To End a War

by Richard Holbrooke

  Preparations. By the second week of October, preparations had become frantic. Several task forces framed positions on every issue from elections to the creation of a joint railroad commission. Robert Gallucci, the former Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs, was given responsibility for coordinating implementation of civilian activities if an agreement was reached.

  Our strategy for Dayton was both ambitious and simple: we would never have a better chance to end the war in Bosnia—and therefore we sought to address as many issues as possible in the final agreements. What was not negotiated at Dayton would not be negotiated later. We recognized that implementation would be at least as difficult as the negotiations themselves, but we rejected the minimalist theory that we should negotiate only those matters on which implementation would be relatively easy. Later we would be criticized for being overly ambitious, but the alternative would have been a “small” agreement, not much more than a cease-fire—and an opportunity lost, perhaps forever.

  While the preparations continued at home, teams spread out across Europe to conduct three simultaneous negotiations. First, Slocombe, Kornblum, and Clark flew to Brussels to gain more support for a multinational NATO-led force. Observing the response to their trip, Perry said that NATO had finally “emerged from a long dark tunnel of indecision and irresolution.”

  Second, Perry and Talbott continued their negotiations with Moscow on Russia’s role in a peacekeeping force. President Clinton discussed this with Yeltsin by phone on September 27 and in person with Kozyrev one week later; Perry, Slocombe, and Talbott saw Marshal Grachev in Geneva on October 8. The Russians wanted to participate in any military force in Bosnia, but they wanted it led not by NATO but by either the United Nations or some special coalition in which they played a role equal to that of the United States. Although the President, Perry, and Talbott had explained repeatedly to the Russians that this was impossible—”a deal breaker,” as Strobe put it, because it would destroy the key principle of NATO, unity of command—the Russians did not budge.

  The third negotiating track remained in the Balkans. I was already committed to a Contact Group meeting in Moscow, and the French had insisted that we stop first in Paris. We timed our travel so we could hold the Contact Group meeting in Moscow, join Talbott and Slocombe for the discussions on the Russian role in peacekeeping, and then return to the Balkans for a final “pre-Dayton systems check.”

  The fighting in western Bosnia intensified as the cease-fire approached. NATO planes swung back into action, attacking a Bosnian Serb command bunker after the Serbs shelled a U.N. base southeast of Tuzla and killed a twenty-nine-year-old Norwegian peacekeeper. Both sides tried to make last-minute gains, with the Federation forces having much the better of it. Facing the end of the fighting, the Croats and the Bosnians finally buried their differences, if only momentarily, and took Sanski Most and several other smaller towns. But Prijedor still eluded them. For reasons we never fully understood, they did not capture this important town, a famous symbol of ethnic cleansing.*

  Other parts of the cease-fire agreement were slowly falling into place. The power lines into the capital were steadily being restored as the Serbs and the Croats showed U.N. engineers the location of the mines. However, despite Russian promises, Gazprom continued to delay the reopening of the gas lines into Sarajevo. Finally, after several days of drama, Pickering obtained a serious offer from the Russians: they would agree to await later payment of the unpaid bills, and open the valves, provided the Bosnians agreed not to hold them responsible for any explosions or other damage caused when the gas went back on. When Sarajevo agreed, the gas began to flow (without any serious explosions). On October 11, in a dramatic moment, the lights began to flicker on all over the city, and the first tentative bursts of gas started through the pipes in Sarajevo. A few hours later, wild shooting broke out all over Sarajevo—not fighting, but celebrations. The cease-fire had officially started, although fighting continued for a few more days in the west.

  Before leaving for Paris and Moscow, I planned a weekend on Long Island. The President wanted a final discussion, which could not be scheduled until I was already on my way in a car. This led to a surreal scene on the Long Island Expressway. Asked to call the White House on Friday afternoon, October 13, I found myself at the appointed hour trapped in heavy traffic with my family on the Long Island Expressway. The White House switchboard told me not to use a cellular phone for a conversation with the President. I called back from a service-station pay phone, and was connected immediately to Christopher, Lake, and Berger. With the deafening sound of truck traffic in the background, we chatted as we waited for the President to join the call. Two men in a pickup truck drove over, and after a short wait made it clear that in their view my time at the pay phone was up. Their cigarette packs were lodged inside the sleeves of their T-shirts, James Dean-style, and they looked increasingly annoyed. I imagined the headlines in the tabloids if I told them the truth: “Man Attacked in LIE Phone Booth; Claimed He Was Talking to Prez.”

  Finally, as we waited impatiently, the President came on the line, asking me where I was. “You won’t believe it, Mr. President,” I said, in a low voice. “Is this the envoy to The Washington Post?” he asked with amusement, referring to a favorable editorial a week earlier. “How do you get such an article?” he continued. “I can’t get them to say anything nice about me.” I replied that the editorial had not been all that laudatory, and that it came after “eighteen straight hits on me.” “Don’t complain,” the President laughed. “You won’t get many of those.

  “Can we get a united Sarajevo?” he asked. “Could we protect it?” “The Serbs want a Berlin with guns,” I said. “The two sides have incompatible positions on four or five key issues. Everyone knows that only a peace settlement will bring U.S. involvement. They can’t have one without the other.”

