring together emerging interdisciplinary literatures on war economies42

and the political repercussions of humanitarian action.43 Although scholars have increasingly focused on the role of international inter-

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vention in shaping internal wars, less attention has been devoted to examining how such intervention can (often unintentionally) become part of the war economy with long-lasting consequences. In concen- trated form, the Sarajevo siege provides a stark illustration of this dy- namic.

All types of wars—large and small, past and present—have some sort of criminalized dimension. But it is particularly evident in inter- nal conflicts that take place in a context of anemic state capacity, lim- ited production, and reliance on external funding and supplies. Such conflicts are partly made possible by “taxing” and diverting humani- tarian aid, informal diaspora funding,44 illicit trading across frontlines and other forms of smuggling, and the black-market selling of looted goods. They may use irregular combatants who operate in the ab- sence of, alongside, and sometimes within formal military units, and are especially prevalent when at least one side does not have a regular army and is not a full-fledged state.

The importance of the criminalized war economy becomes espe- cially apparent in the context of evading international economic sanctions and arms embargoes. In this respect, external intervention contributes to the criminalization of conflict, creating an economic op- portunity structure for clandestine commerce and making the compet- ing sides more reliant on smuggling channels. Under these conditions, war can be a continuation of business by clandestine means: military success on the battlefield can hinge on entrepreneurial success in the murky underworld of smuggling. Moreover, the black market net- works and embargo-busting infrastructure built up during wartime can persist into the postwar reconstruction period.45

The criminalized dimensions of conflict are too often either neg- lected or treated too narrowly and one-dimensionally. For example, while security scholars have increasingly taken into account the exter- nal aspects of internal wars,46 the emphasis tends to be on how these conflicts are formally internationalized (through UN interventions, diplomatic mediation efforts, provision of aid, peacekeeping, human rights monitoring and media reporting, and so on), paying far less at- tention to how they are also informally internationalized (through sanctions evasions, clandestine arms shipments, and other smuggling practices). This reflects a more general tendency for international rela- tions scholars to shy away from scrutinizing the “covert world” and the

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illicit dimensions of the global economy.47 Smugglers, arms traffickers, and criminals-turned-combatants are typically not treated as central players—strikingly apparent by the virtual absence of these actors from the pages of the leading journals in the field.48 As evident in wartime Sarajevo, these actors do not merely profit from and feed off of military conflict but can be decisive in its conduct, longevity, and outcome. They are not simply the by-products of war but can be integral to the very practice of war. Moreover, as the Sarajevo case illustrates, many of these actors emerge from the devastation of war as part of a new elite with close ties to political leaders and the security apparatus, often impeding reforms and complicating post-conflict reconstruction efforts.

The potential danger of focusing on these type of actors and activities is to present an over-criminalized narrative of the conflict. John Mueller, for instance, suggests that the violence in Bosnia was largely provoked and perpetuated by relatively small groups of marauding thugs and common criminals, leading him to conclude that such organized vio- lence resembles crime more than warfare. Mueller’s provocative argu- ment is a valuable antidote to popular accounts of ethnicity-driven mass violence. But it goes too far in reducing conflict narrowly to the actions of apolitical bands of opportunistic loot-seekers. What is needed is a more nuanced and complex understanding of the criminalized di- mensions of conflict. For example, contrary to Mueller’s assertion that “criminal armies simply do not have the ability, or more accurately the will, to stand and fight, and they will fade away,” not all criminal com- batants are necessarily cowardly—and indeed, as evident early on in the siege of Sarajevo, can sometimes show impressive resolve, stand their ground, and even be heroic in dire circumstances.49

A broader analysis also needs to go beyond the role of criminal combatants to include the much more diverse set of local and interna- tional actors, including arms dealers, embargo busters, and local black market entrepreneurs that make up the criminalized side of warfare. Equally important, this should not mean taking politics out and simply reducing all behavior to criminality and personal material gain. Differentiations between what is political and what is criminal are too easily overstated and indeed present a false dichotomy. Some economic approaches to conflict, for example, have framed the analy- sis around a separation between greed and grievance motives, when in fact the distinction can substantially blur in practice.50 As evident in

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the story of the siege of Sarajevo and the wider war in Bosnia, crimi- nality and private predation do not simply trump politics in wartime but rather interact with it in complex ways. Some aspects of the crim- inalized side of conflict are state-sponsored and directly serve politi- cal interests, such as when political leaders subcontract out key tasks to criminals and smugglers, because they either cannot or prefer not to perform these tasks themselves. This has long been recognized by American military strategists. For instance, a U.S. Army field manual on urban operations observes:

Criminal elements or organizations may not always work against Army commanders. They can be co-opted or influenced to serve friendly objectives. For example, during World War II the US Navy worked covertly with the Mafia in New York City to secure the New York harbor from German U-boats believed to be torpedoing ships there. The Mafia controlled most dock ac- tivities [in] New York harbor and was perfectly positioned to monitor other subversive waterfront activity. This capability provided needed information to the Navy for its counterintelli- gence and security tasks. New York civil authorities therefore agreed to permit a Navy-Mafia alliance to operate at the port for the greater good of the country.51

Political sponsorship of criminal actors and smuggling practices can provide a license for robbery and war profiteering—while at the same time contributing to strategic war objectives and state-building projects. There can also be much variation in political motives for col- lusion with the criminal underworld beyond self-enrichment. In the Bosnian war, for example, the early Serb use of criminal combatants in irregular paramilitary units (mostly away from the Sarajevo area) helped to obscure the complicity of the Belgrade government52 and compensate for desertions and recruitment difficulties in the regular army.53 For the Sarajevo government, in contrast, the initial military de- pendence on criminals-turned-combatants was more of a survival strat- egy, providing a desperately needed substitute for a regular military force before a formal army with an operational command structure was fully in place. In some respects, this is reminiscent of the old practice of using mercenaries and privateers in early European state-building.54

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Thus, while the Bosnian conflict is characterized as the archetypal ex- ample of a so-called “new” type of warfare,55 it also partly reflects a throwback to a much older form of organized violence—but in a rad- ically different global setting.

