Still furious, Christopher left for meetings across the street at the United Nations. Before he departed, he told Sacirbey that the situation would have to be cleared up right away if Sarajevo wanted to avoid serious consequences to its relations with the United States. I met with Carl Bildt and the four Contact Group representatives, who were distressed at having been shunted around. Apologizing, I invited them to talk to Sacirbey, but their efforts to move him got nowhere.
Sacirbey was scheduled to deliver his speech to the U.N. at 11:30. I asked him not to reveal to the press that we were in a state of crisis. He promised—and walked out onto First Avenue into a sea of journalists, whom he promptly told that he would not accept any agreement that did not provide for “direct elections.”
The Contact Group waited, eating sandwiches in the office of Madeleine Albright’s deputy, Edward “Skip” Gnehm. When Sacirbey returned, he seemed buoyed up by his public appearance at the General Assembly. Speaking in the great hall had taken some of the edge out of him. He now presented himself as the person who could solve the problem. Christopher returned from his other meetings to rejoin the fray. After coordinating with Tony Lake, we told Sacirbey that President Clinton would speak to the nation at 3:00 P.M. He would either announce the agreement and praise the Bosnians, or he would state publicly that New York had failed because of Sarajevo’s stubborness.
Asking for a private room, Sacirbey called Izetbegovic to relay our ultimatum. For a long time we waited. Then he emerged. “If President Clinton will say in his statement that he strongly opposes partition,” he said, “we will agree.” Since this was an existing American position, we assented on the spot. We also promised to pursue the cause of direct elections in the future. We went back upstairs to hold a brief formal meeting with the Croatian and Serbian Foreign Ministers, who had been waiting for four hours, and adjourned.
At 3:50 P.M. on September 26, the President announced the agreement from the White House pressroom. “There is no guarantee of success,” he said, “but today’s agreement moves us closer to the ultimate goal, and it makes clear that Bosnia will remain a single internationally recognized state. America will strongly oppose the partition of Bosnia.”
As soon as the President finished his short statement, we met with the press. We could finally show the skeptics that we were building a central government, at least on paper. We had agreed on a three-person presidency, a parliament, a constitutional court, and other important attributes of a national government. A great bridge had been crossed—but with more difficulty than we had expected, revealing even more clearly than before the troubling divisions within the Bosnian government.
We announced our return to the region in two days to resume the shuttle. To journalists who asked if we were now going to get a cease-fire agreement, I was noncommittal. The truth was, we didn’t know.
* Cohen became Secretary of Defense during President Clinton’s second term.
* See Egypt’s Road to Jerusalem: A Diplomat’s Story of the Struggle for Peace in the Middle East, by Boutros Boutros-Ghali, which contains frequent references to “my own awareness of my family’s long tradition,” and “its many generations [of] rich tradition of service to the country” (pp. 6, 7, et al.).
* Although it had existed in other forms for decades, Henry Kissinger gave “The Channel” its name when it was conducted by him and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. See White House Years, by Henry Kissinger, p. 141.
CHAPTER 13
Cease-fire
When the people vote on war, nobody reckons
On his own death; it is too soon; he thinks
Some other man will meet that wretched fate.
But if death faced him when he cast his vote,
Hellas would never perish from battle-madness.
And yet we men all know which of two words
Is better, and can weigh the good and the bad
They bring; how much better is peace than war!
—EURIPIDES, Suppliant Women
Your Place or Ours? No one wanted to relive the near disaster in New York. But despite the drama and difficulties, the September 26 agreement, with its unprecedented provisions for a central governmental structure, went a long way toward answering those who had criticized the Geneva agreement as a partition deal.
As we embarked on the evening of September 28 on our fourth trip to the Balkans, shuttle diplomacy had begun to lose its momentum. The three Balkan Presidents would soon have to be brought together in an all-or-nothing, high-risk negotiation. But none of the three key issues for such a meeting had been determined: its timing, its connection to a cease-fire, and where the peace talks would be held. Washington would leave the first two issues to us, but the third required a presidential decision, and our team had a serious disagreement with most of Washington.
