The trip to Greece and Macedonia was only part of the itinerary that busy September 4. From Skopje we headed to Ankara for an overnight visit to meet with Bosnian president Izetbegovic and his team and secure his support for our agreed principles, then back to Belgrade to get the same from Milosevic. Nothing was easy.
We were trying to achieve agreement on what was essentially a repeat of the previous summer’s Contact Group plan on how Bosnia would be divided 51–49, and spelling out what kind of autonomy the two elements of the federal structures would have would become the first objective of the shuttle. We called the paper that we intended to announce in Geneva on September 8 the “Agreed Principles.” Those principles, however, weren’t so agreed at first. Izetbegovic reluctantly agreed to the two entities—the Federation and the Sprska Republic—but objected to the name for the latter, since the use of the term republic implied sovereignty, or at least the possibility that the Bosnian Serbs would someday achieve it. For his part, Milosevic objected to calling Bosnia a republic and preferred a weaker formulation like union, which could suggest more of a confederation than a unitary state. He also insisted that the Serb entity be allowed to refer to itself as a republic, which would give him far more latitude in dealing with the Bosnian Serb leadership.
But Milosevic had also agreed to Bosnia’s “present borders” (that is, no land grabs to be given over to Serbia) and “continuing international recognition,” a concession to the fact that Bosnia was indeed in existence and that the Serbs recognized this fact.
In Ankara, Izetbegovic agreed to participate in Geneva by sending his foreign minister, Mo Sacirbey, to join the Yugoslav foreign minister, Milan Milutinovic, and the Croat foreign minister, Mate Granic.
As the hour of 10 A.M. on September 8 approached, there was no sign of Sacirbey and Holbrooke was going into full-scale panic mode. Unbeknownst to me, he had had a rough telephone conversation earlier in the morning with Sacirbey, who had just insisted that in the document “Bosnia-Hercegovina” must be called the “Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina,” a change that would be a bridge too far for the Serbs (especially at this late hour).
After that morning phone call—which at the time I knew nothing about—Dick asked me calmly around 9 A.M. to make sure Sacirbey arrived okay. This wasn’t the sort of request Holbrooke usually made of me, but I agreed to do so and asked if he would like me to do the same with Milutinovic and Granic. He said no need, so I immediately called the Bosnian mission in Geneva and reached Sacirbey, who assured me he was getting ready and would be there soon. Around 9:30 I called again and was told he had left for the U.S. mission. A few minutes before 10 A.M., there was no sign of Sacirbey and Holbrooke approached me in a rage.
“I asked you to do one thing. One thing. One thing only, to deliver Sacirbey, and he’s not here!” His shouting was audible throughout the room as people looked over to see what was going on. On the one hand I thought that at forty-three I was a little too old to be screamed at in a way that I hadn’t heard since childhood. His behavior was particularly egregious in that he had not bothered to tell me that he had had a shouting match with Sacirbey minutes earlier over the inclusion of the word republic. On the other hand, I composed myself long enough to think about the unimaginable pressure he was under. The press was already there, and if for some reason Sacirbey were not to show it would strike a potential deathblow to his management of the process. A Geneva meeting without the Bosnians would have been a fiasco, and I knew Washington would turn such a disaster into a blame-Holbrooke moment. I had already learned—and would again later—how lonely the position of a special envoy can be. And besides, as Strobe Talbott had told me earlier, “when dealing with Holbrooke, one has to accept the good along with the bad. It is a total package.” I decided to stand there and take it, and to assure him I would find Sacirbey.
A minute later Sacirbey walked in, apologizing for being late due to the Geneva traffic. Holbrooke greeted him as a long-lost family member, and I took my seat immediately behind Holbrooke. Holbrooke chaired the meeting, starting with his insistence that Sacirbey, Granic, and Milutinovic shake hands for the assembled press while representatives from the Contact Group, nine seats in all, gathered around a small table.
