To End a War

by Richard Holbrooke

  If the search for a process that can produce coherent policies is difficult in Washington, it seems to be even harder in the new Europe. Carl Bildt has made a useful observation: the United States, he points out, has to harmonize “institutional views” while Europe has to coordinate “national views.” Bildt, who saw the two systems from a unique vantage point, observed:

  In Washington everything has to be formulated and shaped in a continuous compromise between the State Department, the Defense Department, the Treasury, intelligence agencies, and purely domestic factors. The rivalry between these various interests sometimes runs very deep. A great deal of blood can be spilt in the course of inter-agency debates in Washington. But when this apparatus finally decides on a policy, the United States then has the resources to implement its policy which is almost completely lacking in Europe [emphasis added].10

  A QUESTION OF EVIL

  Advocates of realpolitik, like three of its most famous American practitioners, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and George Kennan, have long argued that American advocacy of human rights conflicted with America’s true national security interests, amounted to interference in the internal affairs of other nations, and weakened the nation’s strategic and commercial interests. In his book Diplomacy, Kissinger portrayed American foreign policy as a constant struggle between realism, symbolized by Theodore Roosevelt, and idealism, as epitomized by Woodrow Wilson. Kissinger, who strongly favored TR, wrote, “The American experience has encouraged the belief that America, alone among the nations of the world, is impervious and that it can prevail by the example of its virtues and good works. In the post-Cold War world, such an attitude would turn innocence into self-indulgence.”11

  Under Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Bush, such “realist” theories were in the ascendancy. (The Carter Administration and the Reagan Administration, after the forced departure of Secretary of State Al Haig, took much more assertive positions on human rights.) But based on personal experiences in the late 1970s with authoritarian leaders like Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and Park Chung Hee of South Korea—both of whose corrupt strongman regimes were peacefully replaced by democracies—I came to the conclusion that the choice between “realists” and “idealists” was a false one: in the long run, our strategic interests and human rights supported and reinforced each other, and could be advanced at the same time. In short, American foreign policy needed to embrace both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. These thoughts were never far from my mind as we searched for a way to end the war.

  Throughout the negotiations, I thought often of the refugees I had visited in 1992: how they knew many of the men who had killed and raped their families; how some of the killers had been their co-workers for twenty years; and how they had hardly been aware of ethnic hatred until 1990. Some people offered what had happened during World War II as proof that ethnic hatred was in the Yugoslav bloodstream. But the bloodbath and fighting of 1941–45 were a product of the larger struggle and genocide Hitler had unleashed. The rest of Europe found a path to peace and reconciliation, but Yugoslavia suffered a bad case of arrested development under communism. Then demagogic and criminal leaders seized power.

  The killers were driven by ethnic prejudice rekindled by ultranationalists and demagogues. How could adults do such things to their neighbors and former classmates? After a while, the search for explanations failed. One simply had to recognize that there was true evil in the world.

  The full ferocity of that evil so stunned most Europeans and Americans that they could not at first comprehend it. Then, as Carl Jung had warned, they did not know “what to pit against it.” There was confusion over whom to blame, and disputes about what was happening; this increased as the war continued, since atrocities were committed by members of all three ethnic groups. But although Croats and Muslims were also guilty of atrocities, the Bosnian Serbs remained the primary perpetrators of the actions that made the phrase “ethnic cleansing” a part of the English language.

  It was easy to conclude, as Eagleburger did, that nothing could be done by outsiders. Or that all Serbs were inherently evil. Such judgments allowed people to justify their own inaction. But drawing either inference would be to share the fundamental mistake of the people of the Balkans themselves, imputing to an entire ethnic group the attributes of its worst elements. For more than fifty years people had debated the degree to which the entire German people shared culpability for the Holocaust, and now a similar question arose: was the entire Serb “nation” responsible for the actions of its leaders and their murderous followers?