The Sarajevo experience also indicates that all aspects of criminal- ized conflict are not uniformly negative and in fact can be essential for daily survival. Indeed, Bosnia as a state would probably not exist (or certainly not in its present form) without the assistance of criminal combatants, black market traders, and arms embargo busters. In this regard, the Sarajevo story represents a case of criminally enabled state-making—a modern-day variant of Charles Tilly’s famous char- acterization of “war making and state making as organized crime.”56

The criminalized side of conflict can have a double-edged and con- tradictory character. As the defense of Sarajevo illustrates, criminal gangs can perform important military functions while also robbing and abusing those they are supposed to be defending. The criminal- ized dimensions of conflict can contribute to the stubborn persistence of war, but also to its ending, for example by tilting the military bal- ance through clandestine weapons procurement. Smuggling is cer- tainly about profits and greed, but at the same time can be essential for daily sustenance. Smuggling is thus not just about illicit enrich- ment but about coping and surviving under desperate circumstances. In the case of wartime Sarajevo, black marketeers were often depicted as opportunistic vultures, feeding on the city’s misery. Many certainly fit this description. Yet the sheer diversity of actors and activities in- volved in the smuggling economy suggests there were many shades of gray, blurring distinctions between patriots and profiteers.

Preview

The story that follows traces the creation, maintenance, lifting, and aftermath of the siege of Sarajevo. The next two chapters focus on the buildup to the siege, its imposition, and its persistence. First, major players in Sarajevo’s criminal underground spearheaded the defense of the city during the first critical weeks and months of the siege be- fore a substantial international presence was established. While also robbing local residents, many of these criminals-turned-soldiers were

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embraced as war heroes for their leadership role before a regular army was fully formed and operational. Second, a thriving black market trade soon emerged that crossed the siege lines, providing an essential supplement to official relief aid. Third, vital military equip- ment and supplies gradually filtered into the city through various smuggling channels—sometimes with the complicity of the interna- tional interveners and even the besiegers. As documented in chapter 3, the UN-directed international relief effort not only conditioned and structured the political economy of the siege, but international actors on the ground also became deeply enmeshed as facilitators and even direct participants in the war economy. Chapter 4 shows how the siege conditions also provided a convenient cover and opportunity to redistribute wealth, privilege, and power within Sarajevo—a “siege within the siege” that largely took place backstage.

Chapter 5 turns to the lifting of the siege. Although minimal access to arms and ammunition placed the Sarajevo government on the de- fensive throughout most of the conflict, evading the UN arms embargo through smuggling channels proved essential not only in sustaining their war effort but in eventually shifting the military balance on the ground. On the front stage, the siege was lifted with the help of NATO air strikes, but backstage the war was brought to an end with an in- flux of smuggled arms to Bosnian government forces (covertly aided by friendly countries such as Iran and quietly encouraged by the United States). Thus, smuggling helped to sustain the conflict—but also helped to bring it to an end.

Chapter 6 examines the legacy of the criminalized side of the siege and wider war, evident in the emergence of a new elite enriched by war profiteering, and an expansive postwar smuggling economy partly based on political protections and informal trading networks built up during wartime. For comparative insights, chapter 7 briefly extends the analysis to other sieges within Bosnia (Srebrenica) and outside the region (Leningrad, Grozny, Falluja), revealing variations across place and time that illuminate what is and is not distinctive about the Sarajevo case. I conclude the book with an evaluation of broader implications and lessons for scholars and practitioners.

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Sarajevo, crowded into a narrow valley between steep foothillsand mountains, could not be more perfectly situated for siegeplanners. Straddling the narrow Miljacka River, the city is thirteen kilometers long on an east-west axis and only three to four kilometers wide. It is in an exceptionally poor defensive position. By the start of the siege in early April 1992, hundreds of artillery pieces, mortars, and tanks encircled the city, dug into positions prepared months in advance. The Serb-held hillside suburb of Grbavica was close to the downtown area and overlooked what became known as “sniper alley,” and the more distant mountains provided perfect terrain for artillery positions.

This story begins with the buildup to the siege, its imposition, and the city’s surprisingly effective and criminally enabled resistance. Rather than bringing a quick end to the siege, the international reac- tion instead helped establish the rules of the game and further crimi- nalize the conflict, with long-lasting repercussions. The point here is not to provide a general explanation of the origins of the war or a de- tailed, blow-by-blow account of its beginning, but rather to show how the covert preparations for conflict, the formative moments dur- ing its outbreak, and the nature of the international reaction all set the stage for a highly criminalized and unexpectedly long siege and wider war.

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The Road to Siege Warfare

In the spring of 1992, Bosnia, one of six republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, declared independence following the earlier international recognition of Slovenia and Croatia as indepen- dent states. Bosnia’s ethnic Serbs, following the leadership of the Ser- bian Democratic Party (SDS), feared minority status in the new Bos- nian state and thus opposed independence. The Bosnian Croats and Muslims, following the respective leaderships of the Croatian Demo- cratic Union (HDZ) and the Party of Democratic Action (SDA), strongly favored independence as a way of avoiding the dominance of neighboring Serbia.1 As the European Community announced recognition of Bosnia as an independent state in early April 1992, one of the most brutal conflicts in recent times began between the Belgrade-aided Bosnian Serbs on one side and Bosnian Croats and Muslims (in an on-and-off alliance of convenience) on the other. The war, which marked the return of siege-style warfare in Europe, lasted from April 6, 1992, to October 12, 1995.

Just a few years earlier, the SDS, HDZ, and SDA, had formed a co- alition of convenience that brought these nationalist political parties to power. As Mirko Pejanovib notes, “They decided to cooperate for the sake of one basic goal: to keep the democratic, liberal, and leftist parties out of power.”2 But beyond the immediate goal of winning the November 1990 elections they could not agree on core issues regard- ing Bosnia’s future. Once in power, Robert Donia observes, the “lead- ers of the three nationalist parties engaged in a systematic division of personnel appointments in every government entity, institution, and enterprise in the city. The kingpins of nationalist party patronage net- works spent much of 1991 securing their fair share of jobs at all levels, in some cases running roughshod over professional qualifications and frequently overriding established succession practices.”3

By mid-1991, the short-lived uneasy alliance between the three na- tionalist parties had come undone. SDS officials moved to set up par- allel institutions in many Sarajevo municipalities. SDS leaders such as Radovan Karadzib harbored plans to besiege the city as early as Sep- tember.4 In November, the Sarajevo newsweekly Slobodna Bosna pub- lished a document revealing that the SDS had established a war staff

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with plans to besiege the city if war were to break out.5 Most Saraje- vans, nevertheless, continued to optimistically believe that war would be avoided, and were thus caught largely unprepared for both its out- break and longevity. Even as war engulfed neighboring Croatia in 1991, including the Serb sieges of Dubrovnik and Vukovar, and the bloodshed began to spill over into Bosnia in early 1992, most Saraje- vans stubbornly held onto the belief that the conflict would not reach their city.