Holbrooke moved the meeting along quickly, not wanting to give anyone time to think of some way to mess it up. By prior agreement, there was no discussion about the Joint Agreed Principles, while each participant made a short statement. A member from the Yugoslav delegation, the “vice president” of the Bosnian Serbs, Nikola Koljevic, rose to make a statement from the backbench to protest the proceedings, but he was ruled out of order. The press was allowed to photograph the event, and it was over almost before it started.
The shuttle continued for almost three weeks before all the delegations were to head to Wright-Patterson Air Fore Base, near Dayton, Ohio, for still another three-week process, which would finally conclude the “Dayton Peace Accords.” Just days after Geneva, on September 13, we were back in the field to negotiate a halt to the bombing in return for lifting the siege of Sarajevo.
Milosevic had asked us to come to his hunting lodge north of Belgrade, in the hilly part of Vojvodina known as Fruska Gora. In this meeting he got right to the point about the ongoing bombing campaign against Serb forces in Bosnia. The campaign had continued since Paris with only a short pause to allow for what turned out to be fruitless conversations between UN commanders and the Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic. Milosevic was adamant that the bombing needed to stop if more progress was to be achieved toward a peace accord. He proposed a general cease-fire on the ground. Cease-fires in Bosnia, as in many other places, seldom held for long if no political arrangement quickly followed. We were not ready with a political arrangement. The Joint Agreed Principles had begun the process, but there was much to be done. We proposed instead that Bosnian Serb forces withdraw from around Sarajevo, lifting a siege of that city that had become the longest siege in Europe since World War II.
Milosevic explained that he could not negotiate this on his own. Mladic and Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic would have to do it.
“And they are here.”
“Where?” Holbrooke asked in astonishment.
“Over there.” Milosevic gestured over his shoulder. “In a villa.”
Holbrooke asked for a break and huddled with the team.
“Should we talk with them?”
Everyone agreed with should.
“Should I shake their hand?” Holbrooke asked. I thought it was about as inappropriate a question as I could imagine. Given how far we had gone in just two weeks, that we were standing on the cusp of ending years of brutal killing in the Balkans, and of lifting the siege of Sarajevo, how could he ask whether to shake the hand of people we knew would eventually be in prison if there were any justice in the process?
“Dick, for Christ sake, do it, and let’s get on with this and go home.” No one disagreed.
As Mladic and Karadzic walked in, each with his own awkward gait, they both looked to me like the Serb peasants they were: Mladic a short, murderous one, and Karadzic a tall, murderous one—the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt observed at the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in the early 1960s. Holbrooke greeted them as stiffly as possible, though he did shake hands with both. Later a journalist would ask me whether he shook hands with them, and I responded I hadn’t noticed.
Mladic acted as though he had been brought there under duress, with Karadzic acting as the conciliator, urging Mladic not to leave and occasionally offering his considered opinion that all the violence was caused by the Muslims and Croats. He explained that the Bosnian Serbs were the victims while maintaining a stranglehold on the lives of two hundred thousand people living in Sarajevo. He frequently invoked the name of Jimmy Carter, who had met with him and other Bosnian Serbs in their “capital” of Pale and made a statement after his talks that had convinced the Bosnian Serbs that he was their friend.
With no progress, the discussions broke for dinner, and I found myself sitting across from Mladic, who remained hunched over his food, chewing on a bone held in his hands, having dispensed with the knife and fork. We talked a little, but he was not interested in substance, asking me gruffly how it was I could speak some Serbian.
After dinner the delegations sat outside on a large veranda. After what we assumed was some prompting from Milosevic, Karadzic surprised us with a proposal that the U.S. side work on a document. If for no other reason than to get away from this miserable Bosnian Serb delegation, all of us—including Bob Owen, Don Kerrick, and Jim Pardew—worked on a statement that in effect meant the Bosnian Serbs would pull their forces from Sarajevo. Discussions over the document went to deep into the night, with Milosevic playing a passive role and Karadzic urging his military colleague to participate with General Wes Clark on defining the weapons to be withdrawn. Holbrooke explained that the bombing would continue unless there was an agreement on Sarajevo. In fact, Admiral Bill Owens, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had told us a week before that almost all the targets had already been struck, and that at best there were just a few more days before aircrews would in effect be asked to “bomb rubble.” Holbrooke had asked for the pace of the attacks to be slowed, a gross interference in operations that was not well received within the military. We knew that unless there was a major decision to start hitting infrastructure and other targets, the bombing was going to be over soon. But Holbrooke wasn’t about to reveal that to the delegation.
