To End a War

by Richard Holbrooke

  A final report card on Dayton is not yet possible. When President Clinton visited Sarajevo in December 1997, he said, as I had, that implementation was running about a year behind schedule. But there had been no fighting for two years; the three communities had begun rebuilding ties at the local level; Sarajevo was reunified and rebuilding; a large number of Bosnian Serb weapons had been destroyed; four airports had opened for civilian traffic; a few refugee “open areas” had been created; the odious Pale television transmitters had been silenced; and Banja Luka had begun to replace Pale. At the same time, Carlos Westendorp, the High Representative, did what should have been done two years earlier: he simply decreed the design for a new common currency. On January 22, 1998, American soldiers made their first arrest of a war-crimes suspect in Bosnia: Goran Jelisic, a Bosnian Serb who liked to refer to himself as “the Serbian Adolf.” If such actions continued, the anti-Dayton forces would be progressively weakened, and the chances of creating a peaceful, viable state would dramatically improve.

  Still, while the bloodlust of 1991–95 had begun to subside, it was far from gone; all sides carried deep scars and many still sought revenge instead of reconciliation. Most troubling, the same leaders who had started the war were still trying to silence those who called for multiethnic cooperation. The two most dangerous men in the region, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, remained at large more than three years after Dayton. With Karadzic’s overt involvement, the rearguard forces of Pale still sought to thwart cooperation between the two parts of Bosnia. They had discovered this strategy almost by accident when, “amid large-scale arson and police intimidation while IFOR troops stood by,” they drove most local Serbs out of Sarajevo in March 1996, in what one experienced observer called “the greatest stain on the peace process.”2 As Michael Steiner explained at the end of his tour as Deputy High Representative in late 1997, “The Pale leadership has only one aim, and that is to separate from Bosnia-Herzegovina. Short of that, they are fighting for as autonomous a position as possible within the common state.”3 As long as Pale had residual powers, the threat would be alive.

  Flaws. No one knew the weaknesses of Dayton better than those who had participated in the negotiations. But these were not necessarily the same as those mentioned by outside critics, many of whom confused the peace agreement with its implementation. When I looked back on the negotiations, I invariably returned to several key moments or issues:

  The most serious flaw in the Dayton Peace Agreement was that it left two opposing armies in one country, one for the Serbs and one for the Croat-Muslim Federation. We were fully aware of this during the negotiations, but since NATO would not disarm the parties as an obligated task, creating a single army or disarming Bosnia-Herzegovina was not possible.

  A second problem was our agreement to allow the Serb portion of Bosnia to retain the name “Republika Srpska.”*

  The decision, it will be recalled, was forged in the dramatic late-night meeting with Izetbegovic in Ankara on Labor Day, with the Geneva Foreign Ministers meeting only three days away and the resumption of the bombing still in doubt. “Republic” does not necessarily connote an independent country in the Balkans and eastern Europe, but nonetheless, to permit Karadzic to keep the name he had invented was more of a concession than we then realized.

  The timing of the end of the bombing will always remain disputed. The negotiating team would have welcomed its prolongation for at least another week. But when the military told us in the second week of September that they had only about three days of targets left, we had to negotiate before the bombing ended on its own. Warren Christopher questioned the military’s statement privately, but neither he nor the negotiating team was able to learn the full facts.*

  Informal discussion between us and General Michael Ryan, who commanded Deliberate Force, would have allowed more informed decisions at a critical moment. But such contact was apparently barred by Admiral Leighton Smith, even through General Clark.4

  The creation of a weak International Police Task Force had especially serious consequences. This was the result of several factors, including European objections to a strong international police force, and Washington’s refusal, during a huge budget confrontation with the new Republican Congress, to ask for sufficient American funds for the police. We had identified the problem before Dayton but could not overcome our internal difficulties.

  In his memoirs, Carl Bildt wrote that, in regard to the mandate of the High Representative, “the Americans initially stressed purely military aspects and did not want any cohesive civilian or political authority.”5 Bildt’s observation is valid, although the position he criticizes was not that of the negotiating team, which argued this point by phone with NATO throughout the first ten days at Dayton. Even the compromise position we reached with General Joulwan was a mistake. Bildt’s mandate should have been stronger. On the other hand, when the Bosnian Serbs defied Dayton, the United States urged Bildt to interpret the authority granted him by Dayton more broadly, at which point, ironically, resistance came from the Europeans, who, having correctly criticized us initially for limiting Bildt’s mandate, then reined him in.

  Finally, there were the two arbitrary time limits cited earlier: one year for IFOR; eighteen months for SFOR. They left the impression that the Serbs might be able to outwait the enforcing powers, thus encouraging delaying tactics. By laying out self-imposed time limits, the United States only weakened itself. Everyone closely associated with implementation knew this from the outset. As Madeleine Albright said in a speech in January 1998, “The mission should determine the timetable, not the other way around.”6 When the President dropped the time limits in December 1997, he sent the strongest possible signal that the United States would stay the course, with immediate results.

