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1 onthe second anni- versary of the Dayton peace agreement, this article assesses western contribu- tions to the peace process in Bosnia. The main argument advanced here is that the western powers’-particularly the , Britain, and - were negligent in not preventing and then not quickly ending the in former because they refused to use force to support important principles of international law.2 In their efforts to negotiate an end to the , and in the subsequent implementation of the settlement brokered by the United States in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995, the western powers have tended to appease the aggressors at the expense of the war‘s victims. Unless this tendency is reversed and the international guarantors of the Dayton accords seek a just peace, the current fragile peace could be shattered-and with it the prospects for a stable pan-European security system based on a more open NATO with a new mission to stabilize Europe beyond its traditional borders. The western governments’ condoning of the bombing of the Croatian cities of and in the second half of 1991 gave President Slobodan Milogevie a green light to pursue his ambition of creating an ethnically pure Greater ; and by denying Bosnian President Alija IzetbegoviFs many requests for preventive troop deployments in late 1991, the west missed an opportunity to prevent the war from spreading to Bosnia. Then in 1992, by defining a deliberate policy of as ”,” and a war of

Jane M.O. Sharp directs the Defence and Security Programme at the Institute for Public Policy Research and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Defence Studies at King’s College in London.

The author thanks the editors of International Security and two anonymous reviewers for useful comments on an earlier draft. This article stems from a project at the Centre for Defence Studies, which monitors the implementation of the . The author thanks the Swedish Foreign Ministry for its financial support.

1. The term “western powers” in this article refers to the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the (EU) that make up the western security community. The term “donor community” refers to the main aid donors to Bosnia, including the United States, the EU, Japan, the World Bank, the Organization of Islamic States, and about three hundred nongovernmental organizations. 2. For a similar view, see Michael Steiner, ”Don’t Fool Around with Principles,” Transition, Vol. 4, No. 5 (August 1993, pp. 34-40. Steiner, a senior German diplomat, served on the in 1994-95 and was deputy to in the Office of the High Representative in in 1996-97. 3. h4iloSevit became president of the Serb republic in 1987 and remained in that office until 1996. He is now president of the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, which comprises Serbia and Monte- negro.

International Security, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Winter 1997/98),pp. 101-137 0 1997 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

101

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aggression as a humanitarian crisis, the western democracies rationalized the deployment of inappropriate and ill-equipped forces into a war situation. Only after almost four years of war, more than 200,000 dead, and 2 million displaced did the United States exert leadership and, together with France and Britain, take the kind of military action that could have prevented war in the first place. The Dayton peace agreement codified an October 1995 cease-fire and pre- vented new fighting, but has not yet generated a sustainable peace. Consistent with a tendency toward western appeasement throughout the war, the agreement rewards the aggressors and leaves the nationalist leaders in power. These leaders obstruct reconciliation and integration, and discourage repatria- tion of refugees and displaced persons. In addition, the agreement suffers from four structural problems. First, it is geared to an unrealistically short-term schedule, especially with respect to the stabilizing presence of NATO imple- mentation forces. Second and third, it embraces two sets of contradictory goals: partitioning Bosnia into two political entities with separate armies while seek- ing a single integrated state with central institutions; and imposing arms limits on both entities despite arming and training only one. Fourth, the military and civilian aspects of the agreement are not well coordinated, making for a dangerous law enforcement gap and a fragmented aid program, and leaving little opportunity to exert economic leverage on recalcitrant local parties. Four policy recommendations for the western guarantors of the Dayton accords flow from this analysis. First, donors need to make a long-term com- mitment to the postwar reconstruction of Bosnia, not least to provide an international military presence (with a broad mandate to guarantee freedom of movement and provide public order) until the peace process has stabilized. Second, the western powers should arrest indicted war criminals, not only to bring them to justice but also to remove them from positions of power and influence in their communities. Third, the International Police (IPTF) established by the Dayton accords must either be replaced or be given adequate resources to carry out its mandate to train the local police to provide for public safety and individual security; an interim police force should be created and maintained until that training is completed. Fourth, the interna- tional community of donors must appoint a High Representative who has the standing and authority to coordinate the military and civilian aspects of the agreement and can exert economic leverage over recalcitrant local powers. This article is divided into seven sections. It begins with an overview of western responses to the different phases of the of -