At 2 A.M. Wes Clark reported that the document was agreed to. Holbrooke had wisely resisted the Bosnian Serb demand that he sign; he did not have Washington’s authorization to negotiate such an instrument in the first place. If he tried to send it back for the dreaded clearance process in order to get permission to sign, it would have been returned with numerous proposed changes. But when it was done and sent in as final, no one in Washington, not even the wordsmithing NSC staff, tried to argue.
The Bosnians, however, were another story. When we met with them two days later in the war-torn city of Mostar, some two hours south of Sarajevo, President Izetbegovic and Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic were visibly angry that the bombing had been halted. I told Holbrooke that I thought they were not convinced that the pullback would be for real, and that their opposition would cool in the days ahead. Holbrooke was sufficiently alarmed that he asked Bob Owen and me to accompany Silajdzic back to Sarajevo over the same road that Bob Frasure and the others had been killed on a couple of weeks before. As we walked to the vehicle, Holbrooke gave Bob and me tips on how to handle Silajdzic, seemingly oblivious to the fact that we were being asked to go over a mountain road whose condition had caused the fatal accident involving our colleagues.
Bob and I sat with Silajdzic in the backseat of the SUV and talked about everything under the sun—his time in the United States, his interest in Turkey, even his academic work on Albanians, a subject on which I was able to keep up my end of the discussion. We slowly made our way up to Mount Igman and then down to Sarajevo below, and stopped at the spot where the French armored personnel carrier had fallen off the road. I looked around at what a prosaic place it was; nothing special, as we looked at the scrub pine. The Bosnian leaders did not have much good to say about Frasure, because in trying to get something done, Bob had also talked to the other side. Reflecting on our conversations in Mostar, it looked like we were in for some of the same treatment. That evening we had dinner with Silajdzic at a Sarajevo restaurant where the U.S. ambassador, John Menzies, who had lived for months under Serb shelling, joined us.
Sarajevo was a proud city, one of the great sites of European civilization, a meeting between East and West; in less than thirty minutes one could have walked from the Habsburg Empire to the Ottoman Empire. But now whole parts of it lay in ruins. The old Turkish library was a pile of rubble after a direct hit by Serb artillery. The Hotel Evropa, my favorite place to stay when I visited during the 1970s, also was a ruin. I wondered if it would ever be rebuilt. The Holiday Inn, where I had spent a couple of days the previous January, was shot through by snipers firing automatic weapons from a street known as “sniper alley.” The president’s building, a stately old stone edifice built in a grand Habsburg style, was surrounded by sandbags and barriers. Nothing in the city had been painted in years, and many of the trees that had adorned its boulevards had been cut down for desperately needed firewood. Like a city hit by a natural calamity, it begged the question of whether it was worth rebuilding.
The next morning, an embassy vehicle drove us out to the airport, across the empty runway, still not cleared for aircraft use, and then back onto the dirt road, and finally up to the top of the mountain, where a French helicopter was waiting. We flew down from the mountain, hugging the tops of the trees as we made our way out to the Drina River valley and then the coast to meet up with a small military plane that would catch up to Holbrooke and the rest of the team, now arriving in Belgrade, whom we could debrief about our conversations with the Bosnians.
Owen and I accompanied Holbrooke and the rest of the team back into Sarajevo two days later on the first plane to use the newly opened airport. With the cease-fire implemented, supplies began flowing into the city. As we emerged from the cars in front of the presidential building, a crowd had begun to form and we could hear applause as we made our way inside. By the time we emerged after a lengthy and again disagreeable meeting with Izetbegovic, who was demanding more NATO air action against the Serbs, the crowd outside roared its approval. We all were moved, Holbrooke almost to tears. I told him to wave at them, and he finally did, awkwardly and reluctantly. He knew, as did the rest of us, that there was much to be done before taking any bows.
