To End a War

by Richard Holbrooke

  The meeting quickly turned into a general discussion of the relationship between our two countries. I observed that no nation had done more in Bosnia than France. President Chirac’s personal intervention with President Clinton during his June trip to Washington had been vital in focusing the Administration. Success in the future depended critically on close French-American cooperation, especially since the French military would be responsible for the Sarajevo Sector, as it had been during the war. Finally, I reminded de Charette that we had kept our promise to have the formal signing ceremony in Paris.

  We had agreed to let Europeans head every civilian implementation institution in Bosnia, I said. But there was one exception: we would not yield on the OSCE election unit. The reason was simple: the final wording at Dayton—that the OSCE would “oversee and conduct” the elections—was sufficiently ambiguous that we wanted to ensure a maximalist approach. This required someone of our own choosing.

  He and President Chirac, de Charette said, were equally adamant that this position go to a Frenchman. These elections would take place in Europe, and they required a European to head the OSCE team. We went back and forth for a while. I ended the discussion by noting that when President Clinton arrived in the morning, he would take the matter up directly with President Chirac—and he would not yield.

  On the morning of December 14, President Clinton and his team arrived in Paris for the signing of the peace agreement. He met in the dining room of the Ambassador’s residence with the three Balkan Presidents prior to the formal ceremonies at the Élysée Palace. Two weeks earlier he had made a spectacularly successful trip to both Ireland and Northern Ireland; now he made an eloquent comparison between Bosnia and Ireland. After fifteen months of cease-fire in Ireland, he said, “it is unthinkable for the people to go backward. The whole situation has changed. You need to do the same.”

  After the meeting, we eased the three Presidents into separate parts of the room, and President Clinton moved among them, spending a few minutes with each. The President told Tudjman that we would send Jacques Klein, a career Foreign Service officer who was also a retired Air Force Reserve general, to eastern Slavonia to oversee the transition of the area to Croatia. With Izetbegovic, the President focused on the dangers posed to the NATO troops by the Iranians and the mujahideen. “If any action is taken against our troops,” he said, “it could shatter the whole venture and jeopardize our ability to equip and train your forces. I want to do what I promised, but this could undermine my commitment.” Izetbegovic told the President that the bulk of such personnel “had already left,” a statement we knew not to be true.

  Finally came the President’s first discussion with Milosevic. The White House had taken care to ensure that there would be no photographs of the encounter. Still, this was a meeting Milosevic had long wanted; it put him on a plane with other world leaders after years of isolation. “I know this agreement would not have been possible without you,” President Clinton said, cool and slightly distant. “You made Dayton possible. Now you must help make it work.”

  Milosevic said that the key to peace lay in strict implementation of the Dayton agreements. Then he requested full normalization of U.S.-Yugoslav (i.e., Serbian) relations. We swiftly ended the discussion.

  Ceremony. Minutes later we were at the Élysée Palace, the home of the President of France, for the formal signing ceremony. First, however, President Chirac wanted to see President Clinton alone. As we waited outside their private meeting room, de Charette approached Warren Christopher and me. “Our President has decided to give you Americans the OSCE election position,” he said dryly. “We have our doubts it will work. I hope this is satisfactory to you.”

  We walked to the ballroom of the Élysée Palace, where we were led to assigned seats facing a long table at which sat the three Balkan Presidents. Behind them stood President Chirac, President Clinton, Chancellor Kohl, Prime Minister Major, and Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, filling in for the ailing Boris Yeltsin. One by one the leaders signed, as either principals or witnesses. The Presidents and Prime Ministers spoke, as did Carl Bildt and, oddly, a man whose actions had contributed so little to the ending of the war, Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

  In a strange, almost touching footnote to its sense of injured pride, the French Foreign Ministry called the Dayton Peace Agreement the “Treaty of the Élysée,” and asked the speakers to omit any references to Dayton in their remarks. In addition, it seated Tony Lake, Sandy Berger, General Clark, and me near the back of the room, behind many officials and guests who had played no role in the negotiations. This was inconsequential (and Levitte apologized for it later), and if several newspapers had not noted it the next day, it would not be worthy of recording. I did not judge these sad actions by one or two functionnaires as representative of the country in which I had lived as a teenager, which had influenced me so much, and for which I had such affection. By wielding the ephemeral power of protocol with such a heavy hand, a few Foreign Office bureaucrats only trivialized their country’s important contributions to achieving peace in Bosnia.

