To End a War

by Richard Holbrooke

And to my people, I say, this may not be a just peace, but it is more just than a continuation of war. In the situation as it is and in the world as it is, a better peace could not have been achieved. God is our witness that we have done everything in our power so that the extent of injustice for our people and our country would be decreased.

  In the crush of last-minute problems and details, I had not thought about my own remarks until after the ceremony was already under way. I therefore had to write my statement while half-listening to the previous speakers. My mood was more one of relief than exhilaration, more weariness rather than euphoria. I could not find a way to share in the joy that some of the participants showed, even though I wanted to. After the behavior we had seen from some of the participants at Dayton, I was more worried than ever about implementing the agreement. As several reporters pointed out the next day, my remarks were notable for their cautionary tone, far more so than that of any of the other speakers that day. They began with a tribute to Bob Frasure, Joe Kruzel, and Nelson Drew, and continued:

  The agreements and territorial arrangements initialed here today are a huge step forward, the biggest by far since the war began. But ahead lies an equally daunting task: implementation. On every page of the many complicated documents and annexes initialed here today lie challenges to both sides to set aside their enmities, their differences, which are still raw with open wounds. On paper, we have peace. To make it work is our next and greatest challenge….

  It’s been a long and winding road for all of us, and it’s not over yet—far from it. The immense difficulties and the roller-coaster ride we have lived through in Dayton over the last twenty-one days, and especially in the last few days, only serve to remind us how much work lies ahead. Let us pledge, therefore, that this day in Dayton be long remembered as the day on which Bosnia and its neighbors turned from war to peace.

  * Even neutral countries like Switzerland and Malta, and tiny states like Andorra and Liechtenstein, were members. The chairmanship rotated annually, and in 1996 fell to the Swiss, who did an excellent job.

  * This led to an argument with the French a month later. See chapter 19.

  * In The Death of Yugoslavia, Brian Lapping and Laura Silber’s superb six-part documentary for the BBC, Silajdzic recounts this incident in detail. He describes it as an accident, and laughs as he recalls how upset both Milosevic and the Americans were. To those involved in it at the time, however, it was no laughing matter.

  * See opening quotation, chapter 17.

  BOOK FOUR

  IMPLEMENTATION

  Between the idea

  And the reality

  Between the motion

  And the act

  Falls the Shadow.

  —T. S. ELIOT

  CHAPTER 19

  Slow Start

  In 1884, at the International Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C., representatives from twenty-six countries voted to make … the Greenwich meridian the prime meridian of the world. This decision did not sit well with the French, however, who continued to recognize their own Paris Observatory meridian, a little more than two degrees east of Greenwich, as the starting line for another twenty-seven years, until 1911. Even then, they hesitated to refer directly to Greenwich mean time, preferring the locution “Paris Mean Time, retarded by nine minutes twenty-one seconds.”

  —DAVA SOBEL, Longitude: The True Story of a

  Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific

  Problem of His Time

  AN HOUR AFTER THE DAYTON INITIALING CEREMONY, Kati and I flew With General Shalikashvili to New York. Leaving Wright-Patterson Air Force Base was like release from a comfortable prison; we slowly rediscovered the outside world. Still, after twenty-one days of isolation, normal life seemed far away. The extraordinary public reaction to the Dayton agreement was immensely gratifying, but in the rush of tasks that needed to be done, there was no time to savor it.

  Meeting with the President. The next day, November 22, we met at the White House in an atmosphere that combined relief, pride, and apprehension. Lake’s opening quip reflected the tone: “We’re in a heap of trouble now—but it’s the right kind of trouble.” The President, arriving with Gore a few moments later, thanked everyone, and joked, “I was all set for a disappointment.”

  Asked to begin, I said that the arrest of Karadzic and Mladic was the most critical issue that was not resolved at Dayton. I repeated my view that if the two men, particularly Karadzic, the founder and leader of a still-unrepentant separatist movement, remained at large, full implementation of the agreement would be impossible. The President concurred, saying, “It is best to remove both men.” Without giving a direct instruction, he asked the military to reconsider the issue.

  He then shifted to a more immediate issue: gaining public and congressional support for the policy. “I must be brutally honest with the American people,” he said. “When I address the people I must be sure our military and intelligence people have signed off. I must be honest about what we are getting into.”

  Vice President Gore said Dayton was a gamble worth taking. He paused for a moment, and his face took on a sharp focus. “I want to make an important practical point regarding the JCS and the Pentagon,” he said, looking directly at the Defense representatives in the room. “I’ve had lots of conversations with the Congress. They have told me that our military representatives on the Hill usually leave their audience more uncomfortable than when they arrived. I’m not saying they are trying to undercut our policy, but they are losing us votes up there.”

  After a brief, stunned silence, Deputy Defense Secretary John White took up the challenge: “We need answers that Shali and his colleagues can all feel comfortable with.”