In hindsight, the lack of a strong international response to these earlier Serb military sieges in Croatia may have helped pave the way for the siege of Sarajevo. Robert Toscano, a senior official in the Italian Foreign Ministry’s Directorate of Political Affairs, comments, “It is widely believed that if the international community had ‘drawn the line’ in Dubrovnik, it might have avoided the tragedy of Sarajevo.”6

Warren Zimmerman, the former U.S. ambassador to Belgrade, argues similarly:

Vukovar and Dubrovnik led directly to the merciless attacks on Sarajevo and other Bosnian cities. Yet no Western government at the time called on NATO’s military force to get the JNA [Yugo- slav National Army] to stop shelling Dubrovnik, although NATO’s supreme commander, General John Galvin, had pre- pared contingency plans for doing so. The use of force was sim- ply too big a step to consider in late 1991. I did not recommend it myself—a major mistake. The JNA’s artillery on the hills sur- rounding Dubrovnik and its small craft on the water would have been easy targets. Not only would damage to the city have been averted, but the Serbs would have been taught a lesson about Western resolve that might have deterred at least some of their aggression against Bosnia.7

Much ink has been spilled trying to explain the outbreak of the war in Bosnia. Some arguments stress external economic and political con- ditions as primary explanations,8 others place greater causal weight on domestic factors, such as opportunistic political elites or economic competition over the redistribution of productive assets in the transi- tion to a market-based economy,9 and still others view the conflict as the product of historically rooted ethnic animosities.10 These various

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perspectives, operating at different levels of analysis, share a ten- dency to take for granted or understate how the competing sides ac- tually obtained and sustained their physical capacity to wage war in the first place.11 Antagonistic group history, manipulative politicians, and economic crisis and transition certainly helped create a fertile environment for conflict. But armed conflict by definition requires arms, and there is nothing automatic about the ability to acquire them. While some security scholars argue that “weapons are so readily avail- able through so many channels that any group, including govern- ments, bent on the use of force have no difficulty finding them,”12 the Bosnia experience shows that there can be enormous unevenness in access to weapons, and that this can powerfully shape the strategic calculus to go to war.

The Bosnian Serbs had the overwhelming advantage of being backed by the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), whose Bosnia-based forces had quietly become Bosnian Serb-dominated by early 1992. In January 1992, Serbian president Slobodan Milosevib secretly ordered that all Bosnia-born Serb JNA officers be transferred to Bosnia.13 By April 1992, the vast majority of the 90,000 JNA troops in the republic were Bosnian Serbs.14 When the JNA officially withdrew from Bosnia on May 19, 1992 (some six weeks after the outbreak of the war), most of the army stayed behind—along with their heavy weapons, ammu- nition, and supplies—and simply became part of the newly formed Bosnian Serb army (VRS). In the Sarajevo area, the JNA Fourth Corps was formally disbanded and became the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps of the VRS.

The nationalist Bosnian Serb forces were also heavily advantaged by being covertly armed through trafficking networks from Belgrade. An international arms embargo (UN Security Council Resolution 713) was imposed on the region in September 1991 with the intention of limiting the circulation of weapons and inhibiting war, but in practice the embargo simply cemented the military advantage of the Bosnian Serbs, who were well positioned geographically to access arms and other supplies through smuggling channels to neighboring Serbia.15

Indeed, it was for this reason that Milosevib supported the embargo.16

The embargo was particularly important in reinforcing the enormous imbalance in heavy weapons in favor of the Bosnian Serb forces. Thus, while publicly endorsing the arms embargo on the front stage,

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Milosevib quietly supported and supplied Bosnian Serb forces backstage.

The prewar covert arming of the Bosnian Serbs was substantially orchestrated by Yugoslav State Security and the Ministry of the Inte- rior, and facilitated by the SDS. Two State Security officials, Franko Simatovib (“Frenki”) and Radovan Stojicib (“Badza”), were key archi- tects of the arming efforts.17 JNA military generals were also selec- tively recruited as part of the development of a clandestine network.18

The strategic objective was to use SDS local chapters for deployment of arms and ammunition. Simatovib and Stojicib traveled regularly to Bosnia to organize the SDS and deploy weapons and ammunition. Mihalj Kertes, a leading member of the Milosevib’s ruling Socialist Party, also played a central logistical role, organizing clandestine con- voys of weapons and munitions to the Serb regions in Bosnia in 1990 and 1991.19

While arms were supplied to local Bosnian Serb militias through conduits working for the Serbian Ministry of the Interior, Belgrade- supported paramilitary groups mobilized for action across the border in Bosnia. The covert arming of Bosnian Serbs and subcontracting of irregular paramilitaries helped to obscure the complicity of the Bel- grade government, providing the convenient political cover of plausi- ble deniability.20 In other words, Belgrade could keep up the appear- ance of non-involvement on the front stage, while engaging in covert facilitation backstage. Many of these irregular fighters from Serbia were wooed to Bosnia by the prospect of looting and selling stolen goods on the black market.21 Indeed, many of the irregulars were common criminals.22 In the 1980s and early 1990s, many Yugoslav criminals operating in Western Europe had returned home in the face of intensifying police pressure and tighter immigration restrictions. Conveniently, “the Bosnian war had just started,” wrote a journalist for the Belgrade independent weekly Vreme, “creating the opportu- nity for low-risk robbery in patriotic costume.”23

Some well-known paramilitary leaders were gangsters with close ties to the Yugoslav State Security and Secret Police. The most infa- mous was Zeljko Raznatovib (“Arkan”), whose paramilitary units (“Tigers”) took a lead role in the early ethnic cleansing campaigns in eastern Bosnia.24 Arkan spent much of his youth robbing banks in Western Europe. Having escaped from prison, he returned to Bel-

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grade in the 1980s. At the end of 1990 he became the head of Delije, the official fan club of the local Red Star soccer team, from which he selectively found recruits for his Serbian Volunteer Guard. He report- edly made a fortune on the Belgrade black market by selling looted goods from his military exploits in Bosnia.25 Access to clandestine arms flows and irregular Serb paramilitary units would provide the means to quickly capture and ethnically cleanse some 70 percent of Bosnian territory at the start of the war while much of international attention was fixated on developments in Sarajevo. By the first sum- mer of the war, most of eastern Bosnia was in the hands of Bosnian Serb forces.

