U.S. Team on Bosnia Takes Peacekeeping to the Limit

There’s a new American activism in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Where Western and particularly U.S. peacekeepers once looked for rules that prevented them from acting, they now stretch the rules as far as necessary to achieve results they regard as crucial.

The new aggressiveness is the work of a cadre of tough-minded officials who in the past six months have come to form the U.S. team on Bosnia.

And with them came the shift in policy, foreshadowed by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in a major speech in May and reiterated last week. She signaled a new resolve aimed at “rededicating ourselves to the goal of implementing the Dayton [peace] accords.” There is growing consensus, she said, that “we need to do whatever is necessary to implement Dayton, to make Dayton work.”

The United States intensified its Bosnian role even as Congress and the American people began to focus on the deadline of next June for withdrawing U.S. troops from peacekeeping duties in the Balkans. There had been demands in the Senate and elsewhere that Washington accept a partitioned Bosnia and get out.

Last week, however, Clinton administration officials reported unusual consensus among key congressional leaders on the need for continuing U.S. participation in Bosnian peacekeeping. Although details are still up for debate and the White House contends no final decision has been made, several congressional leaders agreed with administration assessments that pulling out of Bosnia next year would lead to renewed warfare.

Riskier Approach

The “Americanization” of the Bosnia peace process came amid a growing awareness in the Clinton administration earlier this year that the process had stagnated.

That realization not only threatened to spoil what U.S. officials regarded as a foreign policy success but also sullied the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s reputation at a time when the United States was considering the controversial step of enlarging the alliance to include former Soviet bloc nations.

While there is evidence this new level of U.S. determination has produced significant successes, it also has its downside. It is a riskier approach that has already placed American troops under attack for the first time since they arrived in Bosnia nearly two years ago--although there were no serious injuries or deaths in the incidents.

Relations with important European allies also have been strained by their complaints that they are suddenly being shoved aside in what they see as merely the latest change of course in a zigzag policy that has characterized the Clinton administration’s approach to Bosnia.

Some European officials welcome U.S. leadership because it keeps Washington engaged. But other international officials worry that the present, intense American involvement in Bosnia is a series of quick fixes that will be short-lived and could well collapse into a political mess that they will be forced to deal with on their own if the U.S. ends its participation.

The “Americanization” of the Bosnia mission is clearly visible in Washington.

An entirely new team devoted to Bosnia issues, for example, has been operating out of the State Department since April under the leadership of Robert Gelbard, whose official title is special representative of the president and the secretary of State for the implementation of the Dayton accords.

At the White House, a separate directorate is devoted exclusively to Bosnia.

This fall, the State Department established an Office of War Crimes Issues, whose specific tasks include coordinating support for the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Today, no fewer than 10 U.S. government agencies and departments, including the Treasury and Commerce departments and the Federal Aviation Administration, are directly involved in Bosnia.

But more than the growing number of personnel and the addition of offices, it is the kind of appointees to crucial jobs that has shown the priority the administration has put on its Balkan effort.

Gelbard’s appointment, for example, is widely seen as pivotal. A respected though controversial senior diplomat, he has a blunt style and believes in the swift use of American power. This approach has made him an effective player in a part of the world where subtle diplomacy simply gets lost amid the ethnic brinkmanship.

Tension Builds

Gelbard wasted little time making his mark in Bosnia. He ruffled feathers by criticizing Carlos Westendorp, a Spaniard and the senior European peace official in Bosnia. Gelbard rebuked him for failing to spend sufficient time in Bosnia and seemingly questioned his commitment to the peace process. In later meetings, the tension between the two men was palpable.

Further, to persuade Bosnian Croat war crimes suspects to surrender, Gelbard promised them trials within five months--something he had no way of guaranteeing. And he appears to be the principal force behind efforts to destabilize the Bosnian Serb half of the country as a way to prop up “moderates” and undercut Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb president and now indicted war crimes suspect. This has meant helping to install Bosnian Serb police in operations that looked strangely like mini-coups.

Gelbard does not like to “micro-think the legalisms,” as one official put it. For him, ends can justify means. A senior U.S. official in Sarajevo calls Gelbard a “proconsul.”

Many also compare him to Richard Holbrooke, the former assistant secretary of State and chief architect of the Dayton accords, whose knock-heads tactics eventually produced a peace agreement.

Although no longer in the administration, Holbrooke reportedly remains active in the Bosnia peace efforts. “He’s a frequent kibitzer,” explained one senior administration official here. “He doesn’t sit in on policy meetings, but he’s always on the phone with people.”

The ‘Robust’ Clark

Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO’s supreme commander, is another important new American figure in Bosnia. He took over the top alliance military post in July, becoming responsible for the NATO-led Bosnia force. Having also served as Holbrooke’s military advisor during the Dayton negotiations, Clark is arguably more knowledgeable about the Bosnia crisis and more emotionally committed to carrying out the Balkan peace accords than any senior NATO officer.

“He’s more robust in his rhetoric and definitely more forceful than his predecessor in carrying out the mandate” for alliance peacekeeping, a senior NATO diplomat said. The diplomat noted that the seizure of Bosnian Serb television and radio transmitters, action to rein in heavily armed paramilitary units, known as special police, and overt efforts to bolster a Serbian political faction that supports the Dayton agreements have all come since Clark assumed control.

