Richard Holbrooke

When President Bill Clinton picked Richard C. Holbrooke as his point man for Balkan policy in 1995, Bosnia-Herzegovina was embroiled in Europe’s most brutal war since 1945, a conflict with a death toll higher than 200,000, most of them civilians, and atrocities that put “ethnic cleansing” into the lexicon of ghastly euphemisms.

Today, the fighting is over, ended by a complex agreement negotiated in November, 1995 at a U.S. air base in Dayton, Ohio. Although a stable peace is still elusive, the grim reports of mass murder, torture and rape have ended.

In a recently published memoir, “To End a War,” Holbrooke recalls the diplomatic effort that led to Dayton, one that demonstrated the importance of combining negotiations with military muscle and underlined the key role the United States continues to play in Europe a half century after the end of World War II.

Unlike most Washington insider books, this one has only one name on the cover. A skilled and facile writer, Holbrooke wrote his account without a ghost writer.

Starting as a junior Foreign Service officer in Vietnam more than 30 years ago, Holbrooke, 57, has spent much of his adult life in diplomacy, flouting the usual conventions of genteel anonymity. A man of towering ego, with an intellect to match, Holbrooke thrives in the limelight. He resigned his official government post as assistant secretary of state for Europe shortly after the Dayton conference ended but he never left the Washington stage. Recently, Holbrooke acted as a special envoy dealing with crises such as Kosovo and Cyprus.

In May, 1995, shortly after the start of his Balkan mediation, Holbrooke married journalist and author Kati Marton at the residence of the U.S. ambassador in Budapest, Hungary. She is his third wife.

****

Question: Critics complain that Dayton has not produced the sort of unitary state that existed before the war, has not allowed refugees to return home and has not brought former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic and former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic to justice. Were the objectives too ambitious?

Answer: If anything, we weren’t ambitious enough. My only regret of Dayton is not what we did, but what we didn’t do. We knew, going into Dayton, that what we didn’t achieve there we’d never achieve on the ground, so we set a very high benchmark. That benchmark was to create a single state out of two, or to be more precise, three warring factions. These factions had lived in peace for most of the last few centuries but they’d had occasional periods of horrendous warfare and we were negotiating in the under very dramatic circumstances at Dayton.

It should be clear that Dayton created a single country, called Bosnia-Herzegovina, divided in two parts; and that this is not a partition agreement.

In 1996, the first year of implementation, things got off to an extremely rocky start on the civilian side of the implementation front. The military side went well, the forces were separated, and no one was killed. But the failure on the civilian side led to an immediate impression we were partitioning the country. It wasn’t until the summer of 1997 that we dug ourselves out of our hole.

We are, therefore, still running about a year behind schedule on implementation of Dayton. However, we now have more and more attributes of a single country--small things to people in Los Angeles, perhaps, but big things on the ground: a common license plate, a common currency, more and more commerce between the peoples of the region, more and more joint efforts, direct air flights between Belgrade and Sarajevo, trade and so on. There are many promising signs.

*

Q: What’s the best we can now expect? Are we going to get the unitary state?

A: The best we can expect in Bosnia would be the full implementation of Dayton. That will occur--and I stress this--it will occur if the United States and its Western allies and Russia continue to fulfill their commitments to make implementation work. It will fail if the United States and its allies set an arbitrary deadline and walk away.

In short, you can’t let the deadline define the mission. The mission has to define the duration.

It was a mistake in 1995 to set a one-year deadline; and it was an even more serious mistake at the beginning of ’97 to set an 18-month deadline. But when President Clinton, very courageously, stepped up in December of last year and told the American people that this had been a mistake, that he accepted the responsibility for it--parenthetically, however, I think he was given bad advice [in setting the deadline originally]. When President Clinton said that he accepted responsibility for this mistake and that he was removing the deadline, he opened the door to success in Bosnia in the most profound way . . . .

*

Q: Without setting a deadline, which you’re not in a position to do, when do you think U.S. troops can come out?

A: If I were to predict I’d violate the whole spirit of my last answer. But I’m not predicting a long stay. I would think it’s a few years more. But you know, we’ve had 40,000 troops in Korea for 45 years at billions of dollars of cost, and it’s kept the peace. We’ve had troops in the Sinai desert in the multinational force, since the ‘70s . . . .

There are only 7,000 troops there in Bosnia . . . . So while this costs us real money each year, we can afford it. We’re the richest country in the world, and it’s directly related to our national security. It protects stability in the most volatile part of Europe. Europe is an area in which we have a continuing national interest.

*

Q: You say in your book that Bosnia was not the best test for Europe’s ambition to become a major diplomatic and military player. Can you foresee a better test?

A: (Laughter) Well, I think I’m talking in a slightly ironic sense. My real point is that Europe is a powerful cultural and economic force in the world, particularly with the advent of the common currency, but it does not have a common foreign policy or security policy. The way it’s currently structured, it’s unlikely it will. Therefore, Europe needs American involvement and leadership to help it come together under extreme crises. This has happened at least four times in this century--1917, 1941, 1947 with the beginning of the Cold War and, belatedly, in Bosnia in the mid-1990s. In each case, Europe needed American involvement.

