The U.S. goal at Dayton was to turn the sixty-day cease-fire into a permanent peace. The Dayton Peace Accords ended the war and established Bosnia-Herzegovina as an internationally recognized sovereign state.
In the discussion of ending the war in Bosnia, the French insisted on a “new constitution, re-creation of normal conditions of life, and a secure environment.” The French also indicated their intention to introduce civilian authority into every level of the military command system, emphasizing that civilian authorities would report not to the military commander and NATO but to the EU and the UN. Finally, the issues were settled.
The Dayton Peace Accords provided both more and less than the participants expected. The agreement, initialed on November 21, 1995, did not solve all the problems, but it resolved enough of them to provide a pause, and for all parties to feel they had achieved minimum goals. In addition to a cease-fire, an agreement on arms reductions, and boundaries, the accords created a new state that included two multiethnic entities, established boundaries between them, and committed the parties to reversing ethnic cleansing, arresting war criminals, and helping refugees return to their homes. The agreement provided a basis for building democratic, multiethnic institutions for southeastern Europe, with closer ties to the rest of Europe. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) would supervise elections, and Carl Bildt, the Swedish prime minister and UN special envoy for the Balkans, would oversee implementation of the political provisions of the accords.
The accords embodied the parties’ understanding that force was a necessary component of implementing an agreement in the Balkans, allocating power among two entities and three ethnic groups. The three national groups that had been at war for years would survive. Each group would keep its army (by this time all three armies had weapons, although the Muslims lacked heavy weapons). The agreement would be overseen and enforced by a sixty-thousand-person NATO-led implementation force (IFOR), to which the United States contributed twenty thousand troops. IFOR would be headed by an American, Admiral Leighton Smith, who made clear the new rules of engagement: “The senior soldier on the scene has the right and responsibility to protect himself and those under his command or leadership. If he feels threatened, he will use whatever force is necessary to neutralize that threat.”130
A NATO-led stabilization force (SFOR), thirty thousand strong, would also be deployed throughout the country to assist in the continuing implementation of the accords and to protect the unified state. SFOR would be overwhelmingly made up of NATO troops but would also include Russians, Ukrainians, Moroccans, and other Eastern Europeans. It was estimated that about two thousand mujahideen from Iran, Afghanistan, and other Muslim states were in Bosnia. The rapid departure of these foreign Islamic fighters was specifically agreed to in the accords.
The accords were signed on December 14, 1995, in Paris. The official transfer of authority in Bosnia, from the UN peacekeeper mission to the NATO peace enforcement operation, was scheduled for December 19. Meanwhile, the U.S.-Bosnia negotiating team worked to resolve the last details. Holbrooke believed that four key issues still needed to be addressed for the implementation of the accords:
Corruption must be eliminated; transparency and accountability must be established.
War criminals must be arrested.
Refugees must be allowed to return to their homes, and the pace of return must be quickened. Srebrenica must be repopulated. The perpetrators of the Srebrenican massacre must be jailed.
Freedom of the press must be established.
Additional, unwritten commitments related to the Dayton Accords rested on each party’s sometimes unspoken understanding of the stakes. These commitments included the U.S. promise that the UN arms embargo would be lifted promptly and that the United States would assume responsibility for arming and training Bosnian forces to enable them to achieve parity with the Serb forces operating in Bosnia. And the entire agreement was reinforced by the unwritten commitment that NATO would respond to Serb aggression with overwhelming (not proportionate) force.131
Throughout the negotiations, Richard Holbrooke provided brilliant leadership on the American side. When his principal assistant, Robert Frasure, and two colleagues were killed in an accident on the treacherous mountain road leading to Sarajevo, Holbrooke, devastated but determined, took charge of the negotiations.
However, many provisions of the accords have not been carried out, and several problems remain unresolved: the capture of war criminals, the status of Kosovo, and respect for the rights of Kosovars. This phase of war in the Balkans had ended, but no one was greatly surprised when it resumed three years later in Kosovo.
