To End a War

by Richard Holbrooke

  Gelbard and I returned to the White Palace the next morning alone, wondering if Krajisnik would appear. He had told us flatly in Sarajevo that he would not come to another meeting in Belgrade. But there he was, sitting quietly in a chair next to Milosevic, his demeanor quite different from what we had seen two days earlier.

  We turned first to Radovan Karadzic, still the overriding issue. I showed the two men an interview that Karadzic had given the previous day to a German newspaper. Both Milosevic and Krajisnik professed to be unaware of the interview, but they readily agreed that it constituted a flagrant violation of the July 18 agreement. We warned that such actions would increase the chances of a military action to bring Karadzic to justice.

  “If you take such action,” Milosevic said emphatically, “it will be a disaster for all of us. Your nation will regret it.” Gelbard and I shrugged. “That is your problem,” I said. “You cannot threaten our nation. What happens in Bosnia is important to us, but not decisive. For you these events are life and death.”

  Krajisnik offered a guarantee that Karadzic “would henceforth comply fully with the July 18 agreement.” We rejected this as no longer sufficient. “If you wish to affirm that the July 18 agreement is still valid, you may do so, and we will report it publicly,” I said. “But we cannot make a second agreement with you. You signed the first one, and it has been violated.”

  We concluded the meeting by discussing several other issues that concerned us.* Then, after a press conference, we left for the United States. For the first time since Dayton, I felt that the implementation effort was being pursued with sufficient vigor and determination, thanks in large part to Gelbard and Clark. At a meeting in the Cabinet Room on Friday, August 15, I told the President and other senior officials that we were still far behind schedule, but progress was visible in many parts of Bosnia. At the local level, people were trying to live and work together again. But it was necessary to repeat a warning that was now nearly two years old: as long as the leaders who had started the war remained in power in Pale, the country would not be out of danger, and it would be almost impossible to withdraw our troops.

  Milorad Dodik and the second elections. In a bold gamble, the United States and its Contact Group associates backed a proposal by Mrs. Plavsic to hold new elections for the Republika Srpska Assembly. In our August 1997 meeting, Gelbard and I had told Milosevic that we would back these elections despite his strenuous objections. Faced with this unyielding position, Milosevic changed course and began to deal with Plavsic, whom he had long ridiculed publicly.

  The results of the election, held in September 1997 under OSCE supervision, were stunning, and suggested more than any previous event the potential that lay in aggressive implementation of the Dayton Agreements. Eighteen members of the new Bosnian Serb assembly were Muslims, elected by Muslim refugees voting in their home areas under complex electoral provisions hammered out at Dayton, over Milosevic’s objections. These new legislators combined with Plavsic’s supporters to elect as Prime Minister—by one vote—a thirty-nine-year-old businessman named Milorad Dodik, who had not been involved in the war and who had only limited ties to the Bosnian Serb wartime leadership. For the first time since the war began, the Bosnian Serb government was not controlled by the party of Radovan Karadzic. While Izetbegovic and his government in Sarajevo watched skeptically, Dodik announced that he would honor Dayton. In response, the United States and the European Union began to release aid funds previously denied to the Bosnian Serbs. The dismantling of the Bosnian Serb wartime capital of Pale, which we had long hoped for, began as government offices moved, one by one, to Banja Luka.

  The President Decides. On December 22, 1997, President Clinton made his second trip to Bosnia. He took with him not only his family and members of Congress but, in a brilliant display of bipartisanship, former Senator and Mrs. Dole. Dole had told me in early September that he would support an extension of the American troop presence in Bosnia, information I promptly relayed, with Dole’s blessing, to the President, and the two men, once political adversaries, had found common ground over the need to stay the course in Bosnia.

  Two days before his trip, President Clinton held a news conference in which he announced that the United States would keep American troops in Bosnia past the original June 1998 deadline. The President accepted full responsibility for agreeing to the two earlier deadlines, and said he would set no further deadlines.

  This was a benchmark decision for the United States. The President had finally made it explicit that we would not walk away from Bosnia. Three days later, he took that message directly to the people of the Balkans.

  I talked often to the President and his senior advisors in the weeks prior to his announcement and his trip, and I knew how difficult the decision was at the personal level, especially since his political opponents were determined to take advantage of it. But he knew that the original timetable would have done enormous damage to the national interests of the United States and NATO. We spoke again right after the trip, and it was clear that seeing Sarajevo for the first time had had a powerful impact on him and his family. I had the sense that the trip had reaffirmed in his mind the correctness of his strategic decisions, and clarified for him the difficulties that still lay ahead.

  Once it was clear that the United States had abandoned a specific NATO troop withdrawal schedule, the pace of implementation picked up. The first few months of 1998 saw more movement than in the previous two years. The common currency coupon and new coins, a unified telephone system, a single license plate, and limited air, rail, and truck traffic all began to function—although in many cases local officials resisted such reforms, as they would cut into their personal gains under the highly corrupt system that had developed during the war within each ethnic community.

