Bosnia Talks Show What Superpower Can Do When Lobbies Are Absent

By Richard H. Curtiss

One of the most difficult issues in bringing peace to divided Bosnia was settled before Presidents Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia, Franjo Tudjman of Croatia, and Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia arrived at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. The 1991 population of Bosnia had been 44 percent Muslim, 31 percent Serb and 17 percent Croat. Nevertheless, with Bosnian Serbs occupying some 70 percent of the land soon after the outbreak of fighting in April 1992, all of the peace plans prepared since then had focused around a two-way split that would give Bosnia's Muslims and Croats 51 percent of the land, and Bosnian Serbs 49 percent.

Bosnian Muslims accepted the plans, and eventually so did the Croats. The Serbs, who would have had to withdraw from nearly a third of the lands they had seized, rejected those peace plans until August 1995. That was when the first serious NATO airstrikes at Bosnian Serb military targets turned out to be the prelude to a sudden reversal of military fortunes on the ground. While Croatia was overrunning the third of its country that had declared itself an autonomous Serb area, in Bosnia loosely coordinated military offensives by the Muslim-led Bosnian army and by Bosnian Croat militiamen, backed up from time to time by regular Croatian army artillery and armored units, suddenly lifted the siege of the Bihacé pocket in western Bosnia and swept Serb siege guns away from the Bosnian city of Mostar and Croat-populated areas near the Dalmatian coast, and far back into the Bosnian heartland the Serbs had overrun in 1992.

By the time a cease-fire was reached, Serbs occupied about 49 percent of Bosnia, almost exactly the percentage they were to be awarded under the peace plan on the table, and the difficult questions about Serbian military withdrawal had become largely moot. Extremely difficult problems remained to be negotiated, but no matter how they came out there would not be the problem of dislodging unwilling Serb forces from vast areas under their occupation.

Indefatigible and tough-minded American negotiator Richard Holbooke had other things going for him. Three of his American colleagues from the State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon had been killed before his eyes in a vehicular accident that took place only because the Serbs had blockaded a safer road into Sarajevo. The resulting fury at Serb intransigence had helped sustain the belated attention of President Bill Clinton and had strengthened American resolve to use NATO airstrikes to bring the Serbs to the peace table and, if necessary, impose an American peace where the Europeans had been unwilling and unable to deal with the issue.

Current Zones of Control

That is what took place at Dayton. Every night from ll p.m. to 1 a.m. Holbrooke's American team held a meeting to set the agenda for the day ahead. The workday began only six hours later, at 7 a.m. The three national delegations were housed in identical two-story apartments containing Air Force bachelor officers quarters, all facing each other on a quadrangle. Delegates could hardly exit their austere quarters without encountering members of other delegations. Although they now represent three of the five nations that emerged from the breakup of former Yugoslavia, virtually all had served previously in the Yugoslav government, and all shared the same native language—Serbo-Croatian. While U.S. negotiators were ready to re-enact the U.S. role in Arab-Israeli bargaining sessions in which American presidents or secretaries of state had shuttled tirelessly between principals who seldom spoke directly with each other, that was not always necessary in Dayton. Not only did the principals engage in direct conversations, they shared meals together as happened when presidents Milosevic and Izetbegovic dined together at a French restaurant as guests of a French representative at the talks.

Perhaps most important, the security fences around the Ohio air base provided impenetrable barriers to the world media. (With one exception, when Kati Marton, Richard Holbrooke's journalist wife, found herself face-to-face with Izetbegovic and conducted an impromptu interview.) Instead of emerging flushed and angry from difficult bargaining sessions and then painting themselves into rhetorical corners in interviews with the international or their own domestic media, the delegation heads returned to spartan quarters with little to do but prepare themselves for the next full day of negotiations.

Izetbegovic and Milosevic were present from the beginning of negotiations on Nov. 1. Tudjman was present for the beginning, departed for a week of pre-scheduled events in Croatia, and then returned to Ohio for the rest of the talks. There was little doubt from the beginning that a settlement would be hammered out because, if any of the three parties balked, the consequences would have been more difficult than making compromises.

The Serbs have lived under a United Nations embargo for more than two years. Although their suffering is minuscule compared to that of the Bosnians, Milosevic's political fortunes were riding on gaining a settlement that would end the economic hardships the embargo has imposed on his people. He has open partisans in the Russians, who claim that their public opinion will not tolerate a Serb defeat, and silent allies in Britain and France, who were supported by Serbs in World Wars I and II. However, none of Milosevic's open or silent allies were in charge in Dayton.

Similarly, Tudjman had silent supporters in Germany, Austria and to some extent other Catholic countries of Europe that once were linked, like Croatia, to the Axis powers of Europe during World War II. However they may feel about their co-religionists in former Yugoslavia, however, none will cross the United States over the issue.

Tudjman, therefore, has looked to the U.S. for political support and arms. An American "private security" firm that operates with the blessing of the CIA sent retired U.S. military personnel to Croatia to provide military and logistics training that in three years helped transform the Croatian army into a force able to beat the Serbs of Croatia and of Bosnia and, very likely, hold its own with the Serbian army, which still has all of the artillery and aircraft inherited from the former Yugoslavian army, once one of the most formidable forces in Europe.

The Muslim-led Bosnian government forces are the weakest, partly because of seeming endemic disorganization within their still multi-sectarian ranks and mostly because their land-locked country is the only former Yugoslav republic that has been seriously affected by the U.N. arms embargo. Bosnian forces need tanks and heavy artillery and they need the kind of American training the Croats already have received. Bosnian negotiators made it clear they would accept any reasonable terms imposed upon them to get that kind of support.

