In the early hours of the Dayton talks, maps were redrawn, corridors carved out, and the Bosnian capital handed over to those who defended it.
The 30th anniversary of the Dayton Peace Agreement invites renewed scrutiny of its far-reaching impact on Bosnia and Herzegovina and the wider Balkans. In a series of articles published weekly, longtime Transitions contributor Tihomir Loza examines key turning points that led to Dayton, as well as some of the major challenges facing Bosnia today.
Along with the small Brcko district, other territorial issues generated excitement at Dayton. In a 19 November episode that could almost be described as hilarious had it not also been deadly serious, Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who had by now developed something of a rapport, negotiated long into the night to identify pieces of territory that could be given to the Serbs in order to tune the working map close to the internationally-agreed target ratio of 51:49.
Silajdzic and Milosevic finally reached an agreement at about 4 a.m. and shook hands on it. U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who together with chief U.S. negotiator Richard Holbrooke and his deputy Chris Hill had watched them bargain, went to fetch a bottle of wine. As the crew started to have a celebratory drink, Holbrooke felt something was off. He realized Silajdzic had given Milosevic mostly Croat-held territories, something Holbrooke suspected Croatian President Franjo Tudjman wouldn’t be too thrilled about. Hill then woke up the Croatian foreign minister, Mate Granic. “And Mate Granic, a mild-mannered physician, turns into a rhinoceros … He hits the map with his hand and says ‘impossible, impossible. There is 0.00% chance my president will accept this,’ ” Holbrooke recalled Granic saying in the BBC series The Death of Yugoslavia.
Read the last installment of “A New Bosnia” here:
Finding the Gorazde Corridor
Other, earlier negotiating encounters between Silajdzic and Milosevic were more fruitful, including when they considered the eastern Bosniak enclave of Gorazde, which resisted Serb onslaughts for more than three years. A strand of thought among U.S. officials earlier in 1995 was that Bosniaks should be encouraged to think of a more compact and coherent territory for themselves and thus consider swapping the eastern enclaves of Srebrenica, Zepa, and Gorazde for more territory in central Bosnia. By the time Holbrooke’s shuttle diplomacy was in full swing, Gorazde was the only enclave left. Of course, after what happened in Srebrenica in July, the Americans could not afford to be seen as pressuring Bosniaks to swap Gorazde, which is why Holbrooke in August asked Bosnian Foreign Minister Muhamed Sacirbey to tell the press that wasn’t the case. “Ambassador Holbrooke asked me to state to the press categorically that the U.S. is not pressuring our government to give up Gorazde, and of course we have said we will not,” Sacirbey obliged cheekily, according to the Independent.
When Gorazde came up for discussion at Dayton, Milosevic hinted Bosniaks could get a very good solution to the problem of dividing Sarajevo if they gave up Gorazde. The Bosniaks wouldn’t budge, partly because Gorazde had become such a strong symbol of successful resistance to the initially superior Serb forces. They demanded that the city be connected with Sarajevo and the rest of Bosniak territory. The bargaining session started on 16 November at the officers’ club at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, with the two leaders initially at different tables and Holbrooke shuttling between them with their napkin drawings of the area. Eventually Silajdzic went over to Milosevic’s table. As Holbrooke later recalled in his book To End a War, the two men argued “with passion and anger” over many details on the stretch of land between Gorazde and Sarajevo. They couldn’t agree then and there, but Holbrooke thought it was “the first time the two sides had actually negotiated on a territorial issue.”
Bosniak areas, green; and Croat areas, yellow. Source: Library of Congress.
The Gorazde corridor was eventually sorted out later that evening using PowerScene, a highly classified geo-imaging system deployed previously in the Gulf War. Using an ordinary joystick, the viewer could inspect the entire territory of Bosnia, with accuracy “down to two yards,” Holbrooke recounted. The “Nintendo Room,” as it became known, attracted many visitors, all fascinated and eager to “fly” over different parts of the country. Yet, that night neither Silajdzic nor anyone else from the top Bosniak leadership was in attendance. According to Holbrooke, Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic and Sacirbey were sulking after an article in The New York Times, quoting unnamed “Western diplomats,” described Silajdzic as “the key figure.” Holbrooke thought Izetbegovic “had slapped down Haris – hard,” also because he was “unnerved” by Silajdzic’s meeting with Milosevic earlier in the day at the officers’ club as well as a separate visit that the U.S. national security adviser, Anthony Lake, paid to Silajdzic while visiting Dayton late that afternoon. (Holbrooke engineered both meetings.) Instead, generals Wesley Clark and Donald Kerrick negotiated for the Bosniaks that night with Milosevic keen to deal. After a substantial amount of scotch, a defensible corridor of a width averaging 8.3 kilometers was agreed upon after 2 a.m.