  In September 1998, another important nationwide election was held in Bosnia. In several meetings during the summer of 1998 at the White House, I stressed that these elections would be critical in deciding the country’s future. The highest priority was the defeat of Momcilo Krajisnik, who was running for reelection as the Serb co-President of Bosnia and still represented the extreme rejectionism of Karadzic. His departure was, in my view, absolutely necessary for progress in Bosnia. This was especially true since, under the rotation system agreed to at Dayton, the next senior president of Bosnia-Herzegovina would be Serb—and Krajisnik would never convene a meeting of the three-person presidency if elected.

  Gelbard added that Plavsic’s reelection was equally important, although, given her origins as a founding member of the SDS, she still carried a highly unsavory legacy and was firmly opposed to the return of Muslim refugees to the Serb portions of Bosnia. Gelbard predicted that both elections would produce the desired outcome.

  The election results were mixed. Krajisnik lost to a moderate, Zivko Radisic—a man with whom both the Bosnian Muslims and the international community could work. Furthermore, the vote of the extreme nationalist parties in all three communities declined, the first electoral indication that the people might at last be turning away from the leaders whose inflammatory ultranationalism had destroyed Bosnia. In the Republika Srpska Assembly, for example, the number of seats controlled by the SDS had dropped from forty-five to nineteen in just over a year.

  But something went wrong with the second part of the scenario. Running a sloppy and complacent campaign, ignoring the advice of her advisors and of Bob Gelbard, Mrs. Plavsic lost her bid for election as president of Republika Srpska to an ultranationalist, Nikola Poplasen, who represented a party even more extreme than the SDS. In addition—and this was not unexpected—another nationalist, Ante Jelavic, won the election for the Croat co-President of Bosnia, reinforcing concerns that, in the long run, the greatest danger to a single functioning Bosnian state would come not from the Serbs but from the Croats, who could more easily carve parts of the west (where the bulk of the Croats lived) out of Bosnia and annex them formally to neighboring Croatia, which already
exercised de facto control over much of the area through its representative and local thugs.

  Poplasen and Jelavic were setbacks, but Radisic’s victory was a step forward. As a result, Gelbard and I suggested in several meetings at the White House in late 1998 that a significant adjustment in policy was in order: henceforth, the implementing powers needed to seek ways to strengthen the central government, which had been virtually nonexistent while Krajisnik had been its senior Serb representative. Approving this policy shift, Washington and the EU planned to place more power in the central institutions in 1999, and remove as much as possible from the entities. Such a policy—I called it “back to the future”—was precisely what I had originally hoped for at Dayton, since a stronger central government would increase the chances of making Bosnia a viable single country. I urged that we now address the single greatest flaw in the Dayton Agreement—the existence of two opposing armies in a single country—by creating a centralized defense establishment.

  Despite the mixed election results—and despite the fact that refugee return to minority areas, the single most critical indicator of progress, was still moving extremely slowly—even the most hardened critics of Dayton had to be impressed by evidence that the country seemed to be gradually coming together, especially economically. At the end of 1997, Gelbard and the Contact Group decided, as an incentive for further progress, to offer Milosevic a “road map” for normalizing Yugoslavia’s relations with the international community: a series of actions that the U.S. and the Contact Group would take to “reward” Belgrade for supporting strict implementation of Dayton. The steps were primarily economic: the phased removal or suspension of most of the remaining economic restrictions on Yugoslavia, keyed to progress in Bosnia. Beyond that lay Belgrade’s ultimate goal: political acceptance, U.N. and OSCE membership, U.S. recognition.

  In March 1999, the Western powers took two important steps, demonstrating their continued resolve. First, Roberts Owen finally made his long-awaited ruling on the town of Brcko, “awarding” it neither to the Federation nor to the Serbs. Rather, he established a special zone, the “Brcko District,” that would be administered directly by the central government. On the same day, High Representative Carlos Westendorp fired Nikola Poplasen as President of Republika Srbska because of his continual efforts to destroy the Dayton Agreement.

  But long before these events, indeed a year earlier, something that had long been feared occurred. Kosovo, the most difficult of all the problems of the region, the area where the crisis had begun, exploded again.

  By the spring of 1998, Kosovo would create another crisis for—and between—America and its NATO allies and Russia, both proving again the necessity for American leadership and illustrating in the most brutal form the dilemmas created by the terrible and complex history of the Balkans. It would also bring me back to the region in the summer and fall of 1998 under the most difficult conditions in a desperate effort to prevent another Balkan war.

  * Neither argument against action had merit. Fourteen months later, on October 1, 1997, the NATO forces finally closed down the Pale television transmitters, depriving Karadzic and his party of one of their most powerful instruments of power. Although controversial to the last moment, when it took place the action was accomplished without incident or injury—and had the desired effect.

  * To almost everyone’s amazement, the refugees who had been forcibly prevented from returning to Jajce in early August returned peacefully a few weeks later, and more followed after that.

  * More voluntary surrenders—including a number of Serbs—followed in 1998.

  * The bulk of the meeting concerned matters that are still “operational,” and must therefore be omitted from this account.

  CHAPTER 21

  America, Europe, and Bosnia

  Providence has not created mankind entirely independent or entirely free. It is true that around every man a fatal circle is traced beyond which he cannot pass; but within the wide verge of that circle he is powerful and free; as it is with man, so with communities.