All three parties recognized that the only honest broker on the scene was the United States, which in this dispute has been unimpeded by the kinds of domestic religious and ethnic lobbies that have made a shambles of U.S. policies in the Middle East and also in adjacent Greece and Turkey.

America has a Muslim population of at least five million people, but its diversity has kept it from being an effective voice in the Bosnian dispute. The Croats can turn out huge crowds for Washington demonstrations, but there has been little need to do so because Croatia has won in everything that has taken place so far, particularly the Nov. 12 agreement on Eastern Slavonia, which restores Croatia to its 1991 borders.

The U.S. also has a large Serbian-American population, but the actions of Serbian leaders in Bosnia have been so egregious that vocal American defenders of Serbian policies have been reduced, literally, to a handful of people whose own intemperate letters to editors and paid (by Serbia) advertisements in U.S. newspapers have marginalized them as apparent fanatics or kooks.

In short, the absence of domestic pressures freed the U.S. government to do what is in its own (and the area's) best interest, which is to hammer out a lasting settlement to Europe's bloodiest conflict since World War II that also will serve as a warning to other potential ethnic predators that there is a steep price to pay for seeking to seize by force the territory of weaker neighbors.

Three Overriding Issues

With major military withdrawals no longer necessary, three overriding issues remained. First was Sarajevo, which the Serbs hoped to divide into sectarian compartments, just as they have sought to divide all of Bosnia, and soon may be seeking to divide other parts of former Yugoslavia. The Bosnian government, in keeping with its original campaign to make all of Bosnia into a single, multi-sectarian state, insisted that Bosnia's Sarajevan capital must not be divided.

The U.S. proposal was to put all territory within a 12-mile radius of Sarajevo's center under international control. This would make the international area contiguous with areas under Bosnian government and Serb control. It is a solution the Muslims could accept, although it requires withdrawing their forces from the city center they had fought so tenaciously to hold. The Serbs were reluctant to adopt the internationalization of Sarajevo, since it undermined their plans to divide the whole country and eventually annex all of the Bosnian Serb- controlled territory to Serbia.

A second major issue was to turn the Bosnian government-Croat federation from a paper alliance into reality. Tough U.S. diplomacy, backed up by Germany, created the alliance in the first place. It halted Tudjman's plan to, in effect, divide Bosnia with Serbia, leaving the Muslims without anything worthy of calling a country. Unless the U.S. hangs tough, that still could happen, since about half of the territory that has been saved from the Serbs is in fact controlled by Bosnian Croat forces, backed up by Croatia.

By expelling the Serbs from most of its territory, and being allowed to get away with it, Croatia has gained so much from the war in Bosnia that it could settle for uniting Muslim and Croatian-held territories under a Bosnian government that, in turn, would federate with Croatia.

The last tough issue upon which the U.S. should not compromise is the matter of war crimes. It is true that war crimes have been committed by all three sides in the Bosnian conflict. Nevertheless, far more than 90 percent of the victims have been Bosnian Muslims killed by Bosnian Serbs and military or paramilitary forces from Serbia proper.

Croats have committed war crimes against Muslims in Bosnia and against Serbs in Croatia, but on a tiny scale compared to the Serbian crimes. Individual Muslim soldiers undoubtedly have committed atrocities as well, but not as a matter of government policy and on a minuscule scale compared to the crimes of both other parties to the war

The Muslims can agree to war crimes investigations and undoubtedly will convict any Muslim perpetrators who can be identified. Croatia also can agree in principle, so long as it does not have to allow Serb refugees back into the Krajina areas in which the war crimes have been committed.

The Serbs alone have serious problems with the war crimes indictments for the simple reason that the war crimes have been a matter of state policy, both for Bosnian Serbs and for Milosevic himself. Among the Serbs named in the first 43 indictments handed down by the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal were Bosnian Serb "President" Radovan Karadzic and the commander of Bosnian Serb military forces, Ratko Mladic.

Milosevic will have no problem with the indictment against Karadzic, who is his political rival, so long as Serbia is seen by its own people as objecting to the indictment and is not called upon to extradite the Bosnian Serb political leader. Mladic is a political ally of Milosevic but at the same time the eyewitness evidence that Mladic personally was at the scene of mass murders of Muslims, including those last spring at Srebrenica and last summer in the vicinity of Banja Luka, is overwhelming.

Milosevic cannot be involved in extraditing Mladic, but he will not postpone a Bosnian peace settlement solely to protect a general who has openly participated in the mass executions of Bosnian Muslim teenagers, old men, and all males of military age who have fallen into Serb hands in recent months.

An agreement has to emerge from Dayton because all three parties to the war have much to gain from peace, and much to lose from a continuation of the war. So long as the U.S. does not permit compromises on the issues of Bosnian territorial integrity and Sarajevo, the agreement will be a lasting one, at least for this generation. Nor will U.N. peacekeepers of any nationality be in danger.

Further, if the U.S. continues to support without reservation the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal (which can expect no support from the many Western and Eastern European countries with political axes to grind), a precedent will be set that may or may not head off all other wars, but certainly will discourage the kinds of excesses the world has seen in Serbian-held areas of Bosnia.

How fortunate that in the Balkans the world's only remaining superpower finally is able to act like one, unhampered by domestic lobbies or separate agendas of its own. Would that that precedent could be transferred to other troubled areas of the world, like the Middle East, where the U.S. is or is likely to be similarly engaged.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.