JNA backing, paramilitary support, and a successful clandestine arming effort bolstered Bosnian Serb confidence that they could win quickly and decisively, enhancing their willingness and incentives to go to war. They expected a short conflict with limited resistance due to their enormous military power advantage. The Bosnian Serb lead- ership, Tim Judah observes, possessed so many weapons that “it was convinced it would win a crushing victory within weeks.”26 Interna- tional observers had similar expectations. John Fawcett and Victor Tanner note that “there was a widespread assumption on both sides of the Atlantic that Serb forces would rapidly prevail.”27 Bosnian Serb leader Nikola Koljevib was reported to have claimed in April 1992 that the war would end within ten days.28 Momcilo Krajisnik simi- larly commented in March that “everything is ready. In ten days, it will all be over.”29 Radovan Karadzib was even more confident and optimistic, apparently expecting a victory in six days.30 At a heated meeting of the Bosnian parliament on the night of October 14–15, 1991, Karadzib warned Muslim politicians: “Do not think that you will not lead Bosnia-Herzegovina to hell . . . because the Muslim people cannot defend themselves if there is war. . . . How will you prevent everyone from being killed in Bosnia-Herzegovina?”31

The Sarajevo government was woefully under-prepared for war,32

naively counted on international military support if war broke out, was the most vulnerable to an arms embargo, and was in an ex- tremely weak geographic and financial position to access arms sup- plies on the international black market. Not only did the Sarajevo government lack an organized military, but President Alija Izetbe- govib deliberately avoided stockpiling weapons and supplies for the

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possibility of war. Indeed, an important source of arms for the gov- ernment was confiscated weapons from Serbs in the city who had been covertly supplied by the SDS (thus, in a roundabout way, the SDS ironically helped to supply the defense of the city).33 The Interna- tional Peace Research Institute in Stockholm calculated that Bosnian government forces were outgunned nine-to-one by Serb forces.34

Backstage war preparations by Bosnian Muslims were largely lim- ited to two paramilitary formations, the Patriotic League and the Green Berets. The Patriotic League was established in May 1991 under SDA control, soon followed by the creation of the Green Berets. The SDA-paramilitary was informally headquartered in Sarajevo’s Café Herceg-Bosna.35 According to Izetbegovib, the first military ex- perts (mostly former JNA) joined the Patriotic League in July 1991, the first truckload of weapons delivered in August, military training com- menced in September, and the first units were established in October. Nevertheless, the Patriotic League’s organizational capacity and ac- cess to arms remained extremely limited, and was especially anemic in comparison to the Bosnian Serb military arsenal and prepara- tions.36 Local police forces of the Ministry of the Interior, particularly the elite special unit commanded by Dragan Vikib, were also a crucial source of manpower, light weapons, and organization for the city’s defense.

Izetbegovib apparently believed that more extensive and overt front-stage military preparations would be too risky and provocative, and would undermine international sympathy and willingness to in- tervene.37 One can interpret this as either dangerously naïve or as a cynical strategic calculation. Regardless, the stakes were extraordinar- ily high, with Izetbegovib gambling that war would either not come, or if it did that it would spark a strong Western military response on the side of the Sarajevo government. His repeated calls for an interna- tional peacekeeping force in the months leading up to the war fell on deaf ears.

The Start of the Siege and the Criminally Aided Defense

Sarajevo held a special place in Bosnian Serb war plans. The initial objective was not to destroy or sack the entire city, but rather to parti-

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tion it and force the government to surrender. Karadzib stressed that “here [Sarajevo], we are near the viper, and one holds a viper by the throat and not the tail. It is here that the state must be built—Sarajevo is our city.”38 “The Bosnian Serb nationalists,” Donia notes, “aimed to achieve the division of Sarajevo, the capital city, as a microcosm of Bosnia-Herzegovina.”39 In April 1992, SDS vice president Nikola Kol- jevib urged that the partition of Bosnia should begin in Sarajevo.40

Karadzib publicly advocated accomplishing this objective by building a wall through the middle of the city: “Our vision of Sarajevo is like Berlin when the Wall was still standing.”41

In early March 1992 armed SDS supporters set up barricades at major intersections throughout Sarajevo shortly after the republic’s independence referendum (which was boycotted by most Bosnian Serbs). SDA supporters responded with their own set of barricades and checkpoints, sometimes directly across from the SDS positions. The barricades froze traffic in the city and prompted the mobilization of thousands of street demonstrators demanding their removal. The barricades were dismantled, but this would prove to be merely a short-lived pause in an escalating crisis. On April 5, barricades again appeared at key intersections, and once again thousands of peace demonstrators marched through the city. As the crowd approached a roadblock, Serb forces opened fire, killing a young medical student. The crowd swarmed into the General Assembly building, and throughout the next twenty-four hours speakers made impassioned calls for nationalist government leaders, including President Izetbe- govib, to resign in the hope of keeping the peace. On April 6 (the day the European Community recognized Bosnia as an independent state), Serb snipers on the top floor of the Holiday Inn near the As- sembly Building targeted the swelling crowds, killing six and wound- ing more than a dozen more. That same day, Bosnian Serb forces began shelling Sarajevo from hillside positions, officially marking the start of what would become a three and a half year war.

If Sarajevo were to fall or be bisected, the most likely time would have been when the siege was first imposed, before the city was fully mobilized militarily and a substantial international presence had been established. Thus, Sarajevo was most vulnerable during the first criti- cal weeks and months of the siege when the frontlines were most fluid and contested. On May 2, two Serb armored columns came

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within 50 meters of the presidency building, with the apparent aim of cutting the city in half.42 As the first Serb tanks crossed the Miljacka river over the narrow Skenderija bridge, they were repelled by scarce anti-armor weapons. The destroyed armored vehicles blocked further military advancement into the city.43 According to Bosnian military officials, the availability of even a few shoulder-fired rocket launchers changed the military calculus of the Bosnian Serbs, who were wary of exposing their tanks and other armored vehicles in the narrow streets of Sarajevo.44 Also decisive were the military clashes of May 14–16, when local military units pushed Serb forces out of the neighborhood of Pofalibi, creating a secure corridor between central Sarajevo and the government-controlled western parts of the city.45 Judah describes the fighting on May 14 as having “changed the course of the war” and “the single greatest Serbian defeat of the war.”46 If Serb forces had succeeded in bisecting the city, he suggests, the Sarajevo government would likely have collapsed and surrendered.

