To End a War

by Richard Holbrooke

  By its inadequate reaction so far, the United States and, to an even greater extent, the European Community may be undermining not only the dreams of a post-Cold War “common European House” but also laying the seeds for another era of tragedy in Europe.

  Not that such a dire future is inevitable…. If the Europeans and the United States act with boldness and strength, worst-case scenarios do not need to occur…. [But] if the war continues, and the Serbs succeed in permanently reducing the Muslims to a small state or “cantonment” within a Bosnia that has been divided between Croatia and Serbia, the immediate consequences will be terrible—and the long-term consequences even worse. In the short run, the Muslims will have been removed from areas in which they have lived for centuries, with countless thousands butchered, often by their longtime neighbors. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps over one million refugees will have been thrust into a world community already staggering under enormous refugee burdens in

  Africa, Southeast Asia, and South Asia…. Most observers believe that nothing is likely to deter the Serbs except actions that raise the costs of their genocidal policies to an unacceptable level.

  What might this mean in practice? First, international (presumably United Nations) observers should be deployed along the borders and in Kosovo and Macedonia immediately, before fighting spreads to these two critical regions…. Another possibility would be to change the rules of the present [arms] embargo on all combatants—which in practice heavily favors the Serbs, who control the old Yugoslav military-industrial complex—so that the Bosnians can obtain more weapons with which to defend themselves….

  Other actions, including bombing the bridges linking Serbia with Bosnia, and attacking Serb military facilities, must be considered. Such actions may well increase the level of violence in the short term. But since the West does not intend or wish to send its own troops into the war, it is unfair to deny the Muslims the means with which to defend themselves….

  Every day that the killing goes on the chances of preventing the long-term tragedy decrease. What would the West be doing now if the religious convictions of the combatants were reversed, and a Muslim force was now trying to destroy two million beleaguered Christians and/or Jews?

  THE 1992 CAMPAIGN

  In 1988, I had supported Senator Al Gore during the primaries, traveling with him from time to time. Although his campaign started late, it got off to an excellent start, but it ran into immense and, as it turned out, insurmountable obstacles when it hit the primaries in key northern states, especially New York, where I lived through some difficult days with him, his campaign team, and his close-knit family.

  I told Gore I would support him again if he ran in 1992. When he decided not to run—in large part because of the aftereffects of an automobile accident that almost killed his young son—I was uncommitted until several close friends began to draw my attention to Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas.

  The first was Strobe Talbott, who had been Clinton’s housemate at Oxford when they were both Rhodes scholars. Strobe, a friend since he had covered the State Department during the Carter Administration, could not get involved in the campaign since he was still at Time—but his wife, Brooke Shearer, went to work for Hillary Clinton, and traveled with her during much of the campaign. Another journalist I knew well, Joe Klein, then with New York magazine, later with Newsweek and The New Yorker, who had written a series of columns drawing national attention to Clinton, told me the Arkansas Governor was the most exciting Democrat in a generation. The third was Samuel Berger (universally known as Sandy), a partner in a leading Washington law firm and a former colleague in the Vance State Department.

  I met Governor Clinton and his wife, Hillary, at several New York events in the early fall of 1991, and introduced him at one. After a breakfast meeting with a very smart and, it seemed to me, very young aide named George Stephanopoulos, I called Sandy Berger and told him I was ready to support Governor Clinton in any way I could.

  Berger predicted that President Bush would try to portray Governor Clinton as inexperienced and unqualified to deal with national security issues—a technique that had worked well for Republicans in many recent campaigns, including Reagan’s 1980 win over Jimmy Carter and Bush’s defeat of Michael Dukakis in 1988. To prevent this, Sandy wanted to form a small group to work on national security issues early. The core group Berger had in mind would consist of the two of us and his old boss from the Vance State Department, Tony Lake. Sandy thought that Tony, who was teaching at Mount Holyoke, would have more time available than either of us, and, if he took leave in the fall, might be able to devote all his time to the campaign while we assisted him. Lake was at first reluctant: he was planning to write a book about the campaign, not participate in it. Sandy asked if I would call Tony and help persuade him to accept the challenge.

  I was pleased to do so. Tony Lake and I had been close friends for a long time. We had entered the Foreign Service together in 1962, studied Vietnamese together, and served in Vietnam together. Twice in our careers, with his support, I had succeeded him, first as the aide to the Ambassador in Saigon, then as an assistant to the number-two person in the State Department, Nicholas Katzenbach, during the Johnson Administration. I had been the head of the search committee that had given him the job as the director of International Voluntary Services, a small private organization similar to the Peace Corps. He had made the arrangements for my wedding, in Saigon, in 1964; I was godfather to his second child. If we were no longer as close as we used to be—given the effects of time and diverging career paths after 1980—we had remained in constant touch and worked together for thirty years.

  Shortly after our talk Tony went to Little Rock to meet the candidate. The meeting was a success, and Tony quickly got started.

