Tudjman and Eastern Slavonia. Christopher originally planned to return to Washington soon after the ceremony, but in the first example of a pattern that would emerge at Dayton, we changed the schedule at the last moment so that he could attend a hastily arranged meeting between Milosevic and Tudjman on eastern Slavonia. We met in a small VIP cottage about a mile from the Hope Center. The two Presidents sat opposite each other, while Christopher and I sat side by side on a couch between them; Hill and Galbraith also participated. Their greeting was far warmer than their performance for the press; Milosevic jovially hailed Tudjman as “Franjo.” Tudjman called Milosevic “Slobo.”
Ambassador Galbraith started by saying that he believed the solution to eastern Slavonia, on which he had worked tirelessly, lay in the resolution of several relatively small matters. Tudjman replied testily that these so-called technical problems begged the fundamental question, on which he demanded an answer from Milosevic: would the Serbs accept the full reintegration of eastern Slavonia into Croatia? Milosevic replied that the technical issues were really about another core question: would the Serbs have rights as a minority in eastern Slavonia? Milosevic seemed oblivious to the irony that he was arguing a human-rights case on behalf of Serbs from a region that his army had reduced to rubble. Still, he had a point. The Serbs who had lived in eastern Slavonia and the Krajina for generations should have had the same rights as other dispossessed people in the region.
The conversation began with consecutive translation, but as it heated up, we invited the two men to proceed in their native language (or languages), while we tried to follow with the assistance of an interpreter and Chris Hill. Once they were liberated from the civilizing restrictions of English, the decorum of the meeting rapidly deteriorated. “Franjo!” “Slobo!” They shouted with increasing intensity, half in Serb, half in English. Finally I interrupted. “Let’s do something about eastern Slavonia right away,” I said. “Mr. Holbrooke, you are too unrealistic,” Milosevic replied. “This issue must be settled in the field. I cannot control those people in eastern Slavonia.”
Nonetheless, Milosevic agreed to “use his influence,” which he continued to claim was nonexistent, with the eastern Slavonian Serbs. Given this small opening, I suggested that Galbraith and the U.N. negotiator, Thorvald Stoltenberg, return with Tudjman to Croatia the next day, in order to seek an agreement among the local leaders. I thought of the stoic Stoltenberg, who was at that moment on a plane en route to Dayton; he would have time only to grab fresh clothes and take a short nap before returning to Croatia.
Although there had been no change in the positions of the two parties, Milosevic had made two important implicit concessions. For the first time, he had agreed that eastern Slavonia would be discussed at Dayton. And he had previously claimed he had no influence over the Serbs of Slavonia; now he seemed ready to “recommend” a solution to the local Serbs.
Tudjman had gained a point. Events had given him a central role in the peace process. Some critics charged that we had made a deliberate decision to overlook Croatia’s often brutal policies toward Muslims and Serbs in exchange for Zagreb’s support of a peace agreement in Bosnia. The truth, however, was different: we did not empower Tudjman, the situation did. Tudjman could prevent a settlement in Bosnia until he got control of eastern Slavonia, the last piece of Serb-controlled land in Croatia. Given his previous behavior, his threats to go to war again soon after Dayton if he did not get the region back peacefully had to be taken seriously. Tudjman’s ability both to prevent a Bosnia agreement and to threaten another war was his primary leverage over Milosevic. His influence over Izetbegovic came from his ability to break up the Croat-Muslim Federation, whose continued survival was essential for Dayton to work. For years Tudjman had been regarded with contempt by Milosevic and hatred by Izetbegovic; now he had the upper hand over his two rivals, and he knew exactly how to exploit it for his own goals.
