To End a War

by Richard Holbrooke

  We wanted to leave Sarajevo with our fallen and injured comrades that evening. But the injured could travel only by air, and this produced an ironic result: the very permission to use the Sarajevo airfield that had previously been denied us by the Bosnian Serbs—and that could have prevented the accident—suddenly materialized, arranged swiftly by the French directly with Mladic. As we went through that dreadful day, the French and British arranged to send helicopters to the Sarajevo airport to take us out.

  Menzies sent word to President Alija Izetbegovic that we still wanted to see him, but, given the circumstances, we asked him to call on us at the Embassy rather than receive us in the normal manner at his office. At precisely 6:00 P.M., Izetbegovic and Sacirbey strode up the steps of the American Embassy. Menzies, Clark, and I greeted them outside the front door in front of a large throng of journalists, and escorted them into a conference room, where General Bachelet joined us.

  Several people in Washington had suggested that we conduct substantive conversations with Izetbegovic, but it was clear that the circumstances were not appropriate for a serious discussion. With the press listening, I thanked the French and the Bosnians for their help during the long day. The Bosnians, having lost so many people in the war, seemed relatively unmoved by three American dead. Finally, slightly annoyed with Izetbegovic, Menzies pointedly said that, while we fully recognized how many Bosnians had died, these were the first Americans to lose their lives in Bosnia. This seemed to impress Izetbegovic, and he offered some words of condolence.

  The helicopters would be at the airfield shortly. Light was beginning to fade in Sarajevo and the weather was deteriorating. We started for the airport, where there was one more terrible task to perform: the formal identification of Joe Kruzel. Then, as we stood at attention in a light drizzle, a French honor guard escorted three simple wooden coffins, each draped in an American flag, onto a French helicopter. The rain intensified. It was almost dark, and the clouds seemed to be descending toward us, obscuring the mountains that ringed the airfield. The flight out would be hell.

  I turned to General Clark. “We’ve had enough for one day,” I said. “Let’s try again tomorrow. We’ll spend the night in Sarajevo.”

  We slept, but only briefly, on Army cots in the Ambassador’s office. Endless phone calls to Washington, to family and colleagues, filled the evening and the night. Sacirbey, who was distantly related to Joe Kruzel through a cousin of his American wife, came over and stayed for hours. Too exhausted to think, we were unable to sleep until, well after midnight, we had drained ourselves of the event.

  On Sunday, August 20, we set out once again for the Sarajevo airport. This time without an honor guard, we loaded the three coffins onto a French helicopter and the two injured men onto a British helicopter. Although I had spent hundreds of hours on helicopters in and since Vietnam without fear, that French helicopter suddenly, irrationally, scared me. I started toward the British chopper. Clark said, “We should go with the coffins all the way.” Wes and I had not been separated for what seemed like days, and we boarded the French chopper together.

  The helicopters rose noisily into the air. With my knees pressed into one of the coffins, we flew on to Split. To distract myself, I tried to read a John le Carré novel I had been carrying with me, The Secret Pilgrim, but could not focus on the page.

  Rosemarie Pauli had taken over the arrangements in Split from a confused and chaotic combination of military and civilian personnel. She had worked for me in Germany as well as Washington, and I had complete confidence in her ability. We needed to transfer the two men and the three coffins from the helicopters to a special American military plane, carrying medical equipment and military doctors, that would fly us to Germany. I gave Rosemarie only one instruction: make sure that the movement of Gerstein and Hargreaves, who were both on stretchers and looked awful, was done far from the television cameras and with dignity. All this Rosemarie accomplished with her usual skill. Shattered by the loss of our three colleagues, and aware that she would have been in the APC if there had been room for one more person in the helicopter, she carried out her responsibilities calmly and efficiently until we reached Andrews Air Force Base the next day.

