In May, Berger overrode the doubts of some Pentagon officials; his study reaffirmed a solidly pro-Dayton policy. At the suggestion of several Administration officials, I spoke to the President again on Sunday, May 24, three days before his meetings with Yeltsin in Paris, to argue that if we did not revitalize Bosnia policy immediately it might be too late to salvage Dayton.
Meanwhile, the new British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and his Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, made clear that they would follow a more aggressive policy, and urged the same from the United States. When the President, during a joint press conference with Blair in the garden at 10 Downing Street on May 29, was asked about reports of a conflict between Albright and Cohen over Bosnia, he sidestepped the controversy but made it clear that he wanted Dayton to succeed.
As the President returned to Washington, Albright and Gelbard went to Sintra, Portugal, for a meeting of the NATO Foreign Ministers. The NATO countries invited the leaders of Bosnia to Sintra, and, after intense meetings, issued a statement that recommitted them to Dayton. From Sintra, Albright made her first trip to the region as Secretary of State, traveling to Zagreb, Banja Luka, Sarajevo, and Belgrade on May 31. Given her high profile—”the most popular political figure in America,” in the words of Joe Klein—her trip brought attention back to American policy in Bosnia. We talked several times before and during the trip, and she called one last time around midnight, from Zagreb, the evening before she went to Belgrade for her first meeting with Milosevic. She was the first Secretary of State to visit Belgrade since James Baker’s unfortunate trip in June 1991.
Throughout her visit, Albright showed a deft sense of how to communicate with the people of the region. Perhaps this was a function of her background; after all, she had not only been born in Czechoslovakia but spent part of her childhood in Belgrade. This special understanding was most in evidence when she met Biljana Plavsic in Banja Luka. Albright had added the stop almost as an afterthought on the advice of her closest aide, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Jamie Rubin, but the brief visit would have important consequences, emboldening President Plavsic to break publicly with her former mentors in Pale.
Ever since Dayton we had anticipated, even hoped for, a split between Pale and Banja Luka. (It will be recalled that at Dayton we had considered designating Banja Luka as the capital of Srpska, but held back because Izetbegovic objected.) Now it arrived in a most unexpected form. Plavsic publicly attacked her closest colleagues where they were most vulnerable: corruption. Presenting herself as a still-patriotic Serb nationalist, she lashed out publicly at Karadzic and Krajisnik, calling them “criminals” who were living well while stealing from their own people. To almost everyone’s surprise, she struck a responsive chord among many Serbs in western Bosnia, and weakened Pale.
The Team Changes. Major personnel changes were under way within the international effort. Carl Bildt stepped down as High Representative to return to political life in Sweden, replaced by Carlos Westendorp of Spain. I urged Albright and Gelbard to send Jacques Klein to Sarajevo as Westendorp’s deputy. In his tour overseeing the transition of eastern Slavonia to Croatian control, Klein had shown a flair for the sort of forceful, even melodramatic performance that impressed the people of the region.
Another appointment changed the equation significantly: President Clinton and Secretary Cohen chose as NATO’s new Supreme Commander none other than Wes Clark. In naming Clark, they had, in effect, sent Dayton to NATO—an important signal of determination. At the same time a new SFOR commander, General Eric Shinseki, and a new Ambassador, Richard Kauzlarich, took over in Sarajevo.
Bosnia Once More. On July 18, Bob Gelbard, relatively new in his job as the “implementation czar,” asked to have breakfast with me in New York. His drive and focus were impressive, but the situation on the ground was still unsatisfactory—to him as well as to me. Near the end of the breakfast, he asked if I would be willing to make another trip to the region as soon as possible. Its purposes would be to talk to an increasingly obstructionist Milosevic, and help revitalize the implementation effort. Agreeing at once, I proposed that we travel together to show a united front and maximize American pressure. I met Gelbard and his team, including Treasury’s David Lipton, in Paris on August 6. President Clinton himself had talked publicly in recent weeks about “saving Dayton,” a phrase that disturbed some of his senior advisors but that vividly conveyed his own sense of concern. I had told him that we were about one year behind where we should be.