Warren Christopher. Christopher was appalled by the behavior he had just witnessed. But it was useful that it had happened in his presence; he could warn Washington, as he said, that “it is going to be tough the whole way.” Otherwise, he was pleased with the day—more so than I was. It had gone smoothly, and the press coverage appeared to be excellent. Christopher said he would return whenever it was useful, but would leave the timing to the team at Dayton. As we drove to the airstrip, I asked if he was comfortable with the chaotic nature of the process—so alien to his methodical style. “I’m not always sure what you are doing, or why,” he replied, “but you always seem to have a reason, and it seems to work, so I’m quite content to go along with your instincts.”
I thanked him for his confidence. As he left for Washington, I reflected on the long road we had traveled together. I had known Warren Christopher since 1977, when Cy Vance had made him Deputy Secretary of State and me Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. My relationship with him in the Carter Administration had been close, and it became even closer in December 1978, when he undertook a difficult and dangerous mission to Taiwan immediately after President Carter had announced the full normalization of relations with the People’s Republic of China. When a screaming crowd of thousands of angry Taiwanese surrounded and attacked his car as he tried to leave the airport, he handled himself with courage and calm.
In the 1980s, Christopher and I kept in regular contact. He invited me to address his partners at O’Melveny & Myers in Los Angeles. We dined together in Los Angeles and New York, and worked on several business deals together. Despite our close association over eighteen years, we were obviously different in style, age, and background. Where he was cautious and methodical, I tended to be intuitive and impatient. While he looked at issues as a sort of lawyer-judge, adjudicating the differences between the two sides, I was more likely to focus on the historical causes of the problem and its internal dynamic. He came to Washington from California, a Norwegian American raised in North Dakota; I was a New Yorker with a mixed Central European Jewish background and had lived overseas for many years, on three continents. Almost twenty years separated us in age.
I never felt we were competitors. But starting in 1992, some mutual friends, perhaps trying to stir things up, began saying that Chris viewed me with concern. When Christopher was appointed head of the transition task force for the President-elect, the press printed rumors of friction and rivalry between us. When I raised these stories with him, he dismissed them. Whatever the truth about the past, it was extremely unusual for a Secretary of State to give a subordinate the kind of support and backing Christopher had given us during the shuttle. Now, with identical interests, fate had made us an inseparable team.
That evening, after Christopher left, we handed each Balkan delegation the draft annexes on the constitution, elections, and IFOR. Amazed at the detail and length of the documents, the three Presidents began to realize that when we said we wanted a comprehensive agreement, we meant it.
DAY TWO: THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 2
Trying to create a little order out of chaos, we divided our efforts into six areas:
First, Michael Steiner and Dan Serwer, assisted by their diligent German colleague Christian Clages and Chris Hill, would negotiate a new and tougher Federation agreement between the Croats and the Muslims;
Second, Bildt, Owen, and I would negotiate constitutional and electoral issues with Milosevic and the Bosnians;
Third, Clark and Pardew would begin discussions on the military annex with the parties, which I would join later;
Fourth, we would conduct a two-track negotiation on eastern Slavonia, led by Hill and me in Dayton and Galbraith and Stoltenberg in the region;
Fifth, we would try to complete unfinished business internal to the Contact Group, with Robert Gallucci taking the lead on two issues that we had not resolved on that last pre-Dayton weekend, the role of the international police task force and the mandate of the senior civilian implementation official, who would be Carl Bildt;
Finally, we would continue to defer most discussion on the territorial issues (“the map”) until we had made progress on other matters.
What Is the Federation? The distinction between the two levels of government—the central government and the entities—was still confusing, even to many people at Dayton. This was understandable: the designations had changed several times during the war, and were poorly defined. The Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina had been at war since the moment it declared independence in 1992. Its predominantly Muslim government, headed by Izetbegovic, contained some Croats and Serbs, but it had control only over the Muslim part of Sarajevo and the area around Tuzla. Other Muslim areas, such as Bihac and Goradze, were, for all practical purposes, autonomous. The Croat part of Bosnia was run separately out of Mostar by a group of Bosnian Croats whom we considered crooks; they were the people who had waged the terrible war-within-a-war that had torn Mostar and several other mixed Croat-Muslim towns apart in 1993–94. To stop this war and create a common front against the Serbs, the United States, under the leadership of Charles Redman, had created the Federation in early 1994. But we had not followed up. Until the fall of 1994, when I appointed Dan Serwer, no American official was assigned to work on the Federation. His thankless task was to hold the fragile, virtually nonexistent coalition together.