  After the ceremony, we all moved on to the Quai d’Orsay, where Chirac hosted a large banquet. At the end of the meal, the French president pulled me aside for a moment. “Mon cher Holbrooke,” he said, in great good humor, “you have won your point on the elections, but you will see that it is inappropriate for any American, even any European, to conduct these elections in such a place as Bosnia.” I said I hoped events would prove him wrong. At that moment, Milosevic came up to us and, picking up on the subject, told Chirac that he would make the elections work.

  Once again the scene became somewhat surreal. Smoking a cigar, Milosevic sought out President Clinton, with whom he engaged in small talk. Milosevic clearly relished the moment; as Pardew told Bill Perry later, “the Serbian President was last seen in the magnificent hall of the Quai d’Orsay puffing on a cigar half the size of a fence post while making one last—but futile—effort to charm the U.S. President.”

  We flew home on Air Force One, exhausted but awed by what we had witnessed. Despite the minor irritations, the event had been successful in giving the Dayton Agreement the aura that came with a formal ceremony, witnessed by five of the world’s most powerful leaders. It was entirely appropriate that it was formally signed in Europe, the continent on which the war had been fought.

  The President was in a good mood as we flew home. He came back to the second cabin to ask Clark, Kerrick, and me how we thought implementation would proceed. “We will have far fewer casualties than the public and the Congress expect,” I said. The President seemed skeptical; after all, he had heard ominous scenarios from the Pentagon. Clark and Kerrick pointed out that official estimates had to be cautious. But none of us could have imagined just how low the casualty rate actually would be—zero American forces killed or wounded from hostile action in the first three years after Dayton.

  There was a more difficult discussion I had to have with the President, and about an hour out of Paris I sat down alone with him in his office near the front of the plane.

  “Mr. President, the time has come for me to make a tough decision,” I began, somewhat stiffly. “I want to ask your support and understanding for my request to leave the government early next year.” Before leaving Germany, I told him, I had promised Kati—and told Christopher and Talbott—that, since she could not move to Washington because of her children, I would return to New York within a limited period of time. This had already been extended because of the negotiations, but the time had come.

  The President was gracious and compassionate. “Family is terribly important,” he said, and we talked about the strains that public service puts on families. This was one of the most difficult decisions of my life—a choice between a job to which I was fully dedicated and a personal commitment that was precious to me, and I was touched by the President’s support. He asked me to stay on as long as possible to get implementation headed in the right direction, and requ
ested that I remain available for special assignments in the future.

  For Deploys. On December 16, General Joulwan issued the order to begin moving NATO and other forces to Bosnia. It was the first such troop-deployment order since NATO had been formed in 1949.* Most of the U.N. troops already in Bosnia repainted their vehicles from white to a more military-looking olive green, traded in light weapons for heavier ones, and were reassigned to IFOR, the Implementation Force.

  American journalists flooded Bosnia to cover the arrival of U.S. troops, led by two of the three network anchors, Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather. Modern journalism requires that if such stars go out on a story, the story has to be good—that is, dramatic. But the only story was the bad weather, which delayed the crossing of the Sava River for several days. Unable to show any tension or conflict between the arriving American forces and the local population, television exaggerated the dangers facing the troops, and covered the arrival in a sort of retro-Vietnam style that misled the American public as to the dangers the troops faced.

