To End a War

by Richard Holbrooke

  Nervous and unhappy, Milutinovic said he could not control the little Bosnian Serb. “Only my Master can do that,” he added. Then he made a suggestion that surprised me. “I think if you talk to him firmly he will understand.”

  I asked Koljevic and his colleague, “Foreign Minister” Aleksi Buha, to join us in the tiny room. With Milutinovic watching in silence, I told them that if they continued their protest they would deal themselves completely out of the process. “Walk out if you want to,” I told the astonished Serbs. “But if you do, we will continue without you, and Bosnian Serb influence in this process will be eliminated. I doubt President Milosevic will be pleased, but it’s up to you.”

  Koljevic seemed to deflate in front of our eyes. Suddenly he was everyone’s friend, a man of peace who wanted only to be allowed to quote a few lines of his beloved Shakespeare before fading away. He proposed that he be allowed to rise one last time from his seat behind the table, concede that Milutinovic spoke for him and his colleagues, and then remain silent.

  I said we would agree to his request, provided he said nothing substantive, and that Sacirbey and the Croatian Foreign Minister, Mate Granic, both agreed in advance. The confrontation had been intense, but it was over in less than thirty minutes. When we resumed, Koljevic followed his script, pathetically quoting the Bard and “relinquishing” his right to speak, after which we finally started the meeting.

  The rest of the meeting was routine. Each person at the table made a speech; as is usual on such occasions, they were of little consequence. Given the chance to perform before an audience—even without journalists present—the three Foreign Ministers reverted to sterile and accusatory rhetoric.

  That afternoon, at the Intercontinental Hotel, flanked by Carl Bildt, Igor Ivanov, Pauline Neville-Jones, Jacques Blot, and Wolfgang Ischinger, my colleagues and I faced over four hundred journalists, with live broadcasts on CNN and several European networks. We did not invite the three Balkan Foreign Ministers to the press conference, knowing that their natural proclivity to argue would divert attention from the Joint Agreed Principles. Before reading the agreement, I made a personal statement:

  Our first thought this morning when we walked into the room and found that the Foreign Ministers of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia were in the room for the first time in so many months, that they were willing to shake hands and reach a common agreement which, though limited, moves us toward peace … our first thought—all of us—was: if only Nelson, Joe, and Bob Frasure could have seen this day.

  I faltered for a moment, and Carl Bildt graciously picked up the same theme, saying of Frasure that “his excellence, knowledge, and humor made a lot of this possible.”

  The Joint Agreed Principles of September 8 were only a first step toward peace, and we did not want to oversell it. The bombing and the war were still going on. I stressed the limitations of the agreement:

  The statement takes us an important step closer to peace. Yet, important as it is, this statement does not constitute the end of the tragedy in the Balkans. Far from it…. The hardest work still lies ahead. The [two] entities have yet to develop a design for a central connecting structure…. In addition, the parties need to define their internal borders within Bosnia in accordance with the 51–49 principle. We should be under no illusions that these will be easy tasks.

  After the press conference, I asked every member of our team to meet with journalists individually or in small groups organized by the European Bureau’s energetic press officer, Aric Schwan, who had flown to Geneva to assist with the media. We wanted to be sure that the story was properly reported; most especially, we wanted to be sure that everyone understood that the next step was to fix the major omission in the Geneva agreement—the lack of any agreement on a central government. Without this, the agreement could easily be construed as having partitioned Bosnia, when the exact opposite was our goal.

  We were through the first phase of the negotiations, and the world was taking notice. Yet, despite some overly optimistic reporting, we were still far from our goals. We planned to resume the shuttle within a week, but as we headed home we had no clear plan as to how to proceed.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Siege of Sarajevo Ends

  (September 9–14)

  In one of his many public statements, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Montenegrin Radovan Karadzic, said that the Serbs in the past period, when everyone was on their side, had been subjected to “genocidal extermination,” whereas now, over the last year, when so many are against them, they are suffering the least.