  I often received letters, primarily from Serbs or Serbian Americans, charging that my remarks, or those of other American officials, lumped all Serbs together with a few indicted war criminals. This was a fair criticism of comments that could not always be precise. In fact, the majority of Serbs in the former Yugoslavia were ordinary people who did not kill anyone, although, like many “good Germans” during the Third Reich, a large number remained silent or passive in the face of something they admitted later they knew was wrong. But others were courageous opponents of the fires that raged across their land, and some even fought on the Muslim side. One of contemporary Europe’s great visionaries, Czech President Vaclav Havel, addressed this issue in an eloquent essay:

  I consider it an offense against the Serbian people and betrayal of the civic notion of society when evil is identified with Serbian nationality. But I find it equally misguided when evil is not defined at all, for fear of hurting Serbian feelings. All peoples have their Karadzics and Mladics, either real or potential. If such men—as the result of a mix of historical, social, and cultural circumstances—gain greater influence than they have in other parts of the world, it does not mean that they come from a criminal people…. [This] is a conflict of principles, not of nationalities…. In other words, let us beware of attempts to lay the blame for evil on whole peoples. That would be tantamount to adopting the ideology of the ethnic fanatics.12

  WAS BOSNIA UNIQUE?

  After Dayton we came full circle, back to an uncertainty about how much to invest in Bosnia. Having put American prestige on the line in 1995 to end the war, the United States and its allies were uncertain in 1996 and early 1997 about how hard to try to make Dayton work. The result was halfhearted implementation that led critics and cynics to call for scaled-back objectives in Bosnia. Failure to squash the separatist Serb movement immediately after Dayton, when it lay in disarray, seemed to some to prove that partition was inevitable. Such preemptive defeatism could have led to the permanent partition of Bosnia, followed by more refugees and more fighting. The best course remained vigorous enforcement of the Dayton agreement. At the end of 1997, President Clinton’s decision to remove the time limit for U.S. troops dramatically enhanced the chance of success. In 1998 the main constraint was no longer the separatists of Pale, who were beaten, corrupt, and in disarray. Success was within sight, but it would take hard work and a firm commitment from the leaders of the international community—and time.

  The circumstances that led to the collapse of Yugoslavia were so extraordinary that it is difficult to conceive of their recurrence. Yet if history teaches us one thing, it is that history is unpredictable. There will be other Bosnias in our lives, different in every detail but similar in one overriding manner: they will originate in distant and ill-understood places, explode with little warning, and present the rest of the world with difficult choices—choices between risky involvement and potentially costly neglect. But if during the Cold War Washington sometimes seemed too ready to intervene, today America and its allies often seem too willing to ignore problems outside their heartland.

  There will be other Bosnias in our lives—areas where early outside involvement can be decisive, and American leadership will be required. The world’s richest nation, one that presumes to great moral authority, cannot simply make worthy appeals to conscience and call on others to carry the burden. The world will look to Washin
gton for more than rhetoric the next time we face a challenge to peace.

  * See Chapter 8.

  *See Chapter 10.

  This book is dedicated to three cherished colleagues who did not reach Dayton.

  Robert C. Frasure

  Joseph Kruzel

  S. Nelson Drew

  Acknowledgments

  IN APRIL 1968, AVERELL HARRIMAN AND CYRUS VANCE asked me to join the negotiating team they were assembling for the first direct talks with the North Vietnamese. I arrived in Paris a few days later, a twenty-six-year-old Foreign Service officer caught up in the excitement of the world’s most closely watched negotiation. In Paris I read with fascination Peacemaking 1919, Harold Nicolson’s diary of his experiences on the British negotiating team at Versailles. But, lacking his discipline, I left Paris in the summer of 1969 without having kept any personal record of my experience.

