To End a War

by Richard Holbrooke

  Hindsight tends to give historical narrative a sense of inevitability. But there was nothing predetermined about the outcome of the Bosnia negotiations. In August 1995, when they began, it was almost universally believed that they would fail, as all previous efforts had. And we knew that if we failed, the war would continue.

  RICHARD HOLBROOKE

  New York

  April 1998

  Prologue

  But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,

  But often, in the din of strife,

  There rises an unspeakable desire

  After the knowledge of our buried life;

  A thirst to spend our fire and restless force

  In tracking out our true, original course;

  A longing to inquire

  Into the mystery of this heart which beats

  So wild, so deep in us—to know

  Whence our lives come and where they go.

  —MATTHEW ARNOLD, The Buried Life

  THE FIRST TIME I SAW SARAJEVO, I placed my feet for a moment in the cement footprints pressed into the sidewalk on the spot where Gavrilo Princip stood when he fired the bullets that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand. This was in the summer of 1960. I was hitchhiking across southeastern Europe with a friend, and I was nineteen years old. Suddenly, a guide appeared and offered to translate the words engraved in Serbian on the wall above the footprints. “Here, on June 28, 1914,” read the plaque (or so I remember it), “Gavrilo Princip struck the first blow for Serbian liberty.”

  I can still recall my astonishment. “Serbian liberty?” What was this all about? Every college student knew Princip’s act had started Europe’s slide into two world wars and contributed to the rise of both communism and fascism. How could anyone hail it as heroic? And “Serbia” no longer existed as an independent country; it was part of communist Yugoslavia, teeming, or so it seemed to a nineteen-year-old in Eastern Europe for the first time, with grim-faced soldiers and policemen. I never forgot that first brush with extreme nationalism, and it came back to me vividly when Yugoslavia fell apart.

  By the time I saw Sarajevo again, in 1992, thirty-two years had passed. Bosnia had become the worst killing ground in Europe since World War II, and a new phrase had entered the English language: “ethnic cleansing.” With Bosnia on the brink of collapse, I visited the region twice on fact-finding missions for the International Rescue Committee. On the second trip I finally returned to Sarajevo, traveling illegally across Serb lines in a Danish armored personnel carrier. The city, no longer a beautiful and cosmopolitan combination of Muslim, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox cultures, had turned into a desperate hellhole, under heavy mortar, artillery, and sniper attacks. Children gathered twigs for firewood, and people piled shattered buses into makeshift barriers as protection against the constant sniper threat.

  When I reached the war-torn city, I ran into John Burns, the great war correspondent of The New York Times, and asked if he could take me to Princip’s footprints in the pavement. Impossible, he said with a laugh: they had been destroyed by the Bosnian Muslims. But the spirit behind their inscription had been revived—murderously so.*

  * According to Rebecca West in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, the inscription, engraved on “a very modest black tablet,” actually read, “Here, in this historical place, Gavrilo Princip was the initiator of liberty, on the day of St. Vitus, the 28th of June, 1914.” In The Unknown War, Winston Churchill referred to this inscription as “a monument erected by his fellow countrymen [which] records his infamy and their own.” West, pro-Serb throughout her famous book, objected to Churchill’s characterization, and described the words on the plaque as “remarkable in their restraint … [and] justified by their literal truth.”

  CHAPTER 1

  The Most Dangerous Road in Europe

  For all of us there is a twilight zone between history and memory; between the past as a generalized record which is open to relatively dispassionate inspection and the past as a remembered part of, or background to, one’s own life.

  —ERIC HOBSBAWM, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914

  THE MOUNT IGMAN ROUTE TO SARAJEVO was often described as the most dangerous road in Europe. Parts of the road, a narrow, winding red-dirt track originally used only by farmers and shepherds, were controlled by Serb machine gunners, who regularly shot at U.N. vehicles trying to reach the Bosnian capital. The roadbed itself had little foundation and no reinforcement along its sides, and in several of its narrower sections it was difficult for two cars to pass each other. The wreckage of vehicles that had slid off the road or been hit by Serb gunners littered the steep slopes and ravines. In the summer of 1995, however, with the airport closed by Serb artillery, the two-hour drive over Mount Igman was the only way to reach Sarajevo without going through Bosnian Serb lines.

