To End a War

by Richard Holbrooke

  We were running far behind a difficult schedule: we had to fly to Zagreb to see Tudjman, then get to Rome in time for the first “expanded Contact Group” session we had promised the Italians. As Izetbegovic argued, Rosemarie handed me a note warning that we had five minutes left to make our “window” for the last flight of the day, after which we would be unable to get out of Sarajevo until the next day.

  Izetbegovic’s visceral fear of the cease-fire had to be resolved quickly. He studied it in silence, his eyes narrowed. Finally, pointing at the Serb signatures, he said emphatically that he could not affix his signature to the same piece of paper as his enemies. I asked Ambassador Menzies to make a photocopy of the document with the Serb names covered up, and again presented it to Izetbegovic for signature.

  Still he hesitated. I pushed a pen toward him. “Mr. President, you can end four years of fighting in your country with a single signature,” I said, “and on your terms.”

  His colleagues watched him in silence as he stared at the paper. Suddenly, he looked at me suspiciously. “Where is the American signature?” he said. “I don’t see your signature on this document.”

  I grabbed his pen and took the paper from his hands. “Here it is, Mr. President,” I said, and scrawled my name on the document in the lower left-hand corner. “We must leave immediately. If you don’t sign now, the war will continue.” I started to rise.

  Izetbegovic took the paper. His hands shook as he held it. Finally, slowly and reluctantly, he signed the document. We shook hands and raced for the airport, taking the document with us and leaving Ambassador Menzies to call Washington with the news.

  * The first military action against an indicted war criminal did not come until June 10, 1997, when British troops in Prijedor captured one Bosnian Serb and killed another who had been named in sealed indictments by Goldstone’s successor, the Canadian judge Louise Arbour.

  CHAPTER 14

  Choosing Dayton, Getting Ready

  How did a snake get in the tower?

  Delayed in the democracies

  By departmental vanities,

  The rival sergeants run about

  But more to squabble than find out.

  W. H. AUDEN, New Year Letter

  WE KEPT THE CEASE-FIRE SECRET long enough for President Clinton to break the news. At 11:00 A.M. on October 5, he announced “an important moment in the painful history” of the former Yugoslavia. A general cease-fire would take effect in five days, he said, if the gas and electricity were turned on in Sarajevo. This would be followed by talks among the three Balkan Presidents, which would take place in the United States.

  At the very moment the President spoke, our team was in Zagreb, urging Tudjman to capture more territory before the cease-fire took effect. The Croatians had virtually stopped their advance, and Sanski Most and Prijedor still lay inside Serb lines. “You have five days left, that’s all,” I said. “What you don’t win on the battlefield will be hard to gain at the peace talks. Don’t waste these last days.”

  Tudjman requested that we delay the start of the peace conference until the beginning of November, so that it would not interfere with the Croatian parliamentary elections. We agreed. As it turned out, we needed every minute of that extra week to get ready.

  Before leaving the region, we laid down three conditions for the negotiations:

  first, that each President come to the United States with full power to sign agreements, without further recourse to parliaments back home;

  second, that they stay as long as necessary to reach agreement, without threatening to walk out; and

  third, that they not talk to the press or other outsiders.

  All three Presidents agreed to these conditions, although Izetbegovic and Sacirbey objected to the third provision, claiming that they had important friends in Congress and the press with whom they had to keep in touch. We said that serious negotiations were incompatible with the sort of outside contacts they had in mind. Milosevic, reading the document, protested mockingly that we were trying to make him a prisoner. Although this document had no official standing, the three parties generally stuck to its terms—until the final dramatic hours in Dayton.

  Akashi. Our last call in Zagreb before returning to Washington was on U.N. Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali’s senior representative in the former Yugoslavia, Yasushi Akashi, whom I had known since my two visits to Cambodia in 1992. Akashi had been harshly treated by the press and castigated by critics of the U.N. for his weakness. But it was not entirely his fault: he was operating under tight constraints imposed by Boutros-Ghali. Furthermore, Akashi was virtually ignored by General Janvier and the U.N. military.

