James O’Brien

In 1992, James C. O’Brien was a junior staffer working in the little-known Legal Advisor’s office at the State Department when he read the first press reports detailing atrocities and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Although the Balkans wasn’t his field and he had been at State for only three years, O’Brien was so moved by the accounts that he began asking what the United States knew about claims of genocide.

The Yale Law School graduate then started lobbying for something to be done. “Everybody said it was impossible because it was too complicated,” he recalled. “But I figured we really ought to do something.”

With a small group of junior staffers, O’Brien began exploring options. Their work produced the idea and the mechanism to set up what is now the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, an internationally mandated body to indict and try those responsible for all atrocities committed as Yugoslavia unraveled.

For his efforts, O’Brien, 32, was recently appointed special advisor to the president and secretary of state for democracy in the Balkans. He moved to a wood-paneled office just down the hall from Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright. Last week, he became the first U.S envoy to return to Yugoslavia since the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic, where he met new President Vojislav Kostunica.

Despite a decade of rocky relations between Belgrade and Washington, the two men took to each other, U.S. officials said afterward. “Both men are international lawyers. They speak the same kind of language,” said a State Department spokesperson.

O’Brien, who has a reputation for “boundless energy” and can be tracked by the trail of empty Diet Coke cans he leaves behind, now has the daunting task of planning how U.S. diplomacy can support and stabilize Europe’s most fragile new democracy.

The father of two toddlers--and owner of two beagles--O’Brien spends his limited free time reading history, most recently about the end of the Roman Republic, the Irish rebellion and the American revolution.

“It’s interesting to draw the parallels,” he reflected during an interview in his new office last week, “to read about the decay of emperors and then see Milosevic fall, and to read about the struggles of the American founding fathers and then see Kostunica, who can barely find someone to open his office in the morning.”

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Question: After 13 years in power, Milosevic is finally gone, and Kostunica has been installed as the democratically elected president of Yugoslavia. But how much control does he really have? What do Milosevic and his supporters still control?

Answer: When I was in Belgrade, I was struck by the way people not only feel it’s time to move on, but that they have moved on. From their standpoint, Milosevic is a man of the past. It’s a remarkable transformation. Just six weeks ago, they thought he’d be there for years.

It’s a really difficult transition. Kostunica has a very small staff. The federal presidency doesn’t yet have a federal government. The ministries of [the province of] Serbia are still a little bit outside his control. But it’s highly unlikely that Milosevic can mount an attack on the democratic transition. . . . His party is in disarray. Many local chapters have called on him to resign. People who were beholden to him are no longer willing to do anything that might return him to a position of prominence. There will be criminal elements--or people who know they have no place in the new regime or who were indicted by the war crimes tribunal--who know they have to leave and may be willing to do something damaging on the way out the door. So we face a real possibility of more internal unrest.

Q: Milosevic still faces indictment byRobin Wright is chief diplomatic correspondent for The Times.

the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. But Kostunica has said he opposes extradition. What’s likely to happen?

A: It’s interesting to watch Serbian public opinion develop. When the transition started, people were angry at what Milosevic did with the election. As people learn how he stole from them over the past decade, they’re getting a lot angrier. So we’ve started to see calls for him to face trial at home for electoral fraud, corruption, abuse of government resources and now murder. At the same time, there are other people who have been victims. He’s been indicted for crimes in Kosovo, and the Albanian victims deserve their day in court, as well. We definitely think Milosevic should be held accountable at The Hague.

It’s striking that Kostunica said last weekend that he’d find a way to cooperate with the international tribunal. He knows that Yugoslavia can’t provide justice or doesn’t want to get into the argument that it will provide justice for the Albanians, so that’s why an international process makes so much sense. It will require that Kostunica get complete control, and that public opinion develop sufficiently.

Q: What’s the next big step for Kostunica?

A: Kostunica is approaching this methodically, very intelligently. I’ve spoken to him since I returned, and he said he’s close to an arrangement on a new federal government, which will give him control of central authorities. The main sticking point is that he wants to go forward without being involved with the Socialists, as he thinks it’s important to show that Yugoslavia has moved to a new day. He’s also approached the problem with Serbia. Just last week, he reached agreement to have new elections for the Serbian parliament in December and a power-sharing arrangement on the main ministries in Serbia.

Q: Yugoslavia also faces an economic transition, including privatizing state enterprises and the kind of overhauls that witnessed a backlash elsewhere in Europe.