The Sarajevo government announced the formation of the Bosnian army on April 15, but it would take months for it to grow into a force that actually resembled any kind of formal, organized military struc- ture. Sarajevo’s defenders initially numbered perhaps 10,000 to 15,000 armed personnel.47 In the absence of an established military defense system, Sarajevo’s criminal underground is widely credited for play- ing a critical role in saving the city. What Sarajevo lacked was not manpower but rather arms, organization, coordination, and initiative in setting up the basic elements of a perimeter defense. The city’s criminal gangs—teamed up, ironically, with police forces48 and local residents defending their homes—were relatively well armed and well organized, providing some semblance of cohesion that initially substituted for a formal military structure. Their leadership role at the start of the siege also had a huge psychological effect, providing Sara- jevans with a much-needed boost of optimism and sense of defiance in the face of military encirclement. Indeed, some of Sarajevo’s crimi- nal defenders became instant heroes—embraced and celebrated as a kind of “patriotic mafia.”

One of Sarajevo’s leading criminal defenders was Jusuf “Juka” Prazina. Juka was a thief and debt collector before the war, reportedly commanding a network of some 300 armed “collectors” who would later be the core of his army.49 He had been in prison five times and

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was one of the city’s best-known underworld figures. Juka’s early leadership role in the defense of the city, however, transformed him into a local hero overnight. “At that time every armed man was im- portant, and Juka’s men were well equipped, well trained, and well armed,” notes a senior Interior Ministry special unit commander. “No one can deny the fact that Juka with his men arrived to defend the city when it was most needed.”50 Juka’s “wolves,” as his men were called, grew to as many as 3,000 and were armed with sawed-off shotguns and Kalashnikovs. They reportedly “wore crew-cuts, black jump- suits, sunglasses, basketball shoes, and sometimes masks.”51 Juka rode around town in a stolen red Audi, with his name on the license plate instead of numbers.

Posters of Juka appeared throughout the city, and the local media turned him into a celebrity figure. The singer Senad Ramib appeared on a local television program singing a song praising Juka’s heroics, and an upbeat television commercial featured Juka getting into a car with his bodyguards and a Doberman.52 The commercial included a song with the lyrics:

They’re destroying our town. Shame on them! But they didn’t know About Juka.53

The government rewarded Juka’s heroics by giving him multiple official titles, including commander of the Special Forces of the Re- serve Brigade of the Ministry of the Interior, and the commander of the Special Units of the Army.54 These were actually fictional titles meant to appease and impress Juka, who craved recognition and re- spect and aspired to be the city’s top military leader. As Juka allegedly proclaimed, “They all say I’m a great criminal, why shouldn’t I be a great general too?”55

Other key criminal defenders included Ramiz Delalib and Ismet Bajramovib, both of whom were nicknamed “Belo”—which meant “baldy,” though both men had plenty of hair. The journalist Gojko Berib writes that “Belo” was the “most famous nickname in war-time Sarajevo,” which was “common among petty criminals who returned from prison with shaven heads; there were apparently thirteen with

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the right to that nickname, though only two of them were powerful during the war.”56 In striking contrast to Juka, Belo Delalib, the com- mander of the 9th Motorized Brigade, shunned public attention and the media spotlight—so much so that he prohibited journalists from filming him or taking his picture. The other Belo, Ismet Bajramovib, had been imprisoned for rape, assault, and armed robbery before the war broke out. But as a result of his leadership in the early days of the siege he was, ironically, put in charge of the central prison, and also served as a senior member in the Bosnian military police until the be- ginning of 1993. He played a key leadership role in capturing scarce anti-tank weapons and ammunition from the Marshal Tito JNA bar- racks in early June, and was also instrumental in the defense of Do- brinja, a strategically critical Sarajevo suburb near the airport. He led several major military police actions (including one against renegade soldiers who were abusing and robbing citizens) while at the same time engaging in smuggling, racketeering, and cross-frontline trading.57 “I put Ismet in jail during peacetime, and during the trial the court found he was a psychopath,” noted Jusuf Pusina, the Bosnian interior minis- ter at the start of the war. “Then,” during wartime, “suddenly I found he had more authority than me. It was a surreal moment.”58

Some of those who rose to leadership positions in the initial phase of the city’s defense did not have criminal backgrounds but ran their mili- tary units as their own private gangs and refused to conform to a for- mal military command structure. The most famous and feared was Musan “Caco” Topalovib, a nightclub musician and martial arts expert who oversaw frontline defenses in the area from Skenderija on the left side of the Miljacka River eastward. Operating in the frontline neigh- borhood next to Caco’s was the local crime boss Mujo Zulib, who was able to exploit his underworld acumen to mobilize the defense of the Trebevic line and rise to become the commander of the 1st Mountain Brigade. Zulib used a local coffee shop as his headquarters, barking out orders on his walkie-talkie to his men on the front lines.59 Criminal turf became military turf.

Many of Sarajevo’s small-time criminals rushed to pick up arms at the start of the siege simply thinking it would be fun, short-lived, and offer a mechanism for quick advancement. For example, a com- mander of a small, forty-seven-person unit in Dobrinja at the start of the war recalls that most of his men had some kind of criminal back-

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ground, and that 30–50 percent of them were killed early on “trying to be Rambos.” As he explains it, they grew up watching Rambo-type movies, and genuinely believed that these films depicted what war was actually like, that it would be an adventure. Many assumed they could easily take out tanks with Molotov cocktails, thinking that this would work just as it did in the movies. While most Sarajevans were reluctant at the start of the war to pick up a gun, these men and others like them across the city were eager to do so. “They didn’t need to be very smart,” he says, “just more dangerous and daring than the aver- age person.”60 Juka, for example, had a custom-made “bulletproof vest”—oblivious to the fact that it was not actually bulletproof.61 Zulib had allegedly been turned down from military service before the war due to mental incompetence (which was extremely difficult to achieve), but the initial defense of the city required bravado more than brainpower.62 A penchant for risk-taking and adventurism helped to make up for a lack of military training.