The Verdict on Srebrenica
War crimes trials in The Hague have provided details about the mass murder at Srebrenica, making it clear that it was a well-planned, deliberate killing operation. In November 2003, two senior Bosnian Serb officers gave the war crimes tribunal detailed accounts of the orders they received from General Mladic for the murder and burial of more than seven thousand unarmed Bosnian boys and men.132
A French parliamentary commission, established at the urging of the humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) to investigate the French role at Srebrenica, published its report on November 29, 2001. The responsibility for the disaster, it concluded, was shared by France and its Western allies for failing to prevent the massacre after the fall of the “Muslim enclave” of eastern Bosnia in July 1995. The report concluded that the tragedy “was ultimately caused by the absence of political will in France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and [among] the Bosnians, themselves”133—a list that should also include a failure of political will by the United Nations.
Four of the ten deputies on the commission did not agree with all the conclusions, especially the conclusion that France had made a deal with Ratko Mladic to secure the release of UNPROFOR troops. General Javier testified about the disagreements among himself, Akashi, and General Rupert Smith. All witnesses saw General Mladic as the person responsible for the Srebrenica massacres, and many witnesses also held him personally responsible for the siege and the repeated attacks on the unprotected citizens of Sarajevo.134
Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who served as the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights for Yugoslavia from August 1992 through July 1995, resigned after the fall of Srebrenica and Zepa in August 1995 in protest against the UN’s hypocritical claim to be defending Bosnia when in fact it had abandoned it. The Geneva-based UN Human Rights Commission expressed support for Mazowiecki’s “moral and courageous stand and his resignation in protest of the perpetuation of gross violations in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali had no comment.
Mazowiecki was finishing his eighteenth report on human rights violations in former Yugoslavia when he learned of the massacres. The establishment of safe zones where civilians would be protected by UN peacekeepers had been his idea—in fact, his first recommendation. He had asked for sufficient troops to protect the safe areas. The UN Secretariat had requested thirty-four thousand troops to defend the safe areas, but the Security Council had supplied only seventy-six hundred for the mission.135
“Speaking of protecting human rights is meaningless in the context of the lack of consistency and courage on the part of the international community and its leaders,” Mazowiecki wrote. He never hesitated to accuse all sides of the conflict of criminal acts, but he concluded that the Bosnian Serbs were guilty of perhaps 80 percent of the human rights violations and war crimes. He saw the fall of Zepa and Srebrenica as a critical moment that called into question the whole international order—much like the failure of the League of Nations to confront Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, from which the League never recovered. NATO’s very credibility, Mazowiecki believed, was now at stake.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, meanwhile, chose this moment of defeat and humiliation to pay a visit to Africa. “Why,” asked Michael Ignatieff, in an interview for the New Yorker,
“why not return [to Bosnia]? Because if I do,” said the secretary-general, “all the African countries will tell the world that while there is genocide in Africa—a million people have died in Rwanda—the secretary-general pays attention only to a village in Europe.”136
But Srebrenica was no village, and this was not the first time Boutros-Ghali had made clear his view that Africa’s problems should have priority over Europe’s. In July 1992, Boutros-Ghali had advised the Security Council to ignore Lord Peter Carrington’s efforts to end the fighting in the Balkans and focus instead on Somalia. In September 1992, he opposed enforcement of the no-fly zone. In the spring of 1993, he reiterated the extraordinary notion that UN peacekeepers should remain neutral in a conflict in which civilians were being starved and shelled. In April 1993, he requested the recall of the French general Philippe Morillon, who with great personal courage had led a UN convoy of food and medicines into Srebrenica, where civilians—even then—were starving. And in the fall of 1994, Boutros-Ghali requested the recall of a second French general, Jean Cot, the commander of UN forces for former Yugoslavia, who had offended the secretary-general by pressing too hard for prompt and effective air cover for his forces.
In his interview with Ignatieff, Boutros-Ghali commented that humanitarian efforts often fail. He recalled other instances of failure and genocide. “Everywhere we work, we are struggling against the culture of death,” he said.137 But he did not struggle hard enough. Instead, he claimed control over the use of force by the UN and then deprived victims of help in their struggle against aggression, redefined peacekeeping so that it was of no use to anyone, wrote rules of engagement that did not permit UN forces to protect civilians under their care, and shackled NATO.