  We asked Akashi to make his first priority the quick reopening of the electrical lines, which had been cut and mined. Then we bade each other good-bye, almost emotionally. I felt sorry for Akashi. He was leaving Zagreb with his previously distinguished record blemished, but his mission had been doomed from the start because of limits imposed from New York. The United States was delighted with his replacement: Kofi Annan, who was already flying to Zagreb to take up temporary residence. Since the August bombing crisis, Annan was the U.N. official in whom we had the greatest confidence, and his arrival was good news.

  Rome. As our team flew to Rome, Warren Christopher called each Contact Group Foreign Minister to propose that the talks be co-chaired by the United States, the European Union, and Russia at the “Holbrooke-Bildt-Ivanov level.” He would participate only when required. Christopher was concerned that if he attended the entire conference, the other Foreign Ministers would also insist on attending, which would make the negotiations unmanageable.

  The Europeans accepted the American decision to host the talks without complaint, with the exception of the French. To mollify them, Christopher kept open the possibility of a signing ceremony in Paris. Rifkind expressed concern, verging on anger, at the French position, stressing that the British government had never agreed to Paris. But not wishing to turn this into a public problem, he said that the British would be content to host an “implementation conference” shortly after a signing ceremony.

  The expanded Contact Group meeting was designed to satisfy the Italians. Foreign Minister Agnelli began it on October 5 with a dinner in the Renaissance splendor of the Villa Madama, the official guest house of the Italian Foreign Ministry. For someone who had eaten breakfast in Belgrade and lunch in Sarajevo, the scene was disorienting, so enormous was the distance between Rome’s classical grandeur and the ugly realities we had just left.

  The Europeans who were not part of the Contact Group praised American diplomacy and leadership. But there was a clear undercurrent of resentment among some Contact Group members over American “unilateralism.” When I noted that the U.N. seemed reluctant to try to open the roads around Sarajevo, Pauline Neville-Jones exploded, charging that I was trying to “set the U.N. and the Europeans up” to be blamed for a failure. I was unprepared for this outburst. I was not interested in discussing the possibility of failure, I said. We needed to lay the groundwork for a success in which we would all share. For that, the most rigorous enforcement of every detail of every agreement was essential. I expressed myself acidly, criticizing those mired in bureaucratic maneuvers at such a critical juncture in European history. It was probably unwise of me to rise to the bait, but I was trying to lay down a strong marker against unproductive procedural proposals. With her usual grace, Sunni Agnelli moved the discussion to less turbulent issues.

  Despite this tense beginning, the Rome meetings were useful. The next morning, October 6, the Italians formally convened an expanded Contact Group meeting, followed by a special, even larger meeting designed to promote economic recovery of the region—the first time we had focused on the long-term economic needs of the region.

  With Italy having finally hosted a Bosnia conference, Moscow wanted its moment in the limelight. Each major European nation wished to host an international meeting, d
esigned in large part to demonstrate to its domestic audience that it was involved in the peace process. John Kornblum termed this phenomenon “conference proliferation,” and we complained constantly about it as time-consuming and redundant. However, we recognized that these meetings were important for European-American unity.

  Albright and the U.N. The United Nations intended to request a place as a fourth co-chair of the negotiations. Madeleine Albright and I were strong longtime supporters of the United Nations, but we both felt that the U.N.’s participation in the talks would further complicate them. In the end, we agreed that the U.N. representative, Thorvald Stoltenberg, would participate in the negotiations only when they involved eastern Slavonia, and over the next three weeks Madeleine held the U.N. at bay in its quest for a larger role. Telling the U.N. that its involvement would weaken the search for peace was painful, especially for those of us who had grown up believing in the importance of the world body. But Albright stepped up to the task without complaint, and performed with a toughness that was productive if not always popular. In this period, our working relationship became progressively closer and more effective. As she often put it, we had been “joined at the hip” on every key European issue. She also felt a special kinship with my wife, Kati, like herself a product of a Central European refugee family.

