Against the background of the intense NATO bombing and UN shelling of Bosnian Serb positions, the United States took the diplomatic lead to finally conclude the fighting in the Balkans. Negotiations since the Vance Owen Peace Plan had never really succeeded in generating a plan to which all sides would be happy to subscribe. Several proposals were put forward in the years 1993 to 1995, one envisaging three republics in Bosnia-Hercegovina, and another pressing for a 51:49 split of territory between the Bosniacs and Croats, and the Bosnian Serbs. By 1995, however, the Americans realised that all of these plans, whether by the EU, the Contact Group or the United Nations, would not succeed unless they took charge of the negotiating process. This is the most interesting facet of the Dayton Agreement held at the Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio. A recent memoir by General Wesley Clark, who played a very important part in the process, reveals that the US chief negotiator, Richard Holbrooke, was well aware that the Serbs and Bosniacs were quite capable of creating divisions amongst the Europeans, or turning them against the Americans. Relegating the Europeans to a supporting role in essence prevented such a scenario from developing. In addition, military events on the ground had greatly helped the US negotiations, as the Croatian and Bosniac offensives had just about created the desired 51:49 division of territory that was long perceived as a workable framework for the future.
The negotiating positions of the three major regional powers at Dayton offer an insight into individual perspectives by 1995. The Serbian negotiating stance was fascinating, in the sense that Milosevic dominated the agenda and refused to allow the Bosnian Serbs to torpedo the talks. Perhaps for a brief moment in time a veil had been lifted, and the true balance of power as well as the hierarchy of command was finally revealed at Dayton. For Milosevic, time was beginning to run out. The wars had been disastrous for the Serbian economy, sanctions had hit his regime hard, and the international reputation of Serbs had been sullied. Milosevic’s casual abandonment of the Croatian Serbs and then the Bosnian Serbs demonstrated that they had been merely puppets for his own political ambitions, and when they had served their purposes he dropped them with alacrity. Of course, he tried to fashion the agreement to suit his purposes, and attempted to delay the arrival of foreign troops or limit their powers, but the United States refused to be drawn into yet another Balkan trick. At the end of the day, Milosevic was a political survivor. His attempts to play the nationalist card in both Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina had backfired badly, and it was now time to shore up his own regime in Serbia itself. The Croatian position under Tudjman was a reluctantly practical one. After all, it was American assistance that had formed the platform for Croatian military successes in 1995, and the withdrawal of that support would have very significant consequences. Tudjman strongly supported the Bosnian Croats, who were dissatisfied with the dominance of the Bosniacs in parts of the Federation, and aspired to an autonomous area like the Serbs, but the will of the international community was strong enough to keep these nationalistic tendencies under control. The biggest winners in the entire process were the Bosniacs, who managed to involve the world’s only remaining superpower in their region in a political, economic and military sense. Izetbegovic tried hard to expand US involvement in as much of the Bosniac-Croat Federation as possible, on all levels – from policing to military operations. His strategy was quite simple: the ineffectiveness of the Europeans in resolving the crisis meant that the best hope for peace and security for Bosniacs lay with the United States. In this respect, Dayton was a triumph for the victims of Serbian aggression.
The Dayton process culminated in a document called ‘The General Framework Agreement’, which was initialled by all three parties on 21 November before being formally signed at a ceremony in Paris on 14 December 1995. The paper set out in eleven annexes how the peace would be maintained, and included military aspects as well as regional stabilisation, inter-entity boundaries, elections, the constitution, arbitration, human rights, refugees and displaced persons, national monuments, public corporations and an international police task force. A new civil administration called the Office of the High Representative (OHR), the first of which was the Swedish politician Carl Bildt, was created to run the country. To make this comprehensive accord work, a large military formation called the Implementation Force (IFOR), comprising 60,000 soldiers, was deployed to Bosnia-Hercegovina in a plan called Operation Joint Endeavour. Unlike UNPROFOR, whose mandate ended with the deployment of IFOR, this was a NATO unit of which a third of the troops were from the United States and who possessed all the accoutrements for war, from tanks to supporting artillery. Remarkably, IFOR began deploying in Bosnia-Hercegovina just six days after the signing of the accord in Paris.
