Yugoslavia had started as the smallest of crises, a blip on the radar at a historic time when so much else that was taking place was so positive. The end of the Cold War inaugurated a period of almost unparalleled optimism, particularly in central Europe and most especially among the countries that had involuntarily been part of the Soviet Union’s empire for so long: Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Finally, in countries where democracy had been suppressed for almost forty-five years, ordinary people were passionate about long-awaited democratic reforms and a chance at embryonic capitalism, which might provide a better material life, not only for their children in the future, but perhaps even for themselves in the present.
The one exception to the generally hopeful picture in the old communist world was Yugoslavia, where it was not so much democracy that had been suppressed—the Yugoslavs had enjoyed considerably more personal and economic freedom than the people of any other Eastern European country—but nationalism. The price of surface unity in Yugoslavia had been the forceful restraint of the great ethnic differences among the various components of this unlikely country, one that had been stapled together after the end of World War I, and where Serb Orthodox Catholic, Croatian and Slovenian Roman Catholic, and Bosnian and Kosovar Muslim lived in uneasy accord, an accord ensured by the authoritarian regime. In Yugoslavia as the Cold War ended, many non-Serb Yugoslavs were growing particularly nervous about Serb nationalism emanating from Belgrade. On a map of Europe that was otherwise full of bright promise, of people gaining greater freedom, Yugoslavia was the one country that cast a dark shadow.
By early 1990, it was increasingly clear that Yugoslavia would probably not hold together as a unified country. The forces of freedom that had come with the collapse of the communist empire and the destruction of the Berlin Wall had an additional and somewhat different meaning in many parts of Yugoslavia. In both Slovenia and Croatia, for example, it meant not merely freedom from Moscow and from communism, but freedom from rule by Belgrade. Both the Slovenians and the Croatians were anxious to leave the Yugoslav federation and become independent nations. At the same time, a virulent Serb nationalism seemed on the rise, and any move toward independence by any of the country’s former components might be used as an excuse for the Serbs to move against them. The most likely targets were Bosnia, perhaps parts of Croatia, and a part of the country that had almost unique historical significance for the Serbs—Kosovo.
In late February 1990 with Yugoslavia moving steadily toward what appeared to be a breaking point, Larry Eagleburger, then deputy secretary of state in the Bush administration and one of the most experienced American foreign service officers of the last twenty-five years, visited his old stomping grounds in Belgrade. He had spent eight years in Yugoslavia as a foreign service officer. He had been only thirty-two years old when he began his first tour of duty in 1962; and shortly after he had arrived, there had been a catastrophic earthquake in Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, which was a part of the federation. Eagleburger had taken over and directed the immensely successful relief activities, including the construction of an army field hospital in the city, thereby earning from the Yugoslavs the nickname Lawrence of Macedonia. His second tour had come in the late seventies, when Jimmy Carter was president and Eagleburger was named ambassador to Belgrade. He had been welcomed back as something of a national hero.
Now in 1990 he was returning again, this time as a senior administration official to deal with the internal tensions that had been escalating in Yugoslavia since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and to try to reconcile, as one friend said, the irreconcilable. In part because he knew the terrain well, Eagleburger was, his close friends thought, quite reluctant to make this trip. He was unhappy about coming back to a place he knew and had once loved, and averse to dealing with explosive forces he wanted no part of as the nation seemed to be careening toward some kind of violent end. For he sensed that the kind of military commitment it might take to stop the violence on the part of the Western world, most notably the United States of America, was almost surely lacking.
