To End a War

by Richard Holbrooke

  With the interview completed, I spent the rest of the day trying to relax, even finding time to go to the local horse show, where my stepdaughter, Elizabeth, was competing. Good luck calls from Gore, Christopher, Lake, and Albright brightened the day. Some friends came over in the early evening for a long-planned housewarming party, in the middle of which, with most of the guests still there, I left for the Islip airport, where the Air Force plane carrying our new team stopped to refuel and pick me up. Boarding the C-20—the military equivalent of the Gulfstream III—we settled into our seats with nervous jokes and tried to get some sleep before Paris.

  The Final Outrage. At 8:00 A.M., we landed at the military airport outside Paris. Waiting on the tarmac was our Ambassador to France, Pamela Harriman. It was typical of her that she would meet us, even at such an early hour, as a sign of support and in order to brief us immediately on the French point of view; some Ambassadors never made such an effort, no matter what the circumstances. We drove into Paris through heavy traffic, as she outlined a complicated schedule involving meetings with the French, the Contact Group representatives, and President Izetbegovic, who had asked to see us late that evening. I had time for a brief nap before our first meeting, a courtesy call on French Foreign Minister Hervé de Charette. As I woke up, I turned on CNN and heard terrible news: a Bosnian Serb mortar shell had killed at least thirty-five people in a marketplace in Sarajevo. It was the second-worst incident of the war against civilians in Sarajevo. Watching the small screen fill with scenes of new carnage, I wondered if this was a deliberate response to my public warnings of the day before, which had been widely reported in Bosnia. It seemed possible and, as I noted at the time, “I felt doubly awful.”

  Public reaction came quickly. From Pale the Bosnian Serbs accused the Bosnian Muslims of staging the incident to draw NATO into the war. The Muslim leadership called for the suspension of the American peace initiative “unless the obligations and role of NATO are clarified.” United Nations Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali issued a statement that, typically, meant almost exactly the opposite of what it seemed to say: he “unreservedly condemned the shelling” and ordered his military commanders to “investigate this attack immediately and take appropriate action without delay.” In fact, this was a device to avoid taking action.

  None of this mattered much. What counted was whether the United States would act decisively and persuade its NATO allies to join in the sort of massive air campaign that we had so often talked about but never even come close to undertaking. Would our threats and warnings, including my own on Meet the Press the previous day, finally be backed up with action?

  Even before we knew the exact casualty toll—thirty-eight killed and more than eighty-five wounded—I felt this was the final test for the West. Was this a deliberate Bosnian Serb attempt to show the world that our threats were empty? Or was it simply a single mortar fired by a single angry person? And the key question: what would we do in response?

  Within a short time, Strobe Talbott, who was acting Secretary of State, called. He felt that a military response to the latest outrage was “essential,” and wanted to know if the negotiating team agreed. He asked a key question: what effect might retaliatory air strikes have on the negotiations? “Your advice could be decisive,” he said. “There’s a lot of disagreement here.”

  I did not need to think about my reply. The brutal stupidity of the Bosnian Serbs had given us an unexpected last chance to do what should have been done three years earlier. I told him to start NATO air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs—not minor retaliatory “pinpricks,” but a serious and, if possible, sustained air campaign, which was now authorized by the “London rules.” It would be better to risk failure in the negotiations than let the Serbs get away with another criminal act. This was the most important test of American leadership since the end of the Cold War, I said, not only in Bosnia, but in Europe.

  Our telephone conversation was about how to respond to the newest Bosnian Serb atrocity, but it was also part of a controversy that had gone on for thirty years about the relationship between diplomacy and airpower. This issue had haunted American decision makers since 1965, when the use of airpower against North Vietnam had been one of the most controversial aspects of that most controversial of all American wars.