  The chief European negotiator, Carl Bildt of Sweden, had been shot at crossing Serb territory only weeks earlier. He urged us not to use the Igman road. But without visiting Bosnia’s beleaguered capital we could not carry out our mission. On August 15, we made our first attempt, taking a United Nations helicopter from the Croatian coastal town of Split to a landing zone high on Mount Igman, after which we would drive in armored vehicles to Sarajevo. Our helicopter was unable to find a break in the heavy clouds over the landing site. After circling for several unpleasant hours, we returned, frustrated and tired, to Split.

  Hearing that we could not reach Sarajevo, Bosnian Foreign Minister Muhamed Sacirbey, accompanied by the senior American diplomat in Bosnia, John Menzies, drove over Mount Igman to meet us at the Split airport. Known to most Americans via television as the eloquent face of his embattled new nation, Sacirbey was perhaps proudest of the fact that he had been a first-string defensive back at Tulane University. He was tough, strong, and fit. Still, the long and bumpy road trip had tired him, and he was as exhausted as we were. To avoid being overheard, we squeezed into the cabin of our small Air Force jet as it sat on the tarmac, and briefed him on our plans. I stressed that while our mission had the full backing of President Clinton, and represented a last, best hope for peace in the Balkans, there was no guarantee of its success. Our discussion finished as darkness fell over the Balkans, and we flew on to Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, to meet Croatian President Franjo Tudjman. After a day in Zagreb, we arrived in Belgrade on August 17 to meet the key actor in this stage of the drama, President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia.

  Although I knew the other major leaders in the region, this would be my first meeting with the man who, in our view, bore the heaviest responsibility for the war. I approached the meeting with great uncertainty and was guided by my deputy, Robert Frasure, who had spent many hours negotiating with Milosevic earlier that spring.

  Frasure’s main bargaining chip with Milosevic had been the economic sanctions that the United Nations had imposed in 1992 against the “Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,” the name by which Serbia and Montenegro called themselves even though the four other republics of the original Yugoslavia—Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina—had declared themselves independent nations. The sanctions had seriously damaged Serbia’s economy, and Milosevic wanted them ended. But for more than sixteen months he had refused to offer anything concrete in return for our suspending or lifting them.

  Our first meeting with Milosevic, on August 17, lasted almost six hours. He was smart, evasive, and tricky. Warren Zimmermann, our last Ambassador to Yugoslavia, would later write: “Milosevic makes a stunning first impression on those who do not have the information to refute his often erroneous assertions. Many is the U.S. senator or congressman who has reeled out of his office exclaiming, ‘Why, he’s not nearly as bad as I expected!’ ”1 His English was excellent, and he was playing word games devoid of substance—focusing on inconsequential changes in draft documents over which he and Frasure had been arguing since the beginning of the year. His goal remained to get the sanctions lifted at no cost.

/>   Our most important point concerned whom we would negotiate with. The United States, we said, would never again deal directly with the Bosnian Serbs who rained artillery and racist rhetoric down upon the Muslims and the Croats from their mountain capital of Pale. “You must speak for Pale,” I said. “We won’t deal with them ever again.”*

  Frasure thought the meeting had gone well, but it left me dissatisfied. I decided to see Milosevic again the next morning to let him know that we would not continue the cat-and-mouse game he had played with previous negotiators. To emphasize this, it was necessary to change the ground rules a bit. Our entire team of six people had attended the first meeting, but Milosevic had had only two people with him—his new Foreign Minister, Milan Milutinovic, and his chief of staff, Goran Milinovic. Nine people were simply too many to establish the sort of direct relationship necessary for a frank dialogue.

  Early on the morning of August 18, before our second meeting with Milosevic, I met with Frasure and Rudy Perina, the senior American diplomat in Belgrade,† in the garden of the ambassadorial residence. As we walked between the imposing old stone house and the tennis court, under magnificent chestnut trees and presumably out of the range of prying microphones, I said that I planned to throw a controlled fit to make clear to Milosevic that what he was doing was unacceptable. Because of this plan, I added, the next meeting needed to be smaller.

