by Philip Short
The last point was crucial. The Americans, who had no ground forces in former Yugoslavia, could bomb Serb positions with impunity. France and Britain could not.
On May 15 1993, the Bosnian Serbs rejected the Vance–Owen plan. The same day the Security Council approved the creation of ‘security zones’ in six Muslim-populated areas of Bosnia. Clinton rowed back, agreeing that there would be no bombardment of Serb positions and that the arms embargo against Bosnia should remain in force. Public opinion in both the United States and France judged the decision harshly. ‘Mr Clinton has failed to deliver on his promises, talking loudly and leaving his stick on his shoulder,’ wrote the New York Times. ‘The next time he voices threats, they will have less credibility.’ Bernard Kouchner denounced ‘a Munich of the spirit’.
Mitterrand was relieved. ‘No one will make war,’ he told the Cabinet’s Defence Committee. But no one would make peace either.
The fundamental problem was that none of the major powers was ready to take decisive action. Washington was willing to launch airstrikes, ‘from a height of 10,000 metres’ as the French Defence Minister put it; it authorised the CIA to parachute arms to the Bosnian Muslims to circumvent the embargo; but it ‘refused categorically’ any steps which might lead to the direct involvement of American soldiers. At the NATO summit in January 1994, where Mitterrand pushed the US President to take a tougher stance, Clinton agreed to support the latest European peace plan for the partition of Bosnia and to approve airstrikes when Serb forces attacked UN personnel. But when the Russians dug in their heels in support of their Serbian allies, he refused to follow through.
In the meantime the UN force was paralysed. ‘The Bosnians are using the security zones to reinforce and train their troops,’ the UN Commander, General Briquemont, complained, ‘the Croats are threatening to intervene if the Muslims don’t stop attacking, and the Serbs are carrying out a massacre a day.’ At that point France, like Britain, came close to pulling out and abandoning Bosnia to its fate.
That winter Mitterrand had written to Milošević, warning that ‘a veritable genocide’ threatened Sarajevo and other Bosnian towns unless the Serbs allowed relief supplies to pass and urging him to help end this ‘tragic and dishonourable story’. For two weeks the convoys were able to get through. Then they were halted again. ‘This is madness!’ the French leader exclaimed. He became increasingly convinced that the only way to change the situation was for the United States, the European Union and Russia to impose a solution on all three parties – Serbs, Croats and Bosnians – without seeking to judge who was right and who was wrong. But Clinton refused. In the American view, it was for the Serbs, not the Bosnians, to make concessions. Védrine summed up the French government’s frustrations:
The American attitude is completely cynical . . . I am afraid [they] have no vision of the future and no idea how to lead these unfortunate peoples to coexist in peace tomorrow and rebuild their countries. They are encouraging the Bosnians to fight to the last Bosnian, just as [in 1956] they encouraged the Hungarians to rise up against the Soviets, [just as] they armed the Afghan resistance against the same Soviets – which doesn’t stop them being completely indifferent to the chaos into which Afghanistan has [since] fallen. Today they are taking an interest in the good Bosnian Muslims because it’s a way to fight the communist, fascist Serbians . . . The American attitude is no doubt the second reason – after the relentless determination . . . of the three parties to the conflict – that the war has continued so long. There is no reason for the European leaders to share that responsibility with them. Since there is already a European–American malaise on this point, perhaps we should openly provoke a crisis [which] could force the United States to change its attitude?7
To the short-termism of the Americans, which Washington saw merely as a reflection of its national interests, Mitterrand opposed a long-termism which was scarcely less one-sided. Throughout the Balkan conflict, he had complained that ‘the mistake was to have created Bosnia . . . That country is a historical nonsense.’ Europe, he maintained, should never have recognised the Sarajevo government. He told Warren Christopher:
Europe has always lived under empires . . . Some European peoples have never known democracy. Others have never been independent or never existed as nations . . . Now every ethnic group thinks it should have its own special status. We haven’t seen that since the start of the Middle Ages.8
From opposite starting points, both the United States, by focussing exclusively on immediate goals, and France, by situating events in the historical perspective of past centuries, had arrived at a form of detachment which blunted their determination to force a resolution of the problems they now faced.
