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Chapter 11

The Dynamics of Fault Line Wars

IDENTITY: THE RISE OF CIVILIZATION CONSCIOUSNESS

Fault line wars go through processes of intensification, expansion, containment, interruption, and, rarely, resolution. These processes usually begin sequentially, but they also often overlap and may be repeated. Once started, fault line wars, like other communal conflicts, tend to take on a life of their own and to develop in an action-reaction pattern. Identities which had previously been multiple and casual become focused and hardened; communal conflicts are appropriately termed “identity wars.”1 As violence increases, the initial issues at stake tend to get redefined more exclusively as “us” against “them” and group cohesion and commitment are enhanced. Political leaders expand and deepen their appeals to ethnic and religious loyalties, and civilization consciousness strengthens in relation to other identities. A “hate dynamic” emerges, comparable to the “security dilemma” in international relations, in which mutual fears, distrust, and hatred feed on each other.2 Each side dramatizes and magnifies the distinction between the forces of virtue and the forces of evil and eventually attempts to transform this distinction into the ultimate distinction between the quick and the dead.

As revolutions evolve, moderates, Girondins, and Mensheviks lose out to radicals, Jacobins, and Bolsheviks. A similar process tends to occur in fault line wars. Moderates with more limited goals, such as autonomy rather than independence, do not achieve these goals through negotiation, which almost always initially fails, and get supplemented or supplanted by radicals committed to achieving more extreme goals through violence. In the Moro-Philippine conflict, the principal insurgent group, the Moro National Liberation Front was first supplemented by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which had a more extreme position, and then by the Abu Sayyaf, which was still more extreme and rejected the cease-fires other groups negotiated with the Philippine government. In Sudan during the 1980s the government adopted increasingly extreme Islamist positions, and in the early 1990s the Christian insurgency split, with a new group, the Southern Sudan Independence Movement, advocating independence rather than simply autonomy. In the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Arabs, as the mainstream Palestine Liberation Organization moved toward negotiations with the Israeli government, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas challenged it for the loyalty of Palestinians. Simultaneously the engagement of the Israeli government in negotiations generated protests and violence from extremist religious groups in Israel. As the Chechen conflict with Russia intensified in 1992-93, the Dudayev government came to be dominated by “the most radical factions of the Chechen nationalists opposed to any accommodation with Moscow, with the more moderate forces pushed into opposition.” In Tajikistan, a similar shift occurred. “As the conflict escalated during 1992, the Tajik nationalist-democratic groups gradually ceded influence to the Islamist groups who were more successful in mobilizing the rural poor and the disaffected urban youth. The Islamist message also became progressively more radicalized as younger leaders emerged to challenge the traditional and more pragmatic religious hierarchy.” “I am shutting the dictionary of diplomacy,” one Tajik leader said. “I am beginning to speak the language of the battlefield, which is the only appropriate language given the situation created by Russia in my homeland.”3 In Bosnia within the Muslim Party of Democratic Action (SDA), the more extreme nationalist faction led by Alija Izetbegovic became more influential than the more tolerant, multiculturally oriented faction led by Haris Silajdzic.4

The victory of the extremists is not necessarily permanent. Extremist violence is no more likely than moderate compromise to end a fault line war. As the costs in death and destruction escalate, with little to show for them, on each side moderates are likely to reappear, again pointing to the “senselessness” of it all and urging another attempt to end it through negotiations.

In the course of the war, multiple identities fade and the identity most meaningful in relation to the conflict comes to dominate. That identity almost always is defined by religion. Psychologically, religion provides the most reassuring and supportive justification for struggle against “godless” forces which are seen as threatening. Practically, its religious or civilizational community is the broadest community to which the local group involved in the conflict can appeal for support. If in a local war between two African tribes, one tribe can define itself as Muslim and the other as Christian, the former can hope to be bolstered by Saudi money, Afghan mujahedeen, and Iranian weapons and military advisers, while the latter can look-for Western economic and humanitarian aid and political and diplomatic support from Western governments. Unless a group can do as the Bosnian Muslims did and convincingly portray itself as a victim of genocide and thereby arouse Western sympathy, it can only expect to receive significant assistance from its civilizational kin, and apart from the Bosnian Muslims, that has been the case. Fault line wars are by definition local wars between local groups with wider connections and hence promote civilizational identities among their participants.

The strengthening of civilizational identities has occurred among fault line war participants from other civilizations but was particularly prevalent among Muslims. A fault line war may have its origins in family, clan, or tribal conflicts, but because identities in the Muslim world tend to be U-shaped, as the struggle progresses the Muslim participants quickly seek to broaden their identity and appeal to all of Islam, as was the case even with an antifundamentalist secularist like Saddam Hussein. The Azerbaijan government similarly, one Westerner observed, played “the Islamic card.” In Tajikistan, in a war which began as an intra-Tajikistan regional conflict, the insurgents increasingly defined their cause as the cause of Islam. In the nineteenth-century wars between the North Caucasus peoples and the Russians, the Muslim leader Shamil termed himself an Islamist and united dozens of ethnic and linguistic groups “on the basis of Islam and resistance to Russian conquest.” In the 1990s Dudayev capitalized on the Islamic Resurgence that had taken place in the Caucasus in the 1980s to pursue a similar strategy. He was supported by Muslim clerics and Islamist parties, took his oath of office on the Koran (even as Yeltsin was blessed by the Orthodox patriarch), and in 1994 proposed that Chechnya become an Islamic state governed by shari’a. Chechen troops wore green scarves “emblazoned with the word ’Gavazat’ holy war in Chechen,” and shouted “Allahu Akbar” as they went off to battle.5 In similar fashion, the self-definition of Kashmir Muslims shifted from either a regional identity encompassing Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists or an identification with Indian secularism to a third identity reflected in “the rise of Muslim nationalism in Kashmir and the spread of transnational Islamic fundamentalist values, which made Kashmiri Muslims feel a part of both Islamic Pakistan and the Islamic world.” The 1989 insurgency against India was originally led by a “relatively secular” organization, supported by the Pakistan government. Pakistan’s support then shifted to Islamic fundamentalist groups, which became dominant. These groups included “hardcore insurgents” who seemed “committed to continuing their jihad for its own sake whatever the hope and the outcome.” Another observer reported, “Nationalist feelings have been heightened by religious differences; the global rise of Islamic militancy has given courage to Kashmiri insurgents and eroded Kashmir’s tradition of Hindu-Muslim tolerance.”6

A dramatic rise of civilizational identities occurred in Bosnia, particularly in its Muslim community. Historically, communal identities in Bosnia had not been strong; Serbs, Croats, and Muslims lived peacefully together as neighbors; intergroup marriages were common; religious identifications were weak. Muslims, it was said, were Bosnians who did not go to the mosque, Croats were Bosnians who did not go to the cathedral, and Serbs were Bosnians who did not go to the Orthodox church. Once the broader Yugoslav identity collapsed, however, these casual religious identities assumed new relevance, and once fighting began they intensified. Multicommunalism evaporated and each group increasingly identified itself with its broader cultural community and defined itself in religious terms. Bosnian Serbs became extreme Serbian nationalists, identifying themselves with Greater Serbia, the Serbian Orthodox Church, and the more widespread Orthodox community. Bosnian Croats were the most fervent Croatian nationalists, considered themselves to be citizens of Croatia, emphasized their Catholicism, and together with the Croats of Croatia their identity with the Catholic West.

The Muslims’ shift toward civilizational consciousness was even more marked. Until the war got underway Bosnian Muslims were highly secular in their outlook, viewed themselves as Europeans, and were the strongest supporters of a multicultural Bosnian society and state. This began to change, however, as Yugoslavia broke up. Like the Croats and Serbs, in the 1990 elections the Muslims rejected the multicommunal parties, voting overwhelmingly for the Muslim Party of the Democratic Action (SDA) led by Izetbegovic. He is a devout Muslim, was imprisoned for his Islamic activism by the communist government, and in a book, The Islamic Declaration, published in 1970, argues for “the incompatibility of Islam with non-Islamic systems. There can be neither peace nor coexistence between the Islamic religion and non-Islamic social and political institutions.” When the Islamic movement is strong enough it must take power and create an Islamic republic. In this new state, it is particularly important that education and the media “should be in the hands of people whose Islamic moral and intellectual authority is indisputable.”7

As Bosnia became independent Izetbegovic promoted a multiethnic state, in which the Muslims would be the dominant group although short of a majority. He was not, however, a person to resist the Islamization of his country produced by the war. His reluctance to repudiate publicly and explicitly The Islamic Declaration, generated fear among non-Muslims. As the war went on, Bosnian Serbs and Croats moved from areas controlled by the Bosnian government, and those who remained found themselves gradually excluded from desirable jobs and participation in social institutions. “Islam gained greater importance within the Muslim national community, and…a strong Muslim national identity became a part of politics and religion.” Muslim nationalism, as opposed to Bosnian multicultural nationalism, was increasingly expressed in the media. Religious teaching expanded in the schools, and new textbooks emphasized the benefits of Ottoman rule. The Bosnian language was promoted as distinct from Serbo-Croatian and more and more Turkish and Arabic words were incorporated into it. Government officials attacked mixed marriages and the broadcasting of “aggressor” or Serbian music. The government encouraged the Islamic religion and gave Muslims preference in hirings and promotions. Most important, the Bosnian army became Islamized, with Muslims constituting over 90 percent of its personnel by 1995. More and more army units identified themselves with Islam, engaged in Islamic practices, and made use of Muslim symbols, with the elite units being the most thoroughly Islamized ones and expanding in number. This trend led to a protest from five members (including two Croats and two Serbs) of the Bosnian presidency to Izetbegovic, which he rejected, and to the resignation in 1995 of the multicultural-oriented prime minister, Haris Silajdzic.8

Politically Izetbegovic’s Muslim party, the SDA, extended its control over Bosnian state and society. By 1995 it dominated “the army, the civil service and public enterprises.” “Muslims who do not belong to the party,” it was reported, “let alone non-Muslims, find it hard to get decent jobs.” The party, its critics charged, had “become a vehicle for an Islamic authoritarianism marked by the habits of Communist government.”9 Overall, another observer reported:

Muslim nationalism is becoming more extreme. It now takes no account of other national sensibilities; it is the property, privilege, and political instrument of the newly predominant Muslim nation.…

The main result of this new Muslim nationalism is a movement towards national homogenization.…

Increasingly, Islamic religious fundamentalism is also gaining dominance in determining Muslim national interests.10

The intensification of religious identity produced by war and ethnic cleansing, the preferences of its leaders, and the support and pressure from other Muslim states were slowly but clearly transforming Bosnia from the Switzerland of the Balkans into the Iran of the Balkans.

