by Philip Short
Milošević’s forces had withdrawn from Croatia only to throw their support behind the Bosnian Serbs. In April 1992, the Europeans recognised Bosnian independence. The secret agreements reached a year earlier between Milošević and the Croatian leader, Franjo Tudjman, which had remained in force despite the Croatian–Serbian war, then came into play, and the Serbs and Croats began to divide up Bosnia between them.
This time Mitterrand decided Milošević had gone too far. In a series of messages to Belgrade, he asked the Serbian leader to put pressure on his Bosnian Serb ally, Radovan Karadžić, to reopen the airport at the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, which the Serbs were blockading, to permit an airlift of food and other vital supplies. For weeks nothing happened. Then, on June 23, he received a message from the Bosnian President, Alija Izetbegović, whom he had met in Paris at the beginning of the year. ‘We’ve reached the end of the road,’ Izetbegović told him. ‘We have neither food nor arms nor hope. It is the Warsaw ghetto all over again. Will you, yet again, allow the Warsaw ghetto to die?’ The message was delivered by Bernard-Henri Lévy, a flamboyant French literary heavyweight who had just returned from Sarajevo. He compared Izetbegovic’s situation to that of Salvador Allende, the left-wing Chilean President killed in an army coup twenty years earlier, whom Mitterrand had greatly admired.
Later that week, the Twelve met in Lisbon for their first summit since Maastricht and warned that if the Serb blockade were not lifted, the use of ‘military means to attain humanitarian objectives’, a reference to possible air strikes, was no longer excluded. It was an empty threat but it marked a change of tone.
The following afternoon Mitterrand left for home. But instead of heading for Paris, his plane turned east towards Yugoslavia.
The siege of Sarajevo by Serb militias had tightened. The airport was surrounded by Serb armour and, even if the runways could have been cleared, a landing in darkness was impossible. The President spent the night at Split, on the Croatian coast, and next morning flew to the Bosnian capital by helicopter. Dumas had warned Milošević and, through him, the Bosnian Serbs, that a French delegation was about to arrive, but had not disclosed that Mitterrand was leading it. He was driven into the city in an armoured troop carrier but insisted on getting out to walk through the streets, where he was given an ecstatic welcome. People leaned out of the windows of their apartments, cheering and throwing bouquets of flowers, while among the crowds that gathered as he passed, handwritten signs were held up: ‘Merçi, Monsieur’. He laid a rose outside the baker’s shop where, a month earlier, twenty-two people had been killed by a mortar shell, and visited the injured in one of the city’s hospitals. Afterwards, at a news conference with President Izetbegović, he explained why he had come:
I believe in the symbolic force of acts. I hope to seize the world’s conscience to come to the aid of a population in danger, because what is happening is not acceptable. Since the start of the conflict in former Yugoslavia, both sides have committed wrongs. But one cannot put back to back those who fire on an unarmed city and those who are their victims . . . The people of Sarajevo are truly prisoners, condemned to murderous blows, and I feel an overpowering sense of solidarity with them . . . This city is shut off, closed and isolated from the rest of the world, and all the while it is being subjected to practically constant gunfire that is destroying its vital centres and killing many of its people. This is not acceptable.52
Like his journey to Beirut eight years earlier, after a car bomb killed fifty-eight French soldiers, Mitterrand’s decision to fly to Bosnia showed unusual courage. He was 75 years old. His cancer, in remission for a decade, was showing signs of returning. ‘Throughout his visit,’ the New York Times reported, ‘the city was under almost continuous artillery, mortar and sniper fire’. The President’s escort helicopter was hit by rifle fire as they landed, and on the way out he was trapped in the airport terminal, where he was to meet Karadžić and other Bosnian Serb leaders, by a fire fight between Serbian tanks, on the perimeter a few hundred yards away, and Bosnian snipers. ‘The talks [with Karadžić],’ the Times correspondent wrote, ‘in which the Serbs presented their fighters as blameless in Sarajevo, were drowned out at times by volleys of fire from their tanks and machine guns. As they have for weeks past, Serbian gunners fired directly at apartment buildings in [the nearby suburb of] Dobrinja.’ When eventually the President was able to leave, after spending six hours in the city, it was judged that the shelling made it too risky to use a fixed-wing aircraft and he left by helicopter flying at treetop level.