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essentially a catalogue of missed opportunities to prevent, then to halt, the war in Bosnia. The next section explores the Dayton agreement’s structural prob- lems. The third looks at the implications of the law enforcement gap, in terms of both maintaining public order and bringing war criminals to justice. The fourth looks at the western contribution to the process of repatriating refugees and displaced persons. The fifth addresses the problems caused by lack of coordination among the various international aid and reconstruction pro- grams. The sixth section assesses the prospects for a recommitment to the peace process by both the local parties and the western guarantors, and offers some policy recommendations. A concluding section emphasizes the impor- tance of U.S. leadership to the success of the peace process in Bosnia.

Western Responses to the Yugoslav Wars of Dissolution

The Yugoslav wars of dissolution can be seen in five phases. The first phase from 1987 to 1991-when Slobodan MiloSeviC: demonstrated his ambitions to transform Yugoslavia into a -triggered independence move- ments in and but did not engage the western powers. In the second phase, Slovenia’s relatively nonviolent secession in 1991 prompted diplomatic intervention and the creation of a monitoring mission by the Euro- pean Community (EC), which was anxious to make its mark as a foreign and security policy actor. Phase three covers Croatia’s more violent secession in 1991-92, which first engaged UN peacekeepers and triggered reluctant decla- rations of independence from Bosnia-. The fourth, most violent, phase spans the 1992-95 wars, in which Serbia and Croatia (and their proxies in Bosnia) sought to divide Bosnia between them. Diplomatic interventions- mostly under EC and UN auspices--continued in this phase, but had little effect until the summer of 1995 when diplomacy was finally backed by U.S. military force. Only then could the warring parties be persuaded to sign a peace settlement. The fifth phase covers the implementation of the 1995 Dayton peace agreement which, according to its main architect, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Richard C. Holbrooke, is designed to knit a divided Bosnia back together.

PHASE I: FAILURE TO CURB MILOSEVIC: Western failure to prevent the violent did not result from an intelligence failure. Two senior officials in the Bush administration, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Lawrence Eagleburger and

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National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, had both served in , speak Serbo-Croatian, know MiloSevii. well, and would have kept Washington policymakers apprised of MiloSevit‘s ambitions for a Greater Serbia in the late 1980s. In October 1990 the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency shared with EC governments a report predicting in Yugoslavia within twelve months! From Belgrade, then-U.S. Ambassador warned that MiloSevii. constantly stirred up ethnic hatreds and took actions that trou- bled the other five republics. Zimmermann was particularly alarmed by the way MiloSevii. and President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia conspired against advocates of a united Yugoslavia (including President Izetbegovii.) and spoke openly about their decision in March 1991 to carve up Bosnia between a Greater Serbia and a ? As the drew to a close, Yugoslavia ceased to be an important pawn in the East-West competition. Nevertheless, the overwhelming preference of all western governments in the early was to keep Yugoslavia intact, primarily because dissolution would be an ominous precedent for the collapse of the Soviet Union. On June 21,1991, then U.S. Secretary of State James Baker traveled to Belgrade from a meeting in Berlin of the Conference of Security and Cooperation in Europe to present this common western position. Zimmer- mann disputes the widely held view that Baker’s speech gave MiloSevii. a green light to use force to hold Yugoslavia together, but notes that it was not a red light either, given that it was clear the Bush administration had no appetite to use force to stop a Serb offensive against other republics?

PHASE 2: THE EC AND THE SLOVENIAN SECESSION Both Slovenia and Croatia declared independence on June 25, 1991. Under orders from MiloSevii., the Serb-dominated Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) immediately tried to reassert control of the border posts between Slovenia and the rest of Yugoslavia. The JNA offensive occurred while EC ministers were meeting in . Declaring this to have been the ”hour of Europe,” Foreign Minister Jacques Poos of Luxembourg immediately led the EC Troika on a peace mission to Yugoslavia, returning home a few days after having negotiated a cease-fire between the JNA and Sl~venia.~

4. For an inside view of decision making in the Bush administration, see David Gompert, “The United States and Yugoslavia’s Wars,” in Richard Ullman, ed., The World and Yugoslavia‘s Wars, ( Council on Foreign Relations, 1996), pp. 122-144. 5. Warren Zimmermann, Origins of a Catastrophe (New York Random House), pp. 116-117. 6. bid., p. 137. 7. The EC Troika comprises the foreign ministers of the country holding the EC presidency plus the one preceding and the one following. In June 1991, in addition to Poos the Troika comprised