In fault line wars, each side has incentives not only to emphasize it own civilizational identity but also that of the other side. In its local war, it sees itself not just fighting another local ethnic group but fighting another civilization. The threat is thus magnified and enhanced by the resources of a major civilization, and defeat has consequences not just for itself but for all of its own civilization. Hence the urgent need for its own civilization to rally behind it in the conflict. The local war becomes redefined as a war of religions, a clash of civilizations, fraught with consequences for huge segments of humankind. In the early 1990s as the Orthodox religion and the Orthodox Church again became central elements in Russian national identity, which “squeezed out other Russian confessions, of which Islam is the most important,”11 the Russians found it in their interest to define the war between clans and regions in Tajikistan and the war with Chechnya as parts of a broader clash going back centuries between Orthodoxy and Islam, with its local opponents now committed to Islamic fundamentalism and jihad and the proxies for Islamabad, Tehran, Riyadh, and Ankara.

In the former Yugoslavia, Croats saw themselves as the gallant frontier guardians of the West against the onslaught of Orthodoxy and Islam. The Serbs defined their enemies not just as Bosnian Croats and Muslims but as “the Vatican” and as “Islamic fundamentalists” and “infamous Turks” who have been threatening Christianity for centuries. “Karadzic,” one Western diplomat said of the Bosnian Serb leader, “sees this as the anti-imperialist war in Europe. He talks about having a mission to eradicate the last traces of the Ottoman Turkish empire in Europe.”12 The Bosnian Muslims, in turn, identified themselves as the victims of genocide, ignored by the West because of their religion, and hence deserving of support from the Muslim world. All the parties to, and most outside observers of, the Yugoslav wars thus came to see them as religious or ethnoreligious wars. The conflict, Misha Glenny pointed out, “increasingly assimilated the characteristics of a religious struggle, defined by three great European faiths—Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islam, the confessional detritus of the empires whose frontiers collided in Bosnia.”13

The perception of fault line wars as civilizational clashes also gave new life to the domino theory which had existed during the Cold War. Now, however, it was the major states of civilizations who saw the need to prevent defeat in a local conflict, which could trigger a sequence of escalating losses leading to disaster. The Indian government’s tough stand on Kashmir derived in large part from the fear that its loss would stimulate other ethnic and religious minorities to push for independence and thus lead to the breakup of India. If Russia did not end the political violence in Tajikistan, Foreign Minister Kozyrev warned, it was likely to spread to Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. This, it was argued, could then promote secessionist movements in the Muslim republics of the Russian Federation, with some people suggesting the ultimate result might be Islamic fundamentalism in Red Square. Hence the Afghan-Tajik border, Yeltsin said, is “in effect, Russia’s.” Europeans, in turn, expressed concern that the establishment of a Muslim state in the former Yugoslavia would create a base for the spread of Muslim immigrants and Islamic fundamentalism, reinforcing what the French press, interpreting Jacques Chirac, termed “les odeurs d’Islam” in Europe.14 Croatia’s border is, in effect, Europe’s.

As a fault line war intensifies, each side demonizes its opponents, often portraying them as subhuman, and thereby legitimates killing them. “Mad dogs must be shot,” said Yeltsin in reference to the Chechen guerrillas. “These ill-bred people have to be shot…and we will shoot them,” said Indonesian General Try Sutrisno referring to the massacre of East Timorese in 1991. The devils of the past are resurrected in the present: Croats become “Ustashe”, Muslims, “Turks”; and Serbs, “Chetniks.” Mass murder, torture, rape, and the brutal expulsion of civilians all are justifiable as communal hate feeds on communal hate. The central symbols and artifacts of the opposing culture become targets. Serbs systematically destroyed mosques and Franciscan monasteries while Croats blew up Orthodox monasteries. As repositories of culture, museums and libraries are vulnerable, with the Sinhalese security forces burning the Jaffna public library, destroying “irreplaceable literary and historical documents” related to Tamil culture, and Serbian gunners shelling and destroying the National Library in Sarajevo. The Serbs cleanse the Bosnian town of Zvornik of its 40,000 Muslims and plant a cross on the site of the Ottoman tower they have just blown up which had replaced the Orthodox church razed by the Turks in 1463.15 In wars between cultures, culture loses.

CIVILIZATION RALLYING: KIN COUNTRIES AND DIASPORAS

For the forty years of the Cold War, conflict permeated downward as the superpowers attempted to recruit allies and partners and to subvert, convert, or neutralize the allies and partners of the other superpower. Competition was, of course, most intense in the Third World, with new and weak states pressured by the superpowers to join the great global contest. In the post-Cold War world, multiple communal conflicts have superseded the single superpower conflict. When these communal conflicts involve groups from different civilizations, they tend to expand and to escalate. As the conflict becomes more intense, each side attempts to rally support from countries and groups belonging to its civilization. Support in one form or another, official or unofficial, overt or covert, material, human, diplomatic, financial, symbolic, or military, is always forthcoming from one or more kin countries or groups. The longer a fault line conflict continues the more kin countries are likely to become involved in supporting, constraining, and mediating roles. As a result of this “kin-country syndrome,” fault line conflicts have a much higher potential for escalation than do intracivilizational conflicts and usually require intercivilizational cooperation to contain and end them. In contrast to the Cold War, conflict does not flow down from above, it bubbles up from below.

States and groups have different levels of involvement in fault line wars. At the primary level are those parties actually fighting and killing each other. These may be states, as in the wars between India and Pakistan and between Israel and its neighbors, but they may also be local groups, which are not states or are, at best, embryonic states, as was the case in Bosnia and with the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians. These conflicts may also involve secondary level participants, usually states directly related to the primary parties, such as the governments of Serbia and Croatia in the former Yugoslavia, and those of Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus. Still more remotely connected with the conflict are tertiary states, further removed from the actual fighting but having civilizational ties with the participants, such as Germany, Russia, and the Islamic states with respect to the former Yugoslavia; and Russia, Turkey, and Iran in the case of the Armenian-Azeri dispute. These third level participants often are the core states of their civilizations. Where they exist, the diasporas of primary level participants also play a role in fault line wars. Given the small numbers of people and weapons usually involved at the primary level, relatively modest amounts of external aid, in the form of money, weapons, or volunteers, can often have a significant impact on the outcome of the war.

The stakes of the other parties to the conflict are not identical with those of primary level participants. The most devoted and wholehearted support for the primary level parties normally comes from diaspora communities who intensely identify with the cause of their kin and become “more Catholic than the Pope.” The interests of second and third level governments are more complicated. They also usually provide support to first level participants, and even if they do not do so, they are suspected of doing so by opposing groups, which justifies the latter supporting their kin. In addition, however, second and third level governments have an interest in containing the fighting and not becoming directly involved themselves. Hence while supporting primary level participants, they also attempt to restrain those participants and to induce them to moderate their objectives. They also usually attempt to negotiate with their second and third level counterparts on the other side of the fault line and thus prevent a local war from escalating into a broader war involving core states. Figure 11.1 outlines the relationships of these potential parties to fault line wars. Not all such wars have had this full cast of characters, but several have, including those in the former Yugoslavia and the Transcaucasus, and almost any fault line war potentially could expand to involve all levels of participants.

In one way or another, diasporas and kin countries have been involved in every fault line war of the 1990s. Given the extensive primary role of Muslim groups in such wars, Muslim governments and associations are the most frequent secondary and tertiary participants. The most active have been the governments of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and Libya, who together, at times with other Muslim states, have contributed varying degrees of support to Muslims fighting non-Muslims in Palestine, Lebanon, Bosnia, Chechnya, the Transcaucasus, Tajikistan, Kashmir, Sudan, and the Philippines. In addition to governmental support, many primary level Muslim groups have been bolstered by the floating Islamist international of fighters from the Afghanistan war, who have joined in conflicts ranging from the civil war in Algeria to Chechnya to the Philippines. This Islamist international was involved, one analyst noted, in the “dispatch of volunteers in order to establish Islamist rule in Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Bosnia; joint propaganda wars against governments opposing Islamists in one country or another; the establishment of Islamic centers in the diaspora that serve jointly as political headquarters for all of those parties.”16 The Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference have also provided support for and attempted to coordinate the efforts of their members in reinforcing Muslim groups in intercivilizational conflicts.