In each case, many Americans--isolationists and others--said this isn’t our problem. In every case, the U.S. involvement was historically beneficial to Europe and acceptable to the U.S.

*

Q: Is it reasonable to assume the United States can ever avoid a European crisis?

A: That’s a good question. There are certain kinds of second-tier confrontations which the U.S. does not need to get directly involved in. However, even in the second tier of problems, our intervention as a friend to both sides is important.

Examples: In the ‘94, ‘95, ’96 period, when I was the assistant secretary of state and Warren Christopher was secretary of state, we engaged heavily in the resolution of four or five major subregional problems: the Greek-Albanian border dispute; the dispute between Greece and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia over the name of that country; the very contentious disputes between Hungary and its two neighbors--Slovakia and Romania--over the treatment of the Hungarian minorities, and the Italy-Slovenia dispute. All these were legacies of World War I and its aftermath; all were simmering; all had the potential to explode; none did, because of U.S. involvement.

Currently we face three dangerous problems, all in Southeastern Europe--the Greek-Turkish dispute over Cyprus, No. 1; No. 2, Kosovo; and No. 3, closely related, Albania. All of these areas touch on each other.

*

Q: How dangerous is the situation in Kosovo?

A: Very dangerous. It is a lower level of violence, but actually more complicated than Bosnia. In Bosnia, the so-called ethnic hatred was not really ethnic hatred. It was demagogues who exploited ultranationalism, controlled the media air waves and led people into the worst situation. It was like if the Ku Klux Klan and the worst elements of society had been in charge of Los Angeles during the April 1992 riots.

But in Kosovo the ethnic problems are deeper. They’re much deeper. They’re much realer. It has been said by others, not by me, that the Yugoslav wars began in Kosovo and they will end in Kosovo. That may be true.

*

Q: One of those demagogues in Kosovo is the same [Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic] as you had in Bosnia.

A: It has been said of Milosevic that he is both the arsonist and the fireman.

*

Q: What do you have to do to get him to unroll the hoses in Kosovo?

A: The first thing is to get him to sit down and talk to the Kosovo leadership. This he had never done until two weeks ago when we negotiated an agreement for them to meet each other. The talks are now underway, but they’re fragile. They’ve just started, they haven’t produced substantive agreement yet, and they are constantly threatened by the escalation of violence in Western Kosovo. [Kosovo Albanian leaders Friday suspended talks saying they would not resume until Serbian forces withdrew from the province.]

*

Q: NATO Foreign Ministers just voted to study putting forces in Albania and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Is this going to be enough?

A: No. But it’s an essential first step. You can’t just bluster, you need to study what can be done then move forward.

*

Q: Is there a possibility that NATO will move as slowly in Kosovo as it did when Bosnia was falling apart?

A: I think it’s better than that. In the first three wars in the Balkans the West stood by and did virtually nothing until it was too late. This time we’re out actively trying to prevent the war. At this stage in the earlier crises, you can’t point to the kind of active, engaged American diplomacy which now exists.

*

Q: If we could move to Cyprus. Are you concerned that you may have already fired your biggest weapon in Cyprus when you said the Turkish Cypriots were primarily to blame for the crisis?

A: That wasn’t a weapon, that was simply a statement of fact. What happened was that I went back to Cyprus for what was my fourth trip there as a negotiator, at the request of the two sides. They both asked me to come back. But then when I got there, the Turkish side changed its position and took a series of positions which amounted to making as preconditions for negotiations things which the negotiation was supposed to be about. Mainly they said that they would not negotiate unless the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, as they call it, was recognized in advance--which is what the negotiations were supposed to be partly about. And secondly, the government of Cyprus, President Clerides’ government, had to withdraw its application to join the European Union.

Well, that effectively freezes negotiations. You can’t negotiate if the preconditions for a negotiation are the outcome itself . . . .

*

Q: What incentive is there for the Turks to settle?

A: It’s like a Rubik’s Cube, where everyone blocks everyone else. The European Union insults the Turks by gratuitously leaving them out of the European Union membership process when the other 11 applicants are all let in--including Bulgaria and Slovakia, countries which are very far from membership. The Turks, in turn, say well, we’re going to take it out by preventing any progress on Cyprus. The Greeks, meanwhile, block all European Union economic assistance funds for Turkey. It’s a real mess.

*

Q: How important is the unification of Cyprus anyway? Is it not possible that it is one of the places more peaceful with barbed wire running through them?

A: It’s not a quiet, peaceful place. It’s always one spark, one overflight, one motorcycle gang, one rock-and-roll concert, one misunderstanding away from fighting. This, in turn, leaves us with two NATO allies--Greece and Turkey--very important to our security, always also one event away from fighting. Turkey lives in a particularly dangerous neighborhood with Iran, Iraq and Syria as some of its neighbors. We have to deal with that. We can’t just leave it out there. History teaches us only that history is unpredictable and this is not a stable situation.

Without nuclear weapons, it has a lot of similarities to India and Pakistan--deep-seated enmity exacerbated by nationalistic leaders. Luckily there are no nuclear weapons.