How an improbable partnership between U.S. mediators and Serbia’s autocrat paved a way to peace in Bosnia.
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, examining key turning points that led to Dayton, as well as some of the major challenges facing Bosnia today.
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. (The five-nation Contact Group was composed of the United States, Russia, UK, France, and Germany.)
The idea hailed from an earlier, less elaborate peace initiative known as the “EU Action Plan.” In mediators’ view, this was a proposition that could be spun in attractive terms to all three sides. It could enable Bosniak and Croat leaders, now in an uneasy union inside the Federation entity, to claim they were in control of the majority of the country’s land. At the same time, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic would presumably be able to persuade the Bosnian Serbs to accept what, in effect, would be an entire half of the country. As we have seen, in the end Milosevic was unsuccessful, something that led to a rift between Serbia and RS in 1994.
The Bosnian Serbs still held close to 70 percent of Bosnia’s territory at the time, so it’s no wonder why Radovan Karadzic, the RS political leader, and his cohort felt strong enough to defy Serbia’s president. The strategic shifts of summer 1995, including the shock and outrage internationally over the mass killings at Srebrenica, however, enabled Milosevic to bully them into signing over their negotiating rights to him. On 29 August 1995 in Belgrade, on the eve of the NATO Deliberate Force operation, the three top RS leaders – Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic, the military leader, and Momcilo Krajisnik, the speaker of parliament – joined the entire political and military leaderships of Serbia, Montenegro, and FR Yugoslavia, the state formed by Serbia and Montenegro after the breakup of Yugoslavia. Also present was Patriarch Pavle, the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, which had often backed the Bosnian Serbs against Milosevic. They all signed a document that gave the Serbian president the final say in future negotiations on peace terms. The document inevitably became known as the Patriarch Agreement.
Read the first two parts of “New Bosnia” here:
While this piece of political theater was designed to help all involved in different ways, its significance for Milosevic was greatest. Chief U.S. negotiator Richard Holbrooke and his team came to see him the next day, just hours after NATO missiles struck the first Bosnian Serb targets. The Americans expected a tirade on the injustice of the bombing, so Holbrooke came armed with talking points aimed at placating an angry Milosevic. Yet, Serbia’s president seemed keen to leave the impression that the NATO military intervention against the Bosnian Serbs didn’t bother him that much. Astonishingly, he raised the issue only two hours into the meeting, according to the Road to Dayton, a 1997 State Department internal study declassified in 2005.
Milosevic first handed a copy of the previous day’s agreement over to Holbrooke and then talked profusely about a peace scheme that he was hopeful could be put in place now that he, and not the RS leaders, would decide. “We realized at that point we had a negotiation. It was the absolute key moment,” recalled Holbrooke’s deputy, Christopher Hill, an interview for the BBC series Death of Yugoslavia.
Promising that he would only seriously talk to U.S. negotiators, the Serbian president recommitted to the 51:49 formula and pledged to respect Bosnia’s international borders. He also offered a list of very attractive territorial concessions to the Bosniaks and seemed eager for a conference at which he would reach an agreement on that basis with Croatia’s President Franjo Tudjman and Bosniak leader Alija Izetbegovic, president of Bosnia’s collective presidency, in the presence of the Contact Group. This was all music to Holbrooke’s ears. “In principle, we will have a [peace] conference sooner or later,” Holbrooke told him. “But we are not ready yet.”
Working With the ‘Don Corleone of All Serbs’
In subsequent meetings, which included bonding in Milosevic’s countryside retreat, an unlikely partnership developed between Serbia’s strongman and Holbrooke’s delegation. Clearly, the Americans were fascinated and possibly a tiny bit enchanted by this peculiar individual, who, they noted, acted as “Don Corleone of all Serbs.” Most importantly, if the Patriarch Agreement was anything to go by, Milosevic was their best hope for achieving peace – precisely because he likely still was capo dei capi among fellow Serb nationalists. Besides, in contrast to his reputation, he now appeared constructive and in possession of a healthy survival instinct. From his side, Milosevic was obviously pleased with the level of attention he received from the world’s preeminent power. He and Holbrooke cultivated mutual recognition characteristic of alpha males who happened not to be in competition with each other. Most importantly, Milosevic rightly saw this American crew as his best chance of pulling himself out of the hole he had dug for himself (and millions of others).