THE OLD EUROPE AND THE NEW
In the complicated diplomacy that finally silenced the guns of Sarajevo and produced the Dayton Peace Accords and the new state of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the outlines of a new Europe could be discerned. It was not the Europe of the cold war, though NATO played a role. It was not the Europe of Brussels, though the European Union representative, David Owen, continued his negotiations. It was the historic Europe of nation-states—L’Europe des patries, Charles de Gaulle had called it—that stretched from the Atlantic to the Urals.
Lenin was no help in understanding the politics of historic Europe; with his innate contempt for nation-states, he would never have understood why, for example, Boris Yeltsin moved four hundred troops to Sarajevo, where the Serbs greeted them as saviors. More relevant than Lenin is the history of the Ottoman Empire, whose fourteenth-century conquest of Serbia still moves Russians to sympathy, Greeks to rage, and Serbs to mobilization.
During the cold war, ideology and bloc politics had replaced ethnicity and history as organizing principles of European politics. With the end of the cold war, ideology gave way again to ethnicity and history.
Many observers believed the Old Europe was dead, a casualty of the two world wars, bolshevism, Nazism, fascism, and the European Union. But as Yugoslavia disintegrated, old patterns of trust and mistrust, affinity and hostility reemerged, and European powers reached across centuries to find “natural allies” from earlier times: Serbs and Russians; Germans and Croats; Bosnians and Bulgarians.
Nowhere were the old patterns more clear than in Russia, where fanatics like Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, threatened Russian air strikes if NATO attacked Serbs, and liberals like former economics minister Yegor Gaidar and the political class recalled the “old Slavic ties” that linked Russia and Serbia.
Radio Moscow reminded listeners that it was a Russian tradition to support the Serbs, “those ethnic Slav people who are orthodox Christians.” This sentimental recollection of historic Russo-Serbian-Orthodox solidarity not only reinforced the “Slavic brotherhood,” it reminded Russia that it should have a voice and a role in any Balkan settlement. And so, rather suddenly after the cease-fire was signed, Yeltsin moved Russian troops from Croatia to Sarajevo and threatened a veto in the UN Security Council.
Suddenly, Russia was back: a superpower playing an independent role in the first European crisis since the end of the cold war; imposing compliance, of a sort, in the Serbs around Sarajevo and forestalling the NATO air strikes.
Russia was not the only country that was profoundly affected by the Balkan crisis. It stimulated Germany to make its first wholly independent foreign policy initiative since World War II. When it backed Croatia with diplomatic recognition and economic help, Germany’s EU colleagues were shocked and offended by its unexpected interest in traditional national goals. And Germany’s concern with Croatia aroused anxiety in France, where politicians began to worry that if Germany’s attention turned east rather than west, it might drift away from the many ties and institutions designed to anchor it in democratic Western Europe.
So France, confronted with the ghost of the Old Europe, worked harder to strengthen its national and multilateral diplomacy. As the Balkan crisis deepened, socialist president François Mitterrand and his neo-Gaullist prime minister, Edouard Balladur, worked to extend France’s alliances and influence in the east as well as in NATO and Brussels. De Gaulle had seen a Franco-Russian entente as the natural protection for France against a resurgent German nationalism, and Serbia as the southern anchor of a Paris-Moscow arrangement.
How did the Americans fit into the new European politics, where alliances were based less on shared values than on shared history? The American legal-moral tradition in foreign affairs was very different from the historical European balance-of-power tradition. This was one reason that the Clinton administration had a difficult time finding common ground on Bosnia and Kosovo with European allies, and an equally difficult time explaining its actions and intentions to the American people (and perhaps to itself) as the situation developed. The savage war against Bosnia illuminated some important differences in the political sensibilities and reflexes of the Old Continent and the United States—and foreshadowed changes in that relationship that are still emerging.
5.