Placing key sections of the city’s perimeter security in the hands of people like Juka, Zulib, Caco, and the two Belos came at a high price, however. A substantial portion of the perimeter defense was priva- tized and criminalized, with the government in effect subcontracting out military tasks that it could not perform on its own. The full reper- cussions were recognized only slowly, with some of the city’s key de- fense lines claimed as personal turf and divided up into individual fiefdoms and protection rackets. In practice, the military command structure was more personal than professional—for example, Sara- jevo’s army brigades were commonly referred to not by their formal titles (such as the “1st Mountain Brigade”) but rather by their leader (such as “Zulib’s unit”); and similarly, rather than identifying a sol- dier as a member of a particular brigade they were more commonly identified simply as one of “Belo’s boys” or “Juka’s boys.” Some of these defense lines became profit centers that controlled key access routes into and out of the city. They formally served as sites of mili- tary confrontation, but informally regulated and facilitated cross- frontline commercial collaboration and exchange. The city was never entirely sealed off, with those on both sides who controlled the access points essentially functioning as gatekeepers and toll collectors. And, as discussed in detail in the next chapter, the substantial international presence in the city became an integral part of this dynamic.

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As the city’s hodge-podge assortment of loosely organized and co- ordinated defense forces swelled during the early months of the siege, it became increasingly difficult for the besiegers to overcome their manpower deficit. Former Bosnian army general Jovan Divjak claims that the Serb army had fewer than 29,000 people along a sixty-four- kilometer-long siege line.63 While the nationalist Serbs enjoyed over- whelmingly superior firepower and had enough men to surround the city, their numbers were insufficient to take the city block-by-block and were extremely reluctant to risk heavy casualties. Their military hardware could keep Sarajevo bottled up and its residents in a state of terror, but had limited use in close-in street fighting once inside the city. This provided the initial conditions for a siege stalemate, which would be powerfully reinforced and institutionalized by the particu- lar international response to the conflict.

The International Response

As shells fell on Sarajevo and Serb forces made large territorial gains elsewhere in Bosnia, Western governments scrambled to “do something” to contain if not resolve the escalating conflict. Beyond fre- quent front-stage condemnations of the violence and calls for peace negotiations, the main international response was a combination of economic sanctions on the Milosevib regime for its support of the rebel Serbs in Bosnia (which turned much of the Serbian economy into a sanctions-busting black market economy), reaffirmation of the re- gional arms embargo (which placed the Sarajevo government at a sub- stantial disadvantage and made it dependent on black market arms), and large-scale delivery of humanitarian aid to the victims of the con- flict, coordinated by the UNHCR and supported by a limited contin- gent of UN troops. These UN-led efforts offered Western leaders a highly visible and symbolically appealing alternative to risky military intervention and a political shield against charges of inaction.64 The UN provided a convenient vehicle to both condemn and contain the conflict without having to intervene more directly. And some UN agencies, such as the UNHCR, were eager to demonstrate their rele- vance to Western governments, viewing the conflict as an opportunity to take a center-stage role and enhance funding, status, and visibility.

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The most important component of the international response to the Bosnian war was an ambitious UN-led humanitarian aid operation, with Sarajevo and its airport as the centerpiece. UN Security Council Resolution 757, in addition to imposing sanctions on the Belgrade government, reaffirmed that supplying besieged Sarajevo with hu- manitarian aid should be the UN’s priority. It called for creating the “necessary conditions for unimpeded delivery of humanitarian sup- plies to Sarajevo and other destinations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, including the establishing of a security zone encompassing Sarajevo and its airport.” In practice, however, the UN separated out protect- ing the city and protecting the airport, viewing the latter as its primary task—essentially signaling that the siege of the city could continue as long as aid deliveries were let in.

The idea of a humanitarian airlift gained political support and mo- mentum after a successful two-day U.S. military airlift to Sarajevo in mid-April 1992. The gesture was largely symbolic (the 92,000 ready- to-eat military rations were perhaps enough to feed less than half of the city’s inhabitants for a day), but it had a powerful demonstration effect. Importantly, Serb military officials in control of the airport co- operated with the entire operation—even as they continued to shell the city. Fawcett and Tanner, who were in Sarajevo during the siege working for humanitarian assistance organizations and the United Nations, argue that “the April airlift was a critical forerunner of the UNHCR airlift that began at the end of June 1992. In terms of opera- tions, it set important precedents and operational criteria for the later airlift.” Most important, “it showed that humanitarian access to Sara- jevo could be negotiated with the Serb leadership. . . . From the Serb leadership’s perspective, they doubtless drew the lesson that consent on the humanitarian front—the fact that they had been asked to grant permission for the relief effort—allowed them to get away with other- wise unacceptable behavior, such as shelling the city during the visit of U.S. officials.”65

A humanitarian response to the Sarajevo siege was not only politi- cally appealing in Washington policy circles but in European capitals as well. The French were particularly eager to find alternatives to mil- itary intervention. Adding a key endorsement to the humanitarian approach that was gaining popularity, French president François Mit- terrand took center stage during his dramatic visit to Sarajevo in late

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June and singled out the opening of the airport as the number one pri- ority: “The city is shut off, closed and isolated from the rest of the world, and all the while, it is being subjected to practically constant gunfire that is destroying its vital centers and killing many of its people. This is not acceptable.” He concluded: “Therefore, it is neces- sary to open the airport by one means or another.”66

The UN brokered an airport agreement on June 5, 1992, and the UN-directed airlift was up and running by the end of the month, bringing in more than 150 tons of food and medical supplies a day.67

The UNHCR embraced its new task of running the airlift. As Lowell Martin, chief of the UNHCR’s evaluation section, comments, “Al- though several western governments were willing to assume responsi- bility for the airlift, UNHCR was eager to demonstrate its effectiveness, and worked hard to secure responsibility for this aspect of the relief effort. Once the airlift began, the operation gained a much higher po- litical profile and the need for UNHCR’s presence in former Yugo- slavia ceased to be debated internally.”68

Bosnian Serb leaders had multiple motives and incentives for agree- ing to the airlift and turning over the airport to UN forces. Doing so helped to inhibit more forceful Western action, which was far more likely if the city was cut off. As Laura Silber and Alan Little note, “Karadzib was as concerned as anybody to avoid the starvation of Sarajevo: it would have further increased calls by senior western politicians—including Margaret Thatcher and Bob Dole—for military intervention. Would the world really stand by and watch a European capital starve to death? Karadzib planned happily to vacate the airport, making it look like a major concession and throwing the burden of ‘re- sponsible behavior’ back on the Bosnian government.”69 Karadzib told a senior UN official that he did not want the city sealed off entirely be- cause the Muslims in Sarajevo “needed to breathe” (even as he over- saw an ethnic cleansing campaign elsewhere in Bosnia).70