The Soviet Union was a primary participant in the Afghanistan War, and in the post-Cold War years Russia has been a primary participant in the Chechen War, a secondary participant in the Tajikistan fighting, and a tertiary participant in the former Yugoslav wars. India has had a primary involvement in Kashmir and a secondary one in Sri Lanka. The principal Western states have been tertiary participants in the Yugoslav contests. Diasporas have played a major role on both sides of the prolonged struggles between Israelis and Palestinians, as well as in supporting Armenians, Croatians, and Chechens in their conflicts. Through television, faxes, and electronic mail, “the commitments of diasporas are reinvigorated and sometimes polarized by constant contact with their former homes; ’former’ no longer means what it did.”17

FIGURE 11.1 THE STRUCTURE OF A COMPLEX FAULT LINE WAR

In the Kashmir war Pakistan provided explicit diplomatic and political support to the insurgents and, according to Pakistani military sources, substantial amounts of money and weapons, as well as training, logistical support, and a sanctuary. It also lobbied other Muslim governments on their behalf. By 1995 the insurgents had reportedly been reinforced by at least 1,200 mujahedeen fighters from Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Sudan equipped with Stinger missiles and other weapons supplied by the Americans for their war against the Soviet Union.”18 The Moro insurgency in the Philippines benefited for a time from funds and equipment from Malaysia; Arab governments provided additional funds; several thousands insurgents were trained in Libya; and the extremist insurgent group, Abu Sayyaf, was organized by Pakistani and Afghan fundamentalists.19 In Africa Sudan regularly helped the Muslim Eritrean rebels fighting Ethiopia, and in retaliation Ethiopia supplied “logistic and sanctuary support” to the “rebel Christians” fighting Sudan. The latter also received similar aid from Uganda, reflecting in part its “strong religious, racial, and ethnic ties to the Sudanese rebels.” The Sudanese government, on the other hand, got $300 million in Chinese arms from Iran and training from Iranian military advisers, which enabled it to launch a major offensive against the rebels in 1992. A variety of Western Christian organizations provided food, medicine, supplies, and, according to the Sudanese government, arms to the Christian rebels.20

In the war between the Hindu Tamil insurgents and the Buddhist Sinhalese government in Sri Lanka, the Indian government originally provided substantial support to the insurgents, training them in southern India and giving them weapons and money. In 1987 when Sri Lankan government forces were on the verge of defeating the Tamil Tigers, Indian public opinion was aroused against this “genocide” and the Indian government airlifted food to the Tamils “in effect signaling [President] Jayewardene that India intended to prevent him from crushing the Tigers by force.”21 The Indian and Sri Lankan governments then reached an agreement that Sri Lanka would grant a considerable measure of autonomy to the Tamil areas and the insurgents would turn in their weapons to the Indian army. India deployed 50,000 troops to the island to enforce the agreement, but the Tigers refused to surrender their arms and the Indian military soon found themselves engaged in a war with the guerrilla forces they had previously supported. The Indian forces were withdrawn beginning in 1988. In 1991 the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, was murdered, according to Indians by a supporter of the Tamil insurgents, and the Indian government’s attitude toward the insurgency became increasingly hostile. Yet the government could not stop the sympathy and support for the insurgents among the 50 million Tamils in southern India. Reflecting this opinion, officials of the Tamil Nadu government, in defiance of New Delhi, allowed the Tamil Tigers to operate in their state with a “virtually free run” of their 500-mile coast and to send supplies and weapons across the narrow Palk Strait to the insurgents in Sri Lanka.22

Beginning in 1979 the Soviets and then the Russians became engaged in three major fault line wars with their Muslim neighbors to the south: the Afghan War of 1979-1989, its sequel the Tajikistan war that began in 1992, and the Chechen war that began in 1994. With the collapse of the Soviet Union a successor communist government came to power in Tajikistan. This government was challenged in the spring of 1922, by an opposition composed of rival regional and ethnic groups, including both secularists and Islamists. This opposition, bolstered by weapons from Afghanistan, drove the pro-Russian government out of the capital, Dushanbe, in September 1992. The Russian and Uzbekistan governments reacted vigorously, warning of the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. The Russian 201st Motorized Rifle Division, which had remained in Tajikistan, provided arms to the progovernment forces, and Russia dispatched additional troops to guard the border with Afghanistan. In November 1992 Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan agreed on Russian and Uzbek military intervention ostensibly for peacekeeping but actually to participate in the war. With this support plus Russian arms and money, the forces of the former government were able to recapture Dushanbe and establish control over much of the country. A process of ethnic cleansing followed, and opposition refugees and troops retreated into Afghanistan.

Middle Eastern Muslim governments protested the Russian military intervention. Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan assisted the increasingly Islamist opposition with money, arms, and training. In 1993 reportedly many thousand fighters were being trained by the Afghan mujahedeen, and in the spring and summer of 1993, the Tajik insurgents launched several attacks across the border from Afghanistan killing a number of Russian border guards. Russia responded by deploying more troops to Tajikistan and delivering “a massive artillery and mortar” barrage and air attacks on targets in Afghanistan. Arab governments, however, supplied the insurgents with funds to purchase Stinger missiles to counter the aircraft. By 1995 Russia had about 25,000 troops deployed in Tajikistan and was providing well over half the funds necessary to support its government. The insurgents, on the other hand, were actively supported by the Afghanistan government and other Muslim states. As Barnett Rubin pointed out, the failure of international agencies or the West to provide significant aid to either Tajikistan or Afghanistan made the former totally dependent on the Russians and the latter dependent upon their Muslim civilizational kin. “Any Afghan commander who hopes for foreign aid today must either cater to the wishes of the Arab and Pakistani funders who wish to spread the jihad to Central Asia or join the drug trade.”23

Russia’s third anti-Muslim war, in the North Caucasus with the Chechens, had a prologue in the fighting in 1992-1993 between the neighboring Orthodox Ossetians and Muslim Ingush. The latter together with the Chechens and other Muslim peoples were deported to central Asia during World War II. The Ossetians remained and took over Ingush properties. In 1956-1957 the deported peoples were allowed to return and disputes commenced over the ownership of property and the control of territory. In November 1992 the Ingush launched attacks from their republic to regain the Prigorodny region, which the Soviet government had assigned to the Ossetians. The Russians responded with a massive intervention including Cossack units to support the Orthodox Ossetians. As one outside commentator described it: “In November 1992, Ingush villages in Ossetia were surrounded and shelled by Russian tanks. Those who survived the bombing were killed or taken away. The massacre was carried out by Ossetian OMON [special police] squads, but Russian troops sent to the region ’to keep the peace’ provided their cover.”24 It was, The Economist reported, “hard to comprehend that so much destruction had taken place in less than a week.” This was “the first ethnic-cleansing operation in the Russian federation.” Russia then used this conflict to threaten the Chechen allies of the Ingush, which, in turn, “led to the immediate mobilization of Chechnya and the [overwhelmingly Muslim] Confederation of the Peoples of the Caucasus (KNK). The KNK threatened to send 500,000 volunteers against the Russian forces if they did not withdraw from Chechen territory. After a tense standoff, Moscow backed down to avoid the escalation of the North Ossetian-Ingush conflict into a regionwide conflagration.”25

A more intense and extensive conflagration broke out in December 1994 when Russia launched a full-scale military attack on Chechnya. The leaders of two Orthodox republics, Georgia and Armenia, supported the Russian action, while the Ukrainian president was “diplomatically bland, merely calling for a peaceful settlement of the crisis.” The Russian action was also endorsed by the Orthodox North Ossetian government and 55-60 percent of the North Ossetian people.26 In contrast, Muslims within and without the Russian Federation overwhelmingly sided with the Chechens. The Islamist international immediately contributed fighters from Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, and elsewhere. Muslim states endorsed the Chechen cause, and Turkey and Iran reportedly supplied material help, providing Russia with further incentives to attempt to conciliate Iran. A steady stream of arms for the Chechens began to enter the Russian Federation from Azerbaijan, causing Russia to close its border with that country, thereby also shutting off medical and other supplies to Chechnya.27

Muslims in the Russian Federation rallied behind the Chechens. While calls for a Caucasus-wide Muslim holy war against Russia did not produce that result, the leaders of the six Volga-Ural republics demanded Russia end its military action, and representatives of the Muslim Caucasus republics called for a civil disobedience campaign against Russian rule. The president of the Chuvash republic exempted Chuvash draftees from serving against their follow Muslims. The “strongest protests against the war” occurred in Chechnya’s two neighboring republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan. The Ingush attacked Russian troops on their way to Chechnya, leading the Russian defense minister to declare that the Ingush government “had virtually declared war on Russia,” and attacks on Russian forces also occurred in Dagestan. The Russians responded by shelling Ingush and Dagestani villages.28 The Russian leveling of the village of Pervomaiskoye after the Chechen raid into the city of Kizlyar in January 1996 further aroused Dagestani hostility to the Russians.

The Chechen cause was also helped by the Chechen diaspora, which had in large part been produced by the nineteenth-century Russian aggression against the Caucasus mountain peoples. The diaspora raised funds, procured weapons, and provided volunteers for the Chechen forces. It was particularly numerous in Jordan and Turkey, which led Jordan to take a strong stand against the Russians and reinforced Turkey’s willingness to assist the Chechens. In January 1996 when the war spread to Turkey, Turkish public opinion sympathized with the seizure of a ferry and Russian hostages by members of the diaspora. With the help of Chechen leaders, the Turkish government negotiated resolution of the crisis in a way which further worsened the already strained relations between Turkey and Russia.

The Chechen incursion into Dagestan, the Russian response, and the ferry seizure at the start of 1996 highlighted the possible expansion of the conflict into a general conflict between the Russians and the mountain peoples, along the lines of the struggle that went on for decades in the nineteenth century. “The North Caucasus is a tinderbox,” Fiona Hill warned in 1995, “where a conflict in one republic has the potential to spark a regional conflagration that will spread beyond its borders into the rest of the Russian Federation, and will invite involvement of Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Iran and their North Caucasian diasporas. As the war in Chechnya demonstrates, conflict in the region is not easily contained.…and the fighting has spilled into republics and territories adjacent to Chechnya.” A Russian analyst agreed, arguing that “informal coalitions” were developing along civilizational lines. “Christian Georgia, Armenia, Nagorny-Karabakh and Northern Ossetia are lining up against Moslem Azerbaijan, Abkhazia, Chechnya and Ingushetia.” Already fighting in Tajikistan, Russia was “running the risk of being drawn into a prolonged confrontation with the Moslem world.”29

In another Orthodox-Muslim fault line war, the primary participants were the Armenians of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave and the government and people of Azerbaijan, with the former fighting for independence from the latter. The government of Armenia was a secondary participant, and Russia, Turkey, and Iran had tertiary involvements. In addition, a major role was played by the substantial Armenian diaspora in Western Europe and North America. The fighting began in 1988 before the end of the Soviet Union, intensified during 1992-1993, and subsided after negotiation of a cease-fire in 1994. The Turks and other Muslims backed Azerbaijan, while Russia supported the Armenians but then used its influence with them also to contest Turkish influence in Azerbaijan. This war was the latest episode in both the struggle going back centuries to those between the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire for control of the Black Sea region and the Caucasus, and the intense antagonism between Armenians and Turks going back to the early-twentieth-century massacres of the former by the latter.