A: This is going to be a horrifyingly difficult period. It’ll be the toughest transition in the Balkan region, because Yugoslavia’s gone through a period of very sophisticated plundering. The economic structures had become embedded in Milosevic’s network of party and personal corruption. Now, the democratic forces have to build legitimate institutions out of a kleptocracy. In 1989, many thought of Yugoslavia as the jewel of Eastern Europe, and now it has a [gross domestic product] lower than Slovenia’s, which was only one small part of Yugoslavia in 1989.

Q: Few Montenegrins appeared to welcome Kostunica’s first visit there last week, and the Montenegrin president said he would not participate in a new federal government and would instead hold out for more self-government in Montenegro. What can Kostunica do to prevent the growing estrangement between the two countries?

A: I’m impressed that both presidents have said they’re committed to working out some kind of relationship that works for each of them. It’ll take time mostly because there’s a missing party. . . . Yugoslavia is a country that’s a federation of Montenegro and Serbia. So they need to get through the Serbia election so that there’s someone at the table to have these discussions with. Kostunica made it clear to me that the issues of Montenegro will be settled by Montenegrins. It won’t be about Serbia.

Q: Kostunica has a reputation as a strong-willed Serb nationalist. What were your impressions of him?

A: He seemed very thoughtful and on the main issues very knowledgeable. . . . We’ll go through a bit as he’s learning what it is to be president. It will be a bumpy process. . . . We talked about it a little, and he said there’s always so much to do; he has no private life.

Q: Could he become an ally of the United States?

A: He’s been very committed to having Yugoslavia join Europe, and he knows that the United States remains at the center of much of what happens in Europe. He’s just figuring out how to do that on his terms. The real thing is that the ties between Americans and Serbs are too strong, and that will guide him.

Q: What does he want from the United States? And what will the U.S. do for Yugoslavia?

A: The main thing he’s asked for is that we help make things normal, and that has a positive side and a negative side. On the positive side, he recognizes the moral and practical force we have in encouraging people to give him time to consolidate. . . . The more negative side is that he wants us not to ask for special consideration. I spoke with him about reopening our embassy and starting diplomatic relations. He said I want to do that, and I want to do that with other countries, too. But I don’t want it to look like a special thing, reaching out just to the country that Milosevic most targeted in his propaganda. Normalcy means that he wants the U.S. to be just another country.

On aid, he hasn’t put the request that way. We’ve promised to help the people of Yugoslavia in their transition to democracy. We’re going through a period of internal consultation with Congress before we figure out what we can do. . . . He knows that the bulk of the money has to come from the international financial institutions, and he’s asked us to help become a member the [International Monetary Fund] and the World Bank.

Q: What does Kostunica’s victory mean for Kosovo, where many still want total independence rather than just greater autonomy?

A: Everyone in the region is nervous that international money will go to Belgrade, not the region. My message is that the U.S. and its allies are committed to what we’ve taken on throughout the region. In Kosovo, that means getting self-government first, then we’ll start talking about its status. That’s the terms of the U.N. resolution [and] Kostunica supports [it]. . . . Now there are some sensitive issues up front. There are Serbs who have lived [in Kosovo] for generations and need to go home. There are also Albanians held as political prisoners in Serb prisons. He needs to find a way to address that problem. There are people who have been missing since the start of conflict in 1999, and we need to find out what happened to them. If we can take the sting out of some of these humanitarian issues and show that we’re making people’s lives better, then the political context becomes easier.

Q: What will Kostunica’s victory mean for the U.S. role in Bosnia?

A: Kostunica’s committed to the Dayton agreement. Last Sunday, he met with some Bosnian Serb political leaders, and the most hard-line [of them] came out and said we want to see full diplomatic relations between Bosnia and Yugoslavia. That’s pretty good for people who said we want to be a separate country or at least part of Yugoslavia. My concern about Bosnia is that it risks being left behind. It still has political structures that are ethnically divided, and the obstructionists can block things from happening. As a result, Croatia and now Yugoslavia may move toward Europe, and Bosnia will be stuck in the backwater.

Q: What does the ouster of Milosevic mean for Yugoslavia’s neighbors, especially Bulgaria and Romania, which have received outside help in part because of Yugoslavia?

A: The Kostunica victory means that we’ll have every country in Europe democratic. That’s been a goal of America since World War II. . . . Now all those countries will want to be in Europe. We’re committed to seeing the whole neighborhood join Europe and to see Hungary join [the North Atlantic Treaty Organization]. Bulgaria and Romania now have agreements that will help lead them into membership in the European Union, which was inconceivable five years ago. . . . What held them back was a large chunk of land, like a weedy lot in the middle of a neighborhood. But now Yugoslavia can move along with them. *