KOSOVO
The events in Kosovo, especially in 1998–99, offered further proof of the dangers of wishful thinking and the underestimation of bad actors—in this case, the same bad actor who had been at work in Bosnia. Once again, UN threats were unpersuasive; once again, NATO was divided. In this case, however, the United States was able to coordinate action with NATO and bring the ethnic cleansing to an end—perhaps the Clinton administration’s only real foreign policy victory, although it was a long time coming. And the UN has proved useful, after the fact, in peacekeeping and conflict resolution.
BACKGROUND OF THE CRISIS
Soon after the death of Josip Tito on May 4, 1980, rumors spread among the Serbian population of Yugoslavia that Albanians in the southern province of Kosovo were engaged in a plot to eliminate Serbs from the area, and even that they were planning genocide. On September 24, 1986, a “memorandum” from the Serbian Academy of Sciences was published in the mass-circulation paper Vercernje Novosti, bitterly attacking Tito’s 1974 constitution. That constitution had made Kosovo and Vojvodina autonomous provinces with seats in the federal presidency, had given them a voice and vote equal to those of Yugoslavia’s six republics, and had established autonomy in most areas. The destruction of this constitution became a principal goal of Serb nationalists, and Slobodan Milošević was their chief spokesman.
By the time U.S. ambassador Warren Zimmerman arrived in Belgrade in March 1989, Slobodan Milošević had already made his reputation as an “ambitious and ruthless” (in Zimmerman’s words) nationalist leader.1 He used Communist organizational tactics to launch his campaign of repression in Kosovo and extend his personal power in Serbia and Yugoslavia. Wielding populist rhetoric, Soviet-style ruthlessness, and the Communist Party network, Milošević packed meetings and purged opponents in his campaign to create a new post-Communist Yugoslavia. He did not hesitate to use force to make life increasingly difficult for the Kosovars.
Milošević’s intentions were already evident in 1989. Soon after being elected president in Serbia, he revoked the Statute of Autonomy for Kosovo. That revocation was the prelude to a campaign of discrimination and ethnic cleansing against the Albanian Muslims who constituted 90 percent of Kosovo’s population—a campaign that ultimately drove Yugoslavia to war and the NATO governments to countermeasures.
It was hard for Americans to comprehend how aggressive and persistent Milošević was in the eight years following Tito’s death, just as it has always seemed difficult for us to grasp the scope and ambitions of any coercive ideology or personality throughout history. Milošević pressed Serbia’s claim to sovereignty over Yugoslavia and Kosovo, and managed to persuade many Europeans and Americans of its justice, even though Serbia had no historic or constitutional right to such sovereignty. He was the “leader” who drove Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina into wars that left millions homeless and tens of thousands dead, the man whose megalomaniacal drive for power reduced the Yugoslav federal state to a fraction of its former size. Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina eventually acquired weapons and won their independence, but not until Croatia and Bosnia had endured brutal ethnic cleansing and war had spread to Kosovo.
From the beginning, Milošević ruled by force and responded only to force, rebuffing the efforts of seasoned diplomats like Cyrus Vance and the United Kingdom’s Peter Carrington and David Owen to find peaceful settlements to the conflicts. Milošević was not interested in agreements that gave minorities equal rights—or any rights. He was not interested in negotiating agreements or implementing agreements that had been negotiated. Peace and stability were not his priorities.
As chairman of the then Central Committee of the League of Communists of the Serb Party, Milošević launched his plan to gain control of the federal presidency and parliament in early 1989, through a series of carefully drafted constitutional “amendments,” imposed arbitrarily by fiat, that progressively restricted and ultimately eliminated Kosovo’s autonomy. The amendments deprived Kosovo and Vojvodina of autonomy and gave Milošević a near majority in the federal presidency. Milošević was determined to undermine Kosovar Albanians’ political, economic, and social rights, and he used these amendments to seize control over Kosovo’s police, courts, and civil defense; its social, economic, educational, and administrative policy; and even over the choice of an official language. He eliminated Albanian language instruction, segregated Albanian schools, and abolished the Academy of Sciences in Kosovo. Ethnic Albanians were fired from state jobs and replaced by Serbs. The names of streets were changed from Albanian to Serbian.
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