“One Tough Guy”
It was back at the officers’ club when he and Silajdzic discussed Gorazde that the Serbian leader used for the first time his often-recounted gambit on the issue of Sarajevo. According to the Secret History of Dayton, a 1997 State Department internal study, Milosevic told Silajdzic that, after withstanding years of shelling “by Bosnian Serb cowards,” the Bosniaks had “earned” Sarajevo. Earlier in the talks and based on the logic from the original map drawn up by the Contact Group, composed of the U.S., Russia, UK, France, and Germany, a consensus seemed to be forming over a model for Sarajevo based on the position of Washington, D.C. in the U.S. constitutional structure whereby Sarajevo would be a self-governing district separate from the Bosniak-Croat Federation and Republika Srpska entities.
As both Milosevic and Izetbegovic had accepted the Contact Group plan in 1994, no drama was expected over Sarajevo – except that Milosevic was now looking more closely at specifics. He first appeared to search for arrangements that would give the Serbs an equal say in an undivided capital, but Holbrooke thought the proposals the Serb leader came up with were unworkable and certain to be rejected by Izetbegovic. Then on 18 November Milosevic called on Holbrooke and Hill to tell them what he had already told Silajdzic – that the Bosniaks deserved Sarajevo because they hadn’t abandoned it, so they could have it all. Referring to Izetbegovic, Milosevic said, “He is one tough guy. It’s his,” according to Holbrooke’s recollection in To End a War. Milosevic also asked his interlocutors not to mention any of it yet to the Bosnian Serbs.
But when Milosevic showed Holbrooke and Hill on the map what specifically he was offering to concede, it turned out it wasn’t exactly the whole of central Sarajevo. The key neighborhood of Grbavica was missing. Hill told him straightaway that wouldn’t do – neither Izetbegovic, nor the Americans for that matter, would ever accept that. In a further meeting with Silajdzic the next day in Hill’s presence, however, Milosevic eventually agreed that the whole of central Sarajevo, complete with Grbavica, belonged to the Bosniaks. “Milosevic gave it to him. I was amazed. I mean, he basically gave, he gave away Sarajevo at that point,” Hill recalled in The Death of Yugoslavia.
But how could Milosevic, apparently lightheartedly, give up entirely on a city that in 1991 contained Bosnia’s largest concentration of ethnic Serbs (more than 150,000 people, nearly a third of its population)? After all, were the Bosnian Serbs not still in control of many Sarajevo neighborhoods at that point? These questions have puzzled observers ever since, particularly in light of the immediate aftermath of Dayton, which saw Serbs from those parts of the city leave en masse.
We will never know for sure because the Serbian strongman never developed a habit of sharing with the public his true goals and motivations (though it is debatable whether Milosevic ever had elaborate goals powered by strong motivations). Looking back at it, his grand gesture, complete with the praise of the Izetbegovic government’s perseverance during the siege of Sarajevo, sounds contrived and awfully patronizing. After all, he was not a spectator of an amusing affair, but the ultimate boss and paymaster of those who had strangled a city of nearly half a million people for more than three years. Yet, his climbdown must have come from somewhere.
Understanding Milosevic
It is perhaps of some significance here to note that Milosevic performed his turnabout on Sarajevo repeatedly – to Silajdzic, Hill, and Holbrooke, and he also later told Izetbegovic directly that he “deserved” Sarajevo because he fought so hard for it. None of these people thought of his manner as outright disingenuous.