Along with convergent interests, Holbrooke and Milosevic shared a mutual distaste for Europeans. They both now saw EU mediators and ministers as lightweight, petty, endlessly focused on process. Process was hell for both men because it required consultation. Consultation demanded time, which in turn could allow all sorts of sensitivities, Balkan and international, to resurface and derail their plans. “When [EU Special Envoy to the Former Yugoslavia Carl] Bildt comes to see me, I won’t tell him anything, I won’t go into details before I see you,” Milosevic told Holbrooke on 30 August, according to the Road to Dayton.
The day after he and his team relaxed with the Serb leader in his country lodge, Holbrooke went to see the Contact Group in Bonn to tell them that he had just arranged a meeting of the foreign ministers of Croatia, FR Yugoslavia, and Bosnia for 8 September in Geneva and that the sides, including Milosevic, had all but agreed on a set of constitutional principles. Obviously, they couldn’t complain about such positive news. Except they did – about not being told what had been in the making and about Holbrooke’s choice of venue: the U.S. Mission, instead of a neutral UN site. As it happened, Holbrooke didn’t share everything with Washington either. And it was indeed odd for an international peace meeting in the capital of multilateralism to be held at the premises of a national representation, yet Holbrooke regarded any mention of such insubstantial issues as a waste of time.
Closing Dilemmas
Seemingly, the days leading to the Geneva meeting of foreign ministers should have been plain sailing for everyone as most key elements appeared to have already fallen into place. The proposed basic principles for peace and a new constitutional makeup of Bosnia on offer very much corresponded to the Contact Group plan. Everyone had already accepted those principles back in 1994. Of course, this time the main achievement was going to be the already secured Serb acceptance of the Contact Group ratio for territorial division, which the Croats and Bosniaks had accepted more than a year before.
The psychology around both the territory and the principles had, however, now changed. While peace was by no means assured, an overwhelming sense was palpable in late summer 1995 that things might actually happen this time. This raised the stakes for everyone, the Bosniak side in particular.
When the Contact Group map was first presented to the sides in July 1994 on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, Bosniak leader Alija Izetbegovic indicated in a rather peculiar manner that he would almost certainly accept it. “If we assess that the Serbs will say no, we will say yes … The [territorial] solution favors them less than it favors us, and I don’t think they can accept it,” he was quoted as saying in the Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje.
Now that the Contact Group map was only a starting point – even if the 51:49 ratio was to remain unchanged – and that a Serb acceptance of this element of the proposal was certain, matters suddenly became trickier for Izetbegovic. With Milosevic so evidently eager to reach a deal, Izetbegovic could not afford to appear as an obstacle to peace. Yet what, exactly, would he be expected to concede?
By this point, Izetbegovic’s Bosniaks had an increasingly well-armed force, which he claimed numbered some 200,000 soldiers. He was also doing well in the northwest of the country, albeit with Croatia’s vital support and in the context of NATO’s intervention against the Serbs. Under such circumstances, should he not push for more land to put himself in a better negotiating position?
The same was true of the principles upon which the war was to be brought to an end and a new Bosnia built. Even though there wasn’t much new in them, the near certainty of their acceptance by the other two sides increased the risks for Izetbegovic, who had often faced loud, if diffused, opposition from his own camp to compromises with the Serbs and Croats.
The draft principles, shaped by the legal expert on Holbrooke’s team, Roberts Owen, were deliberately simple and brief, yet articulated in a manner that left little room for interpretation around their core meaning. At a late-night meeting on 4 September in Ankara with Holbrooke and his team, Izetbegovic was suddenly objecting to the Bosnian Serb entity’s name. Republika exercised him more than Srpska. It applied sovereignty, he argued. At the time of the Contact Group plan, official documents and mediators referred to Republika Srpska as “Bosnian Serb entity” and “Bosnian Serb Republic,” intermittently. Neither Izetbegovic nor anyone else raised the issue of the Serb entity’s name back then. Now that things looked a fair bit more real, Izetbegovic balked. But under heavy pressure from the Americans, in the small hours of the next day, Izetbegovic accepted Republika Srpska. “I didn’t want to have a quarrel with the Americans because of that name and risk the cessation of the NATO action,” he told Oslobodjenje upon his return to Sarajevo.