We flew first to Split to join a meeting between Izetbegovic and Tudjman. They met against the backdrop of highly publicized actions by both the Croat and Muslim communities against refugee return; each had recently mobilized mobs to prevent other ethnic groups from returning to their homes. In the Vogosca suburb of Sarajevo, a mob of Muslim women—many Srbrenica widows—had blocked Serbs from returning to their homes. In Jajce, a Croat mob had done the same thing to five hundred Muslims.
When we were ushered into the meeting room, we were confronted with an unexpected sight. Instead of facing each other with the previous air of hostility, the two leaders were seated side by side at the end of the table, their shoulders almost touching. I remembered the meeting in Zagreb on September 19, 1995, when Tudjman had yelled at Izetbegovic in front of forty people. Now, as one of Tudjman’s senior aides explained, they wanted to show us—and a large press corps waiting outside—that they could collaborate without American direction. With great pride, Tudjman and Izetbegovic gave us a joint announcement intended to strengthen the Federation. But it was vague and filled with generalities that meant little.
Gelbard and I had never worked closely together before, but we operated easily. I began, “We congratulate you on producing a joint statement. However, if you want us to praise it publicly, you must agree to a second statement with specific deadlines. You must condemn the mob actions against refugee return in both Jajce and Vogosca, and pledge that you will not permit it again.”
We presented a draft that we had drafted during the flight to Split, and settled down to a five-hour negotiation that ended with an announcement containing ten new commitments and specific deadlines. As always in Bosnia, one could not be sure that these deadlines and goals would be honored. But based on the pattern of the previous eighteen months, we knew that the best way to make progress was to forge public agreement on specific dates and goals, and then hold the parties to them.*
In a private meeting, Tudjman complained bitterly to Gelbard, Galbraith, and me about his treatment by Washington. He had been hospitalized with a bout with cancer since I had last seen him, but it was in remission, and he showed only a few effects of his illness. But he believed that the United States had leaked information about his health after an examination at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington. The United States had also hardened its policy in the face of Croatia’s continued expulsion of Serb families from land they had lived on for generations, slowing down or withholding aid to Croatia.
We said that he had to give Dayton more than lip service if he wanted Washington to ease up. I said that we were outraged by the Croat mob in Jajce only three days earlier. “By the way,” Gelbard added dramatically, “I know for a fact that Dario Kordic [the most prominent indicted Croat war criminal] was personally directing that mob. You must send him to The Hague if you want things to change between us.” Tudjman protested that he had no idea where Kordic was or what he was doing. But he did not really expect us to believe this; he was only testing the importance of the issue. We were immovable; Kordic had to be brought to justice.
Eight weeks later, on October 6, 1997, Kordic and nine other indicted Bosnian Croats “voluntarily” surrendered under pressure from Zagreb. It was an important step forward in the quest for war criminals.* Watching Kordic make his farewell statement on television before flying to The Hague, I noticed a small but revealing detail: Kordic’s remarks at the Split airport were translated by Tudjman’s personal interpreter, a clear sign
al that Tudjman and Kordic had reached some sort of private understanding regarding the future.
After our day with Tudjman and Izetbegovic, we spent the night at a resort hotel in Trogir, a beautiful walled city near Split. It was a soft August evening, and my thoughts went back to the last night I had spent in Split, almost exactly two years earlier, before setting out for Mount Igman.
Tuzla and the Generals. The next morning, August 7, we flew to Tuzla at dawn for a meeting with the three senior commanders in the American and NATO chain of command: General Shalikashvili, who had changed his schedule to join us for what was also his final visit to the region; General Clark, now the NATO commander; and General Eric Shinseki, the new SFOR commander. For over a year the Bosnian Serbs had been “cheating” on Dayton by putting military police uniforms on regular soldiers and claiming that they were no longer in the Bosnian Serb Army, even though the military annex of the agreement, anticipating such games, had specifically included “military uniformed police” in the definition of armed forces. These paramilitary police were, I said publicly, “racist, fascist, anti-peace agreement, anti-democratic, and a potential threat to the international community.” Yet until Clark took command of NATO, SFOR had ignored them. Clark instructed Shinseki to issue a warning, followed by enforcement, that henceforth the military uniformed police would be treated the same way as regular forces.