In this war, Turkey was a consistent supporter of Azerbaijan and opponent of the Armenians. The first recognition by any country of the independence of a non-Baltic Soviet republic was Turkey’s recognition of Azerbaijan. Throughout the conflict Turkey provided financial and material support to Azerbaijan and trained Azerbaijani soldiers. As violence intensified in 1991-1992 and Armenians advanced into Azerbaijani territory, Turkish public opinion became aroused, and the Turkish government came under pressure to support its ethnic-religious kinspeople. It also feared that this would highlight the Muslim-Christian divide, produce an outpouring of Western support for Armenia, and antagonize its NATO allies. Turkey thus faced the classic cross-pressures of a secondary participant in a fault line war. The Turkish government, however, found it in its interest to support Azerbaijan and confront Armenia. “[I]t’s impossible not to be affected when your kin are killed,” one Turkish official said, and another added, “We are under pressure. Our newspapers are full of the photos of atrocities.…Maybe we should show Armenia that there’s a big Turkey in this region.” President Turgut Özal agreed, saying that Turkey “should scare the Armenians a little bit.” Turkey, along with Iran, warned the Armenians it would not countenance any change in borders. Özal blocked food and other supplies from getting to Armenia through Turkey, as a result of which the population of Armenia was on the verge of famine during the winter of 1992-1993. Also as a result, Russian Marshal Yevgeny Shaposhnikov warned that “If another side [i.e., Turkey] gets involved” in the war, “we will be on the edge of World War III.” A year later Özal was still belligerent. “What can the Armenians do,” he taunted, “if shots happened to be fired.…March into Turkey?” Turkey “will show its fangs.”30

In the summer and fall of 1993 the Armenian offensive, which was approaching the Iranian border, produced additional reactions from both Turkey and Iran, who were competing for influence within Azerbaijan and the Central Asian Muslim states. Turkey declared that the offensive threatened Turkey’s security, demanded that the Armenian forces “immediately and unconditionally” withdraw from Azerbaijani territory, and sent reinforcements to its border with Armenia. Russian and Turkish troops reportedly exchanged gunfire across that border. Prime Minister Tansu Ciller of Turkey declared she would ask for a declaration of war if Armenian troops went into the Azerbaijani enclave of Nakhichevan close to Turkey. Iran also moved forces forward and into Azerbaijan, allegedly to establish camps for the refugees from the Armenian offensives. The Iranian action reportedly led the Turks to believe they could take additional measures without stimulating Russian countermoves and also gave them further incentive to compete with Iran in providing protection to Azerbaijan. The crisis was eventually eased by negotiations in Moscow by the leaders of Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, by American pressure on the Armenian government, and by Armenian government pressure on the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians.31

Inhabiting a small, landlocked country with meager resources bordered by hostile Turkic peoples, Armenians have historically looked for protection to their Orthodox kin, Georgia and Russia. Russia, in particular, has been viewed as a big brother. As the Soviet Union was collapsing, however, and the Nagorono-Karabakh Armenians launched their drive for independence, the Gorbachev regime rejected their demands and dispatched troops to the region to support what was viewed as a loyal communist government in Baku. After the end of the Soviet Union, these considerations gave way to more long-standing historical and cultural ones, with Azerbaijan accusing “the Russian government of turning 180 degrees” and actively supporting Christian Armenia. Russian military assistance to the Armenians actually had begun earlier in the Soviet army, in which Armenians were promoted to higher ranks and assigned to combat units much more frequently than Muslims. After the war began, the 366th Motorized Rifle Regiment of the Russian Army, based in Nagorno-Karabakh, played a leading role in the Armenian attack on the town of Khodjali, in which allegedly up to 1000 Azeris were massacred. Subsequently Russian spetsnaz troops also participated in the fighting. During the winter of 1992-1993, when Armenia suffered from the Turkish embargo, it was “rescued from total economic collapse by an infusion of billions of rubles in credits from Russia.” That spring Russian troops joined regular Armenian forces to open a corridor connecting Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh. A Russian armored force of forty tanks then reportedly participated in the Karabakh offensive in the summer of 1993.32 Armenia, in turn, as Hill and Jewett observe, had “little option but to ally itself closely with Russia. It is dependent upon Russia for raw materials, energy and food supplies, and defense against historic enemies on its borders such as Azerbaijan and Turkey. Armenia has signed all of the CIS economic and military accords, permitted Russian troops to be stationed on its territory and relinquished all claims to former Soviet assets in Russia’s favor.”33

Russian support for the Armenians enhanced Russian influence with Azerbaijan. In June 1993 the Azerbaijani nationalist leader Abulfez Elchibey was ousted in a coup and replaced by the former communist and presumably pro-Russian Gaider Aliyev. Aliyev recognized the need to propitiate Russia in order to restrain Armenia. He reversed Azerbaijan’s refusals to join the Commonwealth of Independent States and to allow Russian troops to be stationed on its territory. He also opened the way to Russian participation in an international consortium to develop Azerbaijan’s oil. In return, Russia began to train Azerbaijani troops and pressured Armenia to end its support of the Karabakh forces and to induce them to withdraw from Azerbaijan territory. By shifting its weight from one side to the other, Russia was able also to produce results for Azerbaijan and counter Iranian and Turkish influence in that country. Russian support for Armenia thus not only strengthened its closest ally in the Caucasus but also weakened its principal Muslim rivals in that region.

Apart from Russia, Armenia’s major source of support was its large, wealthy and influential diaspora in Western Europe and North America, including roughly 1 million Armenians in the United States and 450,000 in France. These provided money and supplies to help Armenia survive the Turkish blockade, officials for the Armenian government, and volunteers for the Armenian armed forces. Contributions to Armenian relief from the American community amounted to $50 million to $75 million a year in the mid-1990s. The diasporans also exercised considerable political influence with their host governments. The largest Armenian communities in the United States are in key states like California, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. As a result, Congress prohibited any foreign aid to Azerbaijan and made Armenia the third largest per capita recipient of U.S. assistance. This backing from abroad was essential to Armenia’s survival and appropriately earned it the sobriquet of “the Israel of the Caucasus.”34 Just as the nineteenth-century Russian attacks on the North Caucasians generated the diaspora that helped the Chechens to resist the Russians, the early-twentieth-century Turkish massacres of Armenians produced a diaspora that enabled Armenia to resist Turkey and defeat Azerbaijan.

The former Yugoslavia was the site of the most complex, confused, and complete set of fault line wars of the early 1990s. At the primary level, in Croatia the Croatian government and Croats fought the Croatian Serbs, and in Bosnia-Herzegovina the Bosnian government fought the Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats, who also fought each other. At the secondary level, the Serbian government promoted a “Greater Serbia” by helping Bosnian and Croatian Serbs, and the Croatian government aspired to a “Greater Croatia” and supported the Bosnian Croats. At the tertiary level, massive civilization rallying included: Germany, Austria, the Vatican, other European Catholic countries and groups, and, later, the United States on behalf of Croatia; Russia, Greece, and other Orthodox countries and groups behind the Serbs; and Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Libya, the Islamist international, and Islamic countries generally on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims. The latter also received help from the United States, a noncivilization anomaly in the otherwise universal pattern of kin backing kin. The Croatian diaspora in Germany and the Bosnian diaspora in Turkey came to the support of their homelands. Churches and religious groups were active on all three sides. The actions of at least the German, Turkish, Russian, and American governments were significantly influenced by pressure groups and public opinion in their societies.

The support provided by secondary and tertiary parties was essential to the conduct of the war and the constraints they imposed essential to halting it. The Croatian and Serbian governments supplied weapons, supplies, funding, sanctuary, and at times military forces to their people fighting in other republics. Serbs, Croats, and Muslims all received substantial help from civilizational kin outside the former Yugoslavia in the form of money, weapons, supplies, volunteers, military training, and political and diplomatic support. The nongovernmental primary level Serbs and Croats were generally most extreme in their nationalism, unrelenting in their demands, and militant in pursuing their goals. The second level Croatian and Serbian governments initially vigorously supported their primary level kin but their own more diversified interests then led them to play more mediating and containing roles. In parallel fashion, the third level Russian, German, and American governments pushed the second level governments they had been backing toward restraint and compromise.

The breakup of Yugoslavia began in 1991 when Slovenia and Croatia moved toward independence and pleaded with Western European powers for support. The response of the West was defined by Germany, and the response of Germany was in large part defined by the Catholic connection. The Bonn government came under pressure to act from the German Catholic hierarchy, its coalition partner the Christian Social Union party in Bavaria, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and other media. The Bavarian media, in particular, played a crucial role in developing German public sentiment for recognition. “Bavarian TV,” Flora Lewis noted, “much weighed upon by the very conservative Bavarian government and the strong, assertive Bavarian Catholic church which had close connections with the church in Croatia, provided the television reports for all of Germany when the war [with the Serbs] began in earnest. The coverage was very one-sided.” The German government was hesitant about granting recognition, but given the pressures in German society it had little choice. “[S]upport for recognizing Croatia in Germany was opinion-pushed, not government-pulled.” Germany pressured the European Union to recognize the independence of Slovenia and Croatia, and then, having secured that, pushed forward on its own to recognize them before the Union did in December 1991. “Throughout the conflict,” one German scholar observed in 1995, “Bonn considered Croatia and its leader Franjo Tudjman as something of a German foreign-policy protege, whose erratic behavior was irritating but who could still rely on Germany’s firm support.”35

Austria and Italy promptly moved to recognize the two new states, and very quickly the other Western countries, including the United States, followed. The Vatican also played a central role. The Pope declared Croatia to be the “rampart of [Western] Christianity,” and rushed to extend diplomatic recognition to the two states before the European Union did.36 The Vatican thus became a partisan in the conflict, which had its consequences in 1994 when the Pope planned visits to the three republics. Opposition by the Serbian Orthodox Church prevented his going to Belgrade, and Serb unwillingness to guarantee his security led to the cancellation of his visit to Sarajevo. He did go to Zagreb, however, where he honored Cardinal Alojzieje Septinac, who was associated with the fascist Croatian regime in World War II that persecuted and slaughtered Serbs, Gypsies, and Jews.