Before we left for the region, there was the usual round of meetings with Foreign Ministers and other officials. The most important session was with French Foreign Minister Hervé de Charette in his suite at the United Nations Plaza Hotel in New York. De Charette did not share President Chirac’s friendly, open style, or his admiration for American culture. He was a classic high French official, elegant, aloof, always sensitive to real or imagined insults toward himself or France—a distinction that he did not seem to acknowledge. Yet even though his mission was to show that France still stood at the pinnacle of influence in Europe, on the day before our meeting he said to a group of reporters: “As President Reagan once remarked, ‘America is back.’ ” De Charette was under pressure from his colleagues to show that the Foreign Ministry still mattered. To the annoyance of many professional French diplomats, we had been handling sensitive issues directly with Chirac’s small but efficient staff at the Élysée Palace, headed by Jean-David Levitte, a brilliant young diplomat who served as Chirac’s national security advisor.
My meeting with de Charette was a microcosm of the complicated relationship between the United States and France. De Charette began with a complaint. “The French press,” he said, “is saying that the United States had taken over the negotiations and left France standing on the sidelines.” He expressed suspicion that we were already secretly arranging a peace conference in the United States. “It must be held in France,” he said. “If not Paris, then in Évian on the Lake of Geneva. We can seal the resort hotels off from the press, and provide a calm and controlled atmosphere.” He added that the European Union had agreed that France should host the peace talks—something both Germany and Britain firmly denied when asked a few days later.
I assured a skeptical de Charette that no decision had been made on the location or timing of the talks, but told him frankly that I favored an American site. De Charette proposed that we start the talks in the United States and move them to France after a predetermined time, say, two weeks. I said I did not think this would work, but added that perhaps we could consider a formal signing ceremony in France. As we left his hotel suite, de Charette took my arm and said, “This is very important to me and to France.”
The issue of where the talks should be held had become the subject of a fierce internal dispute within the Administration. Our team’s unanimous preference was for the United States, but this was a distinctly minority view in Washington. Most of our colleagues, with the exception of Tony Lake, wanted to hold the talks in Europe, preferably in Geneva, a city that symbolized to me unproductive diplomacy from the Indochina conference of 1954 to the endless rounds of Mideast and Cold War diplomacy. If we had to end up in Europe, my preference was for Stockholm, where Carl Bildt would be our host. At my request, Bildt started planning, in complete secret, for a conference at a resort hotel on Saltsjöbaden, an island not far from the Swedish capital.
The final decision would have to go to the President. Worried that the battle was already almost lost, I decided to appeal directly to Vice President Gore, who did not interfere casually in the normal processes of government. Gore returned my call whi
le I was in a car on the way to La Guardia Airport. For security reasons, he asked that we talk on a land line, and so, from a pay phone at the airport, I made my case. Gore, who seemed surprised by my intensity on this issue, said he would consider it favorably. But, as we headed for Europe, the likelihood of a U.S. site seemed low.
The C-130 lumbered into Sarajevo from Italy at 8:00 A.M. on September 29. In the twelve days since our last trip there had been a visible improvement in the city. In the shadows of the shattered buildings the city streets were animated, even crowded. Streetcars were functioning, and barricades of wrecked cars were being dismantled. It is an unusual experience for a government official to see a direct and immediate connection between his efforts and the lives of ordinary people, but as we drove through the city we felt that our negotiations had already begun to make a difference.
For the first time, we raised the possibility of a cease-fire—without advocating it. Izetbegovic said he was not ready yet: the military trend in western Bosnia was still running in his favor. In fact, we agreed with him.