IFOR’s mandate was to last exactly one year, when it would be replaced by a new formation called the Stabilisation Force, or SFOR (Operation Joint Guard), which would be half its size. Unlike UNPROFOR, IFOR could ‘compel’ any of the parties that were interfering with its mandate on the ground, or in other words, engage in robust peace enforcement. As such it was extremely successful, and finally a sense of normality began to return to Bosnia-Hercegovina. IFOR’s successor, SFOR, has to date been reduced considerably from its peak size of 32,000 to a planned size of 7000 personnel by June 2004, and of the current 27 troop-contributing nations, 11 represent non-NATO forces. SFOR’s tasks have ranged from active patrols to arresting war criminals (21 by 2000), and helping to rebuild the shattered infrastructure of the country. Under the auspices of Operation Harvest, SFOR troops have collected around 11,000 weapons and over 40,000 hand grenades, as well as destroying over 2 million unsafe munitions from bombs to land mines. These forces have been instrumental in opening up safe routes for the civilians of Bosnia-Hercegovina and ensuring a level of security for people on all sides.
It is perhaps ironic that the very place where Milosevic had built up his political powerbase and reputation would ultimately prove to be his Achilles heel. The issue of autonomy had always been at the heart of the dispute between the majority Kosovan Albanians and the minority Serbs, who represented around 10 per cent of the population. These tensions that had been quite apparent at the end of the 1980s began to manifest themselves from 1996 onwards in terms of violence. By 1998, Serb forces (Army and Special Police Units) were openly fighting what they described as a terrorist organisation, the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK), and launched a major offensive that was characterised by killings, burning villages and forcing over 200,000 Kosovans to flee in fear. For the watching international community, it was all too familiar, as Milosevic applied his usual strategy for dealing with opposition. The consequences of a hands-off approach had already been demonstrated in the Balkans Wars of the early 1990s, and inevitably the regional costs would include the economic burden of feeding hundreds of thousands of refugees, as well as the real danger of spill-over in areas like Macedonia. The negotiating process revolved around the Contact Group, Richard Holbrooke, the United Nations, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and NATO, with the latter organisation taking a noticeable lead in terms of willingness to apply force to resolve the issue. In September 1998, the UN Security Council passed UNSCR 1199, which pushed for a ceasefire and the pull-back of military forces in Kosovo. In support of this diplomacy, NATO initiated activation orders for air strikes, and Holbrooke held face-to-face talks with Milosevic, eventually persuading him to accept two verification missions, one by NATO from the air called Operation Eagle Eye, and the other by the OSCE on the ground called the Kosovo Verification Mission. This agreement was rubber-stamped by the UN with the passing of UNSCR 1203. These verification missions that started in November revealed that Serb forces continued to flout the will of the international community, and in January 1999 found apparently hard evidence of a massacre of 45 Kosovo Albanians at a village called Racak. This incident helped to push all sides towards getting a meaningful resolution of the dispute, and talks were initiated between Milosevic, the leader of the shadow government of the Kosovo Albanians Dr Ibrahim Rugova, and the Contact Group, at Rambouillet in France on 6 February 1999. The first round of talks failed to reached a comprehensive settlement, and a second round, or the ‘Paris Follow-On Talks’ (15–18 March), led to the Kosovo Albanians signing up to an agreement that would allow a NATO-organised force into Kosovo itself. Milosevic, however, refused to accept such a proposition. In typical fashion, he had launched a major offensive in Kosovo while the talks were taking place, and was using the negotiations to merely build up his units so that he could dictate his own terms on the ground. On March 22, last-minute face-to-face talks between Richard Holbrooke and Milosevic in Belgrade failed, prompting NATO’s Secretary General Javier Solana, in consultation with the alliance members, to order SACEUER (Supreme Allied Commander, Europe) General Wesley Clark, to start the campaign the next day. NATO’s air operations began on 24 March 1999.