  Vietnam was, of course, the seminal event of our generation. By 1995, its shadows were lengthening, but they had marked almost every contemporary official and politician in Washington—some as student radicals, others as Vietnam veterans; some as doves, others as hawks. There was irony in my support of air strikes. As a young Foreign Service officer working on Vietnam, I had disagreed with the air campaign against North Vietnam. To many of those opposing the use of airpower in Bosnia the lesson of Vietnam and Kuwait was that airpower would be ineffective unless backed up by ground troops—a political impossibility in Bosnia. But the comparison was dangerously misleading: Bosnia was different, and so were our objectives. While we had to learn from Vietnam, we could not be imprisoned by it. Bosnia was not Vietnam, the Bosnian Serbs were not the Vietcong, and Belgrade was not Hanoi. The Bosnian Serbs, poorly trained bullies and criminals, would not stand up to NATO air strikes the way the seasoned and indoctrinated Vietcong and North Vietnamese had. And, as we had seen in the Krajina, Belgrade was not going to back the Bosnian Serbs the way Hanoi had backed the Vietcong.

  The August 28 mortar attack was hardly the first challenge to Western policy, nor the worst incident of the war; it was only the latest. But it was different because of its timing: coming immediately after the launching of our diplomatic shuttle and the tragedy on Igman, it appeared not only as an act of terror against innocent people in Sarajevo, but as the first direct affront to the United States. As we sleepwalked through a busy schedule in Paris, my mind drifted back over the many failures of Western leadership over the last few years, and I hoped—prayed—that this time it would be different.

  * This was a reference to Russia.

  * Fuerth’s mandate, while focused heavily on Bosnia, also covered sanctions against other countries, including Iran and Iraq.

  *In 1996, the State Department established the Robert C. Frasure Memorial Award to “honor an individual who exemplifies a commitment to peace.”

  * In 1981, Johnson and I formed a consulting firm, which we sold to Lehman Brothers in 1985. Jim later became chairman and CEO of Fannie Mae and chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

  CHAPTER 7

  Bombing and Breakthrough

  The time will come when those few hours will say much about war and peace in Bosnia, the role that the United States played in the outcome, the real importance of France, and perhaps the world order that will reflect it.

  —BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY, Le Lys et la Cendre

  Paris, August 28, 1995. With the Administration facing some of the most important decisions since it took office, the “Principals,” including the President and Vice President, were all on vacation. As the hours and the days blurred into one continuous crisis session, the deputies were in charge—so much so that they began teasing each other about it. “We joked,” Strobe Talbott, who was acting Secretary of State, recalled later, “that it was ‘deputy dogs’ day,’ and how we felt like the kid in Home Alone.”

  There was, of course, no joking about the issue at hand. It would prove to be one of the decisive weeks of the war, indeed a seminal week in the shaping of America’s post-Cold War foreign policy. Led by Sandy Berger, who was acting National Security Advisor, the team included John White (acting Secretary of Defense), Admiral Bill Owens (acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), George Tenet (acting Director of the CIA), Undersecretary of Defense Walter Slocombe, and Undersecretary of State Peter Tarnoff. The only Cabinet-level official not on vacation was Madeleine Albright, who shuttled feverishly between Washington and New York trying to overcome the reluctance of U.N. officials to take action. The rest of the team spent much of its time hunched o
ver the oak table in the White House Situation Room, eating cold pizzas and trying to forge a united front with our NATO allies and the U.N.

  Pamela Harriman. We delayed our departure for Belgrade a day while we pressed Washington for air strikes, and set up makeshift offices at Ambassador Harriman’s magnificent official residence on Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré. Less than two hundred yards from the Élysée Palace, where the French President lived, the huge eighteenth-century hôtel particulier and large gardens would have been a powerful weapon for any diplomat; Pamela Harriman knew how to use it especially well.

  Pamela Harriman was no ordinary custodian. Her nearly legendary life was endlessly revisited by breathless journalists, but the gossip obscured the fact that she had done a superb job in Paris. The French, initially impressed only with her glamorous background, which had included many years in Paris in the late 1940s and early 1950s, came to realize that she was a huge asset. Believing France the key to Europe—an ironic position for a person who had spent most of her life as a British citizen and who, moreover, was the daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill—and using her ability to reach almost anyone in Washington by phone, she gained greater access for French officials to important members of the U.S. government than ever before.