  One Country or Two (or Three)? The most serious criticism of the peace agreement came from those who questioned its central premise, that Bosnia should, or could, be reconstructed as a single, multiethnic country. It was fashionable for critics of Dayton to contend that this was not achievable and that the United States should accept, if not encourage, the partition of Bosnia along ethnic lines. While Dayton was a successful cease-fire agreement, this argument went, its political provisions—giving refugees the right of return and affirming a single country and a central government—could never be implemented. Skeptics—including many old Yugoslav hands—had warned us from the outset that it would be impossible for a multiethnic state to survive in Bosnia. But most of those who opposed a multiethnic Bosnia after Dayton had been proven wrong at least twice: first, in 1991, when they believed that Yugoslavia could be held together, then again when, for the most part, they opposed military action or American intervention.

  Still, as implementation slipped seriously behind schedule in 1996–97, some criticized Dayton as a partition agreement, while others criticized it precisely because it was not one. The most distinguished and influential American proponent of the latter view was Henry Kissinger, who argued that Bosnia had never existed as an independent nation and that we should not try to create it now.7 The negotiating team did not share this view. It was not that we underestimated the difficulties of getting the leaders of the three ethnic groups to cooperate; no one knew this better than those of us who had conducted the negotiations! But every other choice was worse. Dividing the country along ethnic lines would create massive new refugee flows. Serbs, Croats, and Muslims who still lived as minorities in many parts of the country would be forced to flee their homes, and fighting would be certain to break out as the scramble for land and houses erupted again. Thus, contrary to the arguments of the partitionists, the chances of fighting would be increased, not decreased, by partition and the relocation that would follow. In addition, there was a moral issue: the United States and its European allies could not be party to creating more refugees and legitimizing the Serb aggression. As The Economist wrote two years after Dayton,

  Partition
would almost certainly provoke mass migration and further bloodshed…. And the fighting might not be confined to Bosnia. The spectacle of a partitioned Bosnia would hearten every separatist in the Balkans. In areas of ethnic instability like Macedonia and Kosovo, who would listen to the West as it urged the merits of sinking differences and living together in harmony? … Fans of partition tend to ignore the situation in central Bosnia, where many Croats live in enclaves surrounded by Muslims. Knowing they would be left in a Muslim-dominated state, most of these Croats dread partition.8

  Of course, as I had written to President Clinton after Dayton, no vital national interest of the United States was directly affected by whether Bosnia was one, two, or three countries. We did not oppose a voluntary change in the international boundaries in Bosnia-Herzegovina or its eventual division into more than one country—if that was the desire of a majority of each of the three ethnic groups at some future date. Other countries had broken up peacefully in recent years, including Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. But this could be decided only by elections free of intimidation, something that was not possible in the aftermath of the war, while the Ultranationalist parties, preaching separatist ethnic hatred, were in control of the media and the police. In all three ethnic groups, the men who started the war in 1991–92 were still in power. They have to disappear to make way for a new generation of leaders willing to reach out to one another. If more leaders like Dodik and Radisic emerged, and survived, Bosnia would survive as a single state.

  AMERICA, STILL A EUROPEAN POWER

  The end of the Cold War did not mean the end of America’s strategic and national interests outside its own borders. This was not self-evident to most Americans, who assumed, or at least hoped, that the need for direct involvement in Europe—and for that matter, in most of the rest of the world—would decline sharply with the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991.

  But once the United States became, to use an oddly ambiguous boast that was often heard after the fall of the Soviet Union, “the world’s only superpower,” its involvement in major events in the rest of the world could no longer be limited to crusades against fascism or communism. The American economy, once heavily centered on its own domestic markets, was now more dependent on global markets than ever before. How could the United States, in a world growing steadily smaller and more interdependent, disengage from the political, strategic, and moral issues that increasingly impinged on its once-splendid isolation?

  This was not to argue that the United States had to become the world’s policeman. Not every issue was equally susceptible to American leadership or American-led solutions; even the world’s only superpower had its limits, and knowing where they were would be a central test of a new generation of Washington policymakers. Each and every American involvement overseas required the support, or at least the passive acceptance, of Congress and the American people. This was one of the many lessons of Vietnam, and it still applied a quarter century after the fall of Saigon.