When the weather cleared, we headed for Sarajevo, after bidding an especially warm farewell to Shalikashvili, whom I would not see again until his emotional retirement ceremony on the parade grounds at Fort Myer at the end of September. I had never known a military officer of whom I was fonder. It was impossible to dislike him, and I was grateful for his personal support even when we occasionally disagreed.
Reviving Implementation. The good news in Sarajevo was that the joint institutions actually existed; the bad news was that they barely functioned.
The joint presidency, composed of Izetbegovic, Krajisnik, and Zubak, was one of the most important litmus tests of Dayton. I was gratified to see that our decision to limit the presidency to three people—one from each ethnic group—had been correct, but the joint presidency was still a limited operation. It had been in a state of suspension for over a month as a Serb protest against the British operation on July 10 in Prijedor—the most important military action since Dayton—which had resulted in the capture of one indicted war criminal and the death of another. The dead Serb had been one of Karadzic’s closest allies, the Prijedor police chief, a notorious killer during the 1992 “death camp” phase of the war, and his death had been a serious blow to the Bosnian Serbs. Only our trip to Sarajevo had forced Krajisnik to attend.
The meeting began in an unlikely manner. Looking directly at me, Krajisnik said that he wanted to make an opening comment. “At Dayton,” he said, “I opposed the agreement. I was wrong. I opposed the deployment of IFOR. I was wrong. Dayton is a good thing for Bosnia. I want to make this clear, especially to Ambassador Holbrooke.”
This statement was not as promising as it sounded. Krajisnik’s “Dayton” was not what we had in mind; his was a way station on the path to partition, ours was an agreement for a single country. He may have signed the agreement, but he still refused to accept its central thesis.
Krajisnik was immovable on every issue. Fed up, we ended the meeting and asked to see him alone. Gelbard and I angrily told him that his behavior was unacceptable, and obviously incompatible with his opening statement of support for Dayton. I said we had not come all this way just to participate in a meaningless meeting. We scheduled a second meeting for that evening at the National Museum in Federation territory. When Krajisnik protested the venue, we told him that if he did not come to the museum we would assume he was withdrawing from the joint presidency. This startled Krajisnik, and he backed down.
Another All-nighter. We resumed at about ten o’clock that evening, August 7, at the National Museum, and turned immediately to three unresolved problems: creating a single telephone system, getting the Standing Committee on Military Matters functioning, and agreeing on the distribution of ambassadorships among the three ethnic communities.
The meetings ended at four in the morning, with agreements on all these issues. The last carried equally great symbolic value, especially when the Muslims agreed that the ambassador in Washington would be a Serb, while they retained the position at the United Nations.
When the final documents were ready for signature, the acting High Representative, Gerd Wagner, brought them in for Krajisnik’s signature. Wagner, whom I had known well in Bonn and Washington, was one of Germany’s rising diplomatic stars. Krajisnik clearly disliked Wagner, and instead of signing the agreements, he began to pick a fight with the affable German diplomat. Furious at Krajisnik’s abuse of Wagner, I leaned forward across the table and said, “I want to tell you something I have never said to anyone else in this long negotiating process: if you do not sign this paper now, as you already promised in front of witnesses, I promise we will never speak to you or deal with you again.” I handed Krajisnik a pen, and he signed the agreements. The next morning, Wagner joined Gelbard and me at a press conference at the American Embassy to announce the agreements of the previous evening. It was a real achievement for Wagner, the highest-ranking German diplomat in Bosnia—but it was one of his last. A few weeks later, he and eleven other people, including five Americans, died when a Ukrainian helicopter crashed into the side of a hill. Once again, as at Mount Igman and Dubrovnik, the enforcing nations had paid the ultimate price for their efforts to bring peace to Bosnia. And once again, the dead were civilians, diplomats, policemen, and aid workers—not soldiers.