Having secured recognition by the West of its independence, Croatia began to develop its military strength despite the U.N. arms embargo levied on all the former Yugoslav republics in September 1991. Arms flowed into Croatia from European Catholic countries such as Germany, Poland, and Hungary, as well as from Latin American countries such as Panama, Chile, and Bolivia. As the war escalated in 1991, Spanish arms exports, allegedly “in large part controlled by Opus Dei,” increased sixfold in a short period of time, with most of these presumably finding their way to Ljubliana and Zagreb. In 1993 Croatia reportedly acquired several Mig-21s from Germany and Poland with the knowledge of their governments. The Croatian Defense Forces were joined by hundreds and perhaps thousands of volunteers “from Western Europe, the Croatian diaspora, and the Catholic countries of Eastern Europe” who were eager to fight in “a Christian crusade against both Serbian communism and Islamic fundamentalism.” Military professionals from Western countries provided technical assistance. Thanks in part to this kin country help, the Croatians were able to strengthen their military forces and create a counter to the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army.37

Western support for Croatia also included overlooking the ethnic cleansing and the violations of human rights and the laws of war for which the Serbs were regularly denounced. The West was silent when in 1995 the revamped Croatian army launched an attack on the Serbs of Krajina, who had been there for centuries, and drove hundreds of thousands of them into exile in Bosnia and Serbia. Croatia also benefited from its sizable diaspora. Wealthy Croatians in Western Europe and North America contributed funds for arms and equipment. Associations of Croatians in the United States lobbied Congress and the President on their homeland’s behalf. Particularly important and influential were the 600,000 Croatians in Germany. Supplying hundreds of volunteers for the Croatian army, “Croat communities in Canada, the United States, Australia, and Germany mobilized to defend their newly independent-homeland.”38

In 1994 the United States joined in supporting the Croatian military buildup. Ignoring the massive Croatian violations of the U.N. arms embargo, the United States provided military training to the Croatians and authorized top-ranking retired U.S. generals to advise them. The U.S. and German governments gave the green light to the Croatian offensive into Krajina in 1995. American military advisers participated in planning this American-style attack, which according to the Croatians also benefited from intelligence supplied by American spy-satellites. Croatia has become “our de facto strategic ally,” a State Department official declared. This development, it was argued, reflected “a long-term calculation that, ultimately, two local powers will dominate this part of the world—one in Zagreb, one in Belgrade; one tied to Washington, the other locked into a Slavic bloc extending to Moscow.”39

The Yugoslav wars also produced a virtually unanimous rallying of the Orthodox world behind Serbia. Russian nationalists, military officers, parliamentarians, and Orthodox Church leaders were outspoken in their support for Serbia, their disparaging of the Bosnian “Turks,” and their criticism of Western and NATO imperialism. Russian and Serbian nationalists worked together arousing opposition in both countries to the Western “new world order.” In considerable measure these sentiments were shared by the Russian populace, with over 60 percent of Muscovites, for instance, opposing NATO air strikes in the summer of 1995. Russian nationalist groups successfully recruited young Russians in several major cities to join “the cause of Slavic brotherhood.” Reportedly a thousand or more Russians, along with volunteers from Romania and Greece, enlisted in the Serbian forces to fight what they described as the “Catholic fascists” and “Islamic militants.” In 1992 a Russian unit “in Cossack uniforms” was reported operating in Bosnia. In 1995 Russians were serving in elite Serbian military units, and, according to a U.N. report, Russian and Greek fighters participated in the Serbian attack on the U.N. safe area of Zepa.40

Despite the arms embargo, its Orthodox friends supplied Serbia with the weapons and equipment it needed. In early 1993 Russian military and intelligence organizations apparently sold $300 million worth of T-55 tanks, antimissile missiles, and antiaircraft missiles to the Serbs. Russian military technicians reportedly went to Serbia to operate this equipment and to train Serbs to do so. Serbia acquired arms from other Orthodox countries, with Romania and Bulgaria the “most active” suppliers and Ukraine also a source. In addition, Russian peacekeeping troops in Eastern Slavonia diverted U.N. supplies to the Serbs, facilitated Serbian military movements, and helped the Serbian forces acquire weapons.41

Despite economic sanctions, Serbia was able to sustain itself reasonably well off as a result of massive smuggling of fuel and other goods from Timisoara organized by Romanian government officials, and from Albania organized by first Italian and then Greek companies with the connivance of the Greek government. Shipments of food, chemicals, computers, and other goods from Greece went into Serbia through Macedonia, and comparable amounts of Serbian exports came out.42 The combination of the lure of the dollar and sympathy for cultural kin made a mockery of U.N. economic sanctions against Serbia as they also did to the U.N. arms embargo against all the former Yugoslav republics.

Throughout the Yugoslav wars, the Greek government distanced itself from the measures endorsed by Western members of NATO, opposed NATO military action in Bosnia, supported the Serbs at the United Nations, and lobbied the U.S. government to lift the economic sanctions against Serbia. In 1994 the Greek prime minister, Andreas Papandreou, emphasizing the importance of the Orthodox connection with Serbia, publicly attacked the Vatican, Germany, and the European Union for their haste in extending diplomatic recognition to Slovenia and Croatia at the end of 1991.43

As the leader of a tertiary participant, Boris Yeltsin was cross-pressured by the desire, on the one hand, to maintain, expand, and benefit from good relations with the West and, on the other hand, to help the Serbs and to disarm his political opposition, which regularly accused him of caving into the West. Overall the latter concern won out, and Russian diplomatic support for the Serbs was frequent and consistent. In 1993 and 1995 the Russian government vigorously opposed imposing more stringent economic sanctions on Serbia, and the Russian parliament voted almost unanimously in favor of lifting the existing sanctions on the Serbs. Russia also pushed for the tightening of the arms embargo against the Muslims and for applying economic sanctions against Croatia. In December 1993 Russia urged weakening the economic sanctions so as to permit it to supply Serbia with natural gas for the winter, a proposal which was blocked by the United States and Great Britain. In 1994 and again in 1995 Russia staunchly opposed NATO air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs. In the latter year the Russian Duma denounced the bombing by an almost unanimous vote and demanded the resignation of Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev for his ineffectual defense of Russian national interests in the Balkans. Also in 1995 Russia accused NATO of “genocide” against the Serbs, and President Yeltsin warned that sustained bombing would drastically affect Russia’s cooperation with the West including its participation in NATO’s Partnership for Peace. “How can we conclude an agreement with NATO,” he asked, “when NATO is bombing Serbs?” The West was clearly applying a double standard: “How is it, that when Muslims attack no action is taken against them? Or when the Croats attack?”44 Russia also consistently opposed efforts to suspend the arms embargo against the former Yugoslav republics, which had its principal impact on the Bosnian Muslims, and regularly attempted to tighten that embargo.

In a variety of other ways Russia employed its position in the U.N. and elsewhere to defend Serbian interests. In December 1994 it vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution, advanced by the Muslim countries, that would have prohibited the movement of fuel from Serbia to the Bosnian and Croatian Serbs. In April 1994 Russia blocked a U.N. resolution condemning the Serbs for ethnic cleansing. It also prevented appointment of anyone from a NATO country as U.N. war crimes prosecutor because of probable bias against the Serbs, objected to the indictment of Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic by the International War Crimes Tribunal, and offered Mladic asylum in Russia.45 In September 1993 Russia held up renewal of U.N. authorization for the 22,000 U.N. peacekeepers in the former Yugoslavia. In the summer of 1995 Russia opposed but did not veto a Security Council resolution authorizing 12,000 more U.N. peacekeepers and attacked both the Croat offensive against the Krajina Serbs and the failure of Western governments to take action against that offensive.

The broadest and most effective civilization rallying was by the Muslim world on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims. The Bosnian cause was universally popular in Muslim countries; aid to the Bosnians came from a variety of sources, public and private; Muslim governments, most notably those of Iran and Saudi Arabia, competed with each other in providing support and in attempting to gain the influence that generated. Sunni and Shi’ite, fundamentalist and secular, Arab and non-Arab Muslim societies from Morocco to Malaysia all joined in. Manifestations of Muslim support for the Bosnians varied from humanitarian aid (including $90 million raised in 1995 in Saudi Arabia) through diplomatic support and massive military assistance to acts of violence, such as the killing of twelve Croatians in 1993 in Algeria by Islamist extremists “in response to the massacre of our Muslim co-religionists whose throats have been cut in Bosnia.”46 The rallying had a major impact on the course of the war. It was essential to the survival of the Bosnian state and its success in regaining territory after the initial sweeping victories of the Serbs. It greatly stimulated the Islamization of Bosnian society and identification of Bosnian Muslims with the global Islamic community. And it provided an incentive for the United States to be sympathetic to Bosnian needs.