But the pressure on him to give it one last try had been mounting for weeks, most of it from people in the American embassy in Belgrade. There it was believed that if any outsider had the authority and the leverage to make these people see what Westerners believed was a rational solution to their problems, it was their old friend Larry Eagleburger. He had been visiting some of the emerging democracies in Eastern Europe at the time, and arrangements were made for him to visit Belgrade as well. Privately he was quite ambivalent about the trip. There were several reasons, one of which was a commitment he had made to the Senate during his confirmation hearings several months earlier not to get involved in Yugoslav affairs. He had, during a relatively brief period out of government, served with Kissinger Associates, a high-powered, supremely well-connected lobbying and consulting firm, where he had made some minor representations for Yugoslav companies, including the maker of the ill-fated Yugo. The net value of his services was small, but there had been the possibility of a conflict of interest. Some of the attacks upon him were viewed by his friends as driven not so much by a genuine belief in that possibility, but by the fact that Jesse Helms, a powerful force on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, though like Eagleburger a Republican, was far to the right of Eagleburger and regarded him as Henry Kissinger’s man, a representative of the old moderate bipartisan foreign policy establishment, which, of course, he was. But a more important reason for his reluctance, some of his colleagues believed, was a prescient sense that things were not going to end well in Yugoslavia. He had just enough knowledge of the forces at work in both countries, Yugoslavia and the United States, to know that there was no conceivable happy ending to this story. Yugoslavia was heading into a downward spiral where the leverage of the United States was likely to be minimal. Besides, he already knew something that all the bright, idealistic, younger officers underneath him who were pushing for greater activism did not know, that the deal was done. The Bush administration had already made its decisions. So it did not matter which options appeared to be open, for in reality they were already closed.
Because James Baker, the secretary of state, was preoccupied with higher-priority issues, such as the evolution of the new Russia, the creation of a single, unified Germany, and events in the Middle East, once Eagleburger was drawn back into Yugoslavia, the issue was likely to remain in his permanent custody. That was not something he sought—an endlessly draining loser that offered few positive options. Some friends felt he had a sixth sense of the future. Yugoslavia would continue to unravel.
As he had suspected, it did not turn out to be a pleasant visit. Eagleburger met with almost every player in this mounting psychodrama. All the more powerful forces suddenly at play, unlike those in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, were heading in what the United States and others in the West would deem a negative direction. He had warned the Slovenes and Croats not to break away from the federation, but he sensed that his words had little weight. They were going to do what suited them and seek long-awaited independence. Then he had engaged in a long, hard session with Slobodan Milosevic, the shrewd, aggressive, jingoistic leader of the Serbs. Eagleburger was well aware that Milosevic had been deliberately fanning the rising ethnic tensions and exploiting them for more than three years as a means of enhancing his own power. Once the two men had been close, or relatively close for an American ambassador and a young, rising apparatchik in a communist country, and some in the embassy had thought of Milosevic, if not exactly as a protégé of Eagleburger’s, as one of his favorites. Milosevic was, it seemed, a bright young man on the rise who in Eagleburger’s eyes represented the new breed of Yugoslav leader, someone who could and would help navigate his country toward the more blessed shores of capitalism. As the head of one of Belgrade’s banks, Milosevic, in comparison with those who had gone before him, appeared to Eagleburger to be remarkably free of dogma. That would certainly turn out to be true—opportunism rather than dogma was at the heart of his every move.
There were, however, a number of Slobodan Milosevics. There was Milosevic One, the original, dutiful Communist Party believer. The man Eagle-burger had liked and had tried to take under his wing was Milosevic Two, the young banker flirting with capitalism. To the Americans stationed in Belgrade, tired of the old communist leaders with their closed minds and ideological mantras, Milosevic Two had seemed like the kind of man who was the hope for the future, a new kind of leader, a modern technocrat, more pragmatic, better educated, less bound by all the old communist orthodoxies. Or as one American said, “Our kind of guy, not one of the old brain-dead Tito hacks, but instead a guy you could go to a nightclub drinking with and he would order Scotch instead of slivovitz.” In the view of Eagleburger, the new generation of ascending leaders like Milosevic was simply smarter, quicker, and more open than the generation preceding them, which, Americans believed, had learned nothing since its leadership had come down from the mountains with Tito in 1945. The new technocrats had less to unlearn than their seniors, and Milosevic, quick, surprisingly facile, able to understand what Westerners wanted and the benefits of dealing with them, was clearly a rising star.
