Sheer survival: choices in war

Andrew Rice

This article was published in Living Ethics: issue 85 spring 2011

The recent arrest of Ratko Mladic for war crimes in Bosnia has increased the intensity of the annual focus on the events at Srebrenica in 1995. That focus invariably neglects the events that led up to the massacre, in
particular the desperate days of mid 1992 until the declaration of a UN Safe Haven in Srebrenica in April 1993. It does not focus on the motivation of the people who fought or sought to survive in that area, nor consider the choices they could or had to make about participation in conflict.

Those days weren’t that long after the end of the Cold War. I recall at university reading of a non-violent resistance school that existed during that time. Worthy arguments were made in what was a Western European setting about choosing not to resist the possible Soviet invader, using instead non-violent means to unsettle
the eventual occupier. Later writings based on similar thinking have argued that such practices could work in other conflict scenarios.

These arguments have pointed to the applicability of this thinking to intracommunity or civil wars. Such wars usually see three groups fight in them. At the core are the true believers: they have unequivocal faith in their cause and are its leaders. The much larger group comprises the opportunists who are there for personal gain and the no-choicers who can not avoid participation. The smaller group beyond that are the criminals who use the nobility of association as a justification for a range of activities.

It’s the no-choice group that is most interesting. The non-violent resistance school would have it that there are always choices. However, in the Cold War example, those choices were premissed on an assumption of civility on the part of the invader and also on accepting a loss of national pride through submission—a challenging notion for many cultures.

The disintegration of Yugoslavia and the rise of nationalist conflict in 1991 and then 1992 saw Croatia and then Bosnia become battlefields for a range of protagonists. The Bosnian Serb politicians—by no means the only protagonists—had a clear strategic intent for Bosnia in 1992: open the route from Serbia to the sea and secure the mineral resources of Eastern Bosnia.

By mid 1992 Serb forces had begun to move on the Muslim areas in Eastern Bosnia. A UN officer described a “slow, remorseless and continuous advance” featuring superior firepower and plentiful ammunition. There was steady, deliberate shelling of front line villages with Serb regular forces working in coordinated ground attacks with irregular forces.

The latter had a strong criminal element. According to the UN officer “it was the Serb PacMan … gobbling up village by village”. It was a true intra-community war where Serb neighbours turned on their Muslim neighbours and vice versa. One Muslim witness described hearing his old maths teacher on the opposition military radio network.

By August of that year Muslim refugees who had been forced from their rural villages were living in nearby forests. Food was short, the weather increasingly difficult, and there was regular shelling of places of shelter or movement. Faced with this onslaught, the choices for the Muslim people were flight, self-defence or offence.

Deliberate orders from the Serb command were to ethnically cleanse villages. The non-violent resistance premiss of stay-andresist was futile.

Armed groups grew out of local village areas, building on a tradition of universal military service and ethnic Muslim representation in the police. A Darwinian evolution saw leaders appointed on reputation as the bravest/toughest. Initially in 1992 these groups protected their villages and the informal ‘refugee camps’ in the forests and operated independently of each other and of the Bosnian Army. Later that year and in 1993 some groups moved out of their local areas as part of coordinated defensive or offensive action in the wider Srebrenica region. For those unable or unwilling to take up arms, choices were stark in the face of the aggression.

A witness in the Oric trial reported Muslim civilians moving behind Muslim counterattacks around the village of Ratkovici in late 1992 and banging pots and pans, presumably to create a sense of a greater force.

Witnesses reported the spontaneous assembly of torbari or ‘bag people’ during major military actions and described how in spite of regular shelling:

People were following even the smallest group of people who were armed. They went in the direction of shelling, shooting, where the action was, any kind of action, because they were expecting to find food, clothes, or anything else that might be useful for sheer survival.

The traditional pastime of soldiers is plundering but they were supplanted in this by desperate tobari. Hunger and fear drove the tobari to be part of the community response to aggression—in part military, but in larger part armed camp follower.

The declaration of the UN Safe Haven merely delayed the eventual Serb victory in Srebrenica by two years. One might argue that the conduct of the victors justified the decisions taken by local Muslims to actively resist the Serb advances of 1992–93. Again, there was little room for testing the theories of the school of non-violent
resistance.

In the same way that local Srebrenica Serbs took up arms to protect their villages from counter-attacks by Muslim forces, the Muslim inhabitants acted in circumstances well beyond the hypothetical. The non-violent resistance school may well have had its place and will continue to do so into the future but it is unlikely to ever provide a one-sizefits- all solution to shaping individual or community choices in times of conflict.