Out of makeshift wartime structures, we sought to create two functioning levels of government: a central government, with its capital in Sarajevo; and two regional entities, one a functioning Croat-Muslim Federation, the other a Bosnian Serb entity with no claims to sovereignty. Steiner and Serwer wanted the Federation to turn responsibility for certain functions, such as foreign affairs and finance, over to the new central government, which would include Muslims, Serbs, and Croats. In turn, local matters such as police, education, and internal security would be assigned to each of the entities—the Federation and the Republika Srpska. The para-state that the Croats called the “Republic of Herzog-Bosnia” was supposed to disappear, turning over its functions to the Federation.
For the first week, Steiner, Serwer, and Hill would struggle with Tudjman, Izetbegovic, and Kresimir Zubak, the President of the Federation, while I worked on other issues.
DAY THREE: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5
The Contact Group was already restive. We had agreed to meet each morning at 9:00 A.M. The first two meetings were a mess, and we wasted almost two hours on trivial matters. This was not why we had come to Dayton. The Europeans had a great deal to contribute, and would be essential for success. But they seemed addicted to interminable meetings focused mainly on procedure, while the three Balkan Presidents waited a few hundred feet away.
We could not afford to waste so much time, yet we had to keep the Europeans involved. After three days, we dissolved the large daily Contact Group meeting and replaced it with a smaller meeting restricted to the six senior representatives at Dayton: Carl Bildt, Pauline Neville-Jones, Wolfgang Ischinger, Jacques Blot, Igor Ivanov, and myself. For symbolic reasons, I suggested we meet in Bildt’s room each morning.
“What Is Europe’s Phone Number?” This arrangement reflected a deeper difficulty within the European Union: who spoke for Europe?
This problem had been famously described by Henry Kissinger when someone in the State Department had said that they had better consult Europe on some issue. “And what,” Kissinger had rumbled to his staff, “is Europe’s phone number?” Now, two decades later, and despite the E.U.’s frequent lip service to a common defense and foreign policy, Kissinger’s question was still relevant.
At Dayton, it was a problem from the outset. Although Carl Bildt was one of the three co-chairmen, Pauline Neville-Jones and Jacques Blot told us privately that Bildt could not speak for their governments on certain issues. This made a mockery of both the theory and the practice of having a E.U. representative as co-chairman, and raised other questions. Whom did Bildt speak for? And when? What, in fact, was his authority? Did he represent only the E.U. countries that were not there? Where did the Germans, who had not made a similar statement, stand?
No clear answers were forthcoming from Neville-Jones or Blot. In fact, they seemed annoyed when we raised the problem, saying, “We’ll sort it out as we go along.” It was a sad admission, on the one hand, that the E.U. did not exist as a single negotiating entity. On the other hand, it was not surprising that nations which still aspired to greatness and global influence wanted to retain an independent voice on foreign policy. What troubled us most was the hypocrisy of the European Union in giving a distinguished former Prime Minister such a grandiose title, then undermining and hamstringing him from the outset, and later blaming us for friction in the negotiations. Reflecting on this situation a year later, Carl Bildt observed philosophically, “Europe lacks the capacity to act because of too many competing interests, while the U.S.—when it sorts out its own mess in Washington—has the capacity to act. The Europeans are good at coordinating with each other, while the U.S. is not, but our internal coordination takes up all our time, and you are more decisive when you get your act together.”