  Still, the memories remained—of Averell Harriman, at the age of seventy-seven, tirelessly trying to convince President Johnson to stop the bombing of North Vietnam; Cyrus Vance sleeping on the floor of his office to ease the pain of a slipped disc; secret talks in Paris suburbs with the North Vietnamese; private emissaries from Vice President Hubert Humphrey asking if he should break with LBJ over Vietnam and resign; and visits from a Harvard professor (and Administration advisor) named Henry Kissinger. During the dramatic final week of the campaign President Johnson halted the bombing of the north, and Richard Nixon won a paper-thin victory over Humphrey amidst a welter of accusations over Vietnam. An opportunity to end the war—and not just the bombing—suddenly slipped away, and the conflict continued for another four years. Contrary to most accounts of this seminal period in American history, it was neither foreordained nor inevitable that the war should continue, with another twenty-five thousand Americans and countless Vietnamese dead. A negotiated end to the war in 1968 was possible; the distance to peace was far smaller than most historians realize.

  When, twenty-seven years later, President Clinton and Secretary of State Christopher asked me to take over the Bosnia negotiations, my friend and teacher Fritz Stern urged me to keep a detailed personal record. History was becoming harder to preserve and reconstruct, he pointed out; internal memoranda, telegrams, and other traditional forms of communication had been replaced by secure telephone calls and private faxes that were lost to history.

  Of course, he was right. But the pace and intensity of the negotiations left me and most of my colleagues with neither the time nor the energy to keep a detailed record, not even at Dayton. My own cables to Washington were extremely rare, and although my Pentagon colleagues did send regular messages to their superiors, these were incomplete, often intentionally so. The best I could do was to dictate a few thoughts occasionally, and preserve a handful of random notes.

  But I remembered the failure to record the 1968 story when its memories were still fresh. Encouraged by my friend and agent, Mort Janklow, and guided by the superb editorial team at Random House—Jason Epstein and Joy de Menil, and, until their departures, Harry Evans and Peter Osnos—I set out to tell the story of these negotiations before the details had receded in my mind.

  For a better understanding of events, especially those that did not involve our negotiating team, I consulted as many former colleagues (and journalists) as possible. Some simply responded to a specific question; others spent hours going through their records or journals to help reconstruct events. Many participants offered specific suggestions for revision or rewording, almost all of which I accepted. Others—including some not involved directly in the negotiations—took time to read all or part of the manuscript, and made important suggestions.

  Valuable work of historical preservation was done in 1996–97 at the direction of Warren Christopher and Tom Donilon. Recognizing that the publication of State Department documents in the annual Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series was no longer adequate alone, they established an experimental unit within the State Department’s Historical Division, to produce a history based both on written records and on supplemental oral histories. They chose Bosnia as the first subject for this experiment, and asked Derek Chollet, a young Columbia University historian, to write the study. When declassified, it will provide an invaluable resource for other historians. I am especially grateful to Derek for his subsequent assistance to me as a researcher, general advisor, and friend throughout the latter part of this project.

  I am indebted to many others who offered information, editorial suggestions, or general assistance, including: Morton Abramowitz, Sheppie Abramowitz, Marshall Adair, Madeleine Albright, Walter Andrusyzyn, Kofi Annan, Don Bandler, Marsha Barnes, Reginald Bartholomew, Richard Beattie, Sandy Berger, Carl Bildt, Joachim Bitterlich, Alan Blinken, Donald Blinken, General Charles Boyd, Robert Bradtke, John Burns, Nick Burns, General George Casey, Warren Christopher, General Wesley Clark, Hillary Rodham Clinton, President Clinton, James Collins, Admiral William Crowe, Tom Donilon, Sandy Drew, Linda Bird Francke, Katharina Frasure, Bennett Freeman, Dan Fried, Leon Fuerth, Peter Galbraith, Ejup Ganic, Judy Gelb, Philip Goldberg, Vice President Gore, Marc Grossman, Sir David Hannay, the late Pamela Harriman, Chris Hill, Chris Hoh, Robert Hunter, Douglas Hurd, Maxine Isaacs, Wolfgang Ischinger, Cati James, Ellen James, James A. Johnson, Vernon Jordan, General George Joulwan, Lena Kaplan, Sir John Kerr, Major General Donald Kerrick, Joe Klein, John Kornblum, Gail Kruzel, Tony Lake, David Lipton, Jan Lodal, Colonel Robert Lowe, Endre Marton, Ilona Marton, Mike McCurry, John Menzies, Judy Miller, Tom Miller, Tom Niles, Victoria Nuland, James O’Brien, Roberts Owen, James Pardew, Rosemarie Pauli, Rudy Perina, William Perry, David Phillips, Tom Pickering, Sir Robin Renwick, Jamie Rubin, Miriam Sapiro, Aric Schwan, Tom Schick, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Schrum, General John Shalikashvili, John Shattuck, Brooke Shearer, Doug Shoen, Tom Siebert, Haris Silajdzic, Walter Slocombe, George Soros, James Steinberg, George Stephanopoulos, Fritz Stern, Elizabeth Stevens, George Stevens, Loucas Tsilas, Cyrus Vance, Jon Vanden Heuvel, Sandy Vershbow, Elie Wiesel, Frank Wisner, and Warren Zimmermann.

