How Bosnia’s second city became the focal point of the war’s dramatic finale.
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 on Fridays, longtime Transitions contributor Tihomir Loza, examines key turning points that led to Dayton, as well as some of the major challenges facing Bosnia today.
If one looked only at the big picture, the diplomatic track in particular, events seemed to unfold in an air of inevitability in the months leading up to the Dayton negotiations, which began on 1 November 1995. With the Bosnian Serb leadership increasingly isolated and unsettled and the military advances of Croatian and Bosniak forces – combined with the unmistakable determination of the U.S. administration to this time see the peace initiative through – all pointed in one direction. By the summer, U.S. military planners were already drawing up plans for a robust, NATO-led peace implementation force. Government lawyers were drafting the text of a possible treaty – a framework document with attachments addressing different aspects, not just of peace implementation, but very much peace- and even nation-building. As of early September, a settlement based on the Geneva Basic Principles appeared all but certain.
On the ground, however, those same months were anything but straightforward. They were marked by intense, accelerated activity. A closer look at some of these developments raises the question of whether any of them had the potential to derail the U.S.-led initiative.
Read the first three parts of “A New Bosnia” here:
The 10 September launch of 13 Tomahawk missiles on Bosnian Serb communications and air defense targets in the northwest of the country was not just a punishment for the Serbs’ failure to meet NATO demands in Sarajevo and the east of the country. It also directly assisted the advancing Croatian Army (HV) and their Bosniak allies, the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH). Chief U.S. negotiator Richard Holbrooke and his team had, in fact, been encouraging Croatia’s President Franjo Tudjman and Bosniak leader Alija Izetbegovic, president of Bosnia’s collective presidency, to keep pressing on, to capture more territory so as to soften the Serb side before the forthcoming negotiations. Their advances were, however, so quick, significant, and achieved at far lower a cost than expected that they inevitably ignited the imaginations of both Bosniak and Croat leaders – as well as the Holbrooke team. Things that wouldn’t have crossed many people’s minds before suddenly seemed possible and quite tempting.
In mid-September, Holbrooke and colleagues wondered whether they should allow the Croats and the Bosniaks to go as far as they could. If they went far enough, perhaps the Contact Group territorial proposition of 51:49 and maybe even the two-entity structure of the country could be abandoned, even though all the tricky elements – the NATO allies, the Russians, and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic —had been lined up to proceed, and soon, on that basis. The principals in Washington soon decided against it.
(The five-nation Contact Group was composed of the United States, Russia, UK, France, and Germany. The 1994 Contact Group peace plan proposed that the territory of Bosnia be divided nearly in half – 51 percent to the Bosniak-Croat Federation and 49 percent to Republika Srpska [RS], which is what the Bosnian Serbs had called their entity since August 1992.)
Shifting Fortunes of War
Even though RS political leader Radovan Karadzic’s wartime government operated from the mountain town of Pale just east of Sarajevo, it was always obvious that the capital of the Bosnian Serb entity would eventually have to be moved to Banja Luka, Bosnia’s second-largest city and the biggest Serb-majority city. Sitting in the middle of a large chunk of Serb-held territory in the northwest, Banja Luka had seen no fighting, though it had been the scene of a terror campaign against its Croat and Bosniak residents, many of whom had fled. Now suddenly the Croatian Army was some 20 kilometers from the city and the Bosnian Serb troops were in disarray.
To Holbrooke’s team, Milosevic, their big hope, seemed “utterly unstressed” with the development, even when the U.S. negotiating team warned him the Croats and Bosniaks “smelled blood.” Saying the Bosnian Serbs’ local commander would bring things under control, he only wanted to talk about the big peace conference in the U.S. he had been fixated on. Within days, however, he was pleading with Holbrooke to stop the offensive.
Officials in Washington feared that, if Banja Luka was allowed to fall, more problems would be created than solved. The city would be bombarded and hundreds of thousands would flee, creating a humanitarian crisis which the U.S. would be blamed for. The Americans thought a direct, large-scale military involvement of the Army of Yugoslavia (VJ) was inevitable if the offensive continued. While Milosevic never said so publicly – according to Montenegrin President Momir Bulatovic, Milosevic’s closest ally – the Serbian president called Holbrooke to tell him that a Croatian move on Banja Luka would mean “total war.”
