To End a War

by Richard Holbrooke

  Our meeting with Admiral Leighton Smith, on the other hand, did not go well. He had been in charge of the NATO air strikes in August and September, and this gave him enormous credibility, especially with the Bosnian Serbs. Smith was also the beneficiary of a skillful public relations effort that cast him as the savior of Bosnia. In a long profile, Newsweek had called him “a complex warrior and civilizer, a latter-day George C. Marshall.” This was quite a journalistic stretch, given the fact that Smith considered the civilian aspects of the task beneath him and not his job—quite the opposite of what General Marshall stood for.

  After a distinguished thirty-three-year Navy career, including almost three hundred combat missions in Vietnam, Smith was well qualified for his original posts as commander of NATO’s southern forces and Commander in Chief of all U.S. naval forces in Europe. But he was the wrong man for his additional assignment as IFOR commander, which was the result of two bureaucratic compromises, one with the French, the other within the American military. General Joulwan rightly wanted the sixty thousand IFOR soldiers to have as their commanding officer an Army general trained in the use of ground forces. But Paris insisted that if Joulwan named a separate Bosnia commander, it would have to be a Frenchman. This was politically impossible for the United States; thus, the French objections left only one way to preserve an American chain of command—to give the job to Admiral Smith, who joked that he was now known as “General” Smith.*

  Smith treated us like VIP tourists visiting Sarajevo for the first time, offering us a canned briefing full of military charts and vague “mission statements.” Close to thirty of his multinational staff sat behind us, saying nothing. On the military goals of Dayton, he was fine; his plans for separating the forces along the line we had drawn in Dayton and protecting his forces were first-rate. But he was hostile to any suggestion that IFOR help implement any nonmilitary portion of the agreement. This, he said repeatedly, was not his job.

  Based on Shalikashvili’s statements at White House meetings, Christopher and I had assumed that the IFOR commander would use his authority to do substantially more than he was obligated to do. The meeting with Smith shattered that hope. Smith and his British deputy, General Michael Walker, made clear that they intended to take a minimalist approach to all aspects of implementation other than force protection. Smith signaled this in his first extensive public statement to the Bosnian people, during a live call-in program on Pale Television—an odd choice for his first local media appearance. During the program, he answered a question in a manner that dangerously narrowed his own authority. He later told Newsweek about it with a curious pride:

  One of the questions I was asked was, “Admiral, is it true that IFOR is going to arrest Serbs in the Serb suburbs of Sarajevo?” I said, “Absolutely not, I don’t have the authority to arrest anybody.”[Emphasis added.]

  This was an inaccurate way to describe IFOR’s mandate. It was true IFOR was not supposed to make routine arrests of ordinary citizens. But IFOR had the authority to arrest indicted war criminals, and could also detain anyone who posed a threat to its forces. Knowing what the question meant, Smith had sent an unfortunate signal of reassurance to Karadzic—over his own network.

  An hour after our meeting with Smith, we met Izetbegovic and asked him to urge the Serbs who still lived in Sarajevo to stay after the city was unified under Muslim control on March 19. Izetbegovic said he would make the statement, but stressed that it could apply only to those Serbs who had lived in Sarajevo before the war, and not those who had seized Muslim apartments after April 1992, often with a sniper or soldier as a live-in member of the family. Within two months, this issue—the unification of Sarajevo—would emerge as the first true post-Dayton crisis, and the international community would fail it.*

  I returned to Washington to warn Christopher and his colleagues again that the civilian effort was already dangerously behind schedule. Christopher talked to Lake and Perry. But bureaucratic inertia and the resistance of the military prevented any serious effort to change the behavior of IFOR. Lake was especially wary of pressuring IFOR, arguing in public and private against anything that suggested that the military should engage in “nation building,” a phrase that had been transformed since the sixties from a noble goal to a phrase meaning “mission creep.”

