To End a War

by Richard Holbrooke

  President Clinton, who had visited Germany several times as a student and had studied German, welcomed Germany’s emergence as a major participant in shaping European policy. Better to work for the gradual re-emergence of Germany as a European power, this time prosperous and democratic, he felt, than to bottle it up and risk an abrupt reaction later.

  Thus, while the German decision on Croatia was wrong, its importance should not be overstated. In fact, Alija Izetbegovic’s remarkably bold statement to the Bosnian Parliament on February 27, 1991—almost ten months before Germany recognized Croatia—foreshadowed the problems to come: “I would sacrifice peace for a sovereign Bosnia-Herzegovina,” he said, “but for that peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina I would not sacrifice sovereignty.” As Silber and Little observe, “To the Serbs, this was a war cry.”15

  Vance got an agreement to stop the fighting in Croatia at the beginning of 1992. By February he had overcome resistance from the local Krajina Serbs, gained Milosevic’s support, and formally recommended to the United Nations the deployment of 12,500 U.N. peacekeepers. Within days, the U.N. had voted to send to Croatia the second-largest international peacekeeping force ever deployed.

  It was a substantial achievement, but there was a cost. Almost one third of Croatia now lay in areas supposedly protected by the United Nations but in fact controlled by the Serbs. Ethnic cleansing of the Croats from these “United Nations Safe Areas” by the Krajina Serbs—who contemptuously proclaimed an independent “republic” on the same terrain—proceeded under the passive eyes of a thirty-nation U.N. peacekeeping force. Vance and Carrington had stopped a war, but the feeble U.N. follow-up left a legacy of pent-up Croatian nationalism that would explode in the Krajina three years later, just as we were beginning our shuttle diplomacy.

  * Kaplan wrote of West, whose work he called “this century’s greatest travel book”: “I would rather have lost my passport and money than my heavily thumbed and annotated copy of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.” For a perceptive analysis of the negative effects of West and her followers, see “Rebecca West’s War,” by Brian Hall, The New Yorker, April 15, 1996.

  In his account of his years as editor of Oslobodjenje, the Sarajevo daily that published throughout the war, Kemal Kurspahic wrote: “At a time of crucial decisions [President Clinton] simply read the wrong book, or more precisely drew the wrong conclusions from Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan, which led to the comforting thought that nothing much could be done in Bosnia ‘until those folks got tired of killing each other’ ” (As Long As Sarajevo Exists).

  Kaplan has repeatedly stated that he did not intend to have this effect. His book is primarily about Greece and Romania. It devotes less than four chapters out of seventeen to the former Yugoslavia, mentions Sarajevo only once and Mostar not at all, and has only twelve references to Bosnia. In his preface, Kaplan says that “nothing I write should be taken as a justification, however mild, for the war crimes committed by ethnic Serb troops in Bosnia, which I heartily condemn.”

  * As journalists reported at the time, the American government had concluded by the early summer of 1992 that the Serbs had carried out close to 90 percent of all the atrocities in Bosnia and Croatia.

  † Page 252. Malcolm’s Bosnia: A Short History was the first serious English-language history of Bosnia, and argued convincingly that Bosnia had its own history and continuing identity. Malcolm undermined the conventional wisdom that the war was the inevitable result of ancient hatreds. It is unfortunate it did not appear earlier.

  * The National Interest, Number 53, p. 102.

  CHAPTER 3

  A Personal Prelude

  With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.