  Areas of Control After Cease-fire, October 12, 1995

  “That’s good,” the President said. “It’s the only dog we’ve got. Let’s use it.”

  The President was particularly concerned about Yeltsin’s support for the peace effort, and spoke with passion about the need to involve Russia in the peacekeeping force.

  “We want the Russians in,” I said. “But they cannot have their own sector. It would look like a Russian zone of occupation after World War II. Secondly, they cannot have any say in NATO decisions to use force, which they are seeking through some kind of council.”

  “We should try to involve Russia,” the President replied. “It’s important. And good luck on your trip.”

  Moscow. After a short stop in Paris to see Chirac, we landed in Moscow. The Russians were pleased at their first opportunity to act as host for the Contact Group. But the meetings, held at the Foreign Ministry, were confused and shapeless; the Russians, not used to running international meetings, had no set agenda. Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, an affable and decent man, but under pressure from the nationalists in Russia, chaired the opening session.

  The French representative, Jacques Blot, announced that it had been “unanimously decided” that Carl Bildt would be the senior civilian representative in Bosnia. Since we had already agreed that the civilian chief would be a European, I agreed to this suggestion despite the odd manner in which it had been sprung on us. To do otherwise would have opened a wide breach within the Contact Group. Besides, we could work with Bildt, whom we had strongly supported in early 1995 as E.U. negotiator.

  Kozyrev suggested that the three Balkan Presidents visit Moscow prior to Dayton. His main purpose was to enhance the prestige of the Yeltsin government on the eve of the election for the Russian parliament, or Duma. The Russians promised that if we agreed to this meeting, they would restrict it to a “photo op” with Yeltsin.

  I had doubts about this proposal. It risked derailing or delaying the negotiating process, notwithstanding the Russian pledge to stay away from substance. Scheduling would be difficult. It seemed u
nlikely that the meeting would have much impact on Duma elections. However, I knew Strobe would favor such a trip, and given our recent conversation I assumed President Clinton would also support it—so I told the Russians that Strobe would address it when he arrived in Moscow the next day.

  That afternoon I went to the airport to meet him and his team, which included Slocombe and James Collins, the head of State’s office for relations with the former Soviet republics.* We headed straight to the Russian Defense Ministry, where we met with a group of grim and skeptical-looking Russian generals. They listened coldly to Strobe and Walt but seemed more receptive when American military officers spoke, especially Wes Clark; with his crisp military bearing and handsome uniform, he seemed to communicate to the Russians soldier-to-soldier, in a manner that we civilians could not match. When our team left for Belgrade the next day, Strobe asked us to leave Wes behind to participate in their discussions.

  In order to join the Bosnia force, the Russians said, they needed joint authority over all decisions. Briefing the NATO Council in Brussels on October 18, Strobe predicted that Yeltsin would “reserve for himself the final say on what has been an extremely contentious issue.” This meant the decision would not be made until the Clinton-Yeltsin summit, scheduled for Hyde Park, New York, on October 23.

  Congress—and the Twelve-Month Limit. On October 17, Christopher, Perry, and Shalikashvili ran into difficulty during an unusual joint appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Democrats joined Republicans in warning that the Administration had not yet made a convincing argument for deploying American troops in Bosnia.

  Like most Americans, affected by endless images on television of U.N. forces killed and wounded in appalling conditions in Bosnia, Congress assumed that American troops would also suffer casualties. This expectation shaped the debate over the next few weeks. Had the public understood that Americans would be sent to Bosnia only in a radically different environment from the one they had seen on television, one that sharply reduced the risk of casualties, there would have been more support for the effort. It was virtually impossible to make the case in the absence of a peace agreement, but Congress demanded that the debate begin before the negotiations at Dayton.

  Trying to bolster support, Perry told the Armed Services Committee that the NATO force in Bosnia would be “the biggest and the toughest and the meanest dog in town,” adding that if it were attacked, “it would bring a large hammer down on them immediately.” Still, the Senators were skeptical. “We haven’t made the case yet,” Christopher said, “but there’s a case to be made and we’ll make it.”

  Two issues dominated the hearing. First, would the Administration submit any decision to deploy troops to Bosnia to a formal vote of the Congress and would it respect the outcome of that vote? Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia spoke for most of his colleagues in a letter to President Clinton that called for “the Congressional majority [to] share full responsibility, from the outset, for any decision to accept the costs and risks of this proposed operation.” Other Senators, including John Glenn, Dan Coats, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and William S. Cohen all pursued this same line.

  Christopher and Perry had prepared carefully for this. Though they said they would “welcome an authorization from the Congress,” they refused to answer repeated questions as to whether or not they would recommend that the President seek such authority and be bound by a vote.

  The second issue was fundamental: how long would American and NATO troops be deployed in Bosnia? Although the NATO plan had not yet been formally approved by the President, Perry and Shalikashvili told the Senators NATO would “complete its mission in twelve months and [then] withdraw.”