Then in more recent years as the communist world around him had begun to implode, Milosevic had changed again and started his ruthless exploitation of the latent and ever-potent Serb nationalism, playing in particular on Serbian fears of the Kosovo Albanians. That was Milosevic Three, the supernationalist Milosevic, a new and truly dangerous figure. No wonder that Eagleburger had not been eager to meet with his latest incarnation. The real Milosevic, it now appeared, represented a breed as old as time itself, a complete cynic who believed in nothing save his own rise to power, used situational ethics in all critical moments, and therefore was the principal author of the tragic chapter about to unfold in the history of Yugoslavia. While many other bright, new democratic leaders were coming to the fore in much of the former communist world, men and women who had paid a high price for their beliefs in the past and were now looking to the future, Milosevic intended to sustain the past by exploiting the ethnic hatreds that had existed in his country just under the surface for centuries.
The Milosevic and the Eagleburger who were about to meet in 1990 were very different from the two men who had met just two years earlier in the summer of 1988, when Milosevic Two was just beginning to morph into Milosevic Three. Few Westerners had yet detected the change. Eagleburger had come back to Belgrade for a brief visit, and Jack Scanlan, then the American ambassador and something of an Eagleburger protégé—he had been deputy chief of mission under Eagleburger when the latter was ambassador—took his former boss to see the Serb leader. Their meeting was one of genuine warmth and affection, two old friends exceptionally glad to see each other and discovering that they wanted the same things and were still in tune. But just a year later, it became clear that Milosevic Three had replaced Milosevic Two and was playing the most important role in tearing the fabric of Yugoslavia apart. By then, his tour of duty in Belgrade over, Scanlan was back in Washington, and he dropped by Eagleburger’s office to see his sponsor, who was deputy secretary of state. “Your friend Milosevic is beginning to cause a lot of trouble over there,” Eagleburger said. “But, Larry,” Scanlan answered, “I met him at your dinner table.”1
Now, in February 1990, summoned back to Belgrade, Eagleburger was not thrilled about meeting his former protégé. “I thought he was a liberal; he talked so convincingly about westernizing Yugoslavia’s economy,” Eagle-burger told another of his protégés, Warren Zimmermann, the American ambassador who had replaced Scanlan. “I just must have been wrong.” Zimmermann did not think Eagleburger had been wrong, just that Milosevic was a more flexible apparatchik than most, with a chameleon-like ability to adjust to different circumstances, and a remarkable lack of commitment to ideology, which had served him well in the rapidly changing political arena in which he had come to power.2 Eagleburger’s meeting with Milosevic was particularly heated. Milosevic insisted that he was being accused unfairly for everything that was going wrong in Yugoslavia. Why did the West always blame the Serbs? he asked. Look what has been done to us by our enemies over the years. It was a typical Milosevic performance, one that all too many Westerners would come to recognize in the following months and years. Of the things being done to the Serbs by others in the country, Milosevic was infinitely well-informed; of the many things being done to others by the Serbs, he always knew absolutely nothing but would be glad, if given the right information, to check them out.
There was no common ground. Eagleburger and Milosevic, once relatively good friends, could, like their respective countries, find no acceptable accord. The United States had sent its best player to play its best card, and it had not worked. There was no reward for stored-up goodwill or favors done in the past, nor was there any reward for appeals to Milosevic about the economic and political benefits of a more humane Yugoslavia, one that avoided human rights violations. The only thing that would catch Milosevic’s attention, Eagleburger suspected, was a cold-blooded threat backed by genuine military force.