Individually and collectively Muslim governments repeatedly expressed their solidarity with their Bosnian coreligionists. Iran took the lead in 1992, describing the war as a religious conflict with Christian Serbs engaging in genocide against Bosnian Muslims. In taking this lead, Fouad Ajami observed, Iran made “a down-payment on the gratitude of the Bosnian state” and set the model and provided the stimulus for other Muslim powers such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia to follow. At Iran’s prodding the Organization of the Islamic Conference took up the issue and created a group to lobby for the Bosnian cause at the United Nations. In August 1992 Islamic representatives denounced the alleged genocide in the U.N. General Assembly, and on behalf of the OIC, Turkey introduced a resolution calling for military intervention under Article 7 of the U.N. charter. The Muslim countries set a deadline in early 1993 for the West to take action to protect the Bosnians after which they would feel free to provide Bosnia with arms. In May 1993 the OIC denounced the plan devised by the Western nations and Russia to provide safe havens for Muslims and to monitor the border with Serbia but to forswear any military intervention. It demanded the end of the arms embargo, the use of force against Serbian heavy weapons, aggressive patrolling of the Serbian border, and inclusion of troops from Muslim countries in the peacekeeping forces. The following month the OIC, over Western and Russian objections, got the U.N. Conference on Human Rights to approve a resolution denouncing Serb and Croat aggression and calling for an end to the arms embargo. In July 1993, somewhat to the embarrassment of the West, the OIC offered to provide 18,000 peacekeeping troops to the U.N., the soldiers to come from Iran, Turkey, Malaysia, Tunisia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The United States vetoed Iran, and the Serbs objected vigorously to Turkish troops. The latter nonetheless arrived in Bosnia in the summer of 1994, and by 1995 the U.N. Protection Force of 25,000 troops included 7000 from Turkey, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Bangladesh. In August 1993 an OIC delegation, led by the Turkish foreign minister, lobbied Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Warren Christopher to back immediate NATO air strikes to protect the Bosnians against Serb attacks. The failure of the West to take this action, it was reported, created serious strains between Turkey and its NATO allies.47

Subsequently the prime ministers of Turkey and Pakistan made a well-publicized visit to Sarajevo to dramatize Muslim concern, and the OIC again repeated its demands for military assistance to the Bosnians. In the summer of 1995 the failure of the West to defend the safe areas against Serb attacks led Turkey to approve military aid to Bosnia and to train Bosnian troops, Malaysia to commit itself to selling them arms in violation of the U.N. embargo, and the United Arab Emirates to agree to supply funds for military and humanitarian purposes. In August 1995 the foreign ministers of nine OIC countries declared the U.N. arms embargo invalid, and in September the fifty-two members of the OIC approved arms and economic assistance for the Bosnians.

While no other issue generated more unanimous support throughout Islam, the plight of the Bosnian Muslims had special resonance in Turkey. Bosnia had been part of the Ottoman Empire until 1878 in practice and 1908 in theory, and Bosnian immigrants and refugees make up roughly 5 percent of Turkey’s population. Sympathy for the Bosnian cause and outrage at the perceived failure of the West to protect the Bosnians were pervasive among the Turkish people, and the opposition Islamist Welfare Party exploited this issue against the government. Government officials, in turn, emphasized Turkey’s special responsibilities with respect to all Balkan Muslims, and the government regularly pushed for U.N. military intervention to safeguard the Bosnian Muslims.48

By far the most important help the ummah gave the Bosnian Muslims was military assistance: weapons, money to buy weapons, military training, and volunteers. Immediately after the war started the Bosnian government invited in the mujahedeen, and the total number of volunteers reportedly came to about 4000, more than the foreigners who fought for either the Serbs or the Croats. They included units from the Iranian Republican Guards and many who had fought in Afghanistan. Among them were natives of Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan, plus Albanian and Turkish guest workers from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Saudi religious organizations sponsored many volunteers; two dozen Saudis were killed in the very early months of the war in 1992; and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth flew wounded fighters back to Jiddah for medical care. In the fall of 1992 guerrillas from the Shi’ite Lebanese Hezbollah arrived to train the Bosnian army, training which was subsequently largely taken over by Iranian Republican Guards. In the spring of 1994 Western intelligence reported that an Iranian Republican Guard unit of 400 men was organizing extremist guerrilla and terrorist units. “The Iranians,” a U.S. official said, “see this as a way to get at the soft underbelly of Europe.” According to the United Nations, the mujahedeen trained 3000— 5000 Bosnians for special Islamist brigades. The Bosnian government used the mujahedeen for “terrorist, illegal, and shocktroop activities,” although these units often harassed the local population and caused other problems for the government. The Dayton agreements required all foreign combatants to leave Bosnia, but the Bosnian government helped some fighters stay by giving them Bosnian citizenship and enrolling the Iranian Republican Guards as relief workers. “The Bosnian Government owes these groups, and especially the Iranians, a lot,” warned an American official in early 1996. “The Government has proved incapable of confronting them. In 12 months we will be gone, but the mujahedeen intend to remain.”49

The wealthy states of the ummah, led by Saudi Arabia and Iran, contributed immense amounts of money to develop Bosnian military strength. In the early months of the war in 1992, Saudi government and private sources provided $150 million in aid to the Bosnians, ostensibly for humanitarian purposes but widely acknowledged to have been used largely for military ones. Reportedly the Bosnians got $160 million worth of weapons during the first two years of the war. During 1993-1995 the Bosnians received an additional $300 million for arms from the Saudis plus $500 million in purportedly humanitarian aid. Iran was also a major source of military assistance, and according to American officials, spent hundreds of millions of dollars a year on arms for the Bosnians. According to another report, 80 percent to 90 percent of a total of $2 billion worth of arms that went into Bosnia during the early years of the fighting went to the Muslims. As a result of this financial aid, the Bosnians were able to buy thousands of tons of weapons. Intercepted shipments included one of 4000 rifles and a million rounds of ammunition, a second of 11,000 rifles, 30 mortars, and 750,000 rounds of ammunition, and a third with surface-to-surface rockets, ammunition, jeeps, and pistols. All these shipments originated in Iran, which was the principal source of arms, but Turkey and Malaysia also were significant suppliers of weapons. Some weapons were flown directly to Bosnia, but most of them came through Croatia, either by air to Zagreb and then overland or by sea to Split or other Croatian ports and then overland. In return for permitting this, the Croatians appropriated a portion, reportedly one-third, of the weapons and, mindful that they could well be fighting Bosnia in the future, prohibited the transport of tanks and heavy artillery through their territory.50

The money, men, training, and weapons from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and other Muslim countries enabled the Bosnians to convert what everyone called a “ragtag” army into a modestly well equipped, competent, military force. By the winter of 1994 outside observers reported dramatic increases in its organizational coherence and military effectiveness.51 Putting their new military strength to work, the Bosnians broke a cease-fire and launched successful offensives first against Croatian militias and then later in the spring against the Serbs. In the fall of 1994 the Bosnian Fifth Corps moved out from the U.N. safe area of Bihac and drove back Serb forces, producing the biggest Bosnian victory up to that time and regaining substantial territory from the Serbs, who were hampered by President Milosevic’s embargo on support for them. In March 1995 the Bosnian army again broke a truce and began a major advance near Tuzla, which was followed by an offensive in June around Sarajevo. The support of their Muslim kin was a necessary and decisive factor enabling the Bosnian government to make these changes in the military balance in Bosnia.

The war in Bosnia was a war of civilizations. The three primary participants came from different civilizations and adhered to different religions. With one partial exception, the participation of secondary and tertiary actors exactly followed the civilizational model. Muslim states and organizations universally rallied behind the Bosnian Muslims and opposed the Croats and Serbs. Orthodox countries and organizations universally backed the Serbs and opposed the Croats and Muslims. Western governments and elites backed the Croats, castigated the Serbs, and were generally indifferent to or fearful of the Muslims. As the war continued, the hatreds and cleavages among the groups deepened and their religious and civilizational identities intensified, most notably among the Muslims. Overall the lessons of the Bosnian war are, first, primary participants in fault line wars can count on receiving help, which may be substantial, from their civilizational kin; second, such help can significantly affect the course of the war; and third, governments and people of one civilization do not expend blood or treasure to help people of another civilization fight a fault line war.

The one partial exception to this civilizational pattern was the United States, whose leaders rhetorically favored the Muslims. In practice, however, American support was limited. The Clinton administration approved the use of American air power but not ground troops to protect U.N. safe areas and advocated the end of the arms embargo. It did not seriously pressure its allies to support the latter, but it did condone both Iranian shipments of arms to the Bosnians and Saudi funding of Bosnian arms purchases, and in 1994 it ceased enforcing the embargo.52 By doing these things, the United States antagonized its allies and gave rise to what was widely perceived to be a major crisis in NATO. After the Dayton accords were signed, the United States agreed to cooperate with Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries in training and equipping the Bosnian forces. The question thus is: Why during and after the war was the United States the only country to break the civilizational mold and become the single non-Muslim country promoting the interests of the Bosnian Muslims and working with Muslim countries on their behalf? What explains this American anomaly?

One possibility is that it really was not an anomaly, but rather carefully calculated civilizational realpolitik. By siding with the Bosnians and proposing, unsuccessfully, to end the embargo, the United States was attempting to reduce the influence of fundamentalist Muslim countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia with the previously secular and Europe-oriented Bosnians. If this was the motive, however, why did the United States acquiesce in Iranian and Saudi aid and why did it not push more vigorously to end the embargo which would have legitimized Western aid? Why did not American officials publicly warn of the dangers of Islamist fundamentalism in the Balkans? An alternative explanation for American behavior is that the U.S. government was under pressure from its friends in the Muslim world, most notably Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and acceded to their wishes in order to maintain good relations with them. Those relations, however, are rooted in convergences of interests unrelated to Bosnia and were unlikely to be significantly damaged by American failure to help Bosnia. In addition, this explanation would not explain why the United States implicitly approved huge quantities of Iranian arms going into Bosnia at a time when it was regularly challenging Iran on other fronts and Saudi Arabia was competing with Iran for influence in Bosnia.