Needless to say, such a scenario would have ended the U.S. peace initiative. Besides, the Americans thought that in any negotiated settlement, Banja Luka, as a Serb-majority city, would obviously have to be returned to the Serbs if taken. The U.S. negotiators, however, had to press the stop button several times before the offensive was indeed halted.
On 17 September, at the start of their shuttle to Zagreb, Sarajevo, and Belgrade in a single day, members of Holbrooke’s team, including Gen. Wesley Clark, came to see Tudjman’s defense minister. Gojko Susak enthusiastically showed them on the map how close his troops were to taking Banja Luka. He didn’t like at all being told to stop, yet by the end of the meeting he promised to do so. A number of public statements from other Croatian high officials had indicated that the idea of taking Banja Luka was very much entertained in Zagreb, albeit not for long. President Tudjman, ever the realist, soon put a stop to it. He didn’t merely comply with the Americans’ demand. Tudjman shared much of their reasoning, especially in relation to a specific concern of his own. He reasoned that, if the current push for peace in Bosnia collapsed, his hopes of peacefully reintegrating Eastern Slavonia would be in doubt as those plans also depended on Milosevic’s cooperation. (Bosnian Serb forces, supported by the Yugoslav People’s Army, had taken control of Eastern Slavonia in the second half of 1991 during the early stages of Croatia’s quest for independence.)
A historical curiosity to marvel at here is that Holbrooke and his team were not themselves totally sold on the idea of stopping the Croats from taking Banja Luka. According to Peter Galbraith, the then-U.S. ambassador to Zagreb, he and Holbrooke had “grave doubts” over the merit of the administration’s message on Banja Luka they had been tasked to deliver to Tudjman. In fact, those doubts accompanied them right into the presidential palace. As they walked toward Tudjman’s office, Holbrooke suddenly “grabbed” Galbraith to pull him into a nearby men’s room. “We stood in front of the urinals to once again say ‘was this the correct position?’ We decided it was, and we went up and told Tudjman,” Galbraith recalled in an interview for the documentary Diplomatic Storm. Galbraith also said he has doubts about the matter to this date. And so does Gen. Clark, who suggested in an interview with the Sarajevo website Klix in November 2025 that a stronger agreement would have been possible at Dayton had Croat and Bosniak forces been allowed to take Banja Luka.
Faltering Alliance
The alliance between HV and ARBiH was born out of necessity earlier in the summer of 1995. In preparation for “Operation Storm,” the campaign to liberate territory held by rebel Serbs since 1991, Croatian military planners designated a number of staging areas for their troops, crucially to be able to deploy artillery within range of the rebel Serb stronghold of Knin, very close to the Bosnian border, and in positions from which Serb supply routes could be disrupted. One of the most suitable areas was a sizable and sparsely populated chunk of land on the Bosnian side of the border between the towns of Glamoc and Bosansko Grahovo, both held by Bosnian Serbs. A bit further north along the border was the Bosniak-held city of Bihac, besieged since 1992 and under an intensified Serb offensive in the summer of 1995. On 22 July in Split, presidents Tudjman and Izetbegovic signed a joint declaration on close military cooperation between HV and ARBiH as well as the Croatian Defense Council (HVO), the Bosnian Croat force. Within days, HV and HVO took Glamoc and Bosansko Grahovo, immediately relieving Serb pressure on Bihac. The siege of the city ended with Operation Storm less than two weeks later (enabling Izetbegovic, his foreign minister, and army chief to visit it on 8 August).
Even if they subsequently fought together on some front lines, there were very significant tensions between the Bosniaks and the Croats when it came to who should claim credit for military successes and who should govern the newly captured places. In September, disagreements descended into armed clashes between the two armies in a number of instances, which is one reason why the Americans were less than convinced they could rely on the partnership. In fact, they feared the tensions could descend back into a full-blown armed conflict, a scenario that would have ended their peace effort. That’s why Holbrooke arranged a meeting between Tudjman and Izetbegovic in Zagreb for 19 September.