  Of all the innumerable absurdities and untruths that have been uttered, this statement truly takes the cake. For more than forty years Bosnia was inhabited by Bosnians, and we did not distinguish between Serbs, Muslim, and Croats, or at least such distinctions were not paramount in their mutual relations. Throughout that period, to the best of the Yugoslav and world public’s knowledge, there were no detention camps for Serbs in Bosnia, no brothels for Serb women, no Serbian children had their throats cut…. But according to Karadzic, the Serbs were somehow unhappy then. And now, in the war, with so many dead, … now, according to their leader, the time has come when they are suffering the least…. Ethnically pure states are an impossibility in today’s world, and it is ridiculous to try to create and maintain such a state, even when there is just one nation.

  —MIRA MARKOVIC (Mrs. Slobodan Milosevic),

  in her newspaper column, January 20, 19931

  AFTER THIRTEEN DAYS ON THE ROAD—the longest of all our shuttle trips—we planned to spend at least a week in Washington. There were personal reasons for this, but, with major policy issues to be decided, we also needed a few days to develop a consensus on some key issues.

  Events in Bosnia, however, were moving too fast for a coherent policy review, and after only one working day in Washington we were on our way back to the region. This time we would negotiate the end of the three-year siege of Sarajevo—and unexpectedly meet with the world’s two most wanted indicted war criminals, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.

  On Sunday, September 10, even as we regrouped in Washington, Janvier met again with Mladic in the border town of Mali Zvornik. The meeting had been arranged by Presidents Chirac and Milosevic, both of whom wanted another bombing pause as soon as possible. Chirac was anxious for the release of the two French pilots who had been captured during the bombing. Janvier went to the meeting expecting Mladic to offer the withdrawal of Bosnian Serb heavy weapons from the hills around Sarajevo. But once again the meeting did not go according to the U.N. plan. Instead, Mladic threatened to attack the remaining “safe areas,” and refused to negotiate until after the bombing had ended.

  Mladic’s behavior opened the door for two of the most unexpected and important tactical decisions of the NATO air campaign—to attack vital military targets near the largest Serb city in Bosnia, Banja Luka; and to use Tomahawk cruise missiles. Thirteen of these expensive radar-guided missiles were launched against important Bosnian Serb military centers in western Bosnia, far from Sarajevo and Gorazde. Although a few seven-hundred-pound warheads were hardly as powerful as the hundreds of two-thousand-pound bombs that were being dropped by planes, the psychological effect of such sophisticated weapons, previously used only in the Gulf War, was enormous. The damage, however, was more than psychological: one of the missiles knocked out the main communications center for the Bosnian Serb Army in the west, with devastating consequences.

  Karadzic seemed increasingly desperate. In a letter addressed to Presidents Clinton, Yeltsin, and Chirac, he combined pleading, outrage, and threats, calling the attacks against Banja Luka “bizarre” and “barbaric.” If they continued, he said, the Bosnian Serbs would “reconsider participation in further peace talks.” NATO, he went on, “has declared war against the Republic of Srpska…. Time is rapidly running out.”

  Although Karadzic’s letter seemed to me to confirm the effectiveness of the Tomahawks,
the strikes added to the tension within NATO. On September 11, at a special meeting of the NATO Council, France, Spain, Canada, and Greece criticized the attacks in western Bosnia, claiming that they represented an unauthorized escalation.

  There was also a wintry blast from Moscow. Even before the Tomahawks, Yeltsin had written President Clinton on September 7 to express concern about the bombing. Now, the use of cruise missiles, the quintessential Cold War weapon, rattled the Russians deeply. They could not, they announced angrily, “be indifferent to the fate of the children of our fellow-Slavs.” (The Pentagon immediately denied that any children had been killed in the air strikes.) Russian diplomats threatened to withdraw from the Contact Group. Defense Minister Pavel Grachev called Bill Perry to warn that the strikes could lead Moscow to reconsider its military cooperation agreements with NATO, and even threatened “to help the Serbs in a unilateral way” if the bombing continued. The next day, Russia proposed a U.N. Security Council resolution to condemn the bombing, but Ambassador Albright swiftly headed it off.