David Rohde. In the midst of our negotiations, a new problem arose. An intrepid young Christian Science Monitor journalist, David Rohde, had rented a car in Vienna and, without telling anyone, set out for Srebrenica, hoping to write a follow-up account of its fall, a story that he had been one of the first to cover. On October 29, showing more courage than wisdom, he began digging in the red dirt of the mud dam near Zvornik, the presumed site of a mass grave. Not surprisingly, he was picked up by Bosnian Serb police. As Dayton opened, he was missing somewhere in Republika Srpska.
Rohde’s absence complicated our work considerably. Although he was a private citizen and had knowingly taken great risks—traveling without papers or permission, apparently without the full knowledge of his own editors—we could not ignore the situation. I told Milosevic that while we would continue to discuss the issues, no agreement would be possible at Dayton unless Rohde was found unharmed.
Milosevic was astonished. “You would do all this for a journalist?” he said incredulously. “Yes,” I replied. “We would have no choice.” It was the beginning of a dramatic subplot at Dayton.
The Bosnian Serbs. The joint Yugoslav-Bosnian Serb delegation at Dayton included Momcilo Krajisnik and Nikola Koljevic, and one of General Mladic’s top deputies, General Zdravko Tolimir. Milosevic relegated them to the second floor of the two-story Serb quarters, and treated them with open contempt. This was in sharp contrast to his treatment of Momir Bulatovic, the genial, low-key president of Montenegro, whom he often brought to meetings to demonstrate that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia consisted of more than just Serbia.
On November 2 and 3, Jim Pardew met with Krajisnik and his colleagues to test their attitudes. The meetings were unproductive but revealing. Krajisnik, an unreconstructed opponent of a single state, proposed that Sarajevo be divided, and that the airport be moved so that the land it occupied could be converted into a new Serb downtown area. After five hours, Jim told them their positions were completely unrealistic, and left.
From then on, the Bosnian Serbs were essentially isolated at Dayton. Dark and brooding, they hovered on the edge of the conference, eating alone at Packy’s, avoiding contact with the other national delegations, and trying to communicate with Carl Bildt and Wes Clark, whom they thought would be more accessible. Within a few days, Krajisnik began sending us angry letters demanding to know what was going on. I showed them to Milosevic, observing how odd it was for us to receive missives from members of his delegation asking us what was going on. Milosevic took each letter, crumpled it up without reading it, and threw it ostentatiously into his wastebasket. “Pay no attention to those guys,” he said. “I’ll make sure they accept the final agreement.”
The Museum Dinner. We constantly looked for ways to break down the barriers of hatred and distrust. The most ambitious effort took place on the evening of the third day: a large dinner for all the delegations at th
e Wright-Patterson Air Force Museum.
We picked the site with great care. The Wright-Patterson Air Force Base included the greatest military air museum in the world, with a collection that covered the entire history of aircraft, from before the Wright brothers to the cruise missile. Hangar after hangar held priceless airplanes, beautifully displayed. For an hour before dinner, the delegations walked through the exhibition with museum guides. Izetbegovic showed little interest, but the others were fascinated by this brief diversion. With controlled emotion, Wolfgang Ischinger pulled me aside in front of a Messerschmitt. “This was the plane my father flew during the war,” he said quietly. “I have never seen it before.” Ischinger was a true son of modern Germany—sensitive, urbane, and determined to see his country play a positive role in the world.
Jacques Blot, however, was nowhere to be seen. When Rosemarie called to find him, she discovered that he was boycotting the dinner because the security guards at the gates of Wright-Patterson had stopped his car, forced him to walk around the inspection post, and then searched him using dogs trained to smell explosives.
We put an end to this excessive zeal the next day by ensuring that all senior personnel would be treated with respect and allowed to pass unimpeded through the gates. But it was too late to soothe Jacques Blot’s wounded pride. I called him to apologize and promised it would never happen again, but, enraged, he said my apology was insufficient. The insult was not simply to him, but “to all of France.” He would not leave the compound for our dinner—but he would make a formal protest to Washington and consider returning to Paris. “I will not,” he said, “be sniffed.” He pronounced it “sneefed.”
To End a War Page 34