The U.N. Dilemma. In the first thirteen days after the lifting of the siege, General Rupert Smith had not opened either of the main roads leading out of Sarajevo, though this was one of the guarantees we had obtained from the Serbs on September 14. One of the roads ran through a Serb portion of Sarajevo that had been closed throughout the war, forcing all traffic to detour through a tiny, winding, and dangerous street. The Bosnian government publicly criticized the U.N. for leaving it dependent on what Silajdzic called “that notorious street.”
The Bosnians were right. Frustrated, General Clark and I went to Smith’s office after the meeting with Izetbegovic and urged him to open the main roads and dismantle all checkpoints. “General,” I said, “you have a written commitment from the Serbs that these roads will be opened. If they resist, you can use force—but I don’t think that will be necessary.”
It was a replay of our last meeting. Smith, while far tougher than either Janvier or his predecessor, General Sir Michael Rose, did not appreciate our unsolicited advice, and responded forcefully. He was ready to run his own vehicles out of Sarajevo, but the U.N. had long been doing that. The risks, he said, would be his—not ours. He told us, as he had before, that he did not really control the French forces in Sarajevo Sector who would have to open the road. There were mines everywhere. He needed backing from Zagreb and U.N. headquarters in New York, both of which were passive or negative. Fighting was certain to break out. It would take time. And so on. As for the checkpoints, Smith thought eliminating them was impossible. “Bosnia is a country,” he said with a dry laugh, “where every boy grows up with the dream that someday he will own his own checkpoint.”
We understood Smith’s predicament (and forevermore quoted his memorable line about checkpoints), but even Clark, who had great respect for his fellow general, was disheartened. If we failed to implement the September 14 agreement, its value would quickly be eroded by Serb encroachments and U.N. passivity.
To demonstrate America’s determination to uphold that agreement, I asked John Menzies to send his Embassy staff on daily road trips from Sarajevo to Kiseljak. This was not, of course, a real test of the agreement, since the Serbs would not fire on a vehicle with an American flag and U.S. Embassy license plates, but at least it would show that the United States, for the first time in years, was using these roads.
The “Menzies patrols” produced several minor confrontations and small gains that demonstrated anew the necessity of applying continual pressure on the Serbs. Embassy staffers reported that the Serbs still maintained an armed checkpoint just outside Sarajevo. After a vigorous protest to Milosevic, who at first did not believe we cared about “such chickenshit,” the checkpoint was opened and the barrier raised. This was an example of the new American approach. We would stand firm on every point, no matter how small.
Most American officials viewed Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic as the Bosnian leader with the broadest vision—an eloquent advocate of a multiethnic state. But his power struggles with Izetbegovic and Sacirbey and other members of the Bosnian government often isolated him. His colleagues complained that he was difficult to work with. He carried a serious additional burden: Tudjman and Milosevic distrusted him. Nevertheless, Silajdzic was one of the two most popular Muslim politicians in Bosnia, along with Izetbegovic.
My own feelings about Silajdzic shifted frequently. There was something touching about his intensity and energy, and his constant desire to improve himself intellectually. Although always busy, he seemed alone—his wife and son lived in Turkey. Silajdzic was the only Bosnian official who seemed genuinely to care about economic reconstruction of his ravaged land. His unpredictable moods worried us, but his support would be essential for any peace agreement. Chris Hill got it right: “If we have Haris’s backing, we’ll still have problems with Sarajevo,” he said, “but they will be much reduced.”
John Shattuck and Human Rights. The next morning, September 30, we flew to Belgrade, stopping first at the Zagreb airport for a short meeting with Ambassador Galbraith and John Shattuck, the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Wedging themselves into the plane’s cabin, they gave us a vivid description of their trip the previous day to the Krajina in Croatia, and to Bosanski Petrovac and Kljuc, two towns in western Bosnia that had fallen to Federation forces. They had passed “endless” streams of Serb refugees fleeing eastward to escape the advancing forces of the Federation. At Kljuc, two miles from the front, with the sound of big guns in the distance, they had visited a mass grave site, the first to which any Americans were given access. Shattuck had given a press conference criticizing Zagreb for creating a new refugee flow, this one composed of Serbs driven out of their ancestral homes in the Krajina. His press conference infuriated Tudjman.