Importantly, the terms of the airport agreement specified assuring safe access to the airport and the corridors into the city only for aid delivery—which Serb leaders interpreted to mean they could continue to besiege the rest of Sarajevo unimpeded. The airport agreement, and its implicit acceptance of the siege conditions, was therefore a major Serb victory that would powerfully constrain the UN’s role in Sara- jevo throughout the war. In this regard, the initial mission of the UN

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Protection Force (UNPROFOR) deployed to Sarajevo was narrowly conceived as providing protection for the airport and support for humanitarian aid deliveries, not protection for the city’s besieged population. Indeed, as part of the terms of the airport agreement, the UNPROFOR became siege enforcers by not allowing people to exit or enter the city across the airport grounds. While the UNPROFOR’s mandate would expand during the course of the war (to include, for example, monitoring cease-fires and the NATO enforced no-fly zone in Bosnian airspace), securing the airport and providing support for the humanitarian operation would remain its core task.

These highly restrictive rules of engagement, along with a formal commitment to consent and impartiality, generated intense local bit- terness and resentment toward the UNPROFOR. The presence of the UNPROFOR also inhibited external military action for fear of placing the troops in jeopardy (and indeed, some UN soldiers would later be taken as hostages by Serb forces). Equally important, the UNPROFOR leadership had an interest in avoiding confrontations and antagonis- tic relations with the besieging Serbs, since their mobility and access to the city required Serb consent.

The UNPROFOR was initially formed as a small peacekeeping force in Croatia in early 1992, but it would be substantially expanded through the aid mission in Sarajevo and then elsewhere in Bosnia— becoming the largest and most costly peacekeeping effort ever under- taken by the United Nations.71 What began as a force with fewer than 2,000 personnel in the summer of 1992 grew to over 9,000 troops by the middle of 1993 (though never reaching anywhere near what was considered the necessary size). UN Security Council Resolution 761 on June 29, 1992, authorized additional UNPROFOR troops “to en- sure the security and functioning of Sarajevo airport and the delivery of humanitarian assistance.” In early July, 1,000 Canadian troops ar- rived to manage the airport and make the airlift operationally viable.

Not coincidentally, once the airlift was operational, Western pow- ers immediately stopped insisting on a cease-fire and withdrawal of heavy weapons around the city. The airlift made the siege locally manageable and therefore internationally palatable. Shortly after the airlift was underway, General Lewis MacKenzie, the Canadian UN- PROFOR commander, commented, “We’re getting used to working around the shooting.”72 Some UN officials later tried to even avoid

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calling the situation a siege, preferring to describe it as a “militarily ad- vantageous encirclement” for the Serbs and a “tactical disadvantage” for the city’s defenders.73

Making the siege manageable also meant that it would be econom- ically rewarding for those who controlled access to the city. As Faw- cett and Tanner note, the Bosnian Serb leadership may “have begun to realize that a prolonged siege offered promising commercial opportu- nities.”74 They not only had to approve all aid coming into the airport, but also profited by taking a sizeable cut. As stipulated in the airport agreement, almost one-quarter of all aid allocated for the city would be handed over to the besiegers. The UN was, in this sense, literally buying access to the city. The Bosnian Serb leadership also imposed the terms of the airport agreement on land convoys, which also had to enter the city via the airport grounds.75

Some critics warned that this policy of supplying and relying on the consent of the besiegers in order to feed the besieged was counter- productive and a form of appeasement.76 In his memoir, the former U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke describes the UN’s policy of con- sent in harsh terms: “By allowing the Bosnian Serbs to determine what got in, the U.N. had, in effect, become an unintentional accom- plice to Serb policy. In its press releases, the UNHCR boasted about the amount of food it had brought in, not the inadequacy of the sys- tem or the rising death toll.”77 Indeed, from the very start, the airlift was played up as an international success story, with UNPROFOR commander MacKenzie lobbying and manipulating his superiors to give him the high-profile job of running the airport.78

Setting up the UN airlift had immediate political consequences. Most important, it dramatically reduced the prospects of Western military intervention.79 Local actors were keenly aware of the political ramifi- cations of the airlift, which is why Karadzib pushed for it despite op- position from some of his own military leaders.80 On the Sarajevo government side, President Izetbegovib welcomed the airlift even as Vice President Ejup Ganib made a sober assessment of the implications: “By getting out of the airport, just in time, [Serbian leaders] have given the Western powers just enough to allow them to avoid the hard deci- sion of intervening here with military force.”81

In retrospect, the airport agreement and handover of the airport to the UN was the defining moment of international engagement in the

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war in Bosnia. It provided the key mechanism for major powers to make Bosnia first and foremost a humanitarian problem. Based on their experience as senior aid workers in Sarajevo, Fawcett and Tanner argue that “the airport agreement was the turning point in the transformation of the perception of the Bosnian conflict from a war of aggression into a complex humanitarian emergency. It defined the crisis as a humanitar- ian tragedy that called for humanitarian solutions, rather than as a po- litical crisis in need of political measures. It institutionalized the siege of Sarajevo. It made it politically acceptable.”82 The airlift became “the most visible manifestation of Western policy in Bosnia.”83

Similarly, Mark Cutts, a senior UNHCR official, acknowledges that “the airlift developed into a high-profile, donor-led operation which served the political interests of powerful nations who wanted to demonstrate to the world that they were ‘doing something’ in Bosnia. As a tangible and highly visible symbol of the international commu- nity’s efforts to intervene constructively in Bosnia, it became something of an obsession.”84 Pragmatism and expediency trumped: “UNHCR, UNPROFOR and the international community had decided that it was better to have the airlift operating on terms laid down by the Bosnian Serb authorities, than not at all,” Cutts explains. “The problem was that this further empowered the Bosnian Serbs, who turned the tap on and off as they pleased. It gave them enormous leverage over the in- ternational community. Throughout the war, much time was wasted by international negotiators returning almost religiously to Karadzib’s headquarters in Pale, beseeching the Bosnian Serbs to cooperate and pleading with them to turn on the tap to Sarajevo again.”85

