Single Shell Set Off Tripwire for NATO Reversal

Hundreds of people were hurrying through the downtown streets of Sarajevo last Monday, to buy a loaf of bread or a few onions or just to share a cup of coffee with friends, when a single mortar shell crashed into the crowds.

As after so many shellings before, there was pandemonium and blood everywhere, and cries of grief and outrage filled the air. The dead and the dying once again all but covered the sidewalks, lying amid scattered shopping bags and jagged shrapnel. Thirty-seven people had been killed and more than 100 wounded.

Within hours, Anthony Lake, President Clinton’s national security adviser, was on the telephone from Washington to his counterparts in London and Paris. This time, instead of the usual doubts and dithering, there was a bold consensus to act.

“We agreed that there had to be a strong response and not simply a proportionate response,” said a senior U.S. official familiar with the events. “We agreed right away. It was wonderful.”

Thirty-nine hours after the Sarajevo massacre, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization launched the most massive air strike in the alliance’s history. U.S. and allied warplanes streaked across the skies over Bosnia-Herzegovina, bombing Bosnian Serb targets without mercy.

The Bosnian Serb shelling of Sarajevo had tripped the wire on a precariously assembled weapon that had been cocked by the last several months of negotiation and consensus-building by Washington and its European allies.

Partly by happenstance, partly by design, new political developments, diplomacy and front-line clashes combined to make possible a complete reversal of the West’s tepid response to the bloodletting in Bosnia’s 3 1/2-year war.

Dramatic shifts on the battlefield coincided with--and in some cases encouraged--fresh interest and bolder assertiveness, especially in Washington and Paris, after years of failure, frustration and humiliation.

Last week’s air war was able to take place because Washington and its European allies finally agreed on the need for a tougher approach to ending the Bosnian war and because the United Nations was deliberately sidelined in the decision-making process.

The U.S.-European consensus was built over the summer in meetings, through transatlantic telephone calls and with high-gear shuttle diplomacy. Washington, from a safe distance, had long advocated tougher--”more robust,” in the language of diplomacy--action against Serbian separatists. Paris and London, with troops on the ground in the Balkans and vulnerable to capture or worse, had usually demurred.

Worries Over U.N.

Chastened by the taking of hundreds of U.N. peacekeepers as hostages in May following “pinprick” NATO air strikes, the allies were faced with a growing sense that the United Nations could not continue under its traditional flag of neutrality. And it was becoming clear to Western leaders that something would have to be done before winter, which in the harsh Bosnian hinterland begins in October.

Changes began to evolve in earnest around the time of the fall of Srebrenica, a U.N.-designated “safe area” that was overrun July 11 by the Bosnian Serb army. More than 20,000 Muslim refugees were brutally expelled, and many young men summarily executed, according to witnesses.

The world was outraged--again. Alarmed that the safe area of Gorazde was also in danger, French President Jacques Chirac demanded action. In part to counter Chirac, British Prime Minister John Major called a London meeting of foreign and defense ministers to decide what to do.

Painfully aware that the credibility of the West was at stake in Bosnia, the officials who gathered July 21 at the stately 19th-Century Lancaster House in central London agreed on three points that would turn out to change the course of the war significantly.

Instead of the empty threats that such meetings had produced before, the officials agreed on the wider use of air strikes, first to protect Gorazde and other safe areas, including Sarajevo; on the use of the newly ordered Anglo-French rapid-reaction force, and on reform of the “dual-key system” that had given the United Nations a veto over air strikes.

“The London conference broke the logjam,” one military specialist said in London. “The NATO commanders decided . . . to scrap the idea of proportionate response--that is, a single air strike for a Bosnian Serb shelling. Now NATO’s response could be disproportionate if the commanders chose. They agreed on the much larger use of air power.”

“That meant the day of the pinprick response was over. NATO could use whatever amount of power it decided was warranted. And it would begin by wiping out air defenses in Bosnia.”

New U.S. Offer

Although it received little notice at the time, Secretary of State Warren Christopher and other U.S. officials at the London meeting secured European approval for the use of force by offering a package deal: The United States promised to lead a new drive for a negotiated settlement, using air strikes as a bargaining tool.

The proposals that Christopher and the U.S. delegation were offering had actually been developed earlier that month. After the Halifax, Canada, summit of the Group of Seven major industrialized nations in June, Clinton, weary of the way that the Bosnia issue was overshadowing his every moment in the international spotlight, demanded that his advisers devise a tougher posture on Bosnia.