  Nonetheless, as not only Bosnia but the Mideast and Northern Ireland showed, there was a real need for active American leadership in addressing complex problems that, left to their own devices, might fester indefinitely or explode into more serious crises. Sometimes, as in Cyprus, where I spent a great deal of time from 1997 to 1999 as President Clinton’s special emissary, the efforts did not produce solutions to long-standing and seemingly intractable problems. But even Cyprus—widely regarded by experts and scholars as virtually insoluble—benefitted greatly from the engagement of the Clinton Administration, in close coordination with the United Nations and the European Union. Without such continuous pressure and involvement, the situation in Cyprus might have exploded into direct conflict at several points in the last decade of the century. The Russian missiles purchased by the Greek Cypriots, for example, would surely have been deployed in late 1998 with potentially disastrous results if not for a massive international effort led by the United States. Instead, the government of Cyprus wisely diverted the missiles to the island of Crete, part of Greece itself, thus averting a crisis. This was the latest in a series of American efforts, often in conjunction with the United Nations and the European Union, to defuse or resolve thorny issues in the region. The resolution of the bitter dispute between Greece and the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia in September 1995 during the Bosnia shuttle, as described earlier in this book, and our equally successful effort to resolve border disputes between Greece and Albania earlier in 1995, and between Hungary and two of its neighbors in 1996, were other examples of the role that could be played by an activist, hands-on foreign policy that addressed potentially explosive issues early, before they turned into other Bosnias. In the post-Cold War world, where foreign policy was no longer a zero-sum game in which the Soviet Union profitted from any American failure, it was often better to have tried and failed—when the stakes were high enough or the chances of success reasonable—than never to have tried at all.

  At the end of the century, deep, if intangible, factors bound America and Europe, ties of history and culture, as well as common interests, humanitarian, economic, and strategic. Most Americans, including many whose families had fled Europe, wanted nothing more to do with Europe’s internal squabbles. But history, which had pulled the United States into a deep engagement on the European continent three times during the twentieth century—in two world wars and in the Cold War—would not permit us to turn our backs on Europe so easily. After each of the first two involvements, the United States withdrew, or began to withdraw, from the continent: first, in 1919–20, when it decided not to join the League of Nations even though the driving force behind its creation had been President Wilson; second, in 1945–46, when the United States began a rapid withdrawal of its forces from Europe, only to be confronted by the challenge of Soviet expansionism. When the initial postwar American policy, based on an effective United Nations, failed because it required the positive participation of the Soviet Union, the Truman Administration quickly revised its view of Moscow and entered into the century’s third American engagement in Europe, putting into place the Cold War policies that would be known as containment. Perhaps no peacetime foreign policy in history was ever as successful. Despite domestic debate, quarrels with our allies, and the immense tragedy of Vietnam, containment led to the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 and prevented a general European war for over forty years.

  That Americans, after three major wars and fifty years of continuous and contentious engagement in the world, then wanted to focus on domestic priorities and disengage from international obligations was understandable. World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War had cost the nation hundreds of thousands of lives, a staggering amount of money, and a series of often vicious domestic struggles over policy, from the debate over Who Lost China? to McCarthyism and Vietnam. But the hope that international conflicts would fade into the background after the collapse of the Soviet Union and no longer require American leadership was dangerous and unrealistic.

  Well before the Bosnian negotiations, I argued that “an unstable Europe would still threaten essential security interests of the United States.”9 But in the absence of a clear and present danger, a Hitler or Stalin who could personify an evil system that we had to oppose, few in Washington felt the need to invest in European security or to play a part in its reshaping when, for the first time since 1917, Russia needed to be included in the general European security system, rather than excluded from it. But despite the desires of many to build this new European security structure with minimal American participation, the fact was that a stable post-Cold War structure could not be built while an integral part of it, the former Yugoslavia, was in flames. Thus, settling Bosnia was necessary, although not sufficient, for stability in Europe. But Europe found that it could not do this without American support and involvement, while the United States learned that our interests still included stability and peace in Europe.

  The visionary p
olicies of the 1940s had produced unparalleled peace and prosperity for half a century—but for only half a continent. With the war over in Bosnia, NATO, long the private preserve of the nations on one side of the Iron Curtain, could gradually open its doors to qualified Central European nations. It was essential that this be done in a manner that neither threatened Russia nor weakened the alliance. Meanwhile, a new role for Russia, Ukraine, and the other nations of the former Soviet Union was being defined through new agreements like the Founding Act, which created a formal relationship between Russia and NATO yet did not give Russia a veto over NATO activities. Other existing institutions, like the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) were strengthened and expanded; in October 1998 the OSCE would be given a role in Kosovo far larger than any ever attempted before.

  Leadership Without Unilateralism. The great architect of European unity, Jean Monnet, once observed, “Nothing is possible without men, but nothing is lasting without institutions.” It has become commonplace to observe that achieving Monnet’s vision is far more difficult in the absence of the unifying effect of a common adversary. But we should not wax nostalgic for the Cold War. It is now institutional and structural problems that inhibit progress on both sides of the Atlantic.

  The United States has survived divided government between the Executive Branch and the Congress for much of the last two decades. But a bloated bureaucratic system and a protracted struggle between the two branches have eroded much of Washington’s capacity for decisive action in foreign affairs and reduced our presence just as our range of interests has increased. The United States continues to reduce the resources committed to international affairs even as vast parts of the globe—the former Soviet bloc, China—and new issues that once lay outside its area of direct involvement now take on new importance and require American attention. One cannot have a global economic policy without a political and strategic vision to accompany it, as the 1997–98 economic crisis in East Asia has shown.