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The assumed the EC presidency on July 1, and Foreign Minister Hans van den Broek returned to Yugoslavia to broker an agreement in Brioni on July 8, in which the JNA and Slovenian forces agreed to withdraw to their respective barracks. In addition, Slovenia and Croatia pledged not to imple- ment independence for another three months. The author- ized an EC monitoring mission to patrol the Slovenian-Yugoslav border. At this stage, however, MiloSevik would not allow the mission’s mandate to be ex- tended to Croatia, because this would have interfered with his plans to absorb the predominantly Serb regions of Croatia into Greater Serbia.

PHASE 3: SECESSION OF CROATIA The Bush administration was content to let the EC take the diplomatic lead because it saw no vital U.S. interests at stake in Yugoslavia. The EC success at Brioni was less impressive than it seemed at first blush, however, because MiloSevik did not put up much of a fight to keep Slovenia in the Yugoslav federation, in part because so few lived there and because Slovenia’s Territorial Defense Forces resisted the JNA. Croatia was a different matter because of the large Serb population living in the region. As JNA pressure on Croatia increased through the summer of 1991, EC and ’ (WEU) foreign ministers discussed various preventive meas- ures, including interpositional deployments between the JNA and Croatia. British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, however, consistently vetoed any military action under WEU auspices, not least because he preferred Britain to act militarily with the United States under NATO supervision.’ France was more willing to act and tried-in vain-to persuade the United States to send troops, arguing that Britain would not then dare to abstain.” In September 1991 the EC appointed Peter Carrington, a onetime British for- eign secretary and NATO secretary-general, as its special envoy to Yugoslavia. Carrington convened an EC conference on Yugoslavia in on Sep tember 7, with the clear understanding that no EC country would recognize

Foreign Minster Gianni di Michaelis of and Foreign Minister Hans van den Broek of the Netherlands. 8. The WEU comprises the nine members of the EU that are also NATO members. It is an organization searching for a role; France sees the WEU as the defense arm of the EU, whereas Britain regards the WEU as the European pillar of NATO. 9. Britain also felt overstretched militarily after service in the Gulf and with its ongoing counter- terrorist mission in . For further analysis of British policy in Bosnia, see Jane M.O. Sharp, Per@ious Albion or Honest Broker? British Policy in the Former Yugoslavia (London: Institute for Public Policy Research, forthcoming, December 1997/January 1998). 10. Ed Vulliamy, “America’s Big Strategic Lie,” Guardian, May 26, 1996.

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the independence of any of the former Yugoslav republics until a new, looser federal structure had been agreed. (Carrington and van den Broek envisaged a structure similar to that the EC.) Carrington's efforts, however, were consis- tently undermined by , , and , which lobbied for recognition of Croatia through the fall of 1991." Parallel to Carrington's involvement, in August 1991 the JNA began bomb- ing the Croatian cities of Vukovar and Dubrovnik, "cleansing" them of non- Serbs, including the massacre of 260 patients dragged from their beds in a hospital in Vukovar in October. The western powers made no attempt to stop these atrocities, although one former UN protection force (UNPROFOR) com- mander, French General Jean Cot, later claimed that "the Serbs could have been stopped in October 1991 with three ships, three dozen planes, and about three thousand men deployed in Dubrovnik and Vukovar to emphasize the un- equivocal determination of the European Community."'2 The reluctance of western governments (primarily the United States, France, and Britain) to punish Serbia in 1991 not only gave a green light to MiloSevit to continue his aggression, but also encouraged Tudjman to believe that he also could practice ethnic cleansing with impunity in Croatia and in the predominantly Croatian parts of Bosnia.13 In September 1991 the imposed an arms embargo on all of former Yug~slavia.'~Although intended to curb the violence, the embargo had a pernicious effect because while it hampered the military capability of Croatia, and even more so of Bosnia, it boosted the military advantage of the Bosnian Serbs whose main supplier, the JNA, had an abundance of equipment-much of it removed from Croatia and Bosnia over the previous year. UN involvