Day: May 14, 2015
Dayton plus 20
We at SAIS are marking the 20 years since the Dayton agreements (as well as the Srebrenica massacre) with a two-day conference here in DC as well as other events during rest of the year. I was asked to speak yesterday, along with Dan Hamilton, about the situation before Dayton, when the Balkan fire was spreading. Here are my speaking notes, as well as my answers to a couple of questions:
1. Thank you, Marvin [Kalb], for that kind introduction. I confess that it is hard to believe more than 20 years have passed since I first started learning about Bosnia from the Italians.
2. I was deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Rome from 1990 to 93, when the Italians repeatedly tried to convince Washington that it needed to pay attention to the dissolution of Yugoslavia and prevent problems there.
3. Somewhere in the bowels of the State Department are my lengthy cables reporting the very detailed accounts the Prime Minister’s diplomatic advisor provided on the “spreading fire.”
4. Washington’s response was equivocal: yes, we would help get the issue onto the G7 Summit agenda, but Yugoslavia was “out of area,” which meant NATO would have nothing to do with it.
5. I accompanied Secretary of State Christopher in May 1993 when he tried to sell “lift and strike,” the policy of lifting the arms embargo and striking against Serb forces, to then Prime Minister Ciampi.
6. The Italians were unequivocal: they did not want gasoline poured on the fire next door.
7. Two more years went by before NATO struck decisively, in response to shelling of Sarajevo.
8. The August/September 1995 NATO bombing of Serb forces was triggered by a “trip wire.” Zepa and Srebrenica, Muslim enclaves in eastern Bosnia, had already fallen. It had been agreed in NATO that an attack on Gorazde, a third Muslim enclave, would trigger a NATO response. This “Gorazde rule” was extended to three other “safe areas,” Sarajevo, Tuzla and Bihac.
9. The sustained bombing was not limited to the Serb forces that launched a mortar against the Markale market in Sarajevo. I think it arguable that only when it got to the communications nodes of the Bosnian Serb Army did it have a really strategic impact, in combination with the rapid advance of Bosnian and Croatian forces on the ground in western Bosnia.
10. Those forces had vastly improved their capabilities and coordination over the previous two years.
11. The arms embargo was never lifted, but the US turned a blind eye to the violations Iran, Malaysia, Turkey and others indulged in.
12. One of my colleagues in Washington—a leading expert on Syria—is fond of asking me if waiting for action in Bosnia was as painful then as waiting for action on Syria is today.
13. I’m afraid it was. Maybe even more painful: the United States was then the world’s last remaining superpower, Russia posed no serious counterweight, half the population of Bosnia had been displaced and something like 100,000 would eventually be killed, out of a population of only 4.2 million or so.
14. State Department officers were resigning. There were demonstrations calling for action on Bosnia on campuses throughout the United States. Mo Sacirbey and Haris Silajdzic were on the network news and CNN virtually every evening, excoriating the US for failing to act. Congress wanted to lift the arms embargo, despite European hesitation. Read more
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