  The struggle over the U.N.’s role foreshadowed the American determination a year later to oppose Boutros-Ghali’s quest for a second term as Secretary-General. More than any other issue, it was his performance on Bosnia that made us feel he did not deserve a second term—just as Kofi Annan’s strength on the bombing in August had already made him the private favorite of many American officials. Although the American campaign against Boutros-Ghali, in which all our key allies opposed us, was long and difficult—especially for Albright, who bore heavy and unjust criticism for her role—the decision was correct, and may well have saved America’s role in the United Nations.

  Albright and Talbott were also deeply involved in another complicated aspect of the cease-fire agreement—the effort to open the gas lines to Sarajevo. The Russians controlled the pipeline through Gazprom, which did not want to start the gas flowing until it received $100 million in unpaid bills. The Bosnians were furious; most of the debt, they said, was for gas that had been siphoned off by the Serbs. More important, they did not have the money.

  To solve the impasse, Milosevic sent his Prime Minister to Moscow with a personal plea to Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin to open the gas lines immediately and work out the back payments later. Silajdzic also flew to Moscow, hoping to gain credit in Sarajevo for getting the gas turned on. Meanwhile, our Ambassador in Moscow, Thomas Pickering, struggled with the Russian Foreign Ministry and Gazprom through several long nights. Talbott and Leon Fuerth activated the Gore-Chernomyrdin channel, the key working-level mechanism for American-Russian cooperation. Participating in this frustrating subplot through constant telephone calls—the remarkable final conference call included Pickering, Albright, Menzies, Tarnoff, Donilon, Chris Hoh, Nick Burns, and me, all in different locations—I had the impression that for the Russians the issue was financial, not political; the famously powerful and greedy leaders of Gazprom were simply trying to squeeze the Bosnians for back payments, and only Chernomyrdin himself could break the logjam. Still, the gas was not turned on, and the fighting continued. While slamming Moscow for what it regarded as blackmail, Sarajevo took advantage of the cease-fire delay to accelerate the military offensive, which had picked up last-minute momentum.

  The Birth of IFOR. On the same day that the President announced the cease-fire and we met in Rome, Secretary of Defense Perry concluded a special two-day session of the sixteen NATO Defense Ministers in Williamsburg, Virginia. The announcement of the cease-fire gave added urgency to his effort to forge a consensus on the first peacekeeping force in NATO’s storied history. With surprisingly little difficulty, the ministers gave Perry support for a structure without precedent—one that would enforce a peace agreement and include both NATO and non-NATO troops. NATO’s Supreme Commander, General Joulwan, told the ministers he wanted a force of fifty to sixty thousand troops, with separate American, French, and British operational zones. The United States would contribute about one third of the troops, at an estimated annual cost of close to $2 billion. The peacekeeping force would be called the Implementation Force—or IFOR.

  Perry also planned to meet with his Russian counterpart, Marshal Pavel S. Grachev, in Geneva two days later to pursue a visionary goal: bringing Russian troops into a Bosnian peacekeeping force. Moscow bitterly opposed the enlargement of NATO, and we were often at cross-purposes over Bosnia, where the Kremlin resented and feared the reassertion of American leadership. Not since World War II had Russian, American, and other Western European forces served together under a common command. But President Clinton, Perry, and Strobe Talbott, the President’s most influential advisor on Russian policy, believed that if Russia participated in Bosnia, it would be a historic step in the development of cooperation between countries that had been Cold War adversaries only four years earlier.

  Site X. Tom Donilon took over responsibility for finding an acceptable place—which we code-named Site X—for the talks. He assigned the job to the Assistant Secretary of State for Administrative Affairs, Patrick F. Kennedy, an intense, no-nonsense official with over twenty years of government experience as an administrative specialist. Kennedy, with whom I had worked during the Carter Administration, came to my office on October 10 with his aide, Ken Messner, to find out what kind of site we wanted. I repeated our mantra: physical arrangements could make a difference; every detail mattered. Site X would have to hold nine delegations—each Balkan country, the five Contact Group nations, and E.U. representative Bildt. Ideally we wanted an area we could seal off from the press and all other outsiders, close enough to Washington so that senior Administration officials could visit, yet sufficiently remote, as Michael Dobbs later put it in The Washington Post, “to discourage Balkan warlords from running off to television studios in New York and Washington every time the negotiations hit a snag.”

