To End a War

by Richard Holbrooke

  Keeping the Atlantic Alliance, the main pillar of American foreign policy for over half a century, from coming apart over Bosnia was one of our greatest policy challenges. After a year as Ambassador to Germany, I was especially committed to repairing the strains that Bosnia had caused. We needed to work in partnership with the Alliance on a large number of other issues—the enlargement of NATO, a common policy toward the former Soviet Union, the Mideast, and Iran, terrorism, human rights, the environment, and organized crime—but Bosnia had begun to adversely affect everything. I addressed this problem in a blunt personal note to Christopher on August 23:

  The Contact Group presents us with a constant conundrum. We can’t live without it, we can’t live with it. If we don’t meet with them and tell them what we are doing, they complain publicly. If we tell them, they disagree and often leak—and worse.

  In the end, we must keep the Contact Group together, especially since we will need it later to endorse and legitimize any agreement…. On August 20, [one member of the Contact Group] told me in confidence that [his government] now believes that “at least one member” of the Contact Group is passing details of the Contact Group meetings directly to Belgrade….*

  Any temporary Euro-annoyance with less information can be managed. It must be outweighed by our need for speed and security…. But we must never forget that we will need them all if there is ever a settlement—the E.U. for economic assistance, our NATO allies for the new post-U.N. peacekeeping force, the U.N. for legitimizing resolutions, the Islamic Conference for additional aid, and the Russians and Greeks for their influence (however limited) on Belgrade.

  The Memorial Service. Our edgy meeting with the Europeans provided a sharp reminder of the unsentimental world to which we would soon return. But first there were more sad ceremonies at the Fort Myer Memorial Chapel. The next was a service in honor of all three men. There would be only one speaker: the President.

  Any gathering with a President, even a tragic one, has a distinctive quality. The Fort Myer chapel was now infused with a combination of mourning and anticipation. Numerous security personnel, seemingly oblivious to the purpose for which we were gathered, added to the strange feeling, so different from the previous day’s despair.

  Four hundred people crowded into the nondenominational chapel. The President awarded each man the President’s Citizen Medal, and then met privately with their families. He was masterful in such meetings, and afterward Katharina Frasure told me that he had comforted them and shared their loss in a very personal way.

  Emerging from the chapel, the President spoke directly and movingly to the widows and children, saying the three men had “made reason their weapon, freedom their cause, and peace their goal.” Praising them as “quiet American heroes,” the President said that “Bob, Joe, and Nelson were in Bosnia because they were moved by the terrible injustice and suffering there.”

  When the President finished speaking, the audience stood in total silence as he came down from the podium and went up to the families, briefly holding hands with each of the three wives and six children. Then his senior advisors and the negotiating team followed him down a narrow corridor and into a small room with white cinder-block walls and shelves of inspirational books.

  The meeting at Fort Myer proved to be an important benchmark. Although scheduled almost as an afterthought to the memorial service, this casual, quietly emotional meeting with the President was exactly what the Administration needed to restart the process and pull itself back together.

  Pulling up chairs haphazardly, we gathered in a circle. The formality of meetings in the White House, with every seat carefully assigned by rank, was abandoned. Some people, having crowded into the room only to find that there were no more seats, stood against the walls.

  The President asked me to review the status of each of the seven points Lake and Tarnoff had presented on their European trip two weeks earlier. We moved quickly past the more general points to focus on several more problematic issues.

  Lake had told the Western Europeans that we “would pursue cease-fires or an end to offensive operations on the ground.” This was, of course, contrary to the emerging view of the negotiating team, which I explained: the Croatian offensive, while brutal (as is all war), was valuable to the negotiating process. The time would come when a cease-fire was desirable, but right now the trend on the battlefield was, for the first time, unfavorable to the Serbs. Unless given specific instructions to the contrary, I said, we would not seek a cease-fire yet. To my relief, no one took issue with this.

  Lake had also said that the United States was ready to update the Contact Group map to “incorporate more viable borders and distribution of territory,” consider proposals to widen the Posavina Corridor, and provide the Serbs “de jure control over the eastern enclaves” in return for the Bosnians and Bosnian Croats receiving more area around Sarajevo and other territory in central and western Bosnia that would create a more compact and coherent Federation territory. Finally, Lake had told our European allies that because the beleaguered enclave of Gorazde would be difficult to defend and would add to the difficulty of peace-plan implementation, we would seek to steer both parties toward solutions that would “trade Gorazde for other substantial Serb concessions.” I had already told Lake, in London, that I would not support this, but my position was still unknown in Washington.

  I outlined why we should not press Sarajevo to trade away Gorazde or recommend a widening of the Posavina Corridor. The Bosnian government would never voluntarily give up Gorazde following the massacres at Srebrenica and Zepa, nor should we put ourselves in the position of advocating the creation of tens of thousands of new refugees. The Pentagon representatives in the room, who had previously been adamant on this point, said nothing. Breathing another sigh of relief, I quickly moved on.

