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CIA.

Report on Bosnia Blames Serbs for 90% of the


War Crimes
By Roger Cohen
Published: March 9, 1995

WASHINGTON, March 8— In what is believed to be the most comprehensive United States


assessment of atrocities in Bosnia, the Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that 90
percent of the acts of "ethnic cleansing" were carried out by Serbs and that leading Serbian
politicians almost certainly played a role in the crimes.

The C.I.A. report, based on aerial photography and what one senior official called "an
enormous amount of precise technical analysis," also concludes that while war crimes were by
no means committed exclusively by Serbs, they were the only party involved in a systematic
attempt to eliminate all traces of other ethnic groups from their territory.

The report, which is so sensitive one official said it was classified at "an obscene level," was
completed early this year. One reason for the highly secret classification may be that it comes
as the United States and its European allies have embraced the Serbian President, Slobodan
Milosevic, as a potential peacemaker. The Administration may fear that wide dissemination of
the report could cause Mr. Milosevic to cease his cooperation, since the C.I.A.'s conclusions
suggest that he is extremely ill-fitted for the role of peacemaker.

The report's contents were made available to The New York Times by three American officials
-- one in Europe and two in Washington -- whose accounts of it coincided. Two expressed
unhappiness with the way American policy has evolved.

Mark Mansfield, a spokesman for the C.I.A., said, "We do not comment on classified reports."
But people close to the agency said the report has been submitted to senior officials at the
Pentagon, the State Department and the National Security Council.

One official, reading from notes he took from the report, quoted it as saying, "Serbs carried out
at least 90 percent of the ethnic cleansings in Bosnia." Ethnic cleansing generally describes the
practice, common in the Bosnian war, of killing, forcibly evicting and persecuting ethnic
groups other than one's own.

The report, the official said, continued by saying no "conclusive evidence" had been found of
the direct involvement of Serbian leaders in the planning and execution of large-scale ethnic
cleansing.

"But," the report added, "the systematic nature of the Serbian actions strongly suggests that
Pale and perhaps Belgrade exercised a carefully veiled role in the purposeful destruction and
dispersal of non-Serb populations." The Bosnian Serb headquarters is in Pale.
The report, the officials said, also contains specific evidence that some Bosnian Serb leaders --
including Radovan Karadzic -- knew of the concentration camps through which many Muslims
and Croats who had been evicted from their homes in 1992 were processed.

Mr. Milosevic and Dr. Karadzic have consistently denied responsibility for the killing and
imprisonment of Muslims in the 70 percent of Bosnia now held by Serbs. In an interview in
December, Dr. Karadzic attributed the departure of nearly three-quarters of a million Muslims
from this area to "chaos and fear" in an uncontrollable war.

The ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Croats cited in the report took place throughout the area
now controlled by Serbs. It was particularly intense in towns, including Prijedor, Banja Luka,
Zvornik, Bijeljina, Vlasenica, Foca and Trebinje.

The report makes nonsense of the view -- now consistently put forward by western European
governments and intermittently by the Clinton Administration -- that the Bosnian conflict is a
civil war for which guilt should be divided between Serbs, Croats and Muslims.

This argument has increasingly been used by countries -- particularly Britain and France -- that
have been opposed to any Western military intervention in the Bosnian conflict. The
Administration has also made the argument as it has backed away from its initial proposals to
counter "Serbian aggression."

"To those who think the parties are equally guilty, this report is pretty devastating," one official
said. "The scale of what the Serbs did is so different. But more than that, it makes clear with
concrete evidence that there was a conscious, coherent and systematic Serbian policy to get rid
of Muslims, through murders, torture and imprisonment."

The Administration has veered back and forth on the degree of Serbian guilt. In 1993, Secretary
of State Warren Christopher suggested that all three sides shared responsibility, telling the
House Foreign Affairs Committee, "You'll find indications of atrocities by all three of the major
parties against each other."

But more recently, the Administration has guardedly returned to the argument that the war is
rooted in a premeditated Serbian attack on Bosnia's Muslim population.

The officials said the report had prompted what one called "a quiet mini-firestorm of negative
reaction in the Pentagon among people who see it as an effort to bring Americans into the
conflict."

One official described the report as "very objective and straightforward" and argued that a
"sanitized version," from which some aerial photographs and other indications of the C.I.A.'s
methods had been removed, should be made public.

The report, an attempt to collate and analyze all the evidence on the war known to the
intelligence agency, says Muslims and Croats also committed atrocities, some of them of great
ferocity. But it concludes that these actions "lack the intensity, sustained orchestration and scale
of what the Bosnian Serbs did."

During the fighting between Bosnian Muslims and Croats in 1993, both sides engaged in ethnic
cleansing, and the Croats opened several concentration camps for Muslims, mainly around
Mostar. Bosnian Serbs have also been hounded from their homes, mainly in central Bosnian
towns like Zenica.

Richard Goldstone, the judge leading the investigations of the International Criminal Tribunal
for the Former Yugoslavia, has said two conditions must be met for political leaders to be
indicted for war crimes: Did they know about the crimes? Did they have the ability to stop
them?

Two officials said that, on the basis of these criteria, the report suggested virtually conclusively
that Serbian leaders could be indicted.

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