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.

15. But it was only when the Republican candidate for President, Bob Dole, started making political hay criticizing Bill Clinton for failure to fulfill his “lift and strike” promise of 3.5 years earlier that the Administration acted.

16. What might have happened had Washington not acted when it did, and followed up with a peace agreement quickly thereafter?

17. It is possible that once the NATO intervention began the Federation might have won the war had the Americans not insisted on a ceasefire.

18. Serb forces were retreating rapidly in September 1995. The story Holbrooke told Izetbegovic—that the Bosnian Army was over-extended and the Serbs might throw it back towards central Bosnia—was made up out of whole cloth to stop the fighting, but Izetbegovic had some reason to believe it, based on prior experiences during the war.

19. The Federation offensive would likely have taken Banja Luka and Brcko within two weeks, but beyond that point the Croatians were not prepared to go, as there were few (if any) Croats in eastern Bosnia. Bosnia might have been partitioned.

20. Another possibility, had the Federation offensive stalled, would have been the general rearrangement of borders to correspond to ethnic divisions that some in the Balkans still seek might have occurred. Ethnic cleansing could have redoubled, or quadrupled. Not only Bosnia but also Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia and Croatia might have been partitioned.

21. We worried then about the creation of one or more non-viable, rump Islamic states in central Bosnia that would act as platforms for Iranian-sponsored terrorism in Europe. Muslim-inspired terrorism in the US hadn’t been invented yet.

22. That was a main reason we supported the creation of the Bosnian Federation, which I helped make a reality in the year before the Dayton agreements.

23. We also worried about opening Pandora’s box. If the collapse of Yugoslavia were to lead to a general rearrangement of borders to accommodate ethnic differences, why wouldn’t the collapse of the Soviet Union? Moldova was already a problem. Georgia and Ukraine might have become problems much earlier.

24. And we worried about what I would term the “Holbooke nightmare” scenario: this involved expulsion of Albanians from Kosovo into Macedonia, intervention by Greece, Turkey and war within NATO. It was always a low-probability scenario, but one that Holbrooke turned to in 1999 to incentivize the NATO bombing of Serbia.

25. The worst did not happen, and maybe it never would have. But intervention, which got a very bad name in Iraq and Afghanistan, was relatively cheap and easy—at least at our end of things—in Bosnia. The last report from the Congressional Research Service I’ve seen said all the wars and peace in the Balkans in the 1990s cost the US $25 billion or so. That was a relative bargain—a few months of war in Iraq or Afghanistan.

26. Our portion was a small fraction of the total. The Europeans picked up most of the bill and in the end provided most of the troops.

27. So what was accomplished? We saved lives and ended a war, even if the peace was not just and has been more difficult to implement than many of us would like. We also saved NATO from a serious embarrassment on its borders and reminded the world that Europe and the US, when they act together, can make their values prevail and help oppressed people attain their aspirations.

28. I don’t regret that for a moment. I even wish something like it could be repeated in Ukraine and Syria. But a lot of things have changed since 1995 and that is not likely to happen.

Obrad Kesic, Republika Srpska’s man in DC, asked two interesting questions: if the war had continued, would the Bosniaks and Croats have ended up fighting with each other as Holbrooke suggested Tudjman told him was likely? Might the prospect of Serb refugees from Bosnia have caused Milosevic to send in the Yugoslav National Army?

Traveling with the Bosniaks and Croats in the summer of 1995 I was well aware of the tensions between them and their competition to gain territory as the Serbs retreated. But they both recognized the a common enemy and were not going to fight with each other. There was considerable professional respect, though not companionship, between Generals Delic and Blaskic, the Bosnian Army and Croat Defense Force commanders.

The refugees were a serious concern for Milosevic, but the JNA was in no position to intervene. The 180-200,000 Croatian Serbs who had entered Serbia earlier in the year were calling for his neck. He claimed there were 600,000 Bosnian Serbs who might become refugees. They would have represented a serious threat to his hold on power, especially as the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was regarded as a rival to Milosevic not only in Bosnia but also in Serbia. Milosevic had good reason to come to Dayton: he was suing for peace in the face of almost certain military and possibly political disaster.

PS: If you are a Bosnia and Herzegovina afficionado, Madeleine Albright’s remarks at the conference are worth a read.