  Attention would shift away from Bosnia fairly soon, when it became apparent that IFOR was having an easy, untroubled entry. Of course, this was the real story, and it was important; there was to be no repetition of the U.N.’s dreadful experience.

  A Slow Start for the Civilians. The same was not true on the civilian side. At first, Carl Bildt, now the High Representative, had so little money and support that he was forced to operate without an office or telephones, and used his personal cellular telephone as his primary means of communication. After appeals to the European Union, he received enough funding to open his offices in Sarajevo, where he presided like an elegant squatter over a building filled with wrecked rooms, broken toilets, shattered windows, and almost no staff.

  This lag in civilian implementation troubled us enormously, although we shared in the blame for it. While the military, sixty thousand strong, met every early deadline, the civilian side, functioning out of Carl Bildt’s cellular telephone, met almost none, and fell steadily behind schedule. For this Bildt was personally criticized, but the fault was more in the structures we had imposed on him, particularly the failure to give him sufficient funding or stronger backing from IFOR.

  Furthermore, with a weak police advisory effort, Bildt had no enforcement capability for his task. Now the full consequences of the absurd position taken by NATO—opposing a police force with enforcement capability while itself refusing the task—began to come home to roost.

  To say that I was concerned would be an understatement. Having announced my early departure, I agreed to a one-month delay at the request of Christopher to help address the mounting problems. I realized later that I should have stayed longer, but by then we were locked into a firm departure schedule.

  The President Visits Bosnia. The President wanted to visit the troops as soon as possible, and scheduled a trip for mid-January. The trip was unusually difficult, posing, as one White House official said publicly, “more logistical, security, and weather variables” than they had ever encountered before. I had hoped that the President would be able to visit Sarajevo, but the risks were deemed too great by those responsible for presidential security, so it was decided that the only stop in Bosnia would be the American military base at Tuzla.

  On Friday afternoon, January 12, we flew to the American air base at Aviano, Italy, landing before dawn. As the President spoke to American soldiers and their families, bad weather reports poured in from the Balkans, delaying our departure. After two hours on the ground in Italy, we piled into a C-17, a modern, high-performance military cargo plane, for the flight to Tuzla. Four parallel rows of plastic seats facing each other down the middle of the plane created an unusually egalitarian arrangement: the President, his top advisors, and a bipartisan congressional delegation sat almost at random next to journalists, camera crews, enlisted men and women, and a cargo of food for the troops.

  With the weather playing to stereotype, we circled over the landing strip at Tuzla for almost an hour. Finally we landed at the American staging area in Taszar, Hungary, where six thousand American troops had established a forward logistics base for Bosnia. We had planned a brief stop at Taszar later in the day, but we arrived almost seven hours ahead of schedule. Moving fast, the American military took the President to a large tent, where he spoke to American troops while we waited for the weather in Bosnia to clear. I wandered around the base, marveling at how quickly the U.S. military could re-create a special universe and culture almost overnight in any corner of the world. The ankle-deep mud, the wooden pathways, the signs stressing communications security and safety, the individual unit insignias, the small PX, the troops, slightly uncertain of what they were doing in Hungary but ready to carry out their mission—all reminded me vaguely of a war thirty years earlier on the other side of the world. But there were also noticeable differences from Vietnam: most markedly the presence of so many women in uniform, and the cleaner, tighter look of the troops.

  Early in the Administration, the President had had well-publicized difficulties dealing with the military because of questions over why he had not served in Vietnam, but by 1996 these were a fading memory. A generation of soldiers who were born after the war in Vietnam ended looked at Bill Clinton as their President. They seemed pleased he had come to see them, and he was at ease as he chatted with them. The military’s greeting of the President, it seemed to me, was genuinely enthusiastic, and the troops filled the tented area with a war whoop—it sounded like they were grunting “Hoo-aa!”—that shook the ground.