  The plausibility of this statement, even when slightly softened by the President a few days later, was widely questioned at the time—and would cause serious difficulty for the Administration later. It resulted from the deeply held conviction of the Pentagon and the NSC that the American people would not support involvement in Bosnia without an “exit strategy.” There was merit to this theory, as all students of Vietnam and Somalia knew. Nevertheless, announcing before the peace talks began that we would withdraw in twelve months, no matter what happened on the ground, was not an “exit strategy,” but an exit deadline—something quite different, and quite misleading.

  The negotiating team knew that one year was not sufficient to succeed, no matter what happened in Dayton. But we were traveling between Moscow and Belgrade on the day this issue was decided, and after stating once in an earlier discussion that an arbitrary deadline—especially one so unrealistic—was a terrible idea, we were not consulted again. When we heard the news, we feared it would weaken our negotiating hand as well as threaten successful implementation. But the decision had been made, and we had no choice but to defend it publicly.

  A Final Systems Check in the Balkans. As Washington announced its decision on the troop commitment, we began our “final systems check,” visiting all three Balkan capitals. As a display of Contact Group unity, I asked Bildt and Ivanov to travel with us. It was the only joint trip of the three Dayton co-chairmen, and gave us a chance to develop closer working relationships.

  It had been almost two weeks since we had seen Milosevic. He began the October 17 meeting with a strong effort to get the sanctions lifted or suspended prior to Dayton. We rejected his request. John Shattuck had called from the Bosnian town of Zenica that same day to report that several thousand Muslim refugees had been driven toward central Bosnia by paramilitary Serb units, perhaps led by Arkan. At the same time, we had received intelligence reports of continued Yugoslav resupply to the Bosnian Serb Army, despite many assurances from Milosevic to the contrary.

  Milosevic waved off Shattuck’s information. Was the Serbian President lying about what was going on, or was he so isolated that he did not know what his own forces were doing? We did not know, but since he consistently claimed to be uninformed about what was happening in the Banja Luka area, I asked the CIA to prepare a “sanitized” (or unclassified) document that laid out evidence of the ties between Arkan and the Yugoslav Army. We planned to give the document to Milosevic on a second trip to Belgrade on October 19, after Bildt and Ivanov had left. Although the document did not link Arkan directly to the recent events, it was powerful and incriminating.

  When I raised the subject again at lunch on October 19, Milosevic tried to brush it off. “No, no, no,” he said. “Your information is wrong.” At this point, by prearrangement, Pardew pushed our document in front of Milosevic. “Our evidence is all in there, Mr. President,” I said.

  Milosevic looked away. He would not touch the paper lying directly in front of him. I urged him to read it, but he went on eating. Hill observed later that Milosevic acted as if by touching the document he would be physically connected to the charges it contained. When the meal ended, a Serb official came up to Pardew and said that he had left his paper on the table. “No, I didn’t forget it,” Jim said. “It belongs to President Milosevic.”

  Hyde Park. On October 23, a gorgeous fall day, a frail Boris Yeltsin met President Clinton at Franklin Roosevelt’s home at Hyde Park high above the Hudson. Jim Collins had suggested the beautiful setting in the hope that its reminders of FDR’s great wartime alliance with the Soviet Union would encourage a new security relationship, beginning in Bosnia. In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly the previous day, Yeltsin had delivered a blistering attack against NATO expansion and indicated that Russia would not participate in any force under NATO command in Bosnia.

  The President’s goal was to get Yeltsin to agree to participate in a Bosnia peacekeeping force even if the Russians continued to object to NATO enlargement, on the theory that what we did together in the Balkans would become a partial antidote to Russia’s neuralgia about NATO and would, in Talbott’s words, “lubricate the NATO-Russia track.” Talbott and Perry had spent a great deal of time discussing this nuanced approach to Bosnia and NATO during their frequent
trips to Geneva to see Grachev; now, with Dayton only days away, it was up to the President to pull at least the first track—Bosnia—across the finish line while holding firm on NATO.

  The President succeeded brilliantly. After hours of intense and often highly personal discussion, the two men agreed that two battalions of Russian troops, totaling about two thousand soldiers, would participate in the force in Bosnia. President Clinton defended the integrity of the Bosnia command structure—a sacred “red line” for NATO, which would rather have a command without the Russians than the kind of messy structure, with separate chains of command, that the Russians sought. The two Presidents did not attempt to settle this complicated problem, instead handing it back to Perry and Grachev, who were scheduled to meet at the end of the week in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. But they did agree on the size and functions of the Russian contingent, and the meeting set a positive tone for Perry’s closing efforts with Grachev.

  One other issue concerning Bosnia came up at Hyde Park: Yeltsin’s desire for a pre-Dayton summit in Moscow of the three Balkan Presidents. All three Balkan Presidents had told us they would rather not go to Moscow. From their point of view, it would be exhausting, unproductive, and politically undesirable. But Yeltsin was adamant: he did not care that none of the presidents wanted to make the trip to Moscow. Knowing that President Clinton would meet with Izetbegovic and Tudjman the next day in New York, Yeltsin asked him to use “all his influence” to make the meeting happen. Reluctantly, President Clinton agreed.