  Jim O’Brien at the State Department and Don Kerrick at the NSC were especially helpful in obtaining the necessary clearances for the publication of this book, and also gave valuable advice along the way.

  Among those who offered advice and assistance, I must single out Strobe Talbott, who despite his backbreaking schedule as Deputy Secretary of State gave generously of his time to offer detailed criticism and corrections. I am deeply grateful both to him and to his wife, Brooke Shearer, for their support and friendship. I also owe special thanks to Les Gelb, my friend and confidant of over thirty years, who offered wise advice and insight during the negotiations, encouraged this project from the outset, and made invaluable editorial suggestions.

  I must also express my deep appreciation to my colleagues at Crédit Suisse First Boston—Rainer Gut, Jack Hennessy, Lucas Muhlmann, Allen Wheat, and Chuck Ward—for their understanding and support. Without their forbearance, especially when this project ran longer than anticipated, it could never have been completed. As always, I owe Beverly Snyder special thanks for carrying out so many administrative and secretarial tasks, big and small but always “urgent,” with such skill and charm.

  It is commonplace to end acknowledgments with a few words about one’s family. In this case it is hard to find the proper words to describe what I owe to my wife, Kati, who lived every twist and turn of this story, often participating directly. Perhaps because she was born in nearby Hungary, she had an almost intuitive understanding of the people of the region. She also played an important role in Bosnia on her own, as chair of the Committee to Protect Journalists, promoting press freedom during several trips to the region. Some of her contributions are mentioned in the text, but not the most important—the intangible ones of love and support.

  My two sons, who endured the Carter years as children, are now grown and successful in their own careers. They are a constant source of pride an
d joy, and their support for my efforts was enormously important. Anthony appeared in this story unexpectedly at a critical moment right after the fall of Srebrenica, and performed with the skill and courage that makes a father proud. His older brother, David, gave me love and encouragement when it was most needed. Kati’s two wonderful children, Elizabeth and Christopher, also got into the spirit of the project, even helping with some of the final editing.

  I am grateful to everyone for their help. Still, I expect that many readers, especially those who lived through parts of this story, will come forward with suggestions or corrections. I look forward to incorporating them in any future edition of this work.

  Cast of Characters

  Yasushi Akashi Senior U.N. Envoy to the Former Yugoslavia (1993–95)

  Madeleine Albright U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. (1993–97); Secretary of State (1997–)

  Kofi Annan U.N. Undersecretary-General for Peacekeeping

  (1993–97); Secretary-General (1997–)

  Arkan (Zeljko Raznatovic) Leader of paramilitary Serbs

  James Baker U.S. Secretary of State (1989–92)

  Samuel (Sandy) Berger U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor (1993–96); National Security Advisor (1996–)

  Carl Bildt European Union Peace Envoy, High Representative in Bosnia (1995–97)