  Eventually Hungarian President Arpad Goncz, Prime Minister Gyula Horn, Foreign Minister Lazlo Kovacs, and Ambassador Donald Blinken arrived in two small planes. In the chaos and the excitement of President Clinton’s presence, no one met the Hungarian officials, arriving on their own soil, except me and, by chance, Dan Rather, covering the trip for CBS. We squeezed the Hungarians and Ambassador Blinken into some mud-caked military vehicles and sped off to meet President Clinton, driving past a row of broken-down MiG fighter planes, a relic of the Cold War. The presence of six thousand American troops on Hungarian soil only four years after the end of the Cold War—and forty years after the 1956 Soviet invasion—was in itself a remarkable symbol of the transformation of Europe. The Hungarians had one message for President Clinton: that they were ready for NATO membership and that the staging area at Taszar was part of that goal. “Stay as long as you like,” they said. “Turn this into a permanent NATO installation—and let us join the West.”

  The weather at Tuzla was clearing, but by the time we landed, just before 3:00 P.M., daylight was fast disappearing, and the Secret Service put an absolute time limit on our stay. A trip originally scheduled for eight hours was now down to less than three; the schedule collapsed into a makeshift set of quick meetings. The President, dressed in a brown leather bomber jacket and khakis, addressed the troops, who had waited for over two hours outside. Under slate-gray skies, as Apache attack helicopters flew overhead and Secret Service sharpshooters followed his every move, he called the troops “warriors for peace” who had the support and prayers of the American people, and gave promotions to five enlisted men.

  After the speech and a meeting with senior military officers, we had originally scheduled three important meetings: first, with President Izetbegovic and members of his government; then, with representatives of the leading nongovernmental organizations in Bosnia; and finally, with civic and religious leaders of Bosnia. The last meeting, planned at my request, was designed to stimulate the leaders of the Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic, and Jewish communities to work for reconciliation. The religious leaders of the region had done great damage since 1991, stirring up ancient but long-submerged desires for revenge among their followers. This meeting appealed to President Clinton’s sense of the importance of religious leaders for good and bad, derived from his own Southern Baptist background. But with the schedule in disarray, we had to reduce the meeting with Izetbegovic to ten minutes, and co
mbine the last two sessions, turning the plan into a shambles. The President entered a small, overheated room crowded with a diverse group: Catholic priests (including Vinko Cardinal Puljic), Orthodox prelates (led by the Metropolitan Nikolaj), Muslim mullahs, the Muslim and Serb mayors of Sarajevo, Jewish community leaders, Americans and Europeans representing a dozen humanitarian organizations, journalists, and security personnel—and three widows who had lost their husbands during the war. As everyone else yelled and pushed, the President calmly walked through the room, greeting almost everyone individually. Then, as he spoke movingly about the need for religious reconciliation, Harold Ickes, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, pulled me aside and said that the Secret Service insisted that we leave within five minutes. As the astonished and disappointed Bosnians watched, I almost yanked the President out of the room. Our ambitious game plan to use the trip to begin a multiethnic dialogue had gone down the drain with the weather.

  As we were leaving, an American colonel handed me a small plastic bag with something inside it. “A Bosnian soldier found this near the wreckage on Mount Igman and turned it in to the American Embassy,” he said. “It’s Nelson Drew’s Air Force Academy class ring. Would you deliver it to Mrs. Drew?” Sandy Drew has carried it with her ever since.

  Another Shuttle—and Problems. A week later, on January 18, our team was back in Sarajevo. While most people were saying that implementation had just begun, I was acutely conscious of a different equation: the IFOR year was already one twelfth over, and nothing had been accomplished on the political front.

  Still, the trip from the airport into Sarajevo was exhilarating. For the first time we drove through Serb-controlled areas of the city, cutting fifteen minutes off the trip and using roads that had been closed for years. The city was showing more signs of recovery; in a particularly bold move, one merchant had opened a store with a large plate-glass window.