While considerations of civilizational realpolitik may have played some role in shaping American attitudes, other factors appear to have been more influential. Americans want to identify the forces of good and the forces of evil in any foreign conflict and align themselves with the former. The atrocities of the Serbs early in the war led them to be portrayed as the “bad guys” killing innocents and engaging in genocide, while the Bosnians were able to promote an image of themselves as helpless victims. Throughout the war the American press paid little attention to Croat and Muslim ethnic cleansing and war crimes or the violations of U.N. safe areas and cease-fires by the Bosnian forces. For Americans, the Bosnians became, in Rebecca West’s phrase, their “pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer.”53

American elites also were favorably disposed toward the Bosnians because they liked the idea of a multicultural country, and in the early stages of the war the Bosnian government successfully promoted this image. Throughout the war the American policy remained stubbornly committed to a multiethnic Bosnia despite the fact that the Bosnian Serbs and the Bosnian Croats overwhelmingly rejected it. Although creation of a multiethnic state was obviously impossible if, as they also believed, one ethnic group was committing genocide against another, American elites combined these contradictory images in their minds to produce widespread sympathy for the Bosnian cause. American idealism, moralism, humanitarian instincts, naivete, and ignorance concerning the Balkans thus led them to be pro-Bosnian and anti-Serb. At the same time the absence of both significant American security interests in Bosnia and any cultural connection gave the U.S. government no reason to do much to help the Bosnians except to allow the Iranians and Saudis to arm them. By refusing to recognize the war for what it was, the American government alienated its allies, prolonged the fighting, and helped to create in the Balkans a Muslim state heavily influenced by Iran. In the end the Bosnians felt deep bitterness toward the United States, which had talked grandly but delivered little, and profound gratitude toward their Muslim kin, who had come through with the money and weapons necessary for them to survive and score military victories.

”Bosnia is our Spain,” observed Bernard-Henri Levy, and a Saudi editor agreed: “The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina has become the emotional equivalent of the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Those who died there are regarded as martyrs who tried to save their fellow Muslims.”54 The comparison is apt. In an age of civilizations Bosnia is everyone’s Spain. The Spanish Civil War was a war between political systems and ideologies, the Bosnian War a war between civilizations and religions. Democrats, communists, and fascists went to Spain to fight alongside their ideological brethren, and democratic, communist, and, most actively, fascist governments provided aid. The Yugoslav wars saw a similar massive mobilization of outside support by Western Christians, Orthodox Christians, and Muslims on behalf of their civilizational kin. The principal powers of Orthodoxy, Islam, and the West all became deeply involved. After four years the Spanish Civil War came to a definitive end with the victory of the Franco forces. The wars among the religious communities in the Balkans may subside and even halt temporarily but no one is likely to score a decisive victory, and no victory means no end. The Spanish Civil War was a prelude to World War II. The Bosnian War is one more bloody episode in an ongoing clash of civilizations.

HALTING FAULT LINE WARS

“Every war must end.” Such is the conventional wisdom. Is it true of fault line wars? Yes and no. Fault line violence may stop entirely for a period of time, but it rarely ends permanently. Fault line wars are marked by frequent truces, cease-fires, armistices, but not by comprehensive peace treaties that resolve central political issues. They have this off-again-on-again quality because they are rooted in deep fault line conflicts involving sustained antagonistic relations between groups of different civilizations. The conflicts in turn stem from the geographical proximity, different religions and cultures, separate social structures, and historical memories of the two societies. In the course of centuries these may evolve and the underlying conflict may evaporate. Or the conflict may disappear quickly and brutally if one group exterminates the other. If neither of these happens, however, the conflict continues and so do recurring periods of violence. Fault line wars are intermittent; fault line conflicts are interminable.

Producing even a temporary halt in a fault line war usually depends on two developments. The first is exhaustion of the primary participants. At some point when the casualties have mounted into tens of thousands, refugees into the hundreds of thousands, and cities—Beirut, Grozny, Vukovar—reduced to rubble, people cry “madness, madness, enough is enough,” the radicals on both sides are no longer able to mobilize popular fury, negotiations which have sputtered along unproductively for years come to life, and moderates reassert themselves and reach some sort of agreement for a halt to the carnage. By the spring of 1994 the six-year war over Nagorno-Karabakh had “exhausted” both Armenians and Azerbaijanis and hence they agreed to a truce. In the fall of 1995 it was similarly reported that in Bosnia “All sides are exhausted,” and the Dayton accords materialized.55 Such halts, however, are self-limiting. They enable both sides to rest and replenish their resources. Then when one side sees the opportunity for gain, the war is renewed.

Achieving a temporary pause also requires a second factor: the involvement of nonprimary level participants with the interest and the clout to bring the fighters together. Fault line wars are almost never halted by direct negotiations between primary parties alone and only rarely by the mediation of disinterested parties. The cultural distance, intense hatreds, and mutual violence they have inflicted on each other make it extremely difficult for primary parties to sit down and engage in productive discussion looking toward some form of ceasefire. The underlying political issues, who controls what territory and people on what terms, keep surfacing and prevent agreement on more limited questions.

Conflicts between countries or groups with a common culture can at times be resolved through mediation by a disinterested third party who shares that culture, has recognized legitimacy within that culture, and hence can be trusted by both parties to find a solution rooted in the values of that culture. The Pope could successfully mediate the Argentine-Chilean boundary dispute. In conflicts between groups from different civilizations, however, there are no disinterested parties. Finding an individual, institution, or state whom both parties think trustworthy is extremely difficult. Any potential mediator belongs to one of the conflicting civilizations or to a third civilization with still another culture and other interests which inspire trust in neither party to the conflict. The Pope will not be called in by Chechens and Russians or by Tamils and Sinhalese. International organizations also usually fail because they lack the ability to impose significant costs on or to offer significant benefits to the parties.

Fault line wars are ended not by disinterested individuals, groups, or organizations but by interested secondary and tertiary parties who have rallied to the support of their kin and have the capability to negotiate agreements with their counterparts, on the one hand, and to induce their kin to accept those agreements, on the other. While rallying intensifies and prolongs the war, it generally is also a necessary although not sufficient condition for limiting and halting the war. Secondary and tertiary ralliers usually do not want to be transformed into primary level fighters and hence try to keep the war under control. They also have more diversified interests than primary participants, who are exclusively focused on the war, and they are concerned with other issues in their relations with each other. Hence at some point they are likely to see it in their interest to stop the fighting. Because they have rallied behind their kin, they have leverage over their kin. Ralliers thus become restrainers and halters.

Wars with no secondary or tertiary parties are less likely to expand than others but more difficult to bring to a halt, as are wars between groups from civilizations lacking core states. Fault line wars that involve an insurgency within an established state and that lack significant rallying also pose special problems. If the war continues for any length of time the demands of the insurgents tend to escalate from some form of autonomy to complete independence, which the government rejects. The government usually demands that the insurgents give up their arms as the first step toward stopping the fighting, which the insurgents reject. The government, also quite naturally, resists the involvement by outsiders in what it considers a purely internal problem involving “criminal elements.” Defining it as an internal matter also gives other states an excuse for not becoming involved, as has been the case of the Western powers and Chechnya.

These problems are compounded when the civilizations involved lack core states. The war in Sudan, for instance, which began in 1956, was brought to a halt in 1972, when the parties were exhausted, and the World Council of Churches and the All African Council of Churches, in a virtually unique achievement for nongovernmental international organizations, successfully negotiated the Addis Ababa agreement providing autonomy for southern Sudan. A decade later, however, the government abrogated the agreement, the war resumed, the goals of the insurgents escalated, the position of the government hardened, and efforts to negotiate another halt failed. Neither the Arab world nor Africa had core states with the interest and the clout to pressure the participants. Mediation efforts by Jimmy Carter and various African leaders did not succeed nor did the efforts of a committee of East African states consisting of Kenya, Eritrea, Uganda, and Ethiopia. The United States, which has deeply antagonistic relations with Sudan, could not act directly; nor could it ask Iran, Iraq, or Libya, which have close relationships with Sudan, to play useful roles; hence it was reduced to enlisting Saudi Arabia, but Saudi influence over Sudan also was limited.56

In general, cease-fire negotiations are furthered to the extent that there is relative parallel and equal involvement of secondary and tertiary parties from both sides. In some circumstances, however, a single core state may be powerful enough to bring about a halt. In 1992 the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) attempted to mediate the Armenian-Azerbaijani war. A committee, the Minsk Group, was created that included the primary, secondary, and tertiary parties to the conflict (Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Turkey) plus France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Belarus, and the United States. Apart from the United States and France, with sizable Armenian diasporas, these latter countries had little interest in producing and little or no capability to produce an end to the war. When the two tertiary parties, Russia and Turkey, plus the United States agreed on a plan, it was rejected by the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians. Russia, however, independently sponsored a long series of negotiations in Moscow between Armenia and Azerbaijan which “created an alternative to the Minsk Group, and…thus dissipated the effort of the international community.”57 In the end, after the primary contestants had become exhausted and the Russians had secured Iran’s backing of the negotiations, the Russian effort produced a cease-fire agreement. As secondary parties, Russia and Iran also cooperated in the intermittently successful attempts to arrange a cease-fire in Tajikistan.

Russia will be a continuing presence in the Transcaucasus and will have the capability to enforce the cease-fire it sponsored so long as it has an interest in doing so. This contrasts with the situation of the United States with respect to Bosnia. The Dayton accords built on proposals that had been developed by the Contact Group of interested core states (Germany, Britain, France, Russia, and the United States), but none of the other tertiary parties were intimately involved in working out the final agreement, and two of the three primary parties to the war were on the margins of the negotiations. Enforcement of the agreement rests with an American-dominated NATO force. If the United States withdraws its troops from Bosnia, neither the European powers nor Russia will have incentives to continue to implement the agreement, the Bosnian government, Serbs, and Croats will have every incentive to renew the fighting once they have refreshed themselves, and the Serbian and Croatian governments will be tempted to seize the opportunity to realize their dreams of a Greater Serbia and a Greater Croatia.