Izetbegovic’s insistence that Bosnia itself be called the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was still the country’s official name, was more substantive. The word “republic” had been removed from the country’s name on Milosevic’s insistence, obviously as a device to underline the break between Izetbegovic’s internationally recognized wartime government, which the Serbs so violently rejected, and a Bosnia to which Milosevic was about to commit them.
That was the point at which the cold, realpolitik heart of Holbrooke’s enterprise spoke. Obviously, he needed Milosevic much more than Izetbegovic, so he casually took Milosevic’s side. U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher was deployed to confirm this to Izetbegovic in a “no ifs, no buts” phone call just before the Geneva foreign ministers meeting on 8 September.
Humiliated, Izetbegovic changed gear to now insist that the right of either entity to form parallel ties with neighboring countries, one of the proposed principles, be conditioned on the approval of the other entity. But this didn’t make much sense as his government had already committed the Bosniak-Croat Federation entity, at least on paper, to forming confederal ties with Croatia. Besides, the entities’ right to special ties with neighboring countries was also part of the Contact Group plan. This did not stop Izetbegovic’s foreign minister, Muhamed Sacirbey, from calling Holbrooke from his hotel room just before the meeting to threaten a boycott, something he did not follow through with. (There was no love lost between Sacirbey and Holbrooke, either then or later.)
Unsurprisingly, in the days after the Geneva meeting at which the three ministers adopted the Basic Principles, state media in Belgrade celebrated what the regime now described as Milosevic’s “peace policy.” Many on the more hardline end of the political spectrum, however, lamented the territorial concessions to which Milosevic had now officially committed the Bosnian Serbs. His one-time ally, Mihailo Markovic, a famous philosopher, had some words of comfort for them. “On a reduced ethnic territory, the Serbs will be much more compact and homogeneous, and better able to defend themselves,” he told Argument magazine.
Escalation Does It
With principles now accepted by all sides, a path to peace looked open – but only in theory, as the Bosnian Serb leaders on the ground were still refusing to comply with NATO demands to completely clear their heavy weapons from the Sarajevo exclusion zone and cease shelling the UN safe areas. By this point, quite a few officials on the decision loop in NATO capitals had come to question the rationale of continuing the Deliberate Force operation. There was also a question mark over how long the Russians could be kept on board. While they repeatedly pleaded with General Mladic to comply, it wasn’t clear that Moscow could much longer afford to be seen as tacitly supportive of an air campaign that so clearly benefited the Bosniak and Croatian forces, which had been making steady progress in the northwest and now even in parts of central Bosnia.
A 10 September decision by the U.S. to fire 13 Tomahawk missiles on Serb command and communication targets in the northwest – which were quite unrelated to the focus of the Deliberate Force campaign around Sarajevo and the east of the country – upset, not just the Russians, but many in the alliance too, including President Jacques Chirac of France. Even though Chirac had become a great advocate of military action against the Serbs, the U.S. failure to consult him over an escalatory move of this magnitude was, of course, infuriating.
Yet, the perceived escalation also seemed to have resolved the impasse almost instantaneously. Three days later, Milosevic summoned the Bosnian Serb leaders to his country retreat, where he was expecting a visit from Holbrooke and his team. Rattled, Karadzic, Mladic, and Nikola Koljevic, the RS vice president, spoke to the Americans about the humiliation that the air campaign, the Tomahawks in particular, inflicted on them. In the small hours of the next day, they agreed to sign a pledge to withdraw the artillery from Sarajevo and open the airport and access roads to the city, as well as cease offensives against the safe areas. And they did, mostly.
Holbrooke and team then visited Zagreb, Sarajevo, and Belgrade in a single day. The high point of this feat was the flight to the just reopened Sarajevo airport, which was obviously very risky even in a military cargo plane escorted by F16s. The gutsy move conveyed a number of key messages to all involved, the most important one being that the U.S. initiative worked and that there was no intention of stopping it.
Late at night in Belgrade, Milosevic again urged Holbrooke to call a Camp David-style conference of the three leaders. Holbrooke again said it was too early, yet then spent time discussing with Milosevic a suitable location in the U.S. where the press could be kept at bay, as well as the duration of the conference and the composition of the Serb delegation. Conveniently for both men, Karadzic and Mladic had been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and were now fugitives from justice and obviously could not travel.
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.