On the second night of Eagleburger’s visit, Warren Zimmermann did something that, for an American in Belgrade, was groundbreaking. He invited about fifteen members of opposition groups representing the different ethnic factions throughout the country to a meeting at his residence. Invisible men became, for the first time, visible, people who had never been to the American ambassador’s residence came, and many who had never spoken before spoke freely that night. Some voices were for the dismemberment of the country, some for making it more of a true confederation, some for holding on if possible to the best of what existed. Eagleburger went around the room asking people what they thought was going to happen next. If years later the evening could be remembered for the warning signals of what was soon to come, it was also, in its pluralism, a reminder of what might have been. Louis Sell, the embassy’s political counselor, was intrigued by the diversity of it, but later the thing he recalled most clearly was the voice of the Slovenians.
When Eagleburger asked if anyone in the room favored the end of Yugoslavia as a unified country, Peter Jambrek from Slovenia was the only one to answer in the affirmative. He also said that his party, the noncommunist DEMOS, was likely to win the upcoming election in Slovenia, and that it would quickly move toward independence, both of which predictions would prove true. Then at the very end of the evening, Jambrek turned the tables and quietly asked Eagleburger a question: If we leave Yugoslavia, what will the United States do? At first Eagleburger was a bit taken aback; it was hardly a question he was eager to respond to. Finally, he answered that the United States hoped Slovenia would not leave the federation, but in the end we would not do anything to force the Slovenian government’s policies. Jambrek thanked Eagleburger for his answer.
It had not at first seemed like the highlight of the meeting, but almost ten years later, what Louis Sell, by then retired from the foreign service, recalled most vividly were Jambrek’s question and Eagleburger’s answer. The Slovenians, Sell remembered, unlike some of the others, had been polite and had not made a lot of noise, but they had got what they wanted, effectively a green light. The deed was done. Word of what Eagleburger had said spread like a brush fire throughout Slovenia, where it was viewed as the final step in the move to independence, for the Slovenians were already aware that the Germans, culturally, socially, religiously, and historically their allies, favored their independence. Nor was it likely to be a solitary act. Slovenian independence would trigger Croatian independence, which would, it was believed by many, inevitably trigger Serbian military moves against Croatia as well as against an extremely naked and vulnerable part of the federation, Bosnia. Thus the stage was being set for tragedy.
To Eagleburger the trip to Yugoslavia was immensely disheartening. When he returned to Washington, he was much chastened. “You guys told me it was bad and getting worse,” he told his aides. “Well, I want you to know that it’s much worse than anyone thought. It’s going to be much bloodier than we thought.” But it had been a small dark moment, a rare exception to the general mood in that region, where, because of the end of communism, almost all the news was good. The events in the Soviet Union and in Germany, not to mention Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest, were much more positive and were all viewed as far more important. Strikingly, in a book written by Michael Beschloss, the diplomatic historian, and Strobe Talbott, then the Time magazine Washington bureau chief, an excellent, almost minute-by-minute chronicle of critical events from 1989 to 1991 in Washington, Moscow, and Germany, there is only the most fleeting mention of Yugoslavia, and not a single mention of Slobodan Milosevic.
The Eagleburger trip to Yugoslavia marked, without anyone realizing it, the end of one era and the beginning of another. We had sent as able a man as the State Department had produced in the postwar era, and one relatively predictable question had revealed a complete lack of a policy for the future in that area. Perhaps there was a generational divide. Men like Eagleburger and many others in the administration he served had done extremely well in confronting previous crises and tensions, where for more than forty years those who wore the black hats were always clearly labeled—they were communists. But now these experts seemed to have trouble adjusting to a new kind of crisis, where the men wearing black hats in Europe were no longer controlled or driven by Moscow. They were just men in black hats capable of doing a great deal of harm. In this new era, evil was simply evil, albeit localized. It no longer bore a recognizable brand name that would cause Washington to spring to readiness, and where there would be large domestic American political constituencies pledged to counteraction. The talents and the experiences of the last forty years had left many senior national security people somewhat slow to spot a very different kind of crisis and ill-prepared to respond.