The visit was a success in that the Bosnian Serbs announced that night that they would turn over control of the airport to the UN peacekeepers, permitting a resumption of the airlift of relief supplies, which started arriving at the rate of 150 tons a day. It was a success, too, in that it silenced, at least for a time, charges from the French opposition, and from the Left, that Mitterrand was soft on the Serbs and should have been threatening military action to bring the conflict to an end.
But it did not fundamentally change the President’s reading of the situation. The Serbs, he now accepted, were aggressors. But they and the Croats were the victors. Bosnia was a fiction. ‘Look at the map,’ he told the Cabinet. A Muslim power had been established there to rule over a collection of scattered districts, but its existence, apart from an ephemeral medieval kingdom, had no historical reality. Instead of trying to acquire arms and internationalise the conflict, the Bosnians should accept the situation and seek a negotiated settlement.53 Britain felt the same. When Mitterrand said that arming the Bosnians would just ‘add war to war’, Major wrote to tell him: ‘I am in complete agreement.’ The Bush administration was even more determined not to get involved. At the State Department the Under-Secretary, Lawrence Eagleburger, was quoted as saying: ‘This conflict is a tribal war. If these people can’t live together without killing each other, it is difficult for us to end [it].’
Humanitarian aid, they all agreed, was desperately needed, not least to mollify opinion at home. But military intervention, even indirectly by making arms available, was ruled out. To Mitterrand it was a war in which all sides were at fault, fuelled by ancient hatreds and old alliances. ‘As long as I live,’ he said, ‘never – mark my words well – never will France make war on Serbia.’
But events were moving in a way that Western governments would be powerless to resist.
While Mitterrand had been in Sarajevo, Izetbegović had spoken to him of Serb ‘extermination camps’. The French Humanitarian Affairs Minister, Bernard Kouchner, who was present, thought the Bosnian leader was exaggerating. But before long the first television images appeared showing Serbian death camps. Public opinion was revolted. In all the European countries and in the United States, where Bush was fighting an uphill battle for re-election against Bill Clinton, pressure for action grew exponentially. People were sickened that their governments were doing nothing in the face of horrors which recalled the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. Mitterrand might tell the Cabinet, ‘Milošević is not Hitler’, but neither the public, nor the press, nor the politicians were ready to continue listening. ‘Non-intervention,’ Jacques Chirac declared, ‘is in fact to make ourselves complicit in a war of territorial conquest and in the atrocities which are taking place day after day.’ Fabius demanded that a war crimes tribunal be established to try the Serbian leaders for crimes against humanity. Both called for the bombing of Serbian military targets.
In October 1992, under US pressure, the UN Security Council imposed a ‘no fly’ zone over Bosnia. Britain and France dragged their feet. Both countries had several thousand soldiers in the peacekeeping force and feared Serb reprisals if Serbian planes were shot down. The French General Staff, like the British, opposed direct military intervention, warning that it could result in ‘a Vietnamese-style escalation, like that under Johnson, [leading] in time to public opinion swinging back in favour of withdrawal’. But by then the momentum towards a tougher position was unstoppable. European Union leader
s, meeting at Edinburgh that month, for the first time explicitly designated Serbia as the aggressor. Three days later Mitterrand agreed to send twelve French aircraft to help enforce the ‘no fly’ zone. ‘If we absolutely must I will accept the bombing [of Serb targets] in Bosnia,’ he said. ‘[But] I oppose any bombing in Serbia, because it would amount to a declaration of war and of that there is no question.’
It was a very strange double standard.