Even though the Croatian contribution to the military successes in the west and northwest was a fair bit more substantial than that of the Bosniak army, Izetbegovic and officials around him seemed carried away with enthusiasm a bit more than those in Zagreb. Just before the meeting, Izetbegovic and Foreign Minister Muhamed Sacirbey floated the idea of offering a “dialogue” to the civilian authorities in Banja Luka to enable civilians to remain in the city once the Bosniak forces captured it. Izetbegovic’s generals had been publicly promising that their troops would indeed be in Banja Luka soon. The meeting quickly turned into a heated exchange – in fact, a long shouting match according to Holbrooke’s team – between the two presidents. Having already decided against moving on Banja Luka and quite shaken by the losses HV had suffered in the previous days when trying to cross the strategic Una river, Tudjman explained that a move on the city wouldn’t be in Croatia’s national interest. According to Bosiljko Misetic, a deputy prime minister present at the meeting, Izetbegovic accepted this argument, but suggested a scenario in which the Croatian army would approach as close as possible to the city to make the Serbs flee, at which point Bosniak forces would occupy Banja Luka. The proposal infuriated Tudjman, who charged Izetbegovic with being ungrateful for the sacrifices Croatia had made, according to the Road to Dayton, a 1997 State Department internal study declassified in 2005.
While the meeting ended with an agreement that there would be no move on Banja Luka, Holbrooke thought – unlike his bosses in Washington – that further advances of Croatian and Bosniak forces elsewhere might still benefit the forthcoming negotiations. Croats and Bosniaks did make some progress in the following days, but already on 22 September U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher was urging all sides to refrain from military actions to allow the peace process to develop. While Tudjman saw no point in continuing the fighting, neither the Serbs nor the Bosniaks heeded Christopher’s call.
The Equilibrium Point
By late September, Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military leader, had managed to reinforce his troops in the northwest and was even mounting some counterattacks. Yet, on the ground, it very much looked like the Bosniaks were still determined to press on. In fact, they were still intent on capturing Banja Luka.
On the basis of U.S. intelligence, Holbrooke and his team thought there was a real danger that the Serbs would start taking back significant parts of territory. It took the Americans a number of further attempts to convince Izetbegovic that it was in his interest to stop the offensives. According to the late president himself, one of those occasions in late September included an explicit threat. “… [incoming U.S. Ambassador John] Menzies came to say America demanded that the offensive toward Banja Luka be halted … We did not stop the offensive immediately, and he came again after five or six days and told me very clearly: ‘If the operation continues, we will bomb you in the same way we bombed the Serbian troops at the end of August and the beginning of September. This is a serious warning,’ ” Izetbegovic told Radio Free Europe in 2000.
Holbrooke denied the U.S. used any threats to force the Bosniaks to halt their offensives. What’s certain, though, is that in late September he became convinced an “equilibrium on the battlefield” had been reached and that things were ripe for a comprehensive ceasefire. He knew that both Tudjman and Milosevic were ready, though for quite different reasons. To persuade Izetbegovic, however, he felt he needed to deploy a U.S. general specializing in intelligence on his team.
“He [Holbrooke] uses us in different ways at different times, depending on what the occasion calls for,” Lt. Gen. Donald L. Kerrick told The New Yorker just days before negotiations at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio were to commence.
“A classic example of this was when we were trying to get the Bosnians to agree to a general ceasefire. They were balking, because their senior military people were telling them they could gain more territory from the Serbs with another week or so of fighting. When we went into the meeting, Dick said to Izetbegovic, ‘I have brought General Kerrick with me. He is the finest military-intelligence officer in the United States government.’ He goes on like this for some time, blowing smoke. Then he says, ‘General Kerrick has done a special survey of the military situation on the ground, has carefully analyzed all the data.’ He turns to me, and says, ‘General Kerrick, please give us the results of your analysis.’ So I tell Izetbegovic that it is our view that his forces can hold what they have got, but they cannot gain much more, and may even lose some of what they have got now, because we have seen the Serbs moving heavy materiel into position to support the Bosnian Serbs.”
Kerrick explained that none of those claims were false – just hyped in their presentation. “Dick was just presenting it in a way to maximize its effect, and it worked.”
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.