  The President’s retreat at Camp David was too close to Washington, too small, too “presidential,” and too closely identified with the 1978 negotiations between Egypt and Israel. Hearing our requirements, Kennedy observed that a military base would best meet our needs. After Wes Clark and I called Jan Lodal, the Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Bill Perry ordered the Pentagon to help Kennedy find Site X immediately.

  Kennedy quickly narrowed the search to three sites: the Navy base at Newport, Rhode Island; Langley Air Force Base in Norfolk, Virginia; and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. When the possibility of Newport arose, Senator Claiborne Pell called to offer us access to some of the great houses along the water in his home state. Though the idea of Milosevic, Izetbegovic, and Tudjman wandering around The Breakers was amusing to contemplate, the facilities at Newport were too spread out. Unable to make the site inspections myself, I asked Rosemarie Pauli to help Kennedy. As they drove around Wright-Patterson, a sprawling base that contained twenty-three thousand government personnel, Kennedy noticed five visiting officers’ quarters (VOQs) grouped around a central parking lot, only a few feet apart. He and Rosemarie decided that while some of the rooms would need substantial improvement, in all other ways Wright-Patterson filled our needs.

  And so Dayton was chosen for the talks, to everyone’s surprise. At the time, it did not sound like an impressive place for a major international conference. As Dobbs wrote in The Washington Post, “Camp David it isn’t.” When we told Milosevic the news on October 17, he protested, half-jokingly, that he did not want “to be locked up like a priest”—a remark that later leaked to Roger Cohen of The New York Times, much to Milosevic’s annoyance. The Europeans, used to negotiations in more opulent settings, literally had no idea where Dayton was, and expressed open unhappiness with a site “somewhere in the middle of America.” Car
l Bildt worried about the hawkish imagery of a military base. But I thought that reminders of American airpower would not hurt.

  Studying Camp David. We could find no exact precedents for the negotiations on which we were about to embark. The closest model, of course, was the Camp David talks in September 1978, when President Carter forged the historic agreement between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin that ended thirty years of armed hostility and wars between Egypt and Israel. As we flew around the Balkans in October, I distributed to every member of our team Carter’s own account of those thirteen days, as well as the section on Camp David in Cyrus Vance’s memoirs, Hard Choices, and William Quandt’s Camp David: Peacemaking and Politics. Dan Hamilton of the European Bureau also interviewed Quandt and Harold Saunders, who had been Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs at the time of Camp David, about every detail, no matter how small, concerning the talks, including eating arrangements, telephone connections to the outside world, and the handling of the press. Of greatest interest to us was the question of personal relations between the leaders at Camp David. Had the Americans been able to create any sort of personal rapport between Sadat and Begin? Could we do so at Dayton? Do people become more malleable after being cooped up for days? Will sheer fatigue make tempers flare?

  I phoned President Carter and listened in fascination as he described how he had tried without success to get Sadat and Begin to talk directly to each other. He had then reverted to “proximity talks,” a diplomatic technique originating in Mideast negotiations held in the 1940s at the U.N., in which the mediator moves between the two parties, who rarely meet one another face-to-face—a sort of “shuttle diplomacy by foot.” We already assumed that this would be our pattern, and always referred to Dayton as “proximity peace talks.” Carter recounted his constant efforts to reduce the personal distaste between the two men. His most memorable effort was a field trip to the Gettysburg battlefield, where, he hoped, being at a site of wasted sacrifice would produce a breakthrough. No such thing happened, of course, and Carter sat in the car between Sadat and Begin for hours, their knees touching, while they ignored each other.