Responding to Clinton’s call and following the fall of Srebrenica, Defense Secretary William J. Perry laid out the plan in mid-July that was taken to the London meeting and eventually led to last week’s air strikes and the accompanying diplomacy.

Around a table in the White House situation room, the soft-spoken defense chief outlined Pentagon proposals for a stronger allied military response to Bosnian Serb attacks on the U.N. safe areas and ran down the list of what the United States and its allies would need to achieve, carefully discussing the advantages and risks.

As some participants remember it, there was not a single dissenting voice.

“The mood was that we had to go for it, and the President was quite emphatic,” one well-placed official recalled. “There’s no doubt that he wanted to see tough action taken.”

Looming on the horizon was the prospect of a full U.N. withdrawal from Bosnia, a costly and shameful operation that could have involved 25,000 U.S. ground troops in the rescue force. Clinton aides acknowledge that they were motivated by fear that without U.S. action, withdrawal was inevitable and Clinton would be forced to send U.S. forces to help extract peacekeepers in the middle of an election year.

For the allies on both sides of the Atlantic, allowing the U.N. peacekeeping force to continue as it had been was the worst of all worlds.

As the London conference approached, Clinton began lobbying his European counterparts by telephone. The Europeans were initially wary and then intrigued by Washington’s newfound interest and apparent commitment. And changes were also under way in Paris and London.

France’s stance on Bosnia shifted radically with the election of Chirac as president in May. Suddenly, the country with the largest number of peacekeepers in Bosnia wanted force used to punish Serbs who had killed and humiliated French soldiers.

Under the conservative Chirac, France also decided that Bosnians were the victims of Serbian aggression. His predecessor, Socialist Francois Mitterrand, recalling the Nazi persecution of the Serbs in World War II, had regarded the Serbs with a certain amount of sympathy. Mitterrand had advocated U.N. neutrality in the Balkans and opposed NATO air strikes against the Serbs.

France Grows Angry

The day after the London conference, two French officers in Sarajevo were killed by Bosnian Serb gunmen. These were not the rank-and-file troops who had been victims of the Serbs until then but two captains, including a highly respected medic. The French were growing increasingly angry.

Up on Mt. Igman outside Sarajevo, the Anglo-French rapid-reaction force was gradually deploying. The French were sending 155-millimeter howitzers, the biggest guns yet for U.N. troops. The United Nations would now have better-armed, combat-ready troops able to accurately target Serbian gun and mortar positions in the hills around Sarajevo.

Seeking to take initiative in the Balkans and secure his own place as a world leader, Chirac enthusiastically supported the rapid-reaction force as a way for front-line U.N. commanders to circumvent the cumbersome chain of command and respond to aggressive actions.

Still, the French--and the Europeans generally--gradually realized over the summer that they did not have the military means to force peace in the Balkans--a morass that they had always argued was, nevertheless, a European morass. Growing Serbian aggression toward the French made Chirac and others believe that a shameful withdrawal was inevitable. Joining the Americans seemed equally inevitable.

Even though the U.S. strategy presented at the London conference resembled previous European strategies that had been rejected, the French went along--helped as much by Chirac and by Clinton’s friendship with him as by the logic of political and military developments.

“No one in Paris felt like staying there for years and years,” Francois Heisbourg, former director of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, told the French newspaper Liberation. “And it was necessary to choose between a humiliating retreat and accepting the American strategy.”

Days after the London conference, NATO ambassadors met in Brussels to discuss how to protect the remaining safe areas, particularly Sarajevo and Gorazde. Here, under Western pressure, U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali reluctantly agreed to turn over the U.N. “key” for launching air strikes to his military commander in the Balkans, French Gen. Bernard Janvier.

This removed the United Nations’ civilian officials--namely, special envoy Yasushi Akashi--from the chain of command. Akashi had been criticized by the United States and European countries for his reluctance to use military power.

Janvier, who may serve the United Nations but who was very aware that his new president is a hawk on Bosnia, now shared the decision on air strikes with U.S. Adm. Leighton W. Smith, commander of NATO forces in Southern Europe. The two experienced military officers liked and trusted each other.

“It was now more of a military decision by Adm. Smith in Naples [NATO’s Southern Command, in Italy], answering to Washington, and Gen. Janvier in Zagreb [the Croatian capital], answering to Paris,” said a London-based military analyst.

The commander in charge of U.N. troops in Bosnia, British Lt. Gen. Rupert Smith, was supportive of air strikes, in marked contrast to the man he replaced in January, British Lt. Gen. Michael Rose.