  Ron Brown. On January 31, I made a farewell call on Ron Brown, the Secretary of Commerce, who had given me exceptional support in Germany and Washington. In addition to thanking him, I asked him to undertake an important mission to Bosnia. Brown had been exceptionally effective in strengthening American exports and supporting business, and I thought his imagination and drive could give a huge boost to the economic reconstruction effort, one of the key long-term tests of our policy. Brown enthusiastically said he could lead a high-level trade delegation to Bosnia in March or April. He asked only that I get Warren Christopher to support the trip with the White House, which I assured him I would do.

  Our friendship, like many in Washington, was political and professional, not personal, but I truly liked Ron Brown. He was then involved in several well-publicized investigations into his personal financial affairs, but of these I knew nothing. What I saw was a superb Cabinet member who had made a significant contribution to the resurgence of the American economy. Now he had agreed to launch an essential part of our Bosnia policy. I thanked him for his willingness to make the trip, added that perhaps I might travel with him as a private citizen, and said farewell. I would never see him again. Nine weeks later, on April 3, his plane, which also carried several other friends and associates, including Assistant Secretary of Commerce Charles Meissner, crashed into a mountain trying to land at Dubrovnik, on the Croatian coast, in a driving rainstorm. Thirty-five people died.

  Jacques Chirac. On February 1, President Chirac visited Washington. The mood was strikingly different from his first trip in June 1995, when his blunt warnings had contributed to the re-evaluation of American policy. Now the agenda could focus on other issues, especially bringing new nations into NATO, the Administration’s next big policy move in Europe.

  In a moving and thoughtful gesture, Chirac held a ceremony at Blair House on February 1 to present the widows of Bob Frasure, Joe Kruzel, and Nelson Drew with the French Medal of Honor. What moved us most was the openness of Chirac’s emotions. Standing next to Katharina Frasure as he gave her Bob’s medal, I could see a large tear running down the cheek of the President of France.

  The Last—and Longest—Trip. This was Warren Christopher’s first trip to the region, and my last as a government official. At first, unlike for previous trips, there was no specific objective—only to say good-bye and bring Christopher and John Kornblum, who had been selected as my successor, up to speed. But by the time it ended, seventeen days later, it had become my longest trip, and it ended with a hastily planned Balkan summit in Rome.

  We left Andrews Air Force Base on the Secretary’s big jet on the morning of February 2, and met with Tudjman late that night in Zagreb. The next morning, after a briefing by Admiral Smith in Tuzla, we flew to Sarajevo. Christopher and his staff were fascinated to see the city they had read about for three years but never visited. Though rebuilding was under way and most of the barricades and wrecked vehicles had been removed, the sight of so much damage stunned them. To his pleasure, Christopher was greeted with cheers and applause when he ventured on a short walk. The next day, after lunch with Milosevic, Christopher headed toward the Mideast, and I took a commercial flight to Switzerland to attend the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. After this, I hoped to launch our diplomatic initiative on Cyprus, accompanied by our Presidential Special Envoy for Cyprus, Richard Beattie, who would carry on the negotiation.*

  The Davos conference was a strange affair. Several thousand people, most of them wealthy businessmen, milled around in groups, attending meetings, setting up meetings, skiing, or socializing. The press was everywhere. So were Russians and other leaders from the former Soviet Union,
who set up shop in one of the many hotels and filled the lobby with the stench of cigarettes and spilled alcohol. The State Department set up a series of high-level meetings for me with leaders from Europe and Asia.

  When I returned to my room there was an urgent message from Tom Donilon, who was in Syria with Christopher. “The Secretary has become increasingly concerned about Bosnia since his trip,” Tom began. “He would like to take advantage of your last few days in government to ask you to return to the region, assemble the three Presidents, and hold a short follow-up summit, perhaps in Rome. He will join you.”