  The Clinton campaign message was, famously, focused on the economy. Still, it was not wise to leave Bush’s leadership in foreign policy unchallenged—a mistake that had badly damaged Dukakis in 1988. To deal with this dilemma, the team proposed to Governor Clinton and Senator Gore a two-pronged approach on foreign policy. On the negative side, they would criticize the Bush record; we did not think it as invulnerable as was commonly believed. On the positive side, Governor Clinton would present positions that would show him as slightly more forward-looking than Bush. As this strategy took shape in the summer of 1992, the issue that presented itself most starkly—because it fit both parts of this strategy—was Bosnia.

  The tragedy in the former Yugoslavia was suddenly emerging into world consciousness. About the same time that I made my first trip there in the summer of 1992, the world began to see shocking film of emaciated prisoners in northern Bosnia, looking at the unblinking camera through barbed-wire fences, scenes straight out of World War II—yet happening now.

  Governor Clinton attacked. Criticizing the Bush Administration for “turning its back on violations of basic human rights” and “being slow on the uptake,” he called on President Bush to show “real leadership” and urged air strikes, supported by the United States if necessary, against the Serbs if they continued to block the delivery of humanitarian goods to the people trapped in Sarajevo. President Bush fired back, attacking his opponent for a “reckless approach that indicates Clinton better do some homework.” However, by early August, partly in response to the criticism, the Bush Administration had adjusted its policy, urging the United Nations Security Council to use force, if necessary, to deliver humanitarian aid to Bosnia. But Clinton pressed on in a speech in Los Angeles on August 14 (the same day, by coincidence, that I was in Banja Luka), promising he would “make the United States the catalyst for a collective stand against aggression.” “In a world of change,” he said, “security flows from initiative, not from inertia.” None of this made much of an impact on the American electorate, but it got a lot of attention in Europe.

  As I told Tony and Sandy, these were correct and brave positions, both morally and politically, and both men deserved praise
for proposing them. There was only one concern, I said: Would President Clinton carry out what candidate Clinton proposed? Proud of getting Governor Clinton to take these positions, Lake said he was confident they would be part of the policy if Clinton was elected. With this in mind, after the trip, I wrote a memorandum to the candidates on August 23:

  To: Governor Clinton, Senator Gore (through Tony Lake and Sandy

  Berger)

  From: Richard Holbrooke

  Subject: Former Yugoslavia

  … Whatever happens the rest of this year, the next Administration is certain to be confronted with a problem of staggering political, strategic, and humanitarian dimensions. I therefore want to bring the following points to your attention:

  1. The Bush Administration’s reactions have been weak and inadequate….

  2. The attention of the press, the efforts of the international relief community, and the belated response of European leaders and President Bush may have slowed down the more awful aspects of the situation, but only slightly….

  3. Your public statements have made a real difference, especially in pushing the Bush Administration into doing more than they otherwise would have done. They have also been interpreted as a sign that, if elected, you will follow a more vigorous policy against Serb aggression, which is the right signal to be sending to all parties….

  This is not a choice between Vietnam and doing nothing, as the Bush Administration has portrayed it. There are many actions that might be done now, including: dropping the arms embargo against the Bosnians, stationing U.N.

  observers along the Kosovo and Macedonia borders…. Doing nothing now risks a far greater and more costly involvement later.

  In the weeks after Clinton’s election victory, I heard little from my campaign colleagues; people with whom I had spent hours were now closeted in transition meetings in Little Rock or otherwise inaccessible. Asked by a Washington-based representative of the Presidential Transition Task Force what I hoped to do in the Clinton Administration, I replied that unless offered the position of Deputy Secretary of State, which was highly unlikely, I would prefer to remain a private citizen in New York and undertake special negotiating assignments for the Administration—a sort of troubleshooter role. Ever since my experience in Paris in 1968 as a junior member of the Vietnam negotiating team under Averell Harriman and Cyrus Vance, I had wanted to test myself against the most difficult negotiations in the world. At this time, I said, the toughest seemed to be Bosnia; I would be interested in becoming the American negotiator for that problem, a position that did not exist in the Bush Administration.

  In those weeks Strobe Talbott and Brooke Shearer stayed in close touch. After Strobe turned down the ambassadorship to Russia for family reasons, the President-elect asked his former Oxford housemate to serve as a senior advisor on relations with the former Soviet Union.* It was a perfect job for him; he had unwittingly been preparing for it most of his life, studying Russian language and history, and writing a series of important books on U.S.-Soviet relations. I helped him draft terms of reference that would give him a larger role than that of previous senior advisors on Soviet affairs, a position that had existed in many earlier administrations, but always as a one-person shop. With the Soviet Union broken up into fifteen independent nations, the existing Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs could not handle the extra responsibility. We proposed creating a separate office to oversee relations with the former Soviet republics, closely linked to the old European Bureau. Despite some grumbling from the bureaucracy, it was put into effect over the next year under his leadership and with the backing of Secretary Christopher.†

  CHRISTMAS IN CAMBODIA, NEW YEAR’S IN SARAJEVO

  In mid-December, Tony Lake called to tell me that he was going to be the President’s National Security Advisor. People who did not understand our complicated relationship had suggested that Tony and I were competitors for this position, but the truth was otherwise. As Tony and Sandy both knew, I had supported Tony for this job. His experience as Henry Kissinger’s assistant in the Nixon White House—a position he resigned in 1970 to protest the invasion of Cambodia—had given him the perfect background for this demanding job. Besides, as I told Tony, I did not wish to compete with him; I wanted to work with him, as we so often had in the past, always with success.