Major changes were under way along many Balkan battlefronts through the summer.

The fall of Srebrenica and, two weeks later, of another safe area, Zepa--while tragic for the people who lived in them--had the unplanned effect of removing U.N. peacekeepers from harm’s way. Those who had been taken hostage in May were not redeployed to Bosnian Serb territory. And British and Ukrainian peacekeepers were removed, ahead of schedule, from Gorazde. The danger of peacekeepers falling hostage had been eliminated.

With the London conference behind them, the Western allies were suddenly spurred to swifter action by Croatia’s offensive retaking the Serb-held Krajina region. Starting Aug. 4, more than 150,000 Serbs were expelled from their homes in the Krajina and driven into Serb-held Bosnia and into Serbia proper.

The West learned two things: The myth of Serbian invincibility was shattered and, perhaps more important, the long-held assumption that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic would send his Yugoslav army to the rescue of the Serbs proved untrue.

Fears that Serbia, the dominant republic of the rump Yugoslavia, would enter the war had long haunted Western planners. Suddenly, those fears were no longer a consideration.

Clinton aides, seeking a way to carry forward the decisions of the London conference on the diplomatic front, seized the moment.

On Aug. 7, Clinton approved a new diplomatic initiative that offered to allow the Bosnian Serbs a loose confederation with Serbia if they signed a deal, according to White House aides, but that threatened to give weapons to the Muslim-led but secular Bosnian government and to launch wider air strikes--big enough to cripple the Serbs’ military machine--if the rebels didn’t.

The job of selling the plan--diplomacy married to military force--fell to National Security Adviser Lake, who was dispatched to London, Paris and other European capitals.

“He was struck by how positive the reactions were,” an aide said. “They [the Europeans] were pleased to see us fully engaged in a diplomatic initiative. They agreed that this was the last chance, that if this didn’t work, [the U.N. peacekeeping force] would come out and things would get worse. And they were tired--tired of trying to do it themselves, and frustrated from their own lack of success.”

Lake returned to Washington in mid-August with agreement on a key principle: If the Bosnian Serbs did not agree to real peace talks on the basis of the plan dividing Bosnia first prepared by the five-nation Contact Group mediating the conflict, the allies would launch air strikes on a larger scale than previously contemplated to protect safe areas, including Sarajevo.

Formally, the air strikes would be launched under the authority of U.N. resolutions protecting the safe areas, but in fact their larger purpose, according to officials, would be to teach the Serbs that failure to cooperate with Western diplomatic demands would bring them unacceptable military damage.

New Realities

The next step was to present these new realities to the Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims, a mission undertaken by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke. The Bosnian Serbs were defiant, and Holbrooke gave them a public warning, declaring on Aug. 27 that they would face wider but unspecified “air action” by NATO if they failed to cooperate.

The next day, Bosnian Serbs shelled Sarajevo.

Lake and other Clinton aides immediately got on the phone to their counterparts, most of whom had their own lines of contact with senior commanders on the scene.

By the end of the day, Chirac, who by coincidence was hosting both Holbrooke and Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic in Paris, demanded that the Anglo-French rapid-reaction force take action. The Clinton Administration demanded a NATO operation. The two were quickly combined.

Up to the last minute, however, there were doubts that the approach would work.

“We worked our way up to Monday night [just before the orders for the next day’s air action were written] thinking that there’s going to be backsliding [by some of the allies],” a senior official recalled. “But there wasn’t.”

At 2 a.m. Wednesday, Aug. 30, the first bombs dropped.

Sixty hours into the air and artillery bombardment, NATO and the United Nations ordered a halt to the operation to allow diplomacy to unfold.

Holbrooke used the lull to broker a meeting for later this week with the foreign ministers of Bosnia, Croatia and Yugoslavia to discuss an end to the war. It is the first such high-level meeting of the three countries in two years.

A breakthrough came when Milosevic emerged as the official representative of the Serbs, a development that U.S. officials hope will ease negotiations.

The pause in the bombings was also being used to give the Bosnian Serbs time to begin lifting the 40-month-old siege of Sarajevo. So far, they have refused to comply, and a deadline for renewed air strikes is set for tonight.

Wilkinson reported from Zagreb, Croatia; Murphy from Belgrade, Yugoslavia; Marshall from Brussels; Kraft from Paris; Tuohy from London; Pine and Meisler from Washington, and McManus from Honolulu.