  “While Europe Slept …” There was one other event of note at Davos. During a meeting I thought was off the record—but nothing is off the record at Davos—I was asked why it took the Americans to solve “another European problem”—a reference to a recent American diplomatic effort that had averted a small war between Greece and Turkey over Imia/Kardak, a tiny islet off the Turkish coast inhabited only by sheep. My answer was honest but undiplomatic. “While President Clinton and our team were on the phone with Athens and Ankara, the Europeans were literally sleeping through the night,” I said. “You have to wonder why Europe does not seem capable of taking decisive action in its own theater.”

  These remarks were picked up by The Washington Post’s chief European correspondent, William Drozdiak, who used them as a metaphor for the confusion and drift that seemed to have settled over the European Union since the end of the Cold War. Although several European commentators had written similar assessments of Europe’s political paralysis, Drozdiak’s article kicked up an unexpected furor and provoked a surprising number of articles in the European press. Several European officials complained to Tarnoff, Talbott, and Kornblum. It was clear the mini-uproar was really about Dayton, not Imia. The commentary fell into two categories: first, those who said my remarks were right but rude; and second, those who said that they were right and needed to be said. No one took issue with the basic thesis. As Philip Gordon of the International Institute for Strategic Studies wrote in the International Herald Tribune on February 17, the comments “hurt so much because Europeans know that such comments are right.”

  I never expected these remarks would be so widely discussed and remembered. Two years later, people were still asking me about the “While Europe slept thesis.”* Of course, my goal had been not to insult the Europeans, but to encourage them to deal with the unresolved problems of their own history and the convoluted E.U. system. “My comments were not a criticism of any individual nation or any individual,” I told Agence France-Presse, “but of an institutional structure which makes it hard for Europe to use its full moral, political, and diplomatic authority in a coherent and consistent way. Every European in Western Europe knows this. It is no secret.”

  Drama in Sarajevo. We chose Rome for the first post-Dayton summit as a way of emphasizing the importance of Italy. Christopher proceeded with his Middle East diplomacy, and I visited Poland and Hungary before returning to Sarajevo on the morning of February 11 to set up the Rome meeting.

  We arrived just in time to be confronted by an unexpected problem: the local police had arrested two senior Bosnian Serb officers, General Djordje Djukic and Colonel Aleksa Krsmanovic, as they entered Sarajevo in a civilian car. The Bosnians claimed the two men were war criminals.

  Since the two men had been apprehended in a manner that violated the free-movement provisions of Dayton, we would normally have insisted that the Muslims release them immediately. But Justice Goldstone complicated matters considerably; from the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, he issued a warrant for the two men—even though they had not been indicted. When Shattuck called Goldstone to find out what was going on, he told us he wanted the two men for questioning and possible indictment.

  Milosevic, on the other hand, demanded their immediate release. The Bosnian Serbs said they would not cooperate any further with IFOR until they were freed. The Muslims, meanwhile, threatened to try them in a Bosnian court.

  In this tense atmosphere, Clark and I met with Admiral Smith on the afternoon of February 11, and asked if he could get the two men out of Sarajevo swiftly and safely. Smith said he could not guarantee that it would be low-risk, but he would develop a plan right away. For once there was no question about IFOR’s authority; Smith saw the danger if they remained in the Sarajevo jail.

  Our team flew to Belgrade, where Milosevic again demanded the immediate release of the two men, saying that they were simple soldiers. The general, he added, was dying of cancer and needed medication urgently. We told Milosevic that the two men could not be released. As for the health of General Djukic, we would ensure that if he was as sick as Milosevic said, he would get the proper medication. (It turned out that he did indeed have cancer.)

  We returned to Sarajevo early the next morning, February 12, tense with concern. Unexpectedly, our visit had turned into a decision-making trip on a risky operation. At 2:00 P.M., I called Goldstone again. He said he had sent the formal request to IFOR two hours earlier for their removal to his jurisdiction. Smith was back in Naples, but he had authorized General Walker to carry out the operation. Walker described the plan: with the prior knowledge of the Bosnian prison authorities, a small group of specially selected French soldiers would move into the jail at night, grab the two prisoners, and move them quickly to American helicopters for transport to The Hague. The greatest danger, in Walker’s view, was that the Serbs would get wind of the operation and try to block it on the roads or shoot the helicopter down, but he felt the risks were acceptable provided they moved fast.