  Apologizing to Rudy, I asked him to drop out of the meeting. Returning to the house, I asked the other two members of our team—Joseph Kruzel, the Senior Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense; and Lieutenant General Wesley Clark, the Chief of Plans for the Joint Chiefs of Staff—to drop out as well. I would take only Frasure and Nelson Drew, an Air Force colonel who, as the National Security Council staff member on our team, represented the White House. Frasure concurred with this suggestion.

  Nothing generates more heat in the government than the question of who is chosen to participate in important meetings. My request ran against a diplomatic custom I greatly respected—that the senior resident American diplomatic representative should attend every official meeting with a head of government. But although unhappy, all three men agreed without objection. It could have been a difficult moment; I was deeply gratified by this early sign of our cohesiveness as a team. Less than an hour later Frasure, Drew, and I were seated in a high-ceilinged meeting room in the Presidential Palace—one of Tito’s old offices—in Belgrade. It was a room we would come to know well in the next seven months. Like other such meeting rooms in communist and former communist countries from Beijing to Bratislava, the room tried to make up for its lack of charm by a drab giganticism. The three of us sat on a long sofa. Milosevic took an armchair a few feet from where I sat at the end of the sofa. Foreign Minister Milutinovic chose another soft chair facing us directly, and Goran Milinovic, always the loyal staff officer, sat at the edge of the group, taking notes.

  As we talked, I thought of the difficulties and dangers we would face each time we tried to reach Sarajevo. It was annoying that we had to depend on U.N. helicopters, the uncertain weather—and that awful road.

  “It is disgraceful,” I said, “that President Clinton’s peace mission has to travel to Sarajevo by such a slow and dangerous route. In order to negotiate we must be able to move rapidly between here and Sarajevo. We have already been in the area for almost a week and we haven’t been able to get there. It is ridiculous. You claim to want peace. I ask you now to arrange for us to fly to Sarajevo or to guarantee that we can use a safer land route without any interference from the Bosnian Serbs.”

  Milosevic stared at us for a moment with a penetrating gaze, as if no one had ever made this request before. Then he replied, “You’re right. I’ll try.” He spoke sharply in Serbian to Goran, who almost ran out of the room. Milosevic said, “I’m sending a message to General Mladic. Let’s see what he can do.”

  Bob, Nelson, and I watched with fascination, looking for clues as to how the enigmatic relationship between Milosevic and Mladic worked. This was the first time we had evidence of what was to become a recurring pattern during the diplomatic shuttle: direct communication between Milosevic and Ratko Mladic, the commander of the Bosnian Serb forces, who had recently been indicted by the International War Crimes Tribunal for direct or indirect responsibility for the murder of thousands of Bosnian Muslims and Croats.

  Less than twenty minutes later, Goran returned and handed a piece of paper to Milosevic. “Mladic says the airport is too dangerous,” Milosevic said. “He cannot guarantee that you would not be shot down by Muslim or Croat soldiers.” This was an absurd statement: everyone knew, I said heatedly, that the only danger to people at the Sarajevo airport was from the Serb gunners ringing the hills around it. But Milosevic was not finished. “Mladic says you can fly to Kiseljak and go in by road from there. You will be completely safe.”

  I knew that road. Its flat terrain and paved surface made it a much easier drive than the route over Mount Igman. But the road ran through Bosnian Serb territory—“Indian country,” as Bob Frasure called it. I had traveled down it as a private citizen almost three years earlier, on December 31, 1992, huddled in the forward seat of a Danish armored personnel carrier, trying to appear inconspicuous under a U.N. helmet and a heavy blue flak jacket. We had been stopped a half-dozen times by heavily armed Serbs who poked machine guns around the inside of the APC while checking our ID cards (to make things worse, mine was a crude forgery). Less than two weeks later, the Serbs had killed a Bosnian Deputy Prime Minister during a search of a French APC not far from where we’d been.