  —HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick

  A PRIVATE TRIP

  ON MARCH 3, 1992, BOSNIA DECLARED ITSELF an independent nation. The United States and the European Union recognized it on April 6. Backed by Belgrade, the Bosnian Serbs demanded that Bosnia withdraw its declaration of independence. Izetbegovic refused, and fighting began, first as local skirmishing. The war had finally come to Bosnia, and with such savagery that, alerted by a few courageous journalists—notably Roy Gutman of Newsday, Chuck Sudetic and John Burns of The New York Times, Kurt Schork of Reuters, and Christiane Amanpour of CNN—the world woke up during the summer of 1992 to the fact that an immense tragedy was taking place, as the cliché went, “in Europe’s backyard.” An ugly new euphemism entered the English language, courtesy of the Serbs: “ethnic cleansing.” It meant the killing, rape, and forced removal of people from their homes on the basis of their ethnic background. Both Muslims and Croats were targets of Serb brutality. But even with a new United Nations peacekeeping force that entered Bosnia in 1992 to assist in humanitarian relief, the catastrophe only worsened.

  Almost by chance, I began to edge into an involvement in the region. In the spring of 1992, I saw the Bosnian Ambassador to the United Nations, Muhamed Sacirbey, on television calling on the world to save his nation. Impressed with his passion and eloquence, I phoned him, introducing myself as an admirer of his cause, and offered my support. Sacirbey thus became my first Bosnian friend, although neither of us imagined that someday we would be negotiating together for his country’s future.

  Sacirbey was one of the bright hopes of the fledgling Bosnian government. Married to an American, he was until 1992 as American as he was Bosnian; his enemies in Bosnia attacked him for speaking his native language with an American accent. But when the new nation needed an effective spokesman at the United Nations, Bosnia’s founder-President, Alija Izetbegovic, chose Sacirbey, whose father, a distinguished doctor in suburban Washington, D.C., was his close friend.

  It was an inspired choice. The terrible television pictures from Bosnia were deeply moving, but Americans needed to identify with an articulate Bosnian who could personalize his nation’s cause. I was only one of many who, moved by his forceful public appearances, offered help. Unfortunately, he was less popular with government officials in both Washington and Europe, who regarded him as inexperienced, even immature, when it came to serious policy issues. He loved journalists and television cameras, and often gave dramatic sound bites without considering their consequences. But he was fun to work with, and enjoyed a teasing, almost fraternal relationship with many Americans, including myself once we began working together in 1994. By the time he was promoted to Foreign Minister in 1995, Sacirbey was one of the two most important Bosnians with whom we dealt on a regular basis. The other was his archrival, Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic.

  In the summer of 1992 all that lay in an unimaginable future. I was still a private citizen when, in early August, I received a telephone call from my old friend and tennis partner Winston Lord, who had been the American Ambassador to China*and was now vice chairman of the International Rescue Committee, a private refugee organization on whose board I also served. Lord asked if I would be interested in joining an IRC fact-finding mission to Bosnia. Within a few minutes Robert deVecchi, president of the IRC, called: Would I be able to leave within a week?

  THE FIRST TRIP

  We left for Croatia on August 11, 1992. Our core group consisted of deVecchi; John Richardson, an Assistant Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford Administrations; and Sheppie Abramowitz, an old friend and refugee expert whose husband, Morton Abramowitz, had served with great distinction as Ambassador to Thailand and Turkey and was now the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The Abramowitzes and I had worked closely together on the Thai-Cambodian-Vietnamese “boat people” refugee crisis in 1979–80.

  As we approached Zagreb, I started keeping a journal. Rereading it for the first time four years later, I was struck by how this trip shaped my subsequent understanding of the situation:*

  August 12, 1992: We are going blind into a war zone, since almost no on
e has yet seen much inside the area, and then only in the last few days. We are going to try to get into the death camps that have gotten so much publicity, but this may be hard; it seems unlikely that the Serbs will let us see anything that further damages their already horrible reputation….

  ZAGREB: At first glance from a car, Zagreb looks like an ordinary Central European town, with an old section that evokes the Austrian imperial roots from which it came, and newer sections of ugly and banal buildings. At the Inter-Continental Hotel, we find the sort of scene that usually signals a story of high drama—an odd-looking collection of people congregating in the hotel lobby: a large man with a flowing mane of white hair; journalists; several Arabs or Iranians whispering to each other in a comer; military personnel in various uniforms.