The Human Rights Bureau faced a long tradition of resistance from the regional branches of the State Department on bureaucratic grounds. It was not surprising, therefore, that some people initially opposed Shattuck’s involvement in Bosnia. But I disagreed: his trips could focus public attention on ethnic cleansing and other war crimes, and increase the pressure on Milosevic to stop these practices. After much discussion, Christopher had agreed to let Shattuck travel in the region under our direction, an arrangement that prevented the creation of overlapping negotiating channels.
Shattuck masked his determination with a dispassionate manner. He had taught at Harvard Law School and served on the board of Amnesty International, and he understood the media, to whom he made himself easily accessible. In the end even the skeptics in the European Bureau, who initially argued that human rights should be handled by the Embassies in the region, saw the value of John Shattuck’s highly publicized, highly focused efforts.
John and I intentionally did not travel together. But in my meetings with Milosevic we added a new demand: that Shattuck be allowed to visit war-crimes sites and towns. Shattuck’s trips would be a constant public reminder that even as we sought peace, we were not abandoning the quest for justice. When Milosevic saw we were serious, he agreed.
Arkan. Shattuck and I were particularly concerned with the activities of Zeljko Raznatovic, popularly known as Arkan, one of the most notorious men in the Balkans. Even in the former Yugoslavia, Arkan was something special, a freelance murderer who roamed across Bosnia and eastern Slavonia with his black-shirted men, terrorizing Muslims and Croats. To the rest of the world Arkan was a racist fanatic run amok, but many Serbs regarded him as a hero. His private army, the Tigers, had committed some of the war’s worst atrocities, carrying out summary executions and virtually inventing ethnic cleansing in 1991–92. Western intelligence was convinced he worked, or had worked, for the Yugoslav secret police.1
The only mechanism for dealing with such problems was imperfect but vital: the International War Crimes Tribunal, located at The Hague. When it was established by the United Nations Security Council in 1993, the tribunal was widely viewed a
s little more than a public relations device. It got off to a slow start despite the appointment of a forceful and eloquent jurist, Richard Goldstone of South Africa, as its chief. Credit for pumping up its role in those early days went to Madeleine Albright and John Shattuck, who fought for its status and funding. Other nations, especially its Dutch hosts and the Germans, also gave it substantial support. During our negotiations, the tribunal emerged as a valuable instrument of policy that allowed us, for example, to bar Karadzic and all other indicted war criminals from public office. Yet no mechanism existed for the arrest of indicted war criminals.
Although the tribunal had handed down over fifty indictments by October 1995, these did not include Arkan. I pressed Goldstone on this matter several times, but because a strict wall separated the tribunal’s internal deliberations from the American government, he would not tell us why Arkan had not been indicted. This was especially puzzling given Goldstone’s stature and his public criticisms of the international peacekeeping forces for not arresting any of the indicted war criminals.* Whenever I mentioned Arkan’s name to Milosevic, he seemed annoyed; he frowned and his eyes narrowed. He did not mind criticism of Karadzic or Mladic, but Arkan—who lived in Belgrade, ran a popular restaurant, and was married to a rock star—was a different matter. Milosevic dismissed Arkan as a “peanut issue,” and claimed he had no influence over him. But Arkan’s activities in western Bosnia decreased immediately after my complaints. This was hardly a victory, however, because Arkan at large remained a dangerous force and a powerful signal that one could still get away with murder—literally—in Bosnia.
Belgrade and Zagreb. Our Zagreb airport meeting with Shattuck and Galbraith completed, we were back in the familiar sitting room in Belgrade by late afternoon on September 30. “The time for a cease-fire is now,” Milosevic said. Like Izetbegovic, he insisted that any peace conference be held in the United States.
To End a War Page 27