  “We can only consider using that road,” I said, “if you give us your personal guarantee that we will not be stopped by the Bosnian Serbs.”

  “I can’t give you that guarantee,” Milosevic said, “but I’ll ask Mladic for one—”

  “That’s out of the question, Mr. President. We can’t possibly accept guarantees from Mladic, only from you.”

  Sitting next to me on the long couch, Bob Frasure leaned over and whispered, “We have no choice except Igman.”

  That night we flew to Split. Four days earlier, we had stayed in the lovely old Kastile Hotel, directly on the water, where we had dared Joe Kruzel and Wes Clark to dive in from their third-story windows. The two men had leaped into the water, proud of their courage. But the Kastile was forty minutes away from the airport, too far for our exhausted team, and we opted for a dreary hotel near the airport with chalk-white walls and blue lights.

  On the short bus trip from our plane to the hotel, Kruzel and Frasure hung on the hand straps and improvised a reggae lyric in anticipation of the trip we were going to make the next day; its refrain was something about “Goin’ up Mount Igman, mon, tryin’ to make da peace, mon.” It wasn’t much to listen to, they cheerfully admitted, as they danced in the bus to their own song. We ate dinner in the bleak hotel dining room, almost alone and unnoticed. I sat with Frasure, Kruzel, and Clark; my executive assistant, Rosemarie Pauli, sat at the next table with Nelson Drew.

  We talked at length about a mutual friend, Frank Wisner, who had recently become Ambassador to India. When it came to personnel in the State Department, Frank was always the first person I consulted. When I became Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs in the summer of 1994, he recommended Bob Frasure for the deputy’s job. Frasure had worked for him in the Bureau of African Affairs ten years earlier. After one meeting with Bob, then finishing a tour as America’s first Ambassador to Estonia, I offered him the job and asked him to reorganize the European Bureau’s Central European division so as to reflect the new emphasis we wished to place on that region.*

  Frasure, fifty-three years old, was a craggy, cynical professional diplomat who loved his work, while grumbling continually about it. He walked—almost shuffled—with a slight stoop, as if about to fall over, but he had enormous energy, great patience, and a strategic sense unusual in career Foreign Service officers. His cables were widely
read in the Department of State not just for their content but for their wit and descriptive powers. His reports of negotiating with Milosevic over lengthy dinners of lamb and plum brandy were classics for both their conciseness and their humor—two qualities not much in evidence in most State Department telegrams.

  Bob’s greatest joy was to retreat to his farm in the Shenandoah and, with his wife, Katharina, and his two daughters, Sarah and Virginia, paint his barn. At the end of 1994, with the situation in Bosnia continuing to deteriorate, Secretary Christopher—who greatly admired Frasure’s cool detachment, fierce loyalty, and patriotism—suggested we add to his portfolio the job of chief Bosnia negotiator. Although Bob had earlier said he did not want direct responsibility for Bosnia, he accepted this enormous additional burden without complaint. But by the summer of 1995, he was visibly worn out by the constant and frustrating travel to the Balkans, and we had agreed that after this trip he would remain at home to backstop our efforts. Frasure wondered constantly if, in its post-Vietnam, post-Somalia mood, our nation would have the nerve and strength to stand up to what he called the “junkyard dogs and skunks of the Balkans.” He believed in the need to use airpower, but doubted that the United States had the political will to do so.

  Joe Kruzel was shorter and stockier than Frasure. At fifty, his sharp mind combined in equal measure theoretical and practical ability. He often wore his eyeglasses on the lower part of his nose and peered over them, in a manner that emphasized his academic background. He was equally proud of his undergraduate days at the United States Air Force Academy and his Ph.D. from Harvard. Kruzel had a certain playfulness into which he could switch effortlessly from his somber, serious demeanor. After our dinner in Split, Joe volunteered to rewrite our presentation for the Bosnians. Reading his memo the next morning, I saw he had slipped in a one-liner, perhaps to see if we were paying attention: “We will need a mini-Marshall Plan (you know Minnie Marshall, George’s sister).”