  August 13: After a day of briefings in Zagreb, I can see that the situation is far more complicated and more difficult than other problems I have seen, even Cambodia. It is the peculiar three-sided nature of the struggle here that makes it so difficult. Everyone says that most people did not want this to happen. Yet it did. Everyone says it must stop. Yet it doesn’t.

  The U.N. refugee briefing yesterday was depressing. Maps filled with the numbers of refugees in each sector lined the room. Our host, Tony Land, a bearded Englishman with a wry sense of humor and a keen sense of the impossibility of his task, gave us a fine explanation of the situation. But when we ask him about the prison camps, he surprises us. “We are absolutely amazed at the press and public reaction to all this,” he says. “For six months we have seen Sarajevo systematically being destroyed without the world getting very upset. Now a few pictures of people being held behind barbed wire, and the world goes crazy. We have seen more deaths in Sarajevo than in the prisons …”

  This turns out to be a widely shared view among the international field-workers. On one hand, they are right—the war is deadlier than the camps. But to the extent that television pictures rouse the world to attention and action—they are, for example, the reason we are here—the pictures of the camps will help Land do his job….

  Noon: The difficult trip to Banja Luka has begun. As I write this, we are sitting in a long line of cars and trucks at the Croatian border, about 60 kilometers from Banja Luka, on the edge of the “Serbian Republic of Krajina”—the Serb-controlled areas of western Croatia. The town just ahead of us has life in it, but an air of tension—little sound, no one raises their voices. A moment ago we heard machine gun fire, and smoke is rising in the near distance. Our driver has just nervously asked me to stop videotaping from our car window. The mood is subdued and edgy.

  Five P.M.: We have arrived in Banja Luka after a trip across land wasted by war. There is no electricity in the town. Our rooms at the Hotel Bosna are small and hot. Heavy gunfire breaks out just outside the hotel. No one can see where it is coming from, and in the street people keep going, on bike or foot, as though nothing has happened.

  Later: The afternoon begins with a scary incident—I am hauled out of my hotel room by Serb policemen because someone reported that I had illegally videotaped inside the U.N. warehouse. Stalling in my room for a moment, I quickly erase the offending footage and go with a young UNHCR employee to see a Serb security officer at the warehouse, Our interpreter-guide explains to the nasty-looking Serb security man that I am not a journalist, etc., and after an angry talk, everything seemed to be under control.

  Our young guide illustrates the dilemma here. When I ask him what his background is, he says, “I don’t know what I am.” He goes on to explain that his immediate family (parents, in-laws, grandparents) is a mixture of Croatian, Serb, Armenian, Russian, Muslim, and Slovenian. “What can I do?” he asks. “I have three choices: to leave, to join the army, or to help people. I choose the third—for now….”

  August 14: An extraordinary day! It begins with loud noise and shooting outside our hotel rooms. We go outside to find armed Serbs conducting a “mild” form of ethnic cleansing right in front of journalists with television cameras. We tape the whole scene. At close to gunpoint, Muslims are signing papers giving up their personal property, either to neighbors or in exchange for the right to leave Bosnia. Then they are herded onto buses headed for the border, although they have no guarantee they will actually be able to leave the country. Some leave quietly, others crying. This is the end of their lives in an area their families have lived in for centuries.

  After this terrible scene, which leaves us shaken and subdued, we pile into white UNHCR vehicles. A few miles north of Banja Luka, we begin to see terrible signs of war—houses destroyed all along the route. As we progress toward the front lines, the destruction increases. We encounter the occasional house left completely undamaged in a row of ruined ones—its occupant a Serb, not a Muslim. Such destruction is clearly not the result of fighting, but of a systematic and methodical pogrom in which Serbs fingered their Muslim neighbors. This is how it must have been in Central Europe and Russia a century ago, but now using modern weapons and communications.

  We are guided through this horrorscape by a tiny and vivacious young Montenegrin from the UNHCR named Senja, who spent a year in Ft. Collins, Colorado, as an exchange student. Whenever we hit a roadblock, she firmly orders us to stay in the car and take no pictures. Then she hops out to talk our way past the awful-looking guards, lounging around with their weapons.