  As we changed aircraft at Split, we spoke briefly to the press, telling them we would resume our shuttle diplomacy in about a week. I expressed particular outrage at a statement by the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, that we had taken “an unnecessary risk” by using the Mount Igman road rather than crossing Bosnian Serb territory—a deliberately nasty reference to the Serb offer to use the Kiseljak road. I called the tragedy “an accident, but an accident of war.”

  Air Force doctors quickly examined Gerstein and Hargreaves as we flew to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. The Supreme Commander of NATO, General George Joulwan, an old friend from Vietnam, had flown to Ramstein from his headquarters in Belgium. He stepped forward, saluted as we disembarked, and embraced me. Then we stood at attention as the three coffins received the first of many official American salutes on their way to their final resting places.

  I knew the American military hospital at Ramstein well from my time as Ambassador to Germany, most unforgettably from an afternoon spent visiting the Americans wounded in the ambush in Mogadishu, Somalia, in October 1993. The raw courage and patriotism of those young men, several of whom had lost their sight or limbs during the fighting, were still vivid in my mind. Now the same doctors treated Gerstein and Hargreaves as we took our first showers in two days and prepared to return home.

  At 12:15 P.M. the next day, August 21, we landed at Andrews Air Force Base. As our large C-141 pulled slowly up to the spot where so many of America’s triumphal and tragic returns have taken place, the injured men were taken off the plane separately, out of sight of the television cameras. Clark, Rosemarie, and I walked into a silent crowd of friends and family. I could see some of our closest colleagues—Warren Christopher, Bill Perry, Strobe Talbott, Madeleine Albright, Tony Lake, Sandy Berger, Peter Tarnoff, and others—sitting immobile in chairs behind a velvet rope. A place had been saved for me next to my wife, who silently squeezed my hand as I sat down.

  We had brought our comrades home, and it was time for others to carry on with the heartbreaking but necessary rituals of remembrance and farewell. Suddenly, exhaustion hit us. As we squinted into the bright midday August sun at Andrews and an Air Force band played “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” the coffins were unloaded and placed by an honor guard into three hearses. Christopher, Lake, and Perry talked movingly about the men who had died. We embraced one another and sought out the wives and children of Bob, Joe, and Nelson. Then, for a few moments, we stood around in a daze, not sure what to do next. Peter Tarnoff, the Undersecretary of State, found me and said gently he would take Kati and me home. We drove into Washington together with Peter, a close friend for over thirty years, and Brooke Shearer, Strobe Talbott’s wife. Dropping us off, Peter suggested we take the rest of the day off, and asked if I could come to the State Department the next morning to meet with Warren Christopher.

  * Many earlier negotiating efforts of both the United States and the Europeans, including an American probe as late as January 1995, had dealt with the Bosnian Serbs as a separate entity.

  † Our diplomatic presence in Belgrade was unique in the world: it was a fully functioning diplomatic mission, yet it was accredited to no one. Neither the United States nor the European Union recognized the claim of Serbia and Montenegro that they still constituted the “Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.” However, because of the value of continuing contacts with the Serbians, we maintained an Embassy in Belgrade even though we did not recognize the country it was in.

  * We abolished the outdated Office of Eastern European Affairs on our first day in office in September 1994, and created in its place three new offices that reflected the post-Cold War realities of Europe. One combined the Nordic countries and the three newly independent Baltic states. We also banished the phrase “Eastern Europ
e” from our official vocabulary, replacing it with the historically and geographically more accurate “Central Europe.” Unfortunately, most people, including the media, still use the outmoded phrase.

  BOOK ONE

  BOSNIA

  AT WAR

  Twelve months ago in Brussels, I

  Heard the same wishful-thinking sigh

  As round me, trembling on their beds,

  Or taut with apprehensive dreads,

  The sleepless guests of Europe lay

  Wishing the centuries away,

  And the low mutter of their vows

  Went echoing through her haunted house,

  As on the verge of happening

  There crouched the presence of The Thing.