At the beginning of February the complacency of the Western powers was shattered by the explosion of a 120mm mortar shell at the market at Sarajevo, killing sixty-six people and wounding 200 others. The attack attracted worldwide condemnation. France, after consulting the United States and Britain, called for a muscular response: the lifting of the siege of the Bosnian capital and the impounding by UNPROFOR of all heavy weapons within a 20-kilometre radius of the city. Four days later, on February 9, NATO issued an ultimatum: if the Serbs did not comply by midnight on Sunday, February 20, airstrikes would be launched to enforce it. The deadline was met. But during the negotiations a new player emerged: Russia. It was pressure from Yeltsin that persuaded Milošević and his Bosnian Serb allies to agree. Mitterrand congratulated the Russian President on the success of his diplomacy and two months later wrote to Bill Clinton to propose yet again that ‘the United States, Russia and the European Union speak with the same voice and exert pressure together on all the protagonists’. This time Clinton agreed. At the end of April 1994, the British, French, Russian and US Foreign Ministers met in London and agreed to form a Contact Group to coordinate policy in the Balkans.
That spring NATO had intervened militarily for the first time, shooting down four Serbian fighters which violated the ‘no-fly zone’ and launching airstrikes in support of UNPROFOR forces. A stalemate set in. ‘There isn’t a real war any more,’ Mitterrand told Clinton in June. ‘There are only local conflicts, so that’s progress. It shows we are on the right track.’ But if there was no war, there was no peace either. Progress towards a diplomatic settlement remained blocked.
It would take another eighteen months before the Dayton accords, negotiated by the US Assistant Secretary of State, Richard Holbrooke, and signed by the Bosnian, Croat and Serbian leaders in Paris in December 1995, brought the conflict to an end. By then Serbian power was ebbing. Yeltsin had made clear the limits of Russian support. During the summer, Croatian forces had recovered the Krajina and then gone on to occupy Serb-controlled areas in western Bosnia. The American Congress had voted to lift the arms embargo. Clinton, facing re-election a year later, was determined to deny the Republicans a chance to accuse him of weakness abroad. Mitterrand had left the scene and a new administration had taken office in Paris, more united than its predecessor and keen to show its mettle by helping to bring the war to an end. The Europeans and the Americans, with Russian acquiescence, finally resolved to use force to impose a settlement. In the first three weeks of September, NATO aircraft flew more than 3,500 sorties against 338 targets in Serb-controlled regions of Bosnia.
The inevitable question, as in Rwanda, was: could it not have been done sooner? Had massive airstrikes been authorised at a much earlier stage, would the butchery have ended more quickly? Perhaps. But no one – in France, in Britain, in the US or in Russia – was prepared to take that risk. In the Balkans, Mitterrand was one player among many and even had he brought all his weight to bear in favour of immediate intervention – which he showed no desire to do – Clinton would certainly not have agreed. Moreover airstrikes in the initial stages of the conflict might well not have had the same effect. By 1995, the circumstances were finally in place for a combination of force and diplomacy to succeed. That had not been the case earlier.
Rwanda
and Bosnia notwithstanding, political life in France continued. In June 1994, elections were due for the European Parliament. Michel Rocard, as First Secretary, was to lead the Socialist campaign. It would be a trial run before the presidential election eleven months later.
The field was even more fragmented than usual. The Left-Radicals, which in the previous two European elections had joined forces with the Socialists, this time campaigned separately. Their standard-bearer was Bernard Tapie, a controversial businessman who had served briefly as a minister under Mitterrand in 1992. Mitterrand admired Tapie. He was bright, charismatic, curious and had had a dozen different careers – racing driver, pop singer, actor, football club manager and corporate raider, among others – all undertaken with the unquenchable determination of those from humble backgrounds who have pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. Precisely because of his unorthodox background, the Socialist leaders loathed him. In the spring of 1994, he was embroiled in a court case involving allegations of corruption – for which he would later be sentenced to two years’ imprisonment – linked to Olympique de Marseille, the city’s football club of which he was President. When he approached Rocard on behalf of the Left-Radicals to discuss a joint campaign, the First Secretary refused to see him. So he decided to head a slate of candidates for the Left-Radicals alone. Mitterrand, always pleased to be able to put a spoke in Rocard’s wheel, quietly encouraged him.
