How a set of converging shifts finally led to Western intervention in Bosnia. Second in a series on the anniversary of the end of the Bosnian War.
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 to be 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 lack of an urgent strategic interest for the great powers in Yugoslavia at the end of the Cold War did not dispel concerns about the potential of post-Yugoslav conflicts to spread to other countries. In what today would be an unthinkable hands-on focus on European security, the outgoing Bush administration sent a direct warning to Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic on Christmas Day 1992. “In the event of conflict in Kosovo caused by Serbian action, the United States will be prepared to employ military force against the Serbians in Kosovo and in Serbia proper,” Bush’s letter said. And when in 1999 it became clear that Milosevic was intent on exporting to neighboring states the conflict he had started in Kosovo the previous year, the Clinton administration put together a NATO operation that soon bombed his forces out of Kosovo.
In contrast, the initial concerns over spillover risks in Bosnia faded fairly quickly as it became obvious that the configuration of the fault lines rendered Bosnia a hemmed-in conflict theater, surrounded on all sides by territories under the firm control of the governments in Belgrade and Zagreb, whether through their armies or through UN-mandated forces. There were no significant nonstate actors operating freely along the borders, nor any uncontrolled spaces that could enable cross-border escalation.
Read the first part of “New Bosnia” here:
This lack of urgency was the background for diplomacy galore between 1992 and 1994, with mediators shuttling back and forth in a quest to find both Western and Balkan consensus. It resulted in three elaborate international peace initiatives, all trying to juggle pieces of contested territory in a way that the three sides could possibly find acceptable simultaneously. The Serbs accepted only one of the three peace plans. The Bosniaks accepted the two peace plans that the Serbs rejected. The Croats accepted all three.
When the UN Security Council created the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in May 1993, it was seen as a token gesture of the rudderless Western governments to placate their publics spooked by images of atrocities. Skepticism was almost universal, not least among those appointed to serve as judges and prosecutors. Ramon Escovar Salom – the former attorney general of Venezuela who was appointed the ICTY’s first chief prosecutor – resigned before actually taking office because he thought the court lacked resources and political backing. The South African judge who succeeded him, Richard Goldstone, recalled a mock comment from a former British prime minister: “Why did you accept such a ridiculous job?”
NATO: Losing Innocence
Between late 1992 and early 1994, it often felt that Bosnia had become a permanent feature of international life. “There were periods of calm and a few of hope. But all the time a fuse was quietly burning its way towards the next set of atrocities. I came to dread the subject; my heart sank when it led the news bulletins,” wrote then-British foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, in his memoir.
The atrocity that set the international involvement on the road to an eventual fullblown military and diplomatic intervention was committed on 5 February 1994, when a Serb mortar attack on Sarajevo’s Markale open market left 68 dead and more than 140 wounded.
As with several previous massacres of this kind, the Bosnian Serb authorities protested innocence, claiming that the Bosniaks staged the attack to win Western sympathy. Given the highly manipulative relationship between the local parties and international actors, the accusation carried a certain superficial plausibility for some observers. Yet even as propaganda it was absurd, and may only have reinforced the sense of general Serb culpability. First, no credible international investigation had ever proved that the Bosniaks deliberately targeted their own civilians. Second, by disowning the worst massacres, were the Serbs not, in effect, drawing attention to – and tacitly admitting – the countless smaller ones in which they had deliberately shelled civilians?
Threatening airstrikes, NATO demanded that heavy weapons be removed from a 20-kilometer exclusion zone around Sarajevo or put under UN control. It was the alliance’s first-ever explicit threat of force – and it worked. It ushered in a period of relative calm in the Bosnian capital with a measure of improvement for civilian life. (Later that month, NATO had its first-ever combat action when two U.S. F16s shot down four Bosnian Serb aircraft over Banja Luka for violating a no-fly zone imposed by the UN in 1992 and enforced by NATO since 1993.)
In a parallel strand of pointed international action, the Bosniak-Croat war ended the following month, March 1994, largely thanks to a U.S. diplomatic push to weld the two groups into a single entity, named the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as a counterbalance to the Serbs.
Endgame Begins
In late spring 1995, outnumbered on many fronts by increasingly agile and well-armed Bosniak forces, the Bosnian Serb army began violating the Sarajevo exclusion zone. They started to seize back heavy weapons from UN collection points and shell the city again. After some extraordinarily interesting wrangling among NATO capitals, NATO commanders on the ground, and UN structures, U.S. and Spanish aircraft obliterated key Serb ammunition depots outside Sarajevo on 25 and 26 May.
Far from realizing that conditions were gathering for a perfect storm that could blow them away, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the Serb political and military leaders, walked right into it. In the grand finale of the war over the following months their mindsets appeared locked in a cycle of bloodlust and madness of even greater magnitude than before. Not only did they respond to NATO airstrikes by intensifying the shelling of Bosniak cities, many of which had in the meantime been proclaimed UN “safe areas,” they also took some 380 UN soldiers hostage.
Mladic had taken UN soldiers hostage before, for example, following NATO airstrikes in western Bosnia in November 1994. NATO would quickly back down, and the hostages would soon be released.