The Sarajevo airlift and the entire humanitarian approach to the Bosnian conflict quickly took on a life of its own, becoming an end in itself. Keeping the airlift going became the driving international policy objective, with day-to-day successes measured by how much aid was or was not getting in. UNHCR officials and Washington policymakers became preoccupied with the quantitative indicators—tonnage of food delivered, the number and size of cargo planes and flights per day, and so on. Recalling daily calls from the White House, one administration official put it bluntly: “When the President of the United States wants to know how many tons of lentils have been delivered that day, you know you have no [expletive] policy.”86 Another State Department offi- cial lamented: “They needed guns, we sent them flour.”87

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The limitations and compromises involved in the airport agree- ment are strikingly illustrated by comparing the Sarajevo and Berlin airlifts:

The allies would certainly not have succeeded in delivering such large quantities to Berlin, and in eventually forcing Stalin to back down and lift the blockade, if they had started off with an agreement which allowed the East Germans to dictate the terms of the airlift, to inspect all arriving cargo, to receive a pay-off of one quarter of all arriving supplies, and to have the remainder pass through an East German road checkpoint before being al- lowed into the city.88

The airlift also provided a politically useful front-stage distraction for the besieging Serbs: it focused international attention and concern narrowly on Sarajevo, keeping the rest of the war-torn country off- stage and out of the media spotlight (where some of the worst atroci- ties were taking place, including the mass execution and expulsion of Muslims from towns and villages and the setting up of concentration camps). With Sarajevo occupying center stage, much of the rest of Bosnia was treated as a sideshow. As Donia observes, “Developments in Sarajevo, and access to the city through its airport, became the dom- inant factors in UN decision making, so that policy toward Sarajevo heavily influenced UN policy toward Bosnia-Herzegovina.”89

Importantly, UN control of the airport not only drew media atten- tion to the airlift but also greatly facilitated the influx of foreign jour- nalists into the city, who could conveniently fly in and out to nearby Germany, Croatia, and Italy via the airlift. The opening of the airport turned a city under siege into the most accessible war zone in Bosnia. This partly explains why Sarajevo was transformed into a global media spectacle, becoming the most familiar face of the war.90 The so- called “CNN effect” was real, but provided a narrow and distorted picture: as preparations were being made to get the airlift going, CNN optimistically reported that “some [UN] officials here say the lull in the fighting has given them new hope, that they can return to the job of clearing the airport and making it safe—a first step toward bring- ing saneness [sic] back to the region.”91 Meanwhile, away from the front-stage cameras in Sarajevo, the killings and mass expulsions con-

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tinued elsewhere in Bosnia. Bosnian Serb leader Nikola Koljevib later acknowledged that the international attention on Sarajevo in the sum- mer of 1992 “had allowed us to get on with what we had to do in northern Bosnia.”92 Koljevib told a foreign journalist that he and other Western observers had essentially been conned: “It amazes me that you all took so long to get the point. Poor Sarajevo! That was all you could think about.”93

Opening the airport and starting up the airlift brought desperately needed (though never sufficient) aid to the city: from the summer of 1992 until January of 1996 (longer than the Berlin airlift) there were 12,951 UN aid flights into the city using planes from twenty countries, bringing in 160,677 tons of humanitarian supplies (144,827 tons of food and the rest non-food items such as medical supplies). During some months, the airlift brought in more than 85 percent of the aid ar- riving in the city.94 The fleet of aircraft that composed the airlift repre- sented Sarajevo’s most important link to the rest of the world.

But as the airlift helped to keep the city from starving, it also made the siege tolerable and therefore internationally acceptable—reducing the likelihood of it being lifted. Humanitarian action became, in effect, a new form of containment. It provided a mode of managing the situ- ation without having to resort to direct military force. It also avoided the specter of hundreds of thousands of refugees exiting the city: de- livering aid would help to deter a further mass exodus of Bosnian refugees.95 The result of this process, as Michael Ignatieff puts it, is that “the U.N. allowed itself to become the administrator of the Ser- bian siege of Sarajevo.”96 At the end of a visit to the city, George Soros put it in even stronger terms: “Sarajevo is a concentration camp and the UN is part of the system that maintains it.”97

The airlift not only served the political interests of major powers but also provided a useful mechanism for UN agencies, most notably the UNHCR, to showcase their activities on the front stage and raise their global profile. The Bosnian war and the siege of Sarajevo in particular were key ingredients in the UNHCR’s effort to reinvent itself and be- come a much bigger player. As Gil Loescher notes, “From being a much-maligned agency in 1989, the UNHCR suddenly became one of the most valued and esteemed of all UN agencies.”98 The UNHCR came to be viewed as an “indispensable actor” in keeping the aid op- eration going in Bosnia: “The prestige of the High Commissioner

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soared as she [Sadako Ogata] had access to the world’s political lead- ers and regularly briefed the UN Security Council on developments in Bosnia.”99 Indeed, “Bosnia transformed the UNHCR into the world’s largest relief agency”—an especially impressive achievement given that it had previously been “an obscure humanitarian agency with no emergency relief profile.”100 Although the UNHCR had some earlier operational experience as a relief agency, this was the first time the UNHCR played this role in an ongoing conflict and on such a massive scale. And remarkably, this transformation all took place in a matter of months.101 Designated as the lead UN agency in the conflict, the UNHCR’s influence and status also grew by supervising and coordi- nating all other international relief organizations, which were rushing in to play a humanitarian role. The UNHCR thus became a quasi- government, overseeing a growing number of agencies (more than 250 by the end of 1995).102

Far from prompting a quick lifting of the siege of Sarajevo, the in- ternational response instead institutionalized it, making the city suf- ficiently accessible to be manageable and sustainable. The Serb be- siegers, the besieged Sarajevo government, and the international interveners (major powers working through the UN) all preferred a different outcome than the creation of a high-profile siege stalemate. Nevertheless, the situation offered certain advantages to key actors on all sides, who found it preferable to some of the possible alterna- tives.

For the besieging Serb forces, their first preference, of course, would have been for the Sarajevo government to simply capitulate early on, quickly partition the city and the rest of the country, and avoid any kind of external intervention that would complicate and challenge their plans. This would have preempted turning Sarajevo into a center-stage conflict under intense international scrutiny. In the absence of this immediate outcome, however, Bosnian Serb leaders and their supporters in Belgrade could cope with (and profit from) economic sanctions, were militarily advantaged by the UN arms embargo, and could gain significant political leverage and economic rewards from the mass influx of humanitarian aid. Moreover, this out- come substituted for and inhibited their least preferred outcome: a strong international military response.

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