Tapie was not Rocard’s only problem. Bernard-Henri Lévy, who had fallen out with the President over his refusal to lift the arms embargo against Bosnia, organised what he called a ‘Sarajevo list’ to campaign for increased European support for Izetbegovic’s government. Initially Lévy and his allies were credited with 12 per cent of voting intentions, much of it drawn from the Left. Rocard decided that they, rather than the Left-Radicals, were the main threat and made clumsy attempts to win them over. It was a fatal error. When the results came in on June 12, the ‘Sarajevo list’ won a paltry 1.5 per cent. Tapie won 12.3 per cent. The Socialists, who under Fabius and Jospin had won well over 20 per cent, saw their support collapse to 14.5 per cent. Rocard’s presidential ambitions were over. The following weekend he was replaced as First Secretary by Henri Emmanuelli.
Mitterrand was delighted to see him go. He was not directly to blame for Rocard’s defeat: his old adversary had obligingly destroyed himself by running a terrible campaign. But it left him with the problem of who would carry the Left’s colours in 1995. Jacques Delors was the obvious choice. He was popular, competent, capable of winning the support of the Centre-Right, a sine qua non for victory at a time when Communist support was hovering around 6 per cent, and he would shortly complete his term as President of the European Commission. ‘He could win,’ Mitterrand said a few weeks later, ‘but the question, the only question, is whether he really wants to. Having spoken to him, I don’t think he does.’ He was right. Delors was flattered, he adored the attention which his new status as potential champion of the Left brought him, but he had no stomach for the battles that a presidential election would entail. On December 11, he announced on television that he would not stand.
That left the Party floundering. Rocard was out of the race. Fabius was entangled in the row over contaminated blood. Emmanuelli was unknown beyond the Socialist Party faithful. Mitterrand had realised months before that if Delors bowed out, the only other possibility was Fabius’s rival, Lionel Jospin, who had withdrawn from active politics a year earlier. He had mixed feelings about Jospin. The strait-laced, schoolmasterly party militant, who had risen through the ranks to become First Secretary in 1981, was ‘psycho-rigid’ in his eyes. But the previous summer he had married his mistress, Sylviane Agacinski, a philosophy teacher, and Mitterrand, remembering his own experience with Anne Pingeot, had recognised the surge of energy in the younger man. ‘It was a pleasure to see him,’ he said after the ceremony. ‘He looked blooming and that’s something which counts too.’ Then in the autumn they had become estranged again. Jospin had criticised him publicly, saying that he would have preferred that Mitterrand’s past were ‘simpler and clearer’, a reference to his record during the war which had once again come under scrutiny. Nonetheless, there was no alternative. At the beginning of February, two and a half months before Election Day, Jospin received the Party’s nomination.
The last ten months of Mitterrand’s presidency were a nightmare. Both physically and mentally he was under attack. Physically from his cancer, mentally by ghosts from his past.
The previous year the hormone treatment he had been having was judged insufficient and he began a course of chemotherapy. It weakened him and failed to stop the cancer progressing. By the spring of 1994 it was clear that a second operation would be necessary. Mitterrand hesitated. His brother, Robert, who had recovered from prostate cancer without surgery, advised against it. ‘How many more times will I have to do this?’ Mitterrand asked Gubler plaintively.