  Standing in the kitchen of a friend’s house during a New York dinner party, I congratulated Tony and offered him whatever assistance he wanted. When he asked what would interest me, I repeated my conversation with the official from the transition team, and mentioned Bosnia. We ended by reminiscing about the long road that had led from Saigon to his new job—the job of his dreams—and Tony closed by promising he would keep in close touch.

  Feeling detached from the excitement swirling around Washington, I decided to make a trip unusual for the holiday season, but fitting my mood. I spent Christmas Eve in Bangkok, floating down the river on a restaurant-boat with a group of Thai officials and Senator and Mrs. Sam Nunn. It was one of those strange cross-cultural experiences Asia offers Americans: we sang Christmas carols and listened to a Thai businessman demonstrate his love of the United States by reciting to us, word for word, President Kennedy’s Inaugural Address. The next morning I flew to Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s exhausted capital, to spend Christmas Day with Tim Carney, a Foreign Service officer who had been assigned to work on the U.N.-sponsored elections. During the day I talked at length with the senior U.N. representative in Cambodia, Yasushi Akashi, who had done a fine job in a nearly impossible situation. At the time these were simply interesting personal conversations with friends, but they later took on another, deeper meaning: when my diplomatic mission began in 1995, Akashi was the U.N. Secretary-General’s senior representative in the former Yugoslavia, and our previous association proved valuable. And Carney, who became Ambassador to the Sudan, would later be part of our planning team for the final negotiations, advising us on how to supervise an election just after a war.

  After another day in Southeast Asia, long one of my favorite parts of the world, I left for Zagreb, thinking that perhaps no one else on earth in 1992 would spend Christmas in Cambodia and New Year’s in Bosnia. As my oldest son, David, said, “Who else could possibly want to do such a crazy thing?”

  First Brash with the Krajina. On December 28, 1992, the afternoon I arrived in Zagreb, I was invited to meet the Foreign Minister of Croatia, Mate Granic. This was my first meeting with a man who was already a key figure in the negotiations, and with whom I would later spend many hours. Balding, immaculately dressed, charming, and polite, he greeted me and almost immediately began to explain why, if the United Nations did not fulfill its obligations under the Vance plan and restore the Krajina to its rightful owners, another war between Serbia and Croatia was inevitable.

  Granic seated me on a sofa—”in the exact spot where Cy Vance sits,” he said, with obvious pride—and took out a huge map of his country. Then, in a controlled but intense manner, Granic described how the Serbs had used the Vance Plan as cover to drive the Croats out of their lands in the Krajina. “Over twenty-five percent of our land is occupied by the Serbs,” Granic said. “Before the war there were two hundred and ninety-five thousand Croats in the Krajina. Now there are only three thousand five hundred. This is our land. This is our country. The Serbs have cut our country almost in half. This is wholly unacceptable to us.”

  Granic’s mild, almost deferential style was in sharp contrast to his words. If the Serbs did not return the Krajina peacefully, he said, his country would have to go to war again. As Granic’s hands moved quickly over the large map in front of us, outlining Croatia’s “lost territory,” it occurred to me that this must have been how the French felt about Alsace-Lorraine, annexed by the Germans after the War of 1870–71, until they regained it after World War I; as Henry Kissinger had written, the effort “to regain that region had sustained French policy for half a century.”1

  Granic le
ft the impression that a war to regain the Krajina would take place no later than the summer of 1993. In fact, it would be two and a half years before Tudjman attacked. I would never forget that conversation, however, which first alerted me to the absolute implacable determination of the Zagreb government to regain every inch of their territory.

  A Wooden Statue. While in Zagreb, I visited several refugee camps, accompanied by Stephanie Frease, a dedicated young American refugee worker from Cleveland who spoke Croatian perfectly. One of her parents was Serb, the other Croat, and until the wars began, she had lived in Cleveland almost unaware of the enmity between the two peoples. We visited a refugee camp in Karlovac, about an hour from Zagreb, where we listened to chilling accounts of how the Serbs had carried out ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Story after story reflected the confusion of the Muslims; they described how some of the Serbs with whom they had lived and worked for decades turned on them in the summer of 1992. Stephanie struggled through tears as she translated.

  Among those we talked to was a young man who identified himself only as a baker from Sanski Most. Suddenly, he fished a plastic bag out from under a thin mattress, and handed me two carefully wrapped wooden figures. “I carved these with a piece of broken glass while I was at Manjaca prison camp,” he said, “to show how we had to stand during the day, with our heads down and our hands tied behind our backs.” The small figures seemed to burn in my hand with their pain and intensity. Mumbling something about their power and beauty, I started to hand them back. “No,” he said. “Please take them back to your country, and show them to your people. Show the Americans how we have been treated. Tell America what is happening to us.”