  All formulas were tried to still

  The scratching on the window-sill,

  All bolts of custom made secure

  Against the pressure on the door,

  But up the staircase of events

  Carrying his special instruments,

  To every bedside all the same

  The dreadful figure swiftly came.

  —W. H. AUDEN, New Year Letter (1940)

  CHAPTER 2

  “The Greatest Collective Failure …”

  America, eternally protected by the Atlantic, desired to satisfy her self-righteousness while disengaging her responsibility.

  —HAROLD NICOLSON, Peacemaking 1919

  We do not interfere in American affairs; we trust America will not interfere in European affairs.

  —JACQUES DELORS, President of the European Community, 1991

  Europe took part in [the war] as a witness, but we must ask ourselves: was it always a fully responsible witness?

  —POPE JOHN PAUL II, speaking in Sarajevo, April 13, 1997

  IN EARLY 1995, IN AN ARTICLE PUBLISHED IN Foreign Affairs, I referred to the former Yugoslavia as “the greatest collective security failure of the West since the 1930s.”1 Although the article had been approved through the formal State Department clearance process, the phrase was not universally welcomed in the Administration. While it was intended to apply to events between 1990 and the end of 1992, there was concern that some people might also apply it to events as late as 1994, halfway into the Clinton Administration’s first term.

  Yugoslavia undeniably represented a failure of historic dimensions. Why and how had it happened—and just at the moment of the West’s great triumph over communism?

  There was, of course, no single, or simple, answer. But five major factors helped explain the tragedy: first, a misreading of Balkan history; second, the end of the Cold War; third, the behavior of the Yugoslav leaders themselves; fourth, the inadequate American response to the crisis; and, finally, the mistaken belief of the Europeans that they could handle their first post-Cold War challenge on their own.

  I. Bad History, or The Rebecca West Factor. Many books and articles about Yugoslavia have left the impression that the war was inevitable. The most famous of all English-language books on the region was Rebecca West’s monumental travel book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, first published in 1941 and continuously in print since then. West’s openly pro-Serb attitudes and her view that the Muslims were racially inferior had influenced two generations of readers and policy makers. Some of her other themes were revisited in modern dress in Robert Kaplan’s widely acclaimed 1993 best-seller, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, which left most of its readers with the sense that nothing could be done by outsiders in a region so steeped in ancient hatreds. According to numerous press reports, the book had a profound impact on President Clinton and other members of the Administration shortly after they came into office.*

  Thus arose an idea that “ancient hatreds,” a vague but useful term for history too complicated (or trivial) for outsiders to master, made it impossible (or pointless) for anyone outside the region to try to prevent the conflict. This theory trivialized and oversimplified the forces that tore Yugoslavia apart in the early 1990s. It was expressed by many officials and politicians over the course of the war, and is still widely accepted today in parts of Washington and Europe. Those who invoked it were, for the most part, trying to excuse their own reluctance or inability to deal with the problems in the region. Some of the most surprising renderings of this view came from Lawrence Eagleburger, the former American Ambassador to Yugoslavia, who succeeded James Baker as Secretary of State near the end of 1992. Eagleburger regularly expressed his frustration with those Americans who called for action in stark terms. In September 1992, for example, almost two months after journalists had first filmed the atrocities being committed by Serbs against Muslims in prison camps in western Bosnia, he said:

  I have said this 38,000 times, and I have to say this to the people of this country as well. This tragedy is not something that can be settled from outside and it’s about damn well time that everybody understood that. Until the Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats decide to stop killing each other, there is nothing the outside world can do about it.