The Dayton Agreement effectively ended the fighting in the former Yugoslavia with the introduction of the Implementation Force (IFOR) into the region, and the creation of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) to direct civil affairs. IFOR was replaced by the Stabilisation Force (SFOR) after a year, and it continues to maintain a significant presence in the region. The Dayton Agreement was never conceived as a long-term solution, and at some stage in the future a comprehensive political settlement (without the presence of international forces) will have to be negotiated.
In retrospect, Operation Allied Force was a somewhat unusual and disjointed campaign for a military organisation that was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. In the run-up to conflict, NATO had planned for a wide range of contingencies concerning the use of force over Kosovo, but the failure of the negotiations appeared to catch the alliance by surprise. In a military sense, it certainly did not have enough aircraft in the theatre at the start of hostilities (these would grow steadily in number throughout the 78 days of bombing), and politically, divisions began to emerge amongst NATO countries when the bombing started. Consequently, these factors meant that the performance of the initial strategy and the effectiveness of NATO strikes were very mixed. In addition to the shortage of strike aircraft (just 120 on 24 March, rising to over 300 by the end of April), which reduced NATO’s ability to initiate a Desert Storm style of air offensive, the awful weather over the region severely degraded NATO ability to hit targets effectively. Consequently, the first phases of the campaign were indecisive and had a frustratingly slow effect on Serbian ethnic cleansing on the ground in Kosovo, which accelerated enormously with 800,000 of Kosovo’s population having been expelled by May. The campaign only started to have an impact when NATO escalated its bombing strategy to include Serbia itself, and neutralised power stations with graphite (soft bombs), and destroyed 34 bridges, 57 per cent of Serbia’s oil reserves, and all of the Yugoslav oil refineries. It was this ability to bring the war to the Serbian people, especially after the destruction of Serb radio and television in Belgrade on 23 April, that placed enormous pressure on Milosevic’s regime. The United States bore the burden of the campaign, contributing the bulk of the attack aircraft, which included B-52s, B-1B bombers and the B-2 Stealth Bombers, which flew 30-hour missions from their base in Missouri! Over 300 cruise missiles were fired during the course of the 78-day action. However, it was a very limited campaign in comparison with previous wars, with just 37,000 air sorties dropping an estimated 23,000 munitions, of which 35 per cent were precision-guided weapons, about four times the amount used during the Gulf War of 1991. In addition, despite not suffering a single fatality in combat, an F-16 and an F-117 Stealth Fighter were shot down. Tragically, the Chinese Embassy was also bombed on 7 May by accident, by a B-2 bomber with satellite-guided bombs (Joint Direct Attack Munitions – JDAMS) and the cause of this error was put down to using out-of-date maps. By early June it was quite clear that Milosevic was ready to negotiate, and on 9 June a military-technical agreement was signed between NATO and the Yugoslav authorities, which encompassed the withdrawal of Serb forces from Kosovo. UNSCR 1244 was passed the next day, which allowed a multinational force under Lt General Sir Michael Jackson (UK) to enter Kosovo to ensure peace and security, where they discovered evidence of widespread abuses of human rights.
The new millennium was a bad year for Milosevic, his former associates and rivals. In January 2000, the notorious Arkan was shot dead outside a fashionable Belgrade hotel, and great mystery surrounds who was behind his killing. Arkan naturally had many enemies, but he was also a major figure in Serbia’s criminal elite that controlled vast portions of the economy. Suspicions have fallen on Milosevic’s son, Marko, who was also allegedly heavily involved in this underworld, or Milosevic himself, who may have feared that Arkan may ‘spill the beans’ to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Or perhaps it was just gangster rivals. In August 2000, a former ally of Milosevic, Ivan Stambolic, suddenly disappeared without trace. Milosevic stood for re-election as Yugoslav President in autumn 2000, and despite losing substantially to his main rival, Vojislav Kostunica, the leader of the Democratic Party of Serbia, ‘Slobo’ tried to rig the elections as he had done on several occasions in the past. Nearly half a million people rose up in protest over this tactic on 5 October in Belgrade, and stormed the Parliament before setting fire to it. It was the last straw for the Serbian people, and Kostunica was propelled into power while Milosevic, realising that the game was up, retired to his Belgrade mansion. Under a dynamic Prime Minister, Zoran Djindjic, who was well aware of the need to improve relations with the international community, Milosevic was arrested in April 2001, before being handed over to the international court at The Hague in late June.