By the end of October we had secured still another document: Further Agreed Principles. The document was similar in its brevity to the Agreed Principles, but instead of showing how Bosnia would be divided, this one demonstrated how the country would be united by joint institutions, including a collective presidency and a national parliament. The Serbs hated the draft, and the Bosnians were not enthusiastic either (largely because with every document the chance of restarting a bombing campaign receded), but by the time we had brought them all around a table, this time in New York, they had agreed. All that remained was to agree to a cease-fire and head to Wright-Patterson in Ohio, our chosen site for the peace talks.
The story of the Dayton Peace Accords, the cliffhangers, the all-nighters, has been told and retold, most authoritatively by Holbrooke himself in his book To End a War. The endgame in the Bosnian war that took us most of September and October to secure agreement on included the lifting of the siege of Sarajevo and a cease-fire as we got ready to head to peace talks in Dayton. In Dayton itself, we worked out the constitution to allow the agreed principles to be implemented, and finally agreed on a map and a unified Sarajevo.
Dayton had its painful moments. Holbrooke, to everyone’s consternation (especially Warren Christopher, who visited the talks several times), had invited his journalist wife, Kati Marton, to attend the negotiations, often sending her on walks with Haris Silajdzic and other senior interlocutors. And when David Rohde, a U.S. journalist back in Bosnia, had rented a vehicle to head into Bosnian Serb territory to look for mass grave sites, he was arrested by members of a local Bosnian Serb militia unit. We approached Milosevic for help in releasing the journalist, and he made calls back through his security services to find the hapless journalist and return him to Sarajevo. Holbrooke brought Kati to see Milosevic and seek his help in the name of the Committee for the Protection of Journalists.
At one morning staff meeting, after a particularly short night of sleep, Holbrooke mentioned an idea to which I responded, “We’ll put it in Kati’s talking points.” This sarcastic comment earned me a trip to the woodshed. As Holbrooke excoriated me, I did nothing except bite the inside of my cheek, shake my head, and walk out. He was in charge of the talks, and their failure would not be laid at anyone’s doorstep except his own. I respected that fact, but some of his actions were becoming hard to take.
Dayton was Holbrooke’s signature work. One of the greatest diplomats of his time would be known for an agreement among warring factions in a Balkan country no one had ever heard of before or has much since. Yet Holbrooke understood, and had the capacity to make others understand, the importance of what he was doing in a broader context. With Europe and the United States drifting apart, he brought them closer together. With questions emerging about U.S. leadership in the world, he demonstrated it was alive and well. With concepts of universal justice emerging on the international stage, he brought them to the practical world, where they have to live. And to diplomats everywhere, he showed that the profession was also alive and well, and that courageous and driven individuals like Dick Holbrooke could make a huge difference.
An hour before the initialing of the agreement, Holbrooke asked me to make sure all was good with the Serb delegation, which had made the most last-minute concessions. I went over to Milosevic’s suite and asked him how the Serb delegation was holding up.
“Well, I’m very happy,” Milosevic said, “but [the head of the Bosnian Serbs, Momcilo] Krajisnic is not.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“In a coma,” he said with a shrug. “It’s all right, not your problem.”
I told Holbrooke that everything was a go. Krajisnic was not pleased, but Milosevic would initial for the Serb delegation and he acted like he couldn’t care less what the Bosnian Serb leader was thinking. The deal was done. A war that had seen hundreds of thousands of people killed and wounded and millions displaced from their homes was over.
“Then let’s get over to the ceremony,” Holbrooke responded while putting his tie on, fumbling with it in the anticipation of something we had waited so long for.
We walked out excitedly from the building that housed our delegation. “Are we late?” Holbrooke asked as we picked up the pace. The day-in, day-out tension of the last few months wouldn’t allow us to relax. We began to jog the three hundred yards to the building, and then, for no apparent reason, with a hundred yards to go we started sprinting, racing each other until we got to the entrance, exhausted again.