In a little more than a month, if all goes according to plan, American power will make an even grander entrance in the wretched Bosnian town of Tuzla. As scores of warplanes scream overhead, dozens of U.S. Army helicopters and gunships will come clattering out of the sky, bearing hundreds of weapons-toting American GIs. That will be just the beginning: a World War I-style convoy of 200 trains will rumble down from the north in the days ahead, heavily laden with tanks and artillery. The idea is to be as noisy and ostentatious as possible, to announce to the Serb irregulars who have been “cleansing” villages with impunity for the past four years that the game has changed. No more ill-equipped Bangladeshi peacekeepers in baby-blue helmets. Meet the U.S. Army, locked and cocked and good to go.
Hail Pax Americana! Salute the return of the superpower! Or, then again, maybe not. The foreign-policy establishment may cheer,and Balkan brigands may head for the hills, but ordinary Americans are decidedly wary of the sacrifices ahead. Drawn inward since the collapse of communism, most voters regard Bosnia as a someone else’s civil war. It will be up to President Clinton to convince them otherwise on Monday night with a televised appeal to the national conscience. His advisers hope at best to win over a “reluctant majority,” and they worry that congressional Republicans will try to undermine the peace deal by blocking the deployment of U.S. troops. More likely, after long and noisy debate, Congress will duck responsibility, deferring to the president’s traditional power to make foreign policy.
Baffled by Bosnia or distracted by domestic concerns, most Americans have not begun to realize the reach and depth of the U.S. commitment made last week in Dayton. Clinton was very slow to take a stand in Bosnia, but his lieutenants have effectively taken a very tough one for him. Holbrooke,in particular, has maneuvered with a panache and confidence worthy of Henry Kissinger. During the three weeks of sometimes round-the-clock wrangling at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Holbrooke overawed the fractious Bosnian, Serb and Croat delegations with not-so-subtle reminders of U.S. power, like hosting a dinner party in an airplane hangar near a stealth bomber and a cruise missile. The agreement he and Christopher won gives America and its allies virtually colonial power to enforce their will in Bosnia.
The 142-page document is less a peace agreement than a declaration of surrender. In effect, the warring parties have given NATO the authority to force a peace-by killing anyone who stands in the way. Under the agreement, Bosnia and Herzegovina is split roughly in half: into a Serb republic and a Muslim-Croat federation, with a weak central government mostly for show. NATO troops will initially patrol a roughly two-mile-wide DMZ between them. Within 120 days, the combatants are required to remove their heavy weaponry to designated barracks. To make them, the 60,000-man occupying army (one third American, one third British and French, one third multinational, including Russian) can use any force necessary. At the Pentagon’s insistence, the rules of engagement are liberal. By and large, U.S. soldiers are free to shoot if they are even potentially threatened. The commander of the force, Adm. Leighton (Snuffy) Smith, has such broad powers that Pentagon wags are calling him “Duke Snuffy of Sarajevo.”
The congressional debate this month will reverberate with worries about “mission creep.” American soldiers sent to Somalia to provide humanitarian relief in late 1992 were increasingly drawn into “nation building” and caught in tribal warfare. When 18 soldiers died in a bungled helicopter raid, many Americans decided the price was too high. Actually, mission creep is a somewhat moot issue in Bosnia–but only because the mission can’t become any more ambitious than it already is. The occupying force will help oversee elections and play local cop. During the occupation of Haiti a year ago, American soldiers had to stand back and watch while thugs beat up the locals. In Bosnia, NATO soldiers will be allowed to step in.
Such broad-reaching power, of course, is a potential invitation to disaster. Senior NATO officers got a taste last week when they met with the U.N. peacekeepers they will replace. The UNPROFOR officials, bitter that Clinton never publicly thanked the United Nations last week, even though 209 U.N. soldiers have died in Bosnia, were scornful of the Dayton agreement. To the U.N. veterans, it appeared that the NATO officials had not begun to think through the complexities and dangers of relocating refugees and refereeing local disputes.
Missteps will likely be recorded by a CNN camera or any one of the thousands of journalists free to roam Bosnia. Unlike the gulf war, when journalists complained about being kept under wraps by Pentagon minders, Bosnia will be wide open to the press. Indeed, as part of their training, American GIs in Germany have been learning crowd control with a camera pressed in their faces. And for all the show of U. S. force, the agreement makes clear that the hair-trigger task of separating the warring parties is supposed to take place in the first 30 days, before most of the main occupying force has arrived. The transfer of turf won’t be pretty: on Saturday there were reports that Croat forces Were systematically looting and burning central Bosnian towns due to be handed to the Serbs.
It is far from certain that the Serbs and Muslims will be in a cooperative mood either. At Dayton, the peace agreement was virtually forced down their throats by the U.S. negotiators and Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic. In theory, the Americans had intervened in the civil war to protect the Bosnian Muslims from slow strangulation by the Bosnian Serbs. But during the siege of Dayton, the Americans’ chief ally was the Serb leader who had helped provoke the murderous civil war with his dreams of Greater Serbia. With his economy battered by international sanctions, Milosevic has now become a bully in the cause of peace.
Milosevic bonded with Holbrooke over Maine lobsters and tumblers of Scotch. “Dick, you’re a bullshit artist,” he said appreciatively. With little apparent concern, he traded away the Bosnian Serb strongholds in the Sarajevo suburbs. Largely cut out from the negotiations, the Bosnian Serb delegates stewed in their rooms. They were notably absent from the initialing ceremony and had to be cajoled into publicly accepting the terms the next day. Under the agreement, the two top Bosnian Serb hard-liners, political leader Radovan Karadzic and military leader Ratko Mladic, are barred from politics. Both have been indicted for war crimes by an international tribunal in The Hague. But the moderates replacing them may not be much better. Nikola Koljevic, the vice president of the self-styled Bosnian Serb parliament, is a Shakespearean scholar-who ordered the firebombing of Sarajevo’s national library.
America’s negotiators were not delicate about bringing their Muslim allies into line. After hearing of a leak from the closed-door sessions, Holbrooke grabbed Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic and yelled, “Did you do this?” Another time he seized Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic by the shoulder when he wandered off for a snack at a crucial moment. Even the normally mild Christopher yelled at Izetbegovic, who seemed dreamily detached at times. The Americans mocked the squabbling Bosnian delegation (Izetbegovic, Silajdzic and Foreign Minister Muhamed Sacirbey) as “Izzy, Silly, and Moe.”
In the end, the Muslims only grudgingly accepted the deal. “This is not a just peace, but we do need peace,” said Izetbegovic. He wasn’t wrong: the international community had in effect ratified the ethnic partition of his country. This, of course, is precisely what Clinton vowed not to do for his first two years in office. But it was the only realistic way to stop the fighting. Holbrooke and Christopher grasped a solution that all sides probably should’ve reached for three years ago. As Holbrooke’s mentor W. Averell Harriman once said after concluding an equally messy peace negotiation over Laos during the Vietnam War, it was “a good, bad deal.”
After 43 months of ethnic war, the warring parties acknowledged that they could not stop the horror. They surrendered, in effect, to NATO.
Civil war erupts in Yugoslavia in April 1992 after Bosnia and Herzegovina declares its independence and the Bosnian Serbs begin a siege of Sarajevo.
After 48 months of ethnic war, with an estimated 250,000 casualties, the Serbs are brought to the bargaining table by the NATO bombing of their positions.
The peace deal lets the Serbs keep 49 percent of the land and gives 51 percent to a Muslim-Croat federation. A NATO-led force of 60,000 troops will enforce the deal