  This strong Russian reaction to the bombing could not be entirely ignored. Perry and Grachev had already begun discussions about Russian participation in a post-peace agreement force in Bosnia. Beyond the Balkans lay the larger issue of Russia’s relations with NATO, a volatile issue ever since President Clinton had announced our intention to enlarge the Atlantic Alliance. With tensions mounting, the President and Christopher sent Strobe Talbott to Moscow immediately for “quiet consultations.” His trip proved timely and effective. After his forceful explanation that the bombing was consistent with NATO’s authority and essential to the negotiations, the Russian concerns, while not eliminated, abated considerably—thus clearing the path for the continuation of the Perry-Grachev negotiations.

  As the bombing continued, Croat and Bosnian Muslim military forces enjoyed their best week since the war began, even though there was still no military coordination between them. In the week after Geneva, the Croats took the town of Donji Vakuf, thus opening up a large area in western Bosnia. Karadzic charged that the NATO air strikes had assisted the offensive. But while the air strikes had undeniably aided the Federation, there was no truth to Karadzic’s charge; in fact, such coordination was the ultimate nightmare of many NATO officers, the “slippery slope” toward the deep military involvement they feared and opposed. The truth remained as simple as it was ironic: the air strikes would never have occurred if Pale had not made a historic misreading of President Clinton and the United States.

  We were approaching circuit overload when the Principals’ Committee met at the White House on the afternoon of September 11. The President attended part of the meeting, and his presence made a huge difference, giving our discussion focus and enabling us to reach some important conclusions quickly.

  Tony Lake wanted us to convene an international peace conference right away. Others began to support him, but I resisted; we needed to allow the Federation offensive to continue, and the gap among the three sides was still too great for face-to-face meetings of the three presidents. Our next diplomatic goal, I said, had to be to fix “the major flaw in the Geneva principles”—the lack of “connective tissue between the two entities.”

  “Has the NATO bombing reached the point of diminishing returns?” the President asked.

  The question was an indication of the heavy pressure the President was under to end the bombing. “No, Mr. President,” I replied. “There may come a time when continued bombing would hurt the peace efforts, but we’re not there yet. The negotiating team believes we should tough it out. Our leadership position is getting stronger. We should use it or we will lose it. It is hurting the Bosnian Serbs, and helping us. As for Milosevic, he is not making a big point of it.”

  Christopher agreed. “The bombing should continue,” he said. “It would be a mistake to back off now.”

  “Okay,” the President said. “But I am frustrated that the air campaign is not better coordinated with the diplomatic effort.”

  This was an astute observation. The same point troubled me deeply; there was no mechanism or structure within the Administration capable of such coordination. It was, in fact, the role of the NSC to coordinate such interagency issues. I wanted to tell the President that this problem required immediate attention. But relations among the NSC, State, and Defense were not something an Assistant Secretary of State could fix. In fact, we later learned that Admiral Smith had ordered Lieutenant General Ryan, who was in charge of the bombing, to have no contact with the negotiating team.

  Unexpectedly, Bill Perry suggested we consider another unilateral bombing pause. This caught Warren Christopher and me slightly off guard. Why would the Secretary of Defense propose a bombing halt just when his forces were dramatically expanding the scope of the bombing? To people not familiar with the ways of the Pentagon it may have appeared inexplicable. But the huge military establishment often operates at several different levels at once. Correctly understood, the Pentagon’s behavior was less surprising. The military did not like putting its pilots at risk in pursuit of a limited political objective, hence their desire to end the bombing as soon as possible. At the same time, if asked to continue the bombing, they would seek to make it as effective as possible. Thus their desire to use Tomahawk missiles and F-117s, the airplane least detectable by radar. In addition, the Navy and the Air Force both wanted to publicize, especially to Congress, the value of their new weaponry. For the Navy, this meant the Tomahawks, which were launched from naval vessels in the Adriatic. For the Air Force, it meant the expensive and controversial F-117, whose value had been questioned by some Pentagon critics.