  It was, of course, undeniable that the ethnic groups within Yugoslavia nursed deep-seated grievances against one another. But in and of itself, ethnic friction, no matter how serious, did not make the tragedy inevitable—or the three ethnic groups equally guilty.*

  Of course, there was friction between ethnic groups in Yugoslavia, but this was true in many other parts of the world where racial hatred had not turned into ethnic cleansing and civil war. There had been periods of intense ethnic conflict in Yugoslavia, most recently in World War II. But the fighting between 1941 and 1945 was part of the larger killing field, triggered by Hitler’s ambitions, into which all of Europe had turned. Though some Serbs nursed ancient enmities that could be traced back to their defeat by the Turks on Kosovo Field in 1389, the three groups had lived together for centuries. Serbs, Croats, and Muslims worked together in every walk of life. There was no noticeable physical or ethnic difference between them, and, in fact, considerable intermarriage. Many people told me that until the collapse of their country they did not know which of their friends were Serb and which were Muslim. Throughout the war, I heard frequent accounts of old friends sending each other personal messages and gifts and helping each other escape across the battle lines. As Noel Malcolm wrote in his 1994 Bosnia: A Short History, “Having travelled widely in Bosnia over fifteen years, and having stayed in Muslim, Croat, and Serb villages, I cannot believe the claim that the country was forever seething with ethnic hatreds.”†

  Yugoslavia’s tragedy was not foreordained. It was the product of bad, even criminal, political leaders who encouraged ethnic confrontation for personal, political, and financial gain. Rather than tackle the concrete problems of governance in the post-Tito era, they led their people into a war. Observing how racial hatred was deliberately inflamed, Warren Zimmermann wrote in his memoir of his ambassadorship:

  Those who argue that “ancient Balkan hostilities” account for the violence that overtook and destroyed Yugoslavia forget the power of television in the hands of officially provoked racism. While history, particularly the carnage of World War Two, provided plenty of tinder for ethnic hatred in Yugoslavia, it took the institutional nationalism of Milosevic and Tudjman to supply the torch…. Yugoslavia may have a violent history, but it isn’t unique. What we witnessed was violence-provoking nationalism from the top down, inculcated primarily through the medium of television…. Many people in the Balkans may be weak or even bigoted, but in Yugoslavia it is their leaders who have been criminal. The virus of television spread ethnic hatred like an epidemic throughout Yugoslavia…. An entire generation of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims were aroused by television images to hate their neighbors.2

  Malcolm similarly observed:

  Having watched Radio Television Belgrade in the period 1991–2, I can understand why simple Bosnian Serbs came to believe that they were under threat, from Ustasa hordes, fundamentalist jihads, or whatever…. It was as if all television in the USA had been t
aken over by the Ku Klux Klan.3

  II. The End of the Cold War. Yugoslavia was cobbled together at the Versailles Conference in 1919–20 from parts of decaying, dying, and defeated empires. In the name of Wilsonian self-determination, the victors of World War I established a country that violated that principle, creating a time bomb that would later explode. Revealingly, its original name was the “Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes,” which was later changed to Yugoslavia, or Land of the South Slavs.

  World War II changed everything once again. Against the backdrop of ethnic violence, especially between Croats and Serbs, a legendary communist leader, Josip Broz Tito—half Croat, half Slovene—came out of the remote mountains of Yugoslavia, seized power by fighting the Nazis, and held it for an astonishing thirty-five years. In 1948 came the event that defined Yugoslavia, Tito’s historic break with the Soviet Union. From then on, the West was ready to overlook or minimize all other problems within Yugoslavia because of the strategic importance of supporting an anti-Soviet state, albeit a communist and undemocratic one, in such a vital area of Europe. Yugoslavia would receive special treatment from the West for the next forty years.

  By the time Yugoslavia started its final agony in 1991, momentous events elsewhere obscured what was happening in the Balkans. The Berlin Wall had been torn down and Germany was unified; communism was dead or dying in Central Europe; the Soviet Union was breaking up into fifteen independent nations; and, in August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, setting in motion the U.S.-led coalition that liberated Kuwait early the following year. Yugoslavia, having lost its strategic importance in the eyes of most Western policy makers, fell to its death almost ignored by the West.