To Mitterrand it was acceptable to use force in Kuwait to safeguard France’s status as a player in world affairs, but not to prevent the butchery of tens of thousands of Europeans in a genocidal war a few hundred miles down the Mediterranean coast. It was true that the circumstances were different. To send ground forces to fight in a country tailor-made for guerrilla combat amid a patchwork of ethnic pockets spitting hatred at each other would have been insane. On the other hand, to bomb Serb artillery positions and airfields would have been a simple way to put pressure on Belgrade and carried little risk.54
Nonetheless, for eighteen months, from July 1991 to December 1992, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the United States, not to mention the smaller European countries, were united in their refusal to do so. Mitterrand’s stance was not the exception but the rule.
It was a failure of leadership by everyone concerned – not only by Mitterrand but by Bush and by Kohl and Major and all the other Europeans. Above all it was a failure of Europe. Mitterrand had said early on that ‘Europe does not have the means to impose its views’. That was a misstatement. Europe did not have the will to impose its views.
The lesson of the Balkans was that all Europe’s talk of ‘political union’, implying the coordination of foreign and defence policy for common goals, was just that: talk. To require political cooperation before economic unity was putting the cart before the horse. With hindsight, Maastricht would have two achievements to its credit. It had made a huge stride towards harmonising economic policy. But it had also shown that, at the present stage of European integration, a pooling of sovereignty in foreign affairs and defence was a pipe dream. For America that was the silver lining. Washington now knew it no longer had to worry about the Europeans striking out on their own. They were incapable of doing so. Even the Eurocorps, conceived by Mitterrand and Kohl as a force of 60,000 men with, as its nucleus, the Franco-German brigade, which Bush and Cheney had fretted about when it was first announced,55 was seen for what it was: an idea that existed largely on paper and would have a marginal impact over the coming decades.56 In the meantime American primacy in the Old World would continue unchallenged.
By the summer of 1992, there was no longer any doubt. Mitterrand’s cancer was back. Two years earlier he had told his doctor, Claude Gubler, that he wanted to prepare public opinion for the possibility that he might have to resign. But on that occasion it had been a false alarm. The complications of his two families had caught up with him. Mazarine, then fifteen, was having an adolescent crisis and Danielle had chosen that moment to leave the family home at Latche in a fit of depression without saying where she had gone. Four days later the GSPR tracked her down in the Pyrenees. The episode had left the President shaken. He asked himself once again whether this second term was worth it if it meant that he was unable to care for those he loved.
This time the relapse was not only real but took a much more acute form than he had experienced before.
Mitterrand was ‘irritable, his face drawn, emaciated and tired’, a visitor to Latche reported in August. ‘He was eating almost nothing and found it hard to stand upright.’ The President told Dumas that he was exhausted, he had ‘to get up at night almost every hour to piss’. At the end of that month, Steg was flown down to examine him. Surgery was necessary, the professor told him, and it could not be delayed. On September 3, against his doctors’ advice, Mitterrand took part in a three-hour-long television debate on the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, which was then hanging by a thread. Eight days later, Steg operated. It was announced that cancerous tissue had been found and that the President would be treated accordingly. Nothing was said about any earlier condition. Medical experts estimated that a man of his age, newly diagnosed with an early-stage cancer, had at least five years and possibly longer ahead of him.57 Only it was not early-stage cancer. He had had it for eleven years and it was already a miracle that he had survived so long.
Asked, as he left hospital on September 16, whether he intended to resign, he shot back: ‘I don’t think they removed a lobe of my brain. It wasn’t up there that it happened.’ It was a matter, he said, of ‘waging an honourable battle against oneself’. Less than 48 hours later he was back at work.
The Maastricht Treaty was approved by a narrow margin – 51 to 49 per cent – opening the way for Denmark and, finally, Britain to complete ratification in the summer of 1993. But the uncertainty carried over into the financial markets. The previous week, on Black Wednesday, speculation against sterling had forced Britain to leave the European exchange rate mechanism, earning George Soros, the most prominent of the currency speculators, the title of ‘the man who broke the Bank of England’. The next target was the franc.