  —ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

  FROM THE BEGINNING OF YUGOSLAVIA’S COLLAPSE, Americans divided into two groups, broadly defined: those who thought we should intervene for either moral or strategic reasons, and those who feared that if we did, we would become entangled in a Vietnam-like quagmire. As awareness of ethnic cleansing spread, the proportion of those who wanted the United States to “do something” increased, but they probably never constituted a majority.

  Nonetheless, in only eighteen weeks in 1995—when the situation seemed most hopeless—the United States put its prestige on the line with a rapid and dramatic series of high-risk actions: an all-out diplomatic effort in August, heavy NATO bombing in September, a cease-fire in October, Dayton in November, and, in December, the deployment of twenty thousand American troops to Bosnia. Suddenly, the war was over—and America’s role in post-Cold War Europe redefined.

  Had the United States not intervened, the war would have continued for years and ended disastrously. The Bosnian Muslims would have been either destroyed, or reduced to a weak landlocked ministate surrounded by a Greater Croatia and a Greater Serbia. Fighting would eventually have resumed in eastern Slavonia. Europe would have faced a continued influx of Balkan refugees. And tens of thousands more would have been killed, maimed, or displaced from their homes.

  This was a substantial achievement. But legitimate questions remain: Was American involvement in the national interest? How did it affect America’s role in the world? Did Dayton bring peace to Bosnia, or only the absence of war? What might we have done better? Can Bosnia survive as a single multiethnic country, as called for in Dayton, or will it eventually divide into two or three ethnically based states? These issues, and others, deserve further attention.

  American Leadership. By the spring of 1995 it had become commonplace to say that Washington’s relations with our European allies were worse than at any time since the 1956 Suez crisis. But this comparison was misleading; because Suez came at the height of the Cold War, the strain then was containable. Bosnia, however, had defined the first phase of the post-Cold War relationship between Europe and the United States, and seriously damaged the Atlantic relationship. In particular, the strains endangered NATO itself just as Washington sought to enlarge it.

  The Clinton Administration was severely criticized for reneging on our commitments to European security and for lowering the general priority accorded to foreign affairs—in short, for weak leadership in foreign policy. These charges deeply troubled the Administration’s senior foreign-policy officials, especially when, ironically, they often came from those who opposed American involvement in Bosnia. In its own eyes, the Clinton Administration had laid down a strong track record in post-Cold War Europe: it had built a new relationship with Russia and the other former Soviet republics; started to enlarge NATO; tackled the Irish problem; strengthened American ties with the Baltic nations and Central Europe; and gained congressional approval for the NAFTA and GATT trade agreements. Nonetheless, the perception that Washington had turned away from Europe at the end of the Cold War was hard to shake as long as we did nothing about Bosnia.

  Dayton changed this almost overnight. Criticism of President Clinton as a weak leader ended abruptly, especially in Europe and among Muslim nations. Washington was now praised for its firm leadership—or even chided by some Europeans for too much leadership. But even those who chafed at the reassertion of American power conceded, at least implicitly, its necessity. As I suggested at the time, this was not a serious problem; it was better to be criticized for too much leadership than for too little.

  After Dayton, American foreign policy seemed more assertive, more muscular. This may have been as much perception as reality, but the perception mattered. The three main pillars of American foreign policy in Europe—U.S.-Russian relations, NATO enlargement into Central Europe, and Bosnia—had often worked against each other. Now they reinfo
rced each other: NATO sent its forces out of area for the first time in its history, and Russian troops, under an American commander, were deployed alongside them. “Clinton managed to pull off the seemingly impossible,” wrote Russia’s former Prime Minister, Yegor Gaidar, “to implement NATO enlargement without causing irreparable damage either to democratic elements in Russia’s political establishment or to U.S.-Russian relations.”1 De Charette had it right: “America was back.”

  Strategic considerations were vital to our involvement, but the motives that finally pushed the United States into action were also moral and humanitarian. After Srebrenica and Mount Igman the United States could no longer escape the terrible truth of what was happening in Bosnia. A surge of sentiment arose from ordinary Americans who were outraged at what they saw on television and from senior government officials who could no longer look the other way. Within the Administration, the loss of three friends on Mount Igman carried a special weight; the war had, in effect, come home.

  Despite American pride over Dayton, our own record in the former Yugoslavia was flawed. The tortured half-measures of the United Nations and the European Union had been inadequate, to be sure, but they had kept the Bosnian Muslims from complete destruction for several years. And the Europeans continued to pay the bulk of the bills, without getting sufficient credit from the American public or the Congress, which, immediately after Dayton, told the Europeans that they would have to carry the burden for civilian reconstruction. Thus, the richest nation in the world, in the midst of its strongest economic performance in thirty years, offered the former Yugoslavia a relatively insignificant amount of aid. Furthermore, despite valiant efforts by John Kornblum, implementation of the Dayton agreement was initially halfhearted. Only in mid-1997, with the arrival of Bob Gelbard and General Clark, did the implementation effort begin to show the energy required.