The Horror of Bosnia
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR The Horror of Bosnia One picture of a naked, screaming child in flames brought the horror of Vietnam home to Americans. Bosnia was brought home by a widely...
...Saddam Hussein, former Assistant Secretary of State Roger Hilsman asserts that the Gulf War, more than any other in modern times, was a "personal clash between two men...
...He also heard that America was turning inward, didn't dare to use force in Bosnia for fear of a quagmire, and could easily have concluded that this was the time to reassert himself in the Middle East...
...In a forthcoming book, George Bush vs...
...The remaining orphans eventually reached safety as wards of Germany at a shelter improvised from a former Soviet air base in the eastern city of Magdeburg...
...Honecker on Trial A word about Erich Honecker, the last Communist boss of East Germany...
...One shudders to think what would happen if the anti-Quayle and anti-Bush forces coalesced...
...As with the Jews, many of them have been forced, at gunpoint, to sign away their homes and possessions...
...Exactly when Saddam Hussein became George Bush's bete noire-as Libya's Muammar Qadaffi was Ronald Reagan's—is hard to say...
...In 1989, Gorbachev vetoed Honecker's plan to shoot down anti-Communist demonstrators...
...He is held responsible for the policy of shooting to kill fleeing refugees, 350 of whom died, although the prosecutors have yet to find a document with his signature ordering the killing...
...For Germany the Honecker trial will be a defining event...
...Nine children with Serbian-sounding names were taken off the bus and held back in the name of Serbian ethnic purity...
...Then, casually, amid proclamations of victory and a celebratory swim in the Tigris River, Saddam gave admittance to the UN inspection team—provided it did not include any citizens of countries in the anti-Iraq coalition...
...The world has grown much smaller since 1938, when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain dismissed the Nazi threat to Czechoslovakia as "a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing...
...He has?partly because of misleading signals?misread America before...
...Still, after German unification, the Soviet Army shielded him and moved him to Moscow, where he took refuge in the Chilean Embassy...
...seemed almost the logo for a campaign that, in early August, appeared to be stumbling from one mishap to another—from a confrontation with unruly Vietnam MIA families whom the President told to "shut up and sit down" to a strident attack by a campaign aide against Governor Clinton that the President had to disavow as violating his own "no sleaze" rules...
...The Bush Administration would be happiest if Bosnia could be kept out of sight during the election campaign...
...The agitation for a change in the Republican ticket may have abated by the time this is read, but at the moment it is almost mind-blowing to contemplate the way stalwart Republicans seem to disagree only on which of the incumbents should bow out...
...But soon after CNN ran film from some of the camps, the President himself finally felt compelled to urge a Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force to assure the delivery of humanitarian aid to Bosnia and Herzegovina...
...Yet at least Panama's Manuel Noriega has been tried and sentenced to prison...
...In former Yugoslavia refugees are not a by-product of war, they are a major objective of the war...
...Saddam survives as a reminder to American voters that the luster of military victory and the liberation of Kuwait have been dimmed both by what led up to the Gulf War and what has followed...
...At Nuremberg, Germans were tried for War crimes by the victorious allies...
...Correspondents in Berlin in 1961 knew him as the man entrusted by Walter Ulbricht, his predecessor, to manage the building of the Berlin Wall...
...His defense is that he was enforcing East German law—his law—prohibiting unauthorized emigration...
...Only belatedly has the State Department confirmed the existence of these camps, while indicating that no action was planned beyond verbal condemnation...
...Vice President Dan Quayle, explaining why Bush broke his "no new taxes" pledge, said that the President was "right in the middle of Desert Storm and Desert Shield" and could not afford a display of budget disunity...
...It seems inconceivable that the hands-off policy could continue indefinitely...
...So, Honecker was forced to leave the Chilean Embassy and was delivered to German justice...
...In Poland, General Wojciech Jaruzelski turned over power peacefully to Lech Walesa and, at last report, has been working on his memoirs in retirement...
...Both of them, says Hilsman, have a tendency to see a conflict of interests in terms of a "personal struggle between rival leaders...
...Two other children on that bus were killed by snipers...
...As a loyal Communist, Honecker may have deserved better from his Russian masters...
...In Romania, Nicolae Ceaucescu and his wife were captured trying to escape, and executed without trial by a firing squad in December 1989...
...But "oops...
...nevertheless, one wonders to what extent his renewed aggressiveness was influenced by his reading of the American election campaign...
...In Hungary, Janos Kadar died in July 1989, and no other Communist leader has been prosecuted...