In a narrative that would be repeated with variations over the next twenty years, the fiercely independent Chairman of the Bundesbank, Helmut Schlesinger, refused to lower German interest rates. Two days later, Mitterrand received Kohl at the Elysée. He was still suffering from his operation – his economic adviser, Guillaume Hannezo, remembered that, during the meeting, he had to leave the room every quarter of an hour to relieve himself – but the urgency of the threat to Europe focussed his mind. ‘If Germany does not react,’ he warned the Chancellor, ‘it’s the end of everything that . . . you and I have accomplished over the last ten years.’ Kohl saw the danger. But Schlesinger, who was in Washington for an IMF meeting, dug in his heels. ‘The two governments can do what they like,’ he told his French counterpart. ‘Me, I won’t sign.’ Kohl telephoned him and, in Hannezo’s words, with the full weight of his 6 feet 5 inches, 260 lb, bulk, ‘sat on the independence of the Bundesbank’. Schlesinger signed. However next morning, September 23, as the French Cabinet met, it seemed that even Germany’s support was not going to be enough. At midday, Pierre Bérégovoy told Hannezo that France would have to follow Britain and Italy and leave the EMS. Three hours later the speculation mysteriously stopped. ‘It was totally irrational,’ Védrine said afterwards. ‘As if by a miracle, on the very edge of the abyss, the [attacks] died away.’
The success of the Maastricht referendum and the defence of the franc helped the government in the opinion polls. But it would take more than that to pull the Left out of the political morass to which the errors of the previous three years had condemned it.
Bérégovoy had got off to a good start. Public opinion found him capable and down to earth. But in the autumn the outlook had darkened. Laurent Fabius, who was to have led the Socialist campaign for the parliamentary elections, now six months away, was charged with manslaughter in connection with the use by hospitals of blood contaminated by the AIDS virus while he had been Prime Minister. The charge was frivolous but it disqualified him as the Socialists’ champion.fn7 Bérégovoy then took over. But he too would unexpectedly stumble.
On February 3, seven weeks before the first round of voting, the Canard enchaîné revealed that in 1986 the Prime Minister had accepted an interest-free loan of one million francs (£85,000 or US $140,000) from Mitterrand’s friend, Patrice Pelat, to buy a small flat in Paris. At the time he had not been a member of the government, so there was no direct conflict of interest, and the fact that, after a lifetime in politics, he needed a loan to buy a modest apartment was testimony enough to his probity. But Pelat’s subsequent involvement with a member of Bérégovoy’s private office in the insider trading scandal over Pechiney had left a whiff of scandal. Bérégovoy, it was claimed, had returned the favour of the loan by helping to further Pelat’s interests after he had been returned to office two years later.
Th
e accusation had been cunningly framed. It had been leaked to the Canard by a right-wing magistrate, Thierry Jean-Pierre, who for years had been waging a fanatical anti-Socialist crusade. In the fevered climate of the campaign, when even to answer such a charge would have been taken as an admission of guilt, it was impossible to disprove.
Even without the discrediting of the Socialists’ two standard-bearers, the Party was in a mess. ‘Each one falls back on his own calculations or those of his clan,’ Védrine had written to Mitterrand. ‘The leaders are tearing each other to pieces. No one has any proposals for the future. In short, the Socialists are going to rack and ruin.’ The succession of scandals, exacerbated by the amnesty; the collapse of the Communist Party and the rise of the National Front; the failure of Édith Cresson’s prime ministership; and the rise in unemployment, which for the first time exceeded three million, meant that once again the only uncertainty was over how badly the Left would lose. There was no way it could obtain a majority. The ‘opening’ to the Centre had failed. The Greens, who the opinion polls predicted would get 15 per cent of the vote, had rejected the Socialists’ approaches. The problem was insoluble. Mitterrand’s party was too discredited to be a useful ally.
A little over a month later, on March 21 1993, the Socialists and Left-Radicals won just over 20 per cent of the vote, the Communists 9 per cent. It was the worst result for the Left since 1958. Even Mitterrand was surprised. ‘I knew we were going to be in a minority, but not to that extent,’ he said that night.