  The President stepped in to support Gore. “My sense,” he said, “is that the diplomatic breakthrough in Dayton has given us a chance to prevail in Congress and in the nation. People see the stakes and the big picture. But we can’t get congressional support without Defense and the military fully behind this. We must show Congress the stakes and the consequences. We can’t promise them zero casualties, but we have to convey a high level of confidence in our capacity to carry out the mission and to manage the gaps in the agreement. Your people have body language. It’s not a question of being dishonest, but we can’t close the deal without the Pentagon’s support.” He looked directly at Shalikashvili. “I know there has been ambivalence among some of your people—not you, Shali, but some of your people—about Bosnia,” he said, “but that is all in the past. I want everyone here to get behind the agreement.”

  The two men rose to leave, and we all rose with them. Their message would have a substantial effect. When the President and Vice President tell their senior aides to get with the program, and when they say it with vigor and even an unmistakable sternness, it does wonders for a divided or reluctant bureaucracy. I wondered if the two men had coordinated their comments; a year later the President told me that they had.

  Congress and the Public. While the public applauded our diplomatic efforts, opinion polls put public opposition to the deployment of American forces to Bosnia at around 70 percent. This was understandable. For almost four years, Americans had watched television pictures of United Nations troops being killed and wounded while unable to defend themselves adequately. Most Americans assumed we were sending our own troops into a similar situation, where they would suffer heavy casualties.

  Sending American troops to Bosnia would be the single most unpopular action of President Clinton’s entire first term. Although the public was proud of the American diplomatic role in ending the war, we had to convince them that the American deployments would be different from those of the U.N., that NATO would shoot first and ask questions later—and that the deployment was in our national interest. Newsweek wryly captured the paradoxical situation in its first post-Dayton issue in an article by Evan Thomas and John Barry:

  Hail Pax Americana! Salute the
return of the superpower! Or, then again, maybe not. The foreign-policy establishment may cheer, and Balkan brigands may head for the hills, but ordinary Americans are decidedly wary of sacrifices ahead…. Most voters regard Bosnia as someone else’s civil war. It will be up to President Clinton to convince them otherwise…. Baffled by Bosnia or distracted by domestic concerns, most Americans have not begun to realize the reach and depth of the U.S. commitment made last week in Dayton.

  Some important members of Congress immediately came to our support: Senators Lieberman, Biden, and Lugar once again were in the forefront. Some qualified their support by tying it to a tight “exit strategy.” Since the Administration had written a one-year timetable into the Dayton agreement, we could not object. Many others opposed the policy outright. Such a position was essentially cost-free, since the Congress knew that the President would send troops regardless of what it did (barring an absolute cutoff of funds, which was very unlikely). Thus members of Congress could take a politically popular position without having to worry about its consequences. Speaker Gingrich predicted that the Administration would win “guarded approval, even acquiescence through inaction” and produced an artfully evasive resolution that allowed his colleagues in the House to vote both sides of the issue; they could give, as he put it, “very strong support for the troops [while objecting to] the president’s policy.”

  In this atmosphere Donilon, and at the White House McCurry and Donald Baer, coordinated an intense public relations campaign. The President invited many members of Congress to the White House for briefings. In December we organized two large congressional delegations to the Balkans. Almost seventy members, an astonishing 15 percent of the entire House, went on these trips. Without exception, the members who went came back swayed in favor of the policy, although participation did not automatically mean full support. Cynthia McKinney, a first-term Democrat from an overwhelmingly black district in Georgia, who had previously focused on domestic issues and expressed great skepticism about foreign “giveaways,” was typical. She told me later, “The trip changed my life. It made me realize that we have to undertake some of the same responsibilities overseas that we need to do at home, and that we must find a way to do both.”

  Europe: Applause and Shock. Dayton shook the leadership elite of post-Cold War Europe. The Europeans were grateful to the United States for leading the effort that finally ended the war in Bosnia, but some European officials were embarrassed that American involvement had been necessary. Jacques Poos’s 1991 assertion that Europe’s “hour had dawned” lay in history’s dustbin, alongside James Baker’s view that we had no dog in that fight.

  “One cannot call it an American peace,” French Foreign Minister de Charette told the press, “even if President Clinton and the Americans have tried to pull the blanket over to their side. The fact is that the Americans looked at this affair in ex-Yugoslavia from a great distance for nearly four years and basically blocked the progression of things.” But de Charette also acknowledged that “Europe as such was not present, and this, it is true, was a failure of the European Union.” Prime Minister Alain Juppé, after praising the Dayton agreement, could not resist adding, “Of course, it resembles like a twin the European plan we presented eighteen months ago”—when he was Foreign Minister. Agence France-Presse reported that many European diplomats were “left smarting” at Dayton. In an article clearly inspired by someone at the French Foreign Ministry, Le Figaro said that “Richard Holbrooke, the American mediator, did not leave his European colleagues with good memories from the air base at Dayton.” They quoted an unnamed French diplomat as saying, “He flatters, he lies, he humiliates: he is a sort of brutal and schizophrenic Mazarin.”* President Chirac’s national security assistant, Jean-David Levitte, called to apologize for this comment, saying it did not represent the views of his boss. I replied that such minidramas were inevitable given the pressures and frustrations we faced at Dayton and were inconsequential considering that the war was over.