  She had married Averell Harriman in 1970, after both her second husband, the celebrated Broadway producer Leland Heyward, and Harriman’s wife, Marie, had died. It was famously part of this story that Pamela Digby Churchill and W. Averell Harriman had had a prior relationship during World War II, when she was still married to Randolph Churchill and Harriman was President Roosevelt’s personal representative in London. Almost eighty when they were reunited, Harriman was rejuvenated by his marriage to Pam, who was then fifty. During the fifteen remaining years of Harriman’s life, Pam created a wonderful final act to his long and storied career. One day, near the end, as we sat in his house in the Westchester hills near New York City, I asked my old boss if there was anything he regretted in his Ufe. Harriman, rarely given to introspection, snapped back without a moment’s hesitation, “Not marrying her the first time.”

  As Harriman aged slowly but inexorably, Pam began to play a more prominent role. When he died in 1986, Pam continued their joint efforts on her own. A number of articles and, finally, two books portrayed her in an unflattering light, as cold and ambitious, but, although upset by the books, she pushed on, ignoring her critics.

  We remained close friends and political allies throughout this period, both before and after Governor Harriman’s death. Now the meeting with Izetbegovic in Paris had given us a chance, after more than twenty years of friendship, to work together during a crisis. Even in the midst of such an intense day, I could not help but take a moment to ask her if it had occurred to her how extraordinary this was. “Of course,” she said. “And Averell would have been so proud of both of us.”

  During the day, on August 28, I met twice with Izetbegovic and Sacirbey, once at the Hôtel Crillon, the second time at the great house on the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré. At the first session, Izetbegovic was still in the suit he had worn to his official meetings with his French hosts, but for the second meeting, he changed into a sort of paramilitary outfit, complete with loose khakis, a scarf, and a beret bearing a Bosnian insignia. I watched with amusement as his car drove across the courtyard of the residence, where our Ambassador awaited him at the front door, dressed in one of her trademark Courrèges dresses. Each was rendered momentarily speechless by the sight of the other—Pam, towering like a Parisian landmark over the diminutive Bosnian, not realizing for an instant that this strange person, dressed like an aging Left Bank revolutionary, was his country’s President; and Izetbegovic, having one day earlier left a shattered city under siege, looking up at this astounding vision in silk.

  When we finally settled down, Izetbegovic demanded that NATO launch strikes against the Bosnian Serbs immediately. Sacirbey went further, saying his President would not see us again until NATO began bombing, a position he repeated in a telephone call to Strobe Talbott. I told Sacirbey that while Strobe and I supported his desire for bombing, such threats were unacceptable.

  What Do the Bosnians Want? To determine our negotiating goals, we needed to know what Izetbegovic and his government wanted. This proved far more difficult than we had expected, and began a debate that would continue for years, one that went to the heart of the matter—the shape of a postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina, and whether it would be one country, or two, or three.

  That evening, for the first time, I posed to Izetbegovic and his colleagues the most important question that would need to be addressed: do you want us to negotiate a single Bosnian state, which would necessarily have a relatively weak central government, or would you prefer to let Bosnia be divided, leaving you in firm control of a much smaller country?

  We would return to this issue repeatedly—and after the end of the war it would take center stage as people debated whether or not the attempt to create a single multiethnic country was realistic. Many in the West believed—and still believe—that the best course would have been to negotiate a partition of Bosnia. At the outset we were ready to consider this approach, even though it ran against the stated policy goal of both the United States and the Contact Group—but only if it were the desire of all three ethnic groups. Most Bosnian Serbs would want to secede from Bosnia and join Serbia itself—this was after all the issue that had led to war. Similarly, most of the Croats who lived along the strip of land in the east bordering Croatia would, given a free choice, seek to join Croatia. But there were also many Serbs and Croats in towns and villages that were ethnically mixed or isolated who could not survive in anything other than a multiethnic state. There was no easy answer to this crucial question: to divide Bosnia-Herzegovina into two independent parts would legitimize Serb aggression and ethnic cleansing, and lands that had been Muslim or Croat for centuries would be lost forever to their rightful inhabitants. On the other hand, trying to force Serbs, Croats, and Muslims to live together after the ravages and brutality of the war, after what they had done to one another, would be extraordinarily difficult.