  Finally, we came to the last point in Lake’s original presentation, the comprehensive program for regional economic reconstruction. This provoked the first real discussion of the meeting, one that we would often remember later.

  The issue went far beyond Bosnia. Everyone in Washington recognized the sea change that had come over congressional attitudes toward foreign assistance. Traditionally hostile to foreign aid, Congress had been especially brutal since control of both houses had passed to the Republicans seven months earlier.

  A huge economic reconstruction program was essential to any Bosnia settlement. Some people treated this as little more than rhetoric, but lasting peace in the region required rebuilding the interdependent economy that, until four years earlier, had existed in a single Yugoslavia, with a single economic infrastructure—railroads, highways, industry, etc. This would require not just rhetoric, but significant American leadership and resources.

  However, because of the congressional repercussions of any new budgetary obligations, Lake and Tarnoff had not been allowed to indicate the size of America’s eventual contribution to a civilian reconstruction effort in Bosnia. Our obvious inconsistency on this issue was troubling. On the one hand, the United States wanted to remain the world’s leading power; on the other, the Administration was reluctant to ask Congress for the resources to ensure that leadership—and Congress was even more parsimonious. This was wrong; even in an era of budget constraints and huge deficits, the nation could afford expenditures it considered vital to its national interests.

  I suggested that an appropriate amount for the first year might be $500 million. My comments provoked a stirring among some of my colleagues. Perry said that an even higher figure—perhaps $1 billion for the first year—would be appropriate.

  “If we can get peace, we should be prepared to put up a billion dollars,” the President said emphatically.

  Cautionary notes from several sides of the room came from people who had been bruised in budget battles with the new Congress. One person warned that since we were having difficulty getting “even $10 million for Ecuador,” huge sums for Bosnia would be v
irtually impossible. The President turned to the White House Chief of Staff, Leon Panetta, a former Director of the Office of Management and Budget, who outlined the immense problem any supplemental request would confront. Panetta saw—and accurately predicted—the extraordinary budget crisis that was to erupt between the Gingrich Republicans and the Executive Branch later in the year, a confrontation so severe that it would ultimately close down most of the U.S. government for over a month.

  I made one last attempt to underline the importance of the reconstruction effort, but a consensus had formed, as it often does in such meetings. It was clear that the amount of American assistance would be far less than desirable.

  This exchange ended the meeting. The President asked us to return to the region quickly, and keep going until we had achieved something. Then, after greeting each new member of the team personally, he clapped me on the shoulder, pulled me aside for a moment to say he was counting on us, and was on his way back to Wyoming.

  Leon Fuerth and the Sanctions Issue. On the morning of August 24, we said good-bye to Nelson Drew, and in the afternoon we walked in silence behind the horse-drawn casket of Joe Kruzel. By this time we had been to Arlington four times in three days; the week had turned into a blur. I asked the negotiating team to meet at the Officers’ Club at Arlington between the two funerals so that we could begin planning our trip, which was only three days away. Because the United Nations sanctions against Serbia were always a central issue, Leon Fuerth joined us.

  Fuerth, Vice President Gore’s National Security Advisor, was one of those powerful but rarely seen people who play major roles behind the scene in Washington. Originally an arms-control expert, he had been a respected member of the national security community before he joined the staff of a young Tennessee Congressman named Al Gore in 1982. In 1993 the Administration gave Fuerth an important responsibility in addition to his duties as the Vice President’s closest foreign policy advisor—implementing American policy worldwide on economic sanctions.* It was unprecedented to give such an assignment to a member of the Vice President’s staff. But when sanctions against Bosnia became a critical issue in 1993, the Principals’ Committee took responsibility away from State, apparently because of a failure to manage it properly, and gave it to Fuerth—an old friend with whom I had worked closely during Senator Gore’s 1988 presidential campaign.

  For months sanctions had been the subject of a heated dispute within the Contact Group, with the United States and Germany on one side, and Britain, France, and Russia on the other. Milosevic hated the sanctions. They really hurt his country, and he wanted them lifted. This gave us a potential lever over him, but by the fall of 1994, London, Paris, and Moscow wanted to lift all or most of the sanctions in return for almost nothing. Washington had a different view, although it was not held unanimously. Some officials believed we should offer Milosevic a small incentive, in the form of some sanctions relief, to “jump-start” the process; others, like Fuerth and Madeleine Albright, opposed any softening of our position without a significant reciprocal action by Milosevic. Although we had some tactical differences, I also opposed giving Milosevic relief without getting something tangible in return.

  Since the end of the Cold War few issues have caused greater tension with our major European allies and Russia than sanctions. But to the credit of Vice President Gore, Leon Fuerth, and Madeleine Albright, the decision to take a hard line on sanctions proved correct; had we not done so, we would have begun the negotiations with almost no bargaining chips.