Holbrooke later wrote that the U.S. mediators never fully understood Milosevic’s move. The best explanation he could think of was that the Serbian president was trying to “weaken their [Bosnian Serb] Pale base by giving away the Serb controlled parts of Sarajevo,” something that Holbrooke saw as consistent with other schemes by which Milosevic intended to undermine Republika Srpska political leader Radovan Karadzic. (Pale was the wartime capital of the Bosnian Serbs.)
While it may be insufficient, Holbrooke’s explanation works for a number of reasons. One is that, unlike some Bosnian Serbs in his delegation, Milosevic had no personal links to Sarajevo whatsoever. Another is that he had indeed built up such enormous contempt for nearly all Pale leaders that it was not at all difficult to imagine him being guided by this aversion to a significant extent. The feeling went back much further than Pale’s rejection of the Contact Group plan. In May 1993, Milosevic and Greek Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis traveled to the resort of Jahorina near Pale to plead with Karadzic and his parliament to accept the Vance-Owen peace plan, which the Croats and Bosniaks had already agreed to by that point. Milosevic’s gamble was that the presence of such a high dignitary from Greece, Serbia’s traditional ally, would sway opinions in parliament toward peace. He and his guest instead experienced a public humiliation of epic proportions as speaker after speaker dismissed the plan.
It is also true that Milosevic’s frustrations with Karadzic often concerned Sarajevo specifically. In the summer of 1992, a state body named the Council for the Coordination of Positions on State Policy was established in Belgrade. It was a talking shop that gathered quite literally all the top civilian and military leaders of Serbia and Montenegro, the constituent members of the newly-formed joint state called the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The group met in early August to hone Belgrade’s position before the London Conference, a high-level international meeting convened to address the escalating violence following the breakup of Yugoslavia.
In a hunting retreat outside Belgrade, a room full of presidents, prime ministers, ministers, special advisers, and generals labored for much of the day over how the Bosnian Serbs could be brought to reason, most critically in relation to their behavior in Sarajevo. The transcript of the day features, for example, a special adviser pleading with the chief of the Army of Yugoslavia for an explanation of the rationale behind the siege of Sarajevo. “What the Serbs are continuing to do in Sarajevo and around it is, in my opinion, unsustainable and unnecessary,” he said. The general offers his own frustration with the Bosnian Serbs, whom he accuses of selecting “the wrong strategic goals … and that’s capturing Sarajevo. They constantly insist on capturing Sarajevo.” “Surely they’ve given that up?” Milosevic interrupts. The general tells him no, Karadzic and his crew haven’t fully abandoned the idea yet.
A number of Karadzic’s colleagues not yet indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia were at Dayton as part of the FR Yugoslavia delegation, “present but not visible,” according to the Secret History of Dayton. Milosevic was rarely seen with them. Momcilo Krajisnik, the speaker of the Republika Srpska Assembly, was the most senior among them. Krajisnik was from Sarajevo, from a wealthy farming family in one of the semi-rural suburbs that Milosevic had just ceded to the Bosniaks. But he didn’t learn about the development from Milosevic. Instead, Milosevic sent an aide, Nebojsa Vujovic, to inform Krajisnik. “I was tasked with telling him and he, as the Americans would say, hit the deck face first,” Vujovic recently told Balkan Insight.
A motive grounded in hard political facts rather than personal frustrations was likely at play as well. In the run-up to and during the Dayton talks, the U.S. mediators as well as a number of other Western leaders opined that Sarajevo must be undivided. For example, UK Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind did so in October before his visit to Sarajevo. At Dayton, the mediators often told the parties they didn’t want a “new Berlin Wall.” “We did not want Sarajevo to be divided as Berlin once was, and it will not,” Christopher explained just after Dayton.
It was indeed plain at the time that the United States and the key European democracies would have never stood for a divided European city, not in the bright-eyed 1990s, in a world that had just emerged from the Cold War. Milosevic would have been aware of this new reality in Europe and capable of reading its implications for the future status of Sarajevo. Yet, once he decided to conform with the prevailing sentiment, why didn’t he go for the self-governing district model for an undivided Sarajevo that was on offer?
Tihomir Loza, a former deputy director of Transitions, manages the organization’s projects in the Balkans. Tihomir also coordinates SEENPM, a network of media organizations in Central and Southeast Europe.