...Neither explanation reflects very well on the leadership ability of a President generally believed to have allowed himself to be manipulated by his "handlers" in his first campaign almost to a point where they in vented a new personality for him...
...Meanwhile, Bush sent a brigade of troops to Kuwait for military exercises?a demonstrative gesture of warning to Iraq not to invade the kingdom again...
...Nor, indeed, does the eventual waffling on the whole matter by both Matalin and Bush...
...His indictment, running close to 800 pages, charges him with corruption, breach of trust and manslaughter...
...Bush Dangling As for "worse-than-Hitler" Saddam Hussein, in July he took President Bush to the brink of military action, then left him dangling there to utter frustrated imprecations: "bully," "dictator," "merchant of death...
...Britain has arranged an international conference on the crisis scheduled to be held August 26-28...
...Oops...
...Now it is Germans judging a German-and, with him, the whole Communist era...
...Quayle should have taken a closer look at the calendar...
...Bush's basic agreement to put taxes on the table with budget cuts was announced on June 26, 1990...
...Although the State Department denounced the forced removals as "totally abhorrent and savage," the Bush Administration has shown no more inclination than European governments to do anything about them beyond tightening both economic sanctions and the diplomatic isolation of Serbia...
...But Honecker is in a different position from the others...
...Britain's former Foreign Secretary, Lord David Owen, speaking of the Western failure to intervene in Bosnia, has warned Prime Minister John Major, "We made that mistake with the Jews in World War II," a reminder of how the Allies refused to bomb the railway to Auschwitz...
...In 1985, President Mikhail Gorbachev, visiting East Berlin, responded to Honecker's rejection of reform by warning in public that "life punishes those who come too late...
...Fear of an election-year "quagmire" led White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater to describe as "reckless" Democratic Presidential candidate Bill Clinton's calls for United Nations-approved air strikes in support of relief efforts...
...This cunning but insular man—who has not traveled in the West—saw a weakened President, down in the opinion polls, drafting his Secretary of State for a political rescue mission...
...Indeed, it may well be that chagrin and disillusionment with the object of his courtship contributed to Bush's demonization of the ungrateful Iraqi dictator...
...What is justice for a onetime Communist dictator who has presided over vast injustice...
...Today he awaits trial in Berlin's Moabit Prison, where, ironically, he was jailed by the Nazis in the 1930s for Communist activities...
...Kuwait was invaded on August 2. The Desert Storm operation started on January 16, 1991...
...Two-and-a-half million people have been displaced...
...The President's designated bully remains Iraq's Saddam Hussein, whom he has called "worse than Hitler...
...Each of President Bush's wars had a personal demon...
...He has not applied that term to Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, whose followers, in the name of "ethnic cleansing," have put Bosnians and Croats in concentration camps or shipped them away in sealed boxcars...
...But Gorbachev was succeeded by Boris Yeltsin, who has no stake in shielding Communist bosses on the lam and does have a stake in getting German economic assistance...
...It is not what the President has in mind when he talks of receiving late-night telephone calls to apprise him of some "coup in a powerful country" or some "bully halfway around the world...
...His monument came down before he did...
...The Bush Administration, on the other hand, has found some marginal campaign utility in Saddam Hussein...
...But certainly not during the period up to the invasion of Kuwait, when the Bush Administration was befriending Iraq with farm credits and sensitive military intelligence...
...Trying to read Saddam's mind is perilous at best...
...To taunts from Bill Clinton and his Vice Presidential candidate, Al Gore, that the Iraqi President might well be in power longer than the American President, Bush snapped, "Whose son do you want to go to Baghdad to find him...
...The highest-ranking surviving Communist there, Vasil Bilak, is being tried for having called in the Soviet tanks in 1968...
...For three weeks Saddam blocked a United Nations weapons inspection of the Ministry of Agriculture in Baghdad prompted by an intelligence tip whose nature and reliability remain unclear...
...The country where he will be tried is not the country he ruled...
...Bosnia was brought home by a widely disseminated photograph of a tearful orphan behind the bullet-cracked window of a bus...
...Subsequently, he declared all of his ministries off limits to the UN inspectors, whatever their nationalities...
...When Mary Matalin, deputy campaign manager, issued her now famous news release, headlined "Sniveling, Hypocritical Democrats," with renewed insinuations of marital infidelity, she was either (1) doing what Bush wanted her to do, while he maintained "deniability," or (2) doing what he did not want her to do, by placingher judgment above his...
...In Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov has been on trial for more than a year, charged with embezzlement and many other crimes...
...In Czechoslovakia, Gustav Husak died of cancer last November...
Vol. 75 • August 1992 • No. 10