Week after week he kept putting off the decision. The Rwandan genocide was raging and France had just announced the launch of Operation Turquoise. On July 4 he flew to Cape Town, becoming the first European Head of State to visit Nelson Mandela after his election to the presidency. From July 8 to 10 he attended a G7 summit in Naples. On the 14th, with Helmut Kohl beside him, he presided over the Bastille Day parade in which, for the first time, German soldiers marched alongside French troops. The following day there was a European summit in Brussels. For a very sick man nearing his 78th birthday it was an impossible schedule. Finally, on the evening of Sunday, July 17, he entered hospital, where Steg operated the next day.
The second operation was more difficult than the first. Mitterrand was suffering from a blockage of both kidneys. Steg succeeded in inserting a catheter into one but was unable to place the second. They decided to leave it. ‘You can live with one good kidney,’ Gubler said. ‘He would never forgive us if [he had to wear] a permanent urine pouch.’ As it was, he added, ‘Steg and I thought [his] life expectancy would be a matter of months.’ Ten days later he was back at the Elysée, chairing a Cabinet meeting. But the second operation marked the beginning of an ineluctable decline. ‘Everywhere,’ Védrine remembered, ‘people were saying that he would not last until the end of the year.’
Like many others in such circumstances, Mitterrand experimented with alternative medicine, including a homeopathic treatment from a controversial ‘healer’ who had been banned from practising medicine a few months earlier. Gubler and Steg were alarmed until one day Mitterrand’s driver, Pierre Tourlier, was persuaded to steal a sample from the presidential briefcase and tests showed that it was harmless.9 Tourlier remembered the President being surrounded by ‘a swarm of pseudo-doctors and charlatans, all promising a miracle cure’. But he continued to receive treatment by more orthodox methods, resuming chemotherapy in the autumn, followed in November by radiation treatment five times a week. Gubler and Steg found an ally in Mazarine, then a few weeks short of her twentieth birthday. When her father threatened to stop the radiotherapy, she upbraided him, ‘You never follow your choices through to the end!’ and took him aside to tell him, out of earshot of the others, that there was no question that he had to continue. Gubler, who was present, remembered that she was the only one who was able to talk to him like that.
For four months after the operation, Mitterrand was in constant pain. He arrived at the Elysée each morning at around 10 a.m. and went immediately to his private quarters to retire to bed and read the newspapers. Anne Lauvergeon, who had succeeded Attali, recounted that whenever she came to discuss the day’s business, Mitterrand used the same words: ‘I’m sorry to present you with such a wretched spectacle.’ If he had no official duties, he would get up at lunchtime and dine at the Elysée or at a restaurant outside. On a good day, he would take a walk. On a bad day, he returned to bed. One frequent visitor to the Elysée that autumn recalled: ‘I had the feeling of coming face to face with death . . . He was already on the other side.’
There were highs and lows, ofte
n in quick succession. In mid-October, for the first time since the operation, he was able to play golf. But two days later, during a Defence Committee meeting on Bosnia, his body seized up. ‘It was as though he was suffocating,’ Védrine remembered. ‘For two interminable minutes he was unable to get out a word. Then he made a sign to me and whispered to call a doctor. By the time I got back he was talking [normally] again.’ The same thing happened when the Cabinet met a week later. ‘He rested his head in his hands and remained frozen for a long time without speaking,’ a minister recalled. Then he got control of himself and the meeting continued. That afternoon he was due to receive the Lithuanian President. The visit had to be delayed for an hour but he refused to cancel it. In the evening, at a farewell for one of his aides-de-camp, he appeared, ‘livid and walking with extreme difficulty’, and shook everyone’s hand. Next day he was at Blois in Normandy, where Jack Lang was mayor, to inaugurate a bridge over the Loire. The ceremony left him exhausted. ‘He lay prostrate in the drawing room,’ Lang recalled. ‘I thought he was going to die. Then he joined us at table and talked for more than two hours.’ Pierre Tourlier remembered journeys when he would vomit and they would have to stop to let him lie down by the side of the road. ‘It’s like having the Gestapo inside me,’ he complained after a particularly violent attack. His son, Gilbert, said that the only time his father felt comfortable was when he was curled up in a foetal position.