Robert Putnam has highlighted the extent to which negotiations between states are “two level games” in which diplomats negotiate simultaneously with constituencies within their country and with their counterparts from the other country. In a parallel analysis, Huntington showed how reformers in an authoritarian government negotiating a transition to democracy with moderates in the opposition must also negotiate with or counter the hard-liners within the government while the moderates must do the same with the radicals in the opposition.58 These two level games involve at a minimum four parties and at least three and often four relations between them. A complex fault line war, however, is a three level game with at least six parties and at least seven relations among them. (See Figure 11.1) Horizontal relations across the fault lines exist between pairs of primary, secondary, and tertiary parties. Vertical relations exist between the parties on different levels within each civilization. Achieving a halt in the fighting in a “full model” war thus is likely to require:

• active involvement of secondary and tertiary parties;

• negotiation by the tertiary parties of the broad terms for stopping the fighting;

• use by the tertiary parties of carrots and sticks to get the secondary parties to accept these terms and to pressure the primary parties to accept them;

• withdrawal of support from and, in effect, the betrayal of the primary parties by the secondary parties; and

• as a result of this pressure, acceptance of the terms by the primary parties, which, of course, they subvert when they see it in their interest to do so.

The Bosnian peace process involved all these elements. Efforts by individual actors, the United States, Russia, the European Union, to produce agreement were notably lacking in success. The Western powers were reluctant to include Russia as a full partner in the process. The Russians vigorously protested their exclusion, arguing that they had historic ties with the Serbs and also more direct interests in the Balkans than any other major power. Russia insisted that it be a full player in the efforts to resolve the conflicts and vigorously denounced the “tendency on the part of the United States to dictate its own terms.” The need to include the Russians became clear in February 1994. Without consulting Russia, NATO issued an ultimatum to the Bosnian Serbs to remove their heavy weapons from around Sarajevo or face air attacks. The Serbs resisted this demand, and a violent encounter with NATO seemed likely. Yeltsin warned that “Some people are trying to resolve the Bosnian question without the participation of Russia” and “We will not allow this.” The Russian government then seized the initiative and persuaded the Serbs to withdraw their weapons if Russia deployed peacekeeping troops to the Sarajevo area. This diplomatic coup prevented escalation of the violence, demonstrated to the West Russian clout with the Serbs, and brought Russian troops to the heart of the disputed area between Bosnian Muslims and Serbs.59 Through this maneuver Russia effectively established its claim to “equal partnership” with the West in dealing with Bosnia.

In April, however, NATO again authorized the bombing of Serbian positions without consulting Russia. This produced an immense negative reaction across the Russian political spectrum and strengthened the nationalist opposition to Yeltsin and Kozyrev. Immediately thereafter, the relevant tertiary powers—Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States—formed the Contact Group to devise a settlement. In June 1994 the group produced a plan which assigned 51 percent of Bosnia to a Muslim-Croat federation and 49 percent to the Bosnian Serbs and which became the basis of the subsequent Dayton agreement. The following year it was necessary to work out arrangements for the participation of Russian troops in the enforcement of the Dayton agreements.

Agreements among the tertiary parties have to be sold to the secondary and primary actors. The Americans, as Russian diplomat Vitaly Churkin said, must lean on the Bosnians, the Germans on the Croats, and the Russians on the Serbs.60 In the early stages of the Yugoslav wars, Russia had made a momentous concession in agreeing to economic sanctions against Serbia. As a kin country which the Serbs could trust, Russia was also at times able to impose constraints on the Serbs and pressure them to accept compromises they would otherwise reject. In 1995, for instance, Russia along with Greece interceded with the Bosnian Serbs to secure the release of Dutch peacekeepers they held hostage. On occasion, however, the Bosnian Serbs reneged on agreements they had made under Russian pressure and thereby embarrassed Russia for not being able to deliver its kin. In April 1994, for example, Russia secured agreement from the Bosnian Serbs to end their attack on the Gorazde, but the Serbs then broke the agreement. The Russians were furious: the Bosnian Serbs have “become mad on war,” declared one Russian diplomat, Yeltsin insisted that “Serbian leadership must fulfill the obligation it has given to Russia,” and Russia withdrew its objections to NATO air strikes.61

While supporting and strengthening Croatia, Germany and other Western states were also able to constrain Croatian behavior. President Tudjman was deeply anxious for his Catholic country to be accepted as a European country and to be admitted into European organizations. The Western powers exploited both the diplomatic, economic, and military support they provided Croatia and the Croatian desire to be accepted into the “club,” to induce Tudjman to compromise on many issues. In March 1995 the case was made to Tudjman that if he wanted to be part of the West he had to allow the U.N. Protection Force to stay in Krajina. “Joining the West,” one European diplomat said, “is very important to Tudjman. He doesn’t want to be left alone with the Serbs and the Russians.” He was also warned to restrict ethnic cleansing as his troops conquered territory in the Krajina and elsewhere peopled by Serbs and to refrain from extending his offensive into Eastern Slavonia. On another issue, the Croatians were told that if they did not join the federation with the Muslims, “the door to the West will be shut to them forever,” as one U.S. official put it.62 As the principal external source of financial support for Croatia, Germany was in a particularly strong position to influence Croatian behavior. The close relation that the United States developed with Croatia also helped to prevent, at least through 1995, Tudjman from implementing his oft-expressed desire to partition Bosnia-Herzegovina between Croatia and Serbia.

Unlike Russia and Germany, the United States lacked cultural commonality with its Bosnian client and hence was in a weak position to pressure the Muslims to compromise. In addition, apart from rhetoric, the United States only helped the Bosnians by turning a blind eye to the violations of the arms embargo by Iran and other Muslim states. The Bosnian Muslims, consequently, felt increasingly grateful to and increasingly identified with the broader Islamic community. Simultaneously they denounced the United States for pursuing a “double standard” and not repelling the aggression against them as it had against Kuwait. Their wrapping themselves in the victim guise made it still more difficult for the United States to pressure them to be accommodating. They thus were able to reject peace proposals, build up their military strength with help from their Muslim friends, and eventually take the initiative and regain a substantial amount of the territory they had lost.

Resistance to compromise is intense among the primary parties. In the Transcaucasus War, the ultranationalist Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnak), which was very strong in the Armenian diaspora, dominated the Nagorno-Karabakh entity, rejected the Turkish-Russian-American peace proposal of May 1993 accepted by the Armenian and Azerbaijani governments, undertook military offensives that produced charges of ethnic cleansing, raised the prospects of a broader war, and aggravated its relations with the more moderate Armenian government. The success of the Nagorno-Karabakh offensive caused problems for Armenia, which was anxious to improve its relations with Turkey and Iran so as to ease the food and energy shortages resulting from the war and the Turkish blockade. “[T]he better things are going in Karabakh, the more difficult it is for Yerevan,” commented one Western diplomat.63 President Levon Ter-Petrossian of Armenia, like President Yeltsin, had to balance pressures from nationalists in his legislature against broader foreign policy interests in accommodating other states, and in late 1994 his government banned the Dashnak party from Armenia.

Like the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians, the Bosnian Serbs and Croats adopted hard-line positions. As a result, as the Croatian and Serbian governments came under pressure to help in the peace process, problems developed in their relations with their Bosnian kin. With the Croats these were less serious, as the Bosnian Croats agreed in form if not in practice to join the federation with the Muslims. Spurred by personal antagonism, the conflict between President Milosevic and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, in contrast, became intense and public. In August 1994 Karadzic rejected the peace plan that had been approved by Milosevic. The Serbian government, anxious to bring sanctions to an end, announced that it was cutting off all trade with the Bosnian Serbs except for food and medicine. In return, the U.N. eased its sanctions on Serbia. The following year Milosevic allowed the Croatian army to expel the Serbs from Krajina and Croatian and Muslim forces to drive them back in northwest Bosnia. He also agreed with Tudjman to permit the gradual return of Serb-occupied Eastern Slavonia to Croatian control. With the approval of the great powers, he then in effect “delivered” the Bosnian Serbs to the Dayton negotiations, incorporating them into his delegation.

Milosevic’s actions brought an end to the U.N. sanctions against Serbia. They also brought him cautious approbation from a somewhat surprised international community. The nationalist, aggressive, ethnic-cleansing, Greater Serbian warmonger of 1992 had become the peacemaker of 1995. For many Serbs, however, he had become a traitor. He was denounced in Belgrade by Serbian nationalists and the leaders of the Orthodox Church and he was bitterly accused of treason by the Krajina and Bosnian Serbs. In this, of course, they replicated the charges West Bank settlers levied at the Israeli government for its agreement with the P.L.O. Betrayal of kin is the price of peace in a fault line war.

Exhaustion with the war and the incentives and pressures of tertiary parties compel changes in the secondary and primary parties. Either moderates replace extremists in power or extremists, like Milosevic, find it in their interest to become moderate. They do so, however, at some risk. Those perceived as traitors arouse far more passionate hatred than enemies. Leaders of the Kashmiri Muslims, Chechens, and Sri Lankan Sinhalese suffered the fate of Sadat and Rabin for betraying the cause and attempting to work out compromise solutions with the archfoe. In 1914 a Serbian nationalist assassinated an Austrian archduke. In the aftermath of Dayton his most likely target would be Slobodan Milosevic.

An agreement to halt a fault line war will be successful, even if only temporarily, to the extent that it reflects the local balance of power among the primary parties and the interests of the tertiary and secondary parties. The 51 percent-49 percent division of Bosnia was not viable in 1994 when the Serbs controlled 70 percent of the country; it became viable when the Croatian and Muslim offensives reduced Serbian control to almost half. The peace process was also helped by the ethnic cleansing which occurred, with Serbs reduced to less than 3 percent of the population of Croatia and members of all three groups being separated violently or voluntarily in Bosnia. In addition, secondary and tertiary parties, the latter often the core states of civilizations, need to have real security or communal interests in a war to sponsor a viable solution. Alone, primary participants cannot halt fault line wars. Halting them and preventing their escalation into global wars depend primarily on the interests and actions of the core states of the world’s major civilizations. Fault line wars bubble up from below, fault line peaces trickle down from above.

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