  The key voice in this decision had to be the primary victims of the war. But Izetbegovic was not prepared to discuss the future shape of Bosnia when I first brought it up in Paris on August 28. He was focused on the necessity for immediate NATO bombing, and wary of negotiations, which had thus far resolved nothing and resulted only in broken promises. Furthermore, the Bosnians had not resolved this question among themselves. Having put all their effort into survival, they had never functioned as a government in the normal sense of the word, nor clearly defined their postwar aims. Yet despite his obvious ambivalence and confusion, even in his first response, he gave an indication of where he wanted to go: Bosnia should remain a single country, he said, but he would accept a high degree of autonomy for the Serb portion.

  Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic, with whom we had a similar discussion a few days later in Zagreb, had the same overall goal in mind, but a far different structure. He wanted a stronger multiethnic central government, with, not surprisingly, a powerful prime minister. Silajdzic spoke with passion about the need to re-create a multiethnic country, although he referred to the Croats with such animosity that I did not see how he could ever cooperate with them. This internal disagreement between the Bosnian President and Prime Minister was disturbing, and was to repeat itself often in the coming months.

  At the center of this tangle was the remarkable figure of Alija Izetbegovic. He had kept the “idea” of Bosnia alive for years under the most difficult circumstances. It was an extraordinary achievement, a tribute to his courage and determination. At the age of seventy, after surviving eight years in Tito’s jails and four years of Serb attacks, he saw politics as a perpetual struggle. He had probably never thought seriously about what it might mean to run a real country in peacetime. Even minor gestures of reconciliation to those Serbs who were ready to re-establish some form of multiethnic comm
unity were not easy for Izetbegovic. His eyes had a cold and distant gaze; after so much suffering, they seemed dead to anyone else’s pain. He was a devout Muslim, although not the Bosnian ayatollah that his enemies portrayed. Yet though he paid lip service to the principles of a multiethnic state, he was not the democrat that some supporters in the West saw. He reminded me a bit of Mao Zedong and other radical Chinese communist leaders—good at revolution, poor at governance. But without him Bosnia would never have survived.

  Three Signals from Pale. Tuesday, August 29, dawned with press reports from Washington that the Clinton Administration was urging NATO and the U.N. to respond militarily. In an editorial, The New York Times objected. “Diplomacy is clearly the better course,” it wrote. “Mr. Holbrooke risks becoming the latest intermediary to fail at Balkan diplomacy, but he is right to try.”

  In Pale, the Bosnian Serbs seemed to realize they had blundered badly by shelling the marketplace. Trying to reduce the chances of air strikes, they took three revealing steps. First, they issued a statement welcoming the American peace initiative. This meant nothing, but it was a sign that Pale felt isolated and overexposed.

  The second signal came directly from Karadzic, who in a fax asked former President Jimmy Carter to return to Pale to negotiate an immediate cease-fire and start peace negotiations. In public, the Administration was properly polite about Carter’s role. Nicholas Burns, the State Department spokesman, said the letter to Carter “contains some potentially positive elements which we are examining carefully.” In fact, however, we saw the letter as a clever attempt to lure the United States back into direct negotiations with Pale, something we had flirted with and rejected six months earlier as dangerously unproductive. Bob Frasure had been the primary architect of the strategy of negotiating solely with Milosevic; although it had not yet borne fruit, I was persuaded, as were my Washington colleagues, that it was the correct approach. While we did not want to elevate Milosevic to statesman status, we planned to negotiate only with him and, at the same time, hold him strictly accountable for the behavior of the Bosnian Serbs.