This time the Serbs filmed the hostages much more than before. Footage showing UN soldiers chained to potential new NATO targets reached living rooms worldwide. The fact that around a quarter of the soldiers taken hostage were French and many were British concentrated minds in Paris and London. “That constituted the really unwise crossing of the line. [The Bosnian Serb leaders] did not seem to know where that limit lay. I think, by contrast, Belgrade did. You simply couldn’t go and crawl on your belly and say: ‘Um, you’ve taken some of our people and, please, can we have them back,’ ” Pauline Neville-Jones, a top UK security official said, as she recalled the mood in an interview for the BBC series Death of Yugoslavia.
While NATO seemingly backed down over the coming weeks to secure the release of hostages, the name of the game was changing rapidly. Between June and August on a mountain above Sarajevo, the French and the British gathered a Rapid Reaction Force (RRF), a heavily armed unit of 4,000 core personnel whose design suggested a combat mission. In parallel, a decision was made to pull back military and civilian personnel in the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) from many exposed positions in or near the Serb-held territories to prevent hostage-taking in any future intervention.
In early July, Mladic mounted an onslaught on the barely defended UN safe area of Srebrenica, an eastern Bosniak enclave in which many thousands of expellees from other places had found refuge. Within weeks of Srebrenica’s fall, a picture of mass executions of Bosniak men and boys started to emerge. Already on 10 August,U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright showed the Security Council satellite images depicting what the U.S. government said it believed were newly dug mass grave sites near Srebrenica. (The ICTY indicted Karadzic and Mladic for genocide elsewhere in Bosnia in late July. They were indicted on genocide charges in relation to Srebrenica in November 1995.)
In early August, the strategic balance in western Bosnia changed completely after the Croatian Army (HV) liberated much of the territory held by rebel Serbs since 1991. The HV continued pushing into Bosnia, linking up with the now much-strengthened Bosniak units and routing Mladic’s army in many places. The general’s response was again sheer savagery. On 28 August, Serb shells hit Sarajevo’s Markale market again, this time killing 43 and wounding 75.
Pictures from the massacre triggered another wave of international outrage and shattered what little remained of Western hesitation. Two days later, on 30 August, an operation aptly named Deliberate Force ensued. NATO artillery and air forces lifted the siege of Sarajevo and substantially degraded Serb capabilities in other places. Even though the operation lasted for three weeks, including a pause in which the Serbs were given an opportunity to comply with NATO demands, it was clear from the outset that a fundamentally different development was underway. Indeed, it very much felt as though it was something that could quickly end the war. Needless to say, many wondered if much of the pointless destruction and killing could have been avoided had NATO intervened in this fashion much earlier, ideally already in 1991 in Croatia.
Exploiting the Split
Meanwhile, U.S. diplomats were finalizing plans for a comprehensive peace settlement. For almost a year they had worked closely with none other than Milosevic, who in the summer of 1994 had a very public falling out with the leadership of the Bosnian Serbs because of their rejection of a peace plan offered by a “Contact Group” of four permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany. He cut off fuel and other key supplies as well as financial support to the government of Republika Srpska (RS), which is what the Bosnian Serbs had called their entity since August 1992. Milosevic even accepted an international monitoring mechanism of the sanctions regime in exchange for a partial suspension of the UN sanctions against Belgrade that had devastated Serbia’s economy.
Most importantly, he promised to work seriously with international mediators on a peace plan – and for the most part he did. Having gained international notoriety as the “butcher of the Balkans” in previous years, he was now selling himself hard as a peacemaker both internationally and at home – and receiving high praise for it from the outset.
Milosevic’s sanctions against Republika Srpska were, of course, very porous. They were not a complete sham, though. He applied sanctions selectively, with the most visible forms of aid, such as the flow of supplies to the RS regime, dramatically reduced initially. At the same time, Milosevic continued to provide salaries to the officers of the Republika Srpska army. For example, he sent an elite fighting unit of Serbia’s state security forces to support the Bosnian Serbs at a very demanding front line in western Bosnia just as his sanctions regime began. (It was a shady group with which Milosevic had close personal ties, the infamous Unit for Special Operations, whose members would be later found guilty of organizing and executing the murder of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003.)
The mediators, nevertheless, correctly gauged that Milosevic was not only desperate to liberate himself from the UN sanctions, but that his take on Bosnia wasn’t necessarily identical to that of the Republika Srpska leadership. While the Serb nationalist universe over which he presided uniformly demanded a substantial part of Bosnia for the Serbs, Milosevic seemed to have thought of Bosnia in rather abstract terms, with no personal ties to specific places. He had never committed to the wilder versions of what the Serbs should actually end up with in Bosnia. In contrast, Karadzic and his cohort routinely asserted that up to 70 percent of Bosnia’s land belonged to the Serbs. Milosevic never explicitly condemned such aspirations either, yet it appears he increasingly did so in private at this time. For exciting color on the issue, browse through the 2016 ICTY Karadzic judgment to get a sense of Milosevic’s distaste for Republika Srpska leaders’ excessive territorial ambitions and the Karadzic persona in particular. (Search, for example, for “complete madness” and “crazy doctor.”)
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.