  With two weeks remaining before the formal signing of the agreement in Paris, Karadzic raised temperatures again in the region. Although he had signed the agreement under Milosevic’s pressure, he announced that Sarajevo would “bleed for decades” unless we changed the Dayton terms. In response, we said that we would not change the agreement. Defending the most problematic part of American policy, Perry predicted that “one year will be sufficient to break the cycle of violence in Bosnia.” Perry broke the year down into two phases, four to six months to enforce a truce and disarmament, and another six months to create a secure environment. As it turned out, he was overly pessimistic on the first task, and overly optimistic on the second.

  There was much work left before the signing ceremony. NATO had to send sixty thousand troops to Bosnia—the largest troop movement in Western Europe since World War II—and deploy thousands more off the Adriatic coast and at a forward logistics base in Hungary. On the civilian side, a series of high-level conferences were jammed into the two weeks immediately preceding the Paris ceremony. First came the annual NATO Foreign Ministers meeting in Brussels on December 5 and 6, which focused heavily on Bosnia. One day later, the scene shifted to Budapest for the annual meeting of the Foreign Ministers of the OSCE, who had to set up the machinery to oversee the elections in Bosnia as called for in the Dayton Peace Agreement. On December 8, the British convened a high-level “Implementation Conference” in London to discuss how to handle the nonmilitary parts of Dayton. Warren Christopher and John Kornblum attended the first two conferences, while Strobe Talbott and Bob Gallucci led the American team to London and Budapest. Meanwhile, I reassembled the negotiating team and returned to the Balkans to pin down the final details for the Paris ceremonies.

  This blizzard of diffused activity demonstrated the key difference between the negotiations and the phase that was beginning. The previous fourteen weeks had been highly focused. Now a wide-ranging effort, involving thousands of civilian and military personnel from the United States and other countries, was about to begin. Unfortunately, we had created a structure for implementing Dayton in which responsibility and authority would rest with no single individual or institution. Although Bosnia would play host to fewer agencies than it had during the U.N. days, too many still remained in the process, including NATO, the U.N. and the UNHCR, the OSCE, the E.U., the World Bank, the IMF—and an organization with no precedent, the Office of the High Representative, headed by Carl Bildt.

  “Foreign Forces and Elements.” When our team met Izetbegovic in Sarajevo on December 8, he was animated and jovial. But his mood darkened when we pressed him on the presence of “foreign forces and elements” in the Muslim portion of Bosnia. These were the Iranians and mujahideen who had been helping the Bosnian Muslims for the previous three years. American intelligence had long known of their existence—they were prominently mentioned, in fact, in my January 1993 memorandum to the incoming Administration—but during the war Washington had not made an issue of their presence since they were helping the otherwise isolated Bosnians to survive. The Dayton agreement required their complete withdrawal within thirty days after the arrival of IFOR, scheduled for December 20. I told Izetbegovic we would withhold our support for the Equip and Train program unless the Iranians and the mujahideen left. The press, aware of their presence, was running stories with headlines that particularly alarmed Congress (The Washington Post, November 30: “Foreign Muslims Fighting in Bosnia Considered ‘Threat’ to U.S. Troops”; The New York Times, December 10: “What’s Iran Doing in Bosnia Anyway?”). With NATO forces about to arrive in Bosnia, we could not tolerate the continued presence of these people in Bosnia, especially since some had ties to groups in the Middle East that had committed terrorist acts against American troops.

  Extremely uncomfortable with this subject, Izetbegovic pledged that the foreign elements would leave within the Dayton timetable “if there is peace.” This was only the first of many conversations we would have on this troublesome issue. />
  In Pale, Karadzic was still giving inflammatory interviews, to our intense annoyance. On December 2, I wrote Milosevic an angry letter demanding that he get the Bosnian Serbs under control. After reading the letter, Milosevic told Rudy Perina that he had been meeting with Bosnian Serb leaders all week, pressing them to “support” Dayton. Six days later, when we met with Milosevic, he told us confidently that he was succeeding. But on the future of Karadzic and Mladic, Milosevic remained adamant; he could not, and would not, deliver the two men to an international tribunal.

  I was concerned that we would not get off to a fast enough start. “Everything depends on a vigorous implementation by IFOR from the first day,” I cabled Christopher at the end of the trip. “A slow start would be a mistake.”

  One day before the Paris ceremony, under pressure from the White House, Congress voted on the deployments. In the Senate, with crucial support from Senator Dole, the Administration won a surprisingly easy 69-to-30 victory. In the House, Gingrich’s odd approach produced a 287-to-141 vote to oppose the Administration’s policy while “supporting” the troops. Coupled with defeats in each house for proposals to cut off funds for the mission, it was enough for Mike McCurry to claim victory. “This is probably the strongest statement of support they could possibly make,” he said. “Having voted overwhelmingly not to shut off funding is, in a sense, supporting the President’s judgment.”

  Paris. By the time of the vote, the negotiating team was already in Paris. The day before the ceremonies, in the midst of a gigantic strike of transit workers that paralyzed Paris, I met Foreign Minister de Charette alone to discuss the unresolved issue of whether an American or a European would run the OSCE election unit in Bosnia.