“He’s like the great white shark--he never sleeps, he never stops moving,” another NATO official said. “The job of NATO commander takes stamina, but he’s got an energy level I’ve never seen before.”

Clark has taken an unusually hands-on approach in Bosnia. He has personally edited press releases in moments of crisis and has gotten heavily involved in details of censoring inflammatory Bosnian Serb broadcasts. Some European officers say he overshadows Eric Shinseki, the U.S. Army general who is the NATO peacekeeping force commander in Bosnia.

“Clark wants to sight the first machine gun of the first soldier in the trench,” said another international official. “For a [NATO supreme commander] to be involved in this kind of detail is unimaginable.”

In October, it was Gelbard and Clark who ordered alliance forces to surround, seize and pull the plug on four strategic Bosnian Serb television transmitters.

Within hours, hard-line Serbs loyal to Karadzic were knocked off the air, deprived of their principal propaganda tool--which they had used to whip up their people’s sentiment against international efforts to bring a lasting peace to the troubled region.

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The action marked the boldest move against the Bosnian Serbs since NATO airstrikes ended the war nearly two years ago. It was also one of the most noticeable examples yet of the newly aggressive, U.S.-led interventionism in Bosnia.

Other actions, such as an Aug. 28 attempt to install moderate police forces, failed, however.

In Bosnia, American diplomats also administer the disputed city of Brcko and head the organization that has run two national elections in the last year. An American--former Los Angeles Police Deputy Cmdr. Mark Kroeker--is a key figure in reorganizing all Bosnian police forces.

U.S. diplomat Jacques Klein, who successfully administered a difficult United Nations mission in a Serb-occupied area of Croatia for 18 months, replaced a German diplomat last summer as the principal deputy to Westendorp, who is technically in charge of the civil reconstruction effort. A brash character who packs a pistol in his briefcase and has the vocabulary of a sailor, Klein often acts first, then informs his European colleagues and bosses later, say those who work with him.

According to those involved, the decision to step up American involvement in Bosnia can be traced to the early days of Clinton’s second term, when a combination of depressing reports detailing setbacks in the field collided with the top appointments of two committed Bosnia activists: Albright as secretary of State and Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger as national security advisor.

By early March, a series of breakfast meetings among senior officials from the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon dealing with Bosnia had provoked what one staffer called “a flurry of pretty provocative e-mail that showed a [complete] policy review was needed to inject new momentum into the process.”

Staying Longer

“If the exit strategy was to achieve a self-sustaining peace for Bosnia, it was clear the trend line of early 1997 wasn’t going to get us there” by June, said an administration official. “But it was also clear that everyone wanted to get there, even if it entailed the prospect of greater risks.”

An official involved in the process said initial differences between Albright, who urged a new, tougher role for the NATO-led military force, and Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, who was concerned about a deeper involvement and overtaxing the military forces, were bridged when Berger proposed a strategy that called for more vigorous enforcement of the existing peacekeeping mandate.

“There’s been a lot of talk about the distance between Albright and Cohen, but since April, there’s been a basic harmony between all players,” one White House official said.

On April 7, Clinton announced Gelbard’s appointment, and within weeks Gelbard had fleshed out the principles of the administration’s new strategy for Bosnia in a 6-inch-thick plan.

“The choice of Gelbard sums up the new U.S. approach,” noted a senior State Department official. “He’s a take-no-prisoners kind of guy.”

While those who helped shape it admit that the new policy carries risks, they note it has already brought results, including: a Bosnian Serb political split that has weakened Karadzic; the arrest of several war crime suspects; highly emotional yet relatively violence-free and fair municipal elections; and a crackdown for the first time on paramilitary police like the Serbian units that guard Karadzic.

Despite these successes, Bosnia specialists outside the administration worry about the dangers in the more aggressive U.S. stance. “It means either long-term involvement or a new war because the [short-term] consequences of all this are destabilizing to Bosnia,” said Susan Woodward, author of “Balkan Tragedy: An Anatomy of the Disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Bosnia War.” “I think it’s going toward long-term American presence, both military and civilian.”

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Meantime, European allies fret about a fickle Congress and worry that the new heightened U.S. role in Bosnia may not last. Even if Congress is on board now, that could easily shift with the first U.S. casualty. They note the irony that it was U.S. fears that initially led the international community to take the most narrow interpretation possible of the peacekeeping mandate of the Dayton accords--a decision that hobbled the process from the start.

“The Americans in Washington began by sniping how . . . they would have to power in here and sort it out,” said a Sarajevo-based European diplomat. “They want to push harder. Well, we also want to crack on but not in a way that throws out major babies with major bathwater.”

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The Bosnia Team

The United State’s increasingly visible presence in Bosnia-Herzegovina is largely due to the strong personalities of members of President Clinton’s foreign policy team:

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Robert Gelbard

Special representative of Bosnia

Described as “a take-no-prisoners kind of guy.”

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Gen. Wesley Clark

NATO’s supreme commander

Like “the great white shark--he never sleeps, he never stops moving”

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Madeleine Albright

Secretary of State

Urges a tougher role for the NATO-led military force.

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Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger

National security advisor

Proposes more vigorous enforcement of the existing peacekeeping mandate.

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Marshall reported from Washington and Wilkinson from Sarajevo.