  Warren Christopher objected first. Because he was normally so soft-spoken, Christopher was especially effective when he raised his voice or showed emotion. “We must carry on the bombing until it has achieved real effectiveness,” he said firmly. “The Serbs must be impressed with our willingness to bomb on a continuous basis if necessary.” Christopher was supported by Lake, Albright, and myself.

  Almost immediately a more serious problem arose. Admiral Owens, the Vice Chairman of the JCS, made a remark that surprised Christopher and me. In his calm, methodical, and authoritative style, Owens said NATO would run out of new authorized “Option Two” targets within two or three days. Of course, Owens said, the bombing could be continued by hitting old Option One and Two targets again. However, this would have diminishing value, and put the pilots at continually greater risk as the Bosnian Serb anti-aircraft gunners became more proficient. To attack Option Three targets, a much broader group that included Serb troop concentrations and equipment throughout Bosnia, we would need to return to both the NATO Council and the U.N. Security Council for permission. But everyone in the room knew that the chances of getting approval from our NATO allies to attack Option Three targets was close to zero.

  On the drive back to the State Department after the meeting, Christopher told me that he doubted that the military had really exhausted all its authorized Option Two targets. But there was no way to question the military within its own area of responsibility—the military controlled the information and independent verification was virtually impossible.

  Only moments earlier the President had observed that the bombing should be calibrated for political and diplomatic purposes, but in fact the opposite was suddenly the case; the military had rewritten our negotiating timetable. My immediate concern was that if the information became public, as so often happened after White House meetings, it would weaken our negotiating hand. If the air campaign was really going to end within a few days, we had to continue the bombing long enough to negotiate something in return. “If NATO runs out of targets before we resume our talks with Belgrade, we won’t have a chance to get anything in return for the bombing,” I said. “Let’s not stop it for free.” Christopher agreed. “Let’s be sure the negotiating team has the benefit of the leverage of military force for as long as possible,” he said.

  Confronting this
new time pressure, Christopher asked that the negotiating team leave for Belgrade the next day, four days ahead of schedule.

  Before leaving the next day, I called Admiral Smith in Naples to ask how much longer he would be willing to continue the bombing. Smith replied that, assuming routine weather, he thought he had about three more days of new targets, after which he could keep the bombing going only by returning to targets that had already been hit—or, as Smith put it in his best salty old sea dog style, “cleaning up a few stray cats and dogs.” The meaning behind the message was clear: Smith did not wish to let the bombing be “used” by the negotiators, and would decide when to stop based on his own judgment. This was hardly the best way to integrate diplomacy and military pressure, but we had no choice in the matter.

  We slept little as we flew to Belgrade on the night of September 12–13. As we prepared for the meetings, I raised a sensitive issue: What should we do if asked to meet the two indicted war criminals who led the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic? Should we meet with them at all, and, if so, how should we deal with them? It was one of those rare questions that combined political and tactical considerations with questions of morality.

  There was a history here. Karadzic and Mladic had met in the past with Western negotiators, including Vance, Owen, and Lord Carrington. Jimmy Carter had spent a great deal of time with Karadzic only seven months earlier, and remained in regular contact with him by phone and fax.

  Nonetheless, I felt deeply uncomfortable about the prospect of sitting down with indicted war criminals. But in the end I decided it was justifiable under these circumstances. In reaching this conclusion, I was deeply influenced by the stories of Raoul Wallenberg and Folke Bernadotte, two legendary Swedes—both the subject of biographies by my wife, Kati—who had negotiated, respectively, with Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler in 1944–1945. Each man had decided to deal with a mass murderer in order to save lives. History had shown the correctness of their decisions, which had resulted in the rescue of tens of thousands of Jews before the two men themselves were killed—Wallenberg in a Soviet prison, Bernadotte at the hands of Israeli terrorists in Jerusalem in 1948.