  We left Sarajevo just before the operation was to begin. Most of the negotiating team went to Zagreb, while I went to Bucharest for a long-planned visit. The operation went smoothly, but an alert television crew filmed the dramatic nighttime transfer at the prison. The two men were safely delivered to The Hague, where they were held for months by Goldstone before the charges against Colonel Krsmanovic were dropped and General Djukic, now close to death from cancer, was released.

  Christopher and I were greatly disturbed by this incident. The seizure of the two men, neither of whom was ever indicted, had disrupted the implementation process and set a bad precedent for the future. We determined to try to prevent any repetition of such an incident before it became a pattern.

  Anglo-American Ties. The next three days were a continuous whirl—Zagreb again, then Frankfurt, London, and Paris—before the main event in Rome. My farewell calls with Foreign Secretary Rifkind and Defense Minister Michael Portillo were personally warm, but Ambassador Crowe and I had the sense of meeting government officials who, more than a year before the next election, felt they were already lame ducks.* We had worked together under the most difficult circumstances. When I returned to Washington in September 1994, the strains in the Anglo-American alliance had been at a level that was nearly intolerable, and rebuilding the relationship, which I still believed was “special”—a once-standard phrase that had been banned by the Major government—had been a high priority. At a small farewell dinner at Ambassador Crowe’s residence, both Foreign Secretary Rifkind and his predecessor, Douglas Hurd, offered their appreciation for the closing of the gap during the last seventeen months. I repeated my mantra: that when the two nations stood side by side, they could change history, but when they split on an important issue the consequences were invariably disastrous.

  Rome. After more farewell calls in Paris, we flew to Rome on February 16 for the first meeting of the three Balkan Presidents since the signing ceremony in December. Admiral Smith, who came to Rome for a few hours, took a dramatic step on the eve of the conference to show that he intended to enforce the military provisions of Dayton. Sending a commando team deep into a mountain area of the Federation on February 17, IFOR raided a “terrorist training camp” and captured eleven “freedom fighters” whom they identified as Iranians, as well as sixty heavy weapons, booby-trapped plastic toys, and a model of an American military headquarters
building. Stunned, Izetbegovic claimed that he was unaware of the presence of this group until the raid. Joulwan and I told him that it was immaterial whether or not he knew; the presence of such people on Bosnian soil violated Dayton and constituted a threat to the IFOR troops.

  With this dramatic event as background, the first Compliance Summit began on the afternoon of Saturday, February 17, with a welcoming speech by Foreign Minister Susanna Agnelli. Christopher and General Joulwan, as well as our team and the Contact Group, sat around a large conference table for the opening session; then we broke down into smaller groups, placing each delegation in separate rooms. For the next two days the corridors of the normally sedate Italian Foreign Ministry reverberated with the arguments of the Balkans—a veritable mini-Dayton. Specific agreements were reached that were designed to get the implementation process back on track: an agreement on what Christopher called the “rules of the road” so that we would never again have to struggle with the consequences of a surprise arrest; a compromise on Mostar that pulled that city, the most explosive in Bosnia, back from the brink of renewed fighting between the Croats and the Muslims; an understanding on improving the performance of the International Police Task Force; and an agreement to hold similar summits regularly.

  We returned to Washington on February 19. Two days later, after some more farewell calls and a generous ceremony on the eighth floor of the State Department for the entire negotiating team attended by Secretaries Christopher and Perry, I resigned as Assistant Secretary of State, and immediately signed papers as an unpaid advisor to the Secretary of State. This meant little, except that I would retain my security clearances and be available on short notice to the Administration. That evening, February 21, I left Washington for a new life in New York.