Ex-Envoy Defends Bosnia Peace Accord

Against a sea of pessimism, Richard Holbrooke, the architect of the Dayton peace accord, said Tuesday that he still believes Bosnia-Herzegovina will eventually emerge as a united, peaceful country.

But the former assistant secretary of state, now a New York investment banker, acknowledged that the accord will be doomed if the two Bosnian Serb leaders indicted on war crimes charges--Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic--are not removed in the months ahead.

Making his first public speech since he left office last month, Holbrooke clearly felt forced to defend the peace process against the prevailing view among analysts in Washington that Bosnia is heading toward a dangerous, permanent partition.

While that is possible, Holbrooke said, the jury is still out. The key, he maintained, is the success or failure of Bosnian elections later this year.

“I don’t envisage in my own mind the possibility of failure,” Holbrooke told a conference sponsored by the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Pessimism, however, was evident at the conference addressed by Holbrooke. Misha Glenny, a British journalist who is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Institute in Washington, told the conference that the accord brokered in Dayton, Ohio, last fall offers nothing more than partition, a contention disputed by Holbrooke.

In recent weeks, most nongovernment analysts in Washington have come to this conclusion: NATO troops have done an effective job of separating the belligerents in Bosnia, but almost nothing has been done to build up a Bosnian federation and prevent it from splitting into three parts--Muslim, Croatian and Serbian.

James A. Schear of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said that aspects of the plan “that tip in favor of partition are working, and the parts of the plan that tip in favor of integration are not working.”

Many analysts deplored the recent exodus of Bosnian Serbs from near Sarajevo, the capital, under pressure from their leaders while Muslims cheered and North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops refused to intervene.

“NATO made a terrible mistake in failing to stop this cleansing,” said Warren Zimmermann, the last U.S. ambassador to the former Yugoslav federation, who now teaches at the School for Advanced International Studies. “The primary American objective in Bosnia is to preserve the multiethnic character of it. What happened in Sarajevo under the inactive gaze of NATO has gone in exactly the opposite direction.”

Holbrooke acknowledged that little has taken place on the civilian side of the accord--the provisions calling for elections, human rights monitoring, reconstruction and refugee resettlement. But he pointed out that NATO has been in Bosnia for only a third of its scheduled one-year stay. And he stressed that the military separation of the combatants is a “substantial” and “extraordinary achievement.”

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.