A few days later, The New York Times would criticize us for having “spent the bulk of [our] time haggling over telephone area codes and designs for a currency and the appointment of Bosnian ambassadors [instead] of dealing with the principal threats to a unified Bosnia.” But the front-page article missed one of the main points of our trip, and indeed of the entire implementation process: to create a unified Bosnia, these seemingly small issues had to be solved, one by one if necessary—and this could be done only under external pressure. The parties themselves could not voluntarily agree on anything yet. The Washington Post got it right, reporting that “Holbrooke’s efforts [were] seen as part of the campaign to end a sense of drift that had settled over the Bosnia peacemaking effort.” Our trip helped revive the implementation process, and set the stage for further progress. Bob Gelbard would continue to travel to the region tirelessly, hammering the parties into slow but steady progress.
Banja Luka and Plavsic. Immediately after the press conference announcing the new agreements on August 8, we flew to Banja Luka to see Biljana Plavsic, who was now receiving international attention for her defiance of both the Pale Serbs and Milosevic. A biologist during the Tito era, she had been a Fulbright scholar in New York and spoke serviceable English. She was on her best behavior, trying hard to charm us. The United States, in turn, had put its weight behind her in her struggle against Pale. Nonetheless, we could not ignore her unsavory origins and close ties to Karadzic.
“I want you to know that while I am still a nationalist, I am also a good democratshe began. This was a shrewd start. “But what we must ask you,” I responded, “is whether you are still a separatist.”
“No,” she answered firmly, “I do not support a separate Serb state, I support Dayton.” Later, although we had agreed to keep our conversation private, her staff made this exchange public. It represented a complete change for her since the days when Bosnian Serbs named tanks after her.
She told us she feared for her life at the hands of Pale thugs. She said that her meeting with Madeleine Albright in May had been critical in her decision to stand up to her former mentors. The day after that meeting, she said, she had gone to Pale to meet with Krajisnik, Buha—and Karadzic. “I told them we should comply with Dayton,” she said, “and they attacked me, told me I had betrayed the revoluti
on, and threw me out of the party.”
When it was time to leave, the most revealing moment of the day occurred. Over one hundred journalists were waiting downstairs. We had assumed she would keep her distance from us in their presence. Instead, she announced that she would sit with us and participate. In addition, she asked David Lipton to explain to the press the price the Bosnian Serbs were paying in lost international aid because of Pale’s refusal to participate in the joint institutions.
Mrs. Plavsic had crossed the Rubicon. It would be difficult for her to scramble back. She had chosen to defy Pale, and was clearly, publicly, counting on American support.
Belgrade, August 8. Once again, Milosevic had moved the meeting place, this time to the “White Palace,” a magnificent royal dwelling in Belgrade unused for over a decade. The gardens were splendid, the food significantly better, and the walls filled with Old Masters, including a Rembrandt. But these cosmetic changes only emphasized that nothing else had changed. In fact, the sense of isolation felt greater.
Alone in the palace except for his faithful aide Goran Milinovic and one Deputy Minister, Milosevic said that Dayton was succeeding and that we should be satisfied, except for the troubles that Mrs. Plavsic was causing. We disagreed strongly, saying that Karadzic was now openly violating the July 18, 1996, agreement, and that, by backing Pale over Plavsic, Milosevic was undermining stability in Bosnia. The meeting meandered on, and even a private talk in the gardens was unproductive.
During dinner, Milosevic and I spoke alone in the reception room. “Mr. President,” I said, “we have been wasting our time tonight. We are willing to return tomorrow if you wish to bring Krajisnik here so that we can try to make some progress.” We finished the meal without any progress.
To End a War Page 50