  Friday, August 25, was my last day in Washington before the resumption of the shuttle. I spent it in endless meetings with foreign ambassadors and colleagues in the Department. But there was one more essential act of mourning and rebuilding. The tragedy on Mount Igman was deeply personal for the European Bureau, which had lost a truly beloved colleague. It needed to pull itself together. So, in the early afternoon, I invited the entire Bureau to join Strobe Talbott and me in the Dean Acheson Auditorium on the ground floor of the Department to decide how we were going to cope with the tragedy. I described the accident in detail, hoping to dispel some of the misunderstandings or rumors so endemic in such a situation. I asked everyone in the Bureau to give John Kornblum full support, and said that we would not replace Bob at this point. We would simply do the best we could; history would judge us by our results.

  Several people asked how Bob’s family was coping. Strobe told them of the extraordinary strength that Katharina Frasure was demonstrating, and described how the previous day she had visited Pete Hargreaves in the hospital, to tell him that she realized he could not have saved her husband. (Strobe, who had visited Hargreaves with her, said it was one of the most inspiring moments of his life.) Finally, I asked my colleagues to consider what permanent memorial we should set up for Bob. Then, after asking everyone to stand for a moment of silence for Bob, Joe, and Nelson, we went back to work.*

  I flew to Long Island to spend the weekend with Kati. We had been married less than two months. The author of a recent book on extremists in the Middle East, she was concerned that rejectionist Bosnian Serbs—the “Hamas wing of the Serbs,” as she put it—would try to kill us, especially if we were making progress toward peace. The risk was real, but we had no choice; the negotiations could not succeed unless we went to Sarajevo.

  We were scheduled to leave for Europe on Sunday, August 27, but before we left, there was one last television interview, with NBC’s Meet the Press. All through the week, the Bosnian Serbs had continued to make provocative statements, and had even exchanged fire with U.N. troops. This interview provided an opportunity to issue a clear warning that there were limits to American forbearance. Such a statement, however, required coordination within the government. On Saturday afternoon, therefore, I called Tom Donilon, Warren Christopher’s chief of staff, for advice. He suggested that, while carefully avoiding a specific commitment that might be repudiated by others, I send a strong signal that we would no longer ignore hostile actions by the Bosnian Serbs. He volunteered to “protect” me within the government if anyone objected later.

  Donilon, the only senior official at State with real political experience, brought a needed focus and crispness to the decision-making process. A proud “working-class kid” from Providence, Rhode Island, Tom joined the Carter White House in 1977 at the age of twenty-two, one of the youngest and brightest of a group of outstanding political operatives assembled by Vice President Mondale’s chief of staff, James A. Johnson.* In 1993, Donilon, who was then a partner in the Washington office of Warren Christopher’s law firm, went to State as an aide to Christopher and emerged, somewhat unexpectedly, as the new Secretary of State’s closest advisor. Although almost unknown to the public, Donilon was widely respected by the press and within the government; he was literally indispensable to the smooth functioning of the State Department.

  At 6:00 A.M. on Sunday morning, an NBC crew arrived to set up their equipment in the sitting room of our weekend house in Bridgehampton. My new family stumbled sleepily over wires and watched in dismay as the crew turned the house into a makeshift television studio. The interview covered many issues that would be critical in the next few months. With Brian Williams moderating, the conservative columnist Robert Novak challenged the heavy emphasis we put on the fact that the leaders of the Bosnian Serbs, their “president,” Radovan Karadzic, and General Ratko Mladic, had been indicted as war criminals by the International War Crimes Tribunal. “Do you think it’s helpful to call [Karadzic] a war criminal?” Novak asked in his famous baiting style, as always on the attack. “Do you think it’s helpful in the negotiations?” I replied:

  It’s not a question of what I call him or what you call him. There’s an international tribunal going on. And let me be clear on something. At Srebrenica a month ago, people were taken into a stadium, lined up, and massacred. It was a crime against humanity of the sort that we have rarely seen in Europe, and not since the days of Himmler and Stalin, and that’s
simply a fact and it has to be dealt with. I’m not going to cut a deal that absolves the people responsible for this.

  Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times asked the question we had prepared for: “What leverage do you have on [the Bosnian Serbs]?” I answered:

  I’d rather not go into the diplomatic details. I think secret negotiations have a right to remain somewhat secret. But I do want to make one thing clear. If this peace initiative does not get moving, dramatically moving, in the next week or two, the consequences will be very adverse to the Serbian goals. One way or another NATO will be heavily involved, and the Serbs don’t want that.

  I spent the rest of the interview trying to avoid saying what this meant—was I threatening NATO air strikes? What were the criteria for success? Under what circumstances would we send in ground troops?

  Most newspapers covered the interview positively the next day. The New York Times ran a front-page article under the headline “U.S. Officials Say Bosnian Serbs Face NATO Attack If Talks Fail”—a headline justified by neither my interview nor the text of the story, but useful in creating the impression of a tougher policy than in fact existed. The International Herald Tribune, a newspaper to which we attached special importance since it was available in the Balkans, ran a similar headline: “U.S. Warns of Air Strikes Unless Serbs Negotiate.”