Milosevic’s trial (still on-going at the time of writing) started in February 2002, and has proved a difficult case to prosecute. The enterprising Zoran Djindjic was assassinated in March 2003 by a former special police unit called the ‘Red Berets’, and during the course of the investigation the body of former President Ivan Stambolic was found. Interestingly, Mirjana Markovic (Milosevic’s wife) and son, Marko, have been implicated in Stambolic’s murder as well as organised criminal activities, as once more the Red Berets (under direct orders) appeared to have committed this assassination. Both mother and son have now fled to Russia to escape an arrest warrant by Serbian police for their involvement in various crimes. On top of these startling revelations, Serbia’s last President, Milan Milutinovic (another ally of Milosevic), handed himself in to The Hague in January 2003 on charges of being a suspected war criminal. Undoubtedly, Serbian politics will be in turmoil for some time to come, as future leaders will have to deal with not only the destroyed reputation of the political body both domestically and internationally, but also the endemic corruption within significant aspects of the national economy, caused by the Milosevic clan and their supporters.
It is interesting to note that most of the major regional and international politicians involved in the Balkan Wars have bowed out from the public gaze in one form or another. Franjo Tudjman died in 1999, and Alija Izetbegovic passed away in 2003. In contrast, the ailing Slobodan Milosevic (his trial is often interrupted by illness) resides at The Hague while still being prosecuted for war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kosovo. John Major and Douglas Hurd, to name two of the British officials, have become elder statesmen though it must be uncomfortable watching the prosecution of a leader for war crimes that they treated with undue respect. President Bill Clinton has retired from office, though probably with the most honours for his efforts in resolving the fighting. Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was firmly behind the military action in Kosovo and deserves great credit for his actions, now finds himself mired in controversy over allegations of unwarranted aggression with American allies in the recent Gulf War II, which itself has significant potential for possible legal action in the future. The great negotiator Richard Holbrooke has also retired from public office, but typically is working towards the public good with his involvement in the fight against AIDS. General Wesley Clark retired not only from the US Army in 2000, but also from the recent race to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for President in 2004. At The Hague, the ICTY is making steady progress towards the prosecution of key figures on all sides involved in the war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. Fifty-nine (to date) are in custody and in various stages of the prosecution process. Many others are serving sentences, some of which are up to 40 years behind bars, and of these the most senior has been Biljana Plavsic (former Vice-President to Radovan Karadzic) who was sentenced to 11 years in jail for her activities and is currently serving this sentence in Sweden. The most notable absentees are Radovan Karadzic (last rumoured to be in Belgrade) and General Mladic. Clearly, it is imperative that both men are brought to trial as quickly as possible if the people of the Balkans are to move forward with dignity. It is also important to note that the Dayton Agreement was not a long-term fix, and at some stage will need to be addressed in a fundamental way. However, the maintenance of the status quo, at least for the foreseeable future, may be the most practical way ahead. Time, as the old cliché suggests, is a great healer, and a new generation of Bosniacs, Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs may be more willing to accommodate each other than the older generation that endured the horror of the wars. The fundamental lesson from the Balkan Wars of the 1990s is that the international community must not treat aggressors and victims with moral equivalence, and must be prepared to call the bluff of dictators as well as intervene with overwhelming military force. Sadly, the continuing existence of long-standing territorial disputes in global affairs, and the unwillingness of nation-states to make these critical distinctions, while civilian populations endure immense suffering, suggest that the lessons of the former Yugoslavia were short-lived.