  The men in this country act as if they would be impotent if they didn’t carry guns. Weapons have empowered people who were until recently gas station mechanics or shopkeepers. I have never seen so many weapons on so many men, even in Vietnam and Cambodia.

  We drive to Sanski Most, crossing a difficult checkpoint at a bridge. As we reach the local Red Cross offices, the most frightening incident of the day occurs: an angry-looking man in a sloppy uniform, wearing Reeboks and smoking a cigarette, starts yelling and waving a semi-automatic around wildly in our direction. He seems drunk. He wants to “borrow” our vehicle, then dump us at the edge of the town—or worse. After a heated argument, Senja insists we be taken to the local police station, where she tells us to stay outside while she goes in alone. For a tense hour we wait, watched with open hostility by the heavily armed men lounging in front of the police station. We worry about Senja, but finally she emerges from the police station, saying urgently, “We have to leave immediately. These people are very angry and very dangerous.” And we take off rapidly for Zagreb, relieved but mystified….

  August 15: We have flown to Split. After checking in at a lovely resort hotel on the sea, we set out for a refugee holding area just across the Croatian border in Bosnia, climbing through a typical Mediterranean landscape, with steep rocky mountains, seaside houses, and small villages. The towns could be in Italy, just across the Adriatic, but the militia makes me think more of Lebanon.

  We arrive in Posesje, a town just inside the Bosnian border. The refugee holding area is a dreadful mess. In a school and its grounds are about 3,000 Muslim refugees who have fled from Serb-controlled areas of Bosnia and were stopped by the Croatians from crossing the border into Croatia.

  Under a broiling sun, with several women crying out their stories at the same time, the refugees tell us for hours of the ordeals they and their families have lived through. Women gather around to recount how their men are still missing, how they were taken away and never seen again. No young men around. It is overwhelmingly oppressive. We return, depleted, to Split.

  For a change of pace, we go to the ancient Roman ruins, near the main street. At this time of year Split is usually filled with tourists, but now there are only a few, mostly German, who seem a dreadful, walking insult to the terrible events happening a few miles away. We visit Emperor Diocletian’s palace, a small part of which has been converted into a church.

  As we look around, an unforgettable scene takes place, in sharp contrast to the rest of the day. Two nuns appear and sit down at the organ. A young girl starts singing, rehearsing for a wedding. Her beautiful voice fills the little church,
echoing off the ancient stones. We stop, transfixed. The horrors of Bosnia are both far away and yet right here. We cannot tear ourselves away. If these moments of love, family, and tradition could last longer, perhaps they could fill the space that war possesses in this self-destructive land.

  August 16: Zagreb. Dinner is again at the buffet of the Inter-Continental, where we are joined by Steve Engelberg, an impressive New York Times correspondent. He offers some opinions: those who might replace Milosevic would probably be worse; Vance did a terrific job stopping the Croatian-Serbian war; there is a serious danger of a European Islamic radical movement if this war is not stopped soon.

  NEW YORK: August 23, 1992: The trip is over. As always, New York’s problems are so demanding that it is hard to get people to worry about misery thousands of miles away. But I do not agree with the argument that we cannot afford to deal with these faraway problems when we have difficulties at home. Such thinking leads to an unacceptable global triage. Our society is still rich enough to deal with the outside world, even after the end of the Cold War.

  The trip had hooked me. Not since Vietnam had I seen a problem so difficult or compelling. I told Strobe Talbott, then a columnist at Time, that if there were a change in Administrations Bosnia would be “the worst kind of legacy imaginable—it would be George Bush and Larry Eagleburger’s revenge if Clinton wins.” Before the trip, The Washington Post and Newsweek had both asked me to write about my trip. I was now anxious to do so. The Newsweek article, in the issue of September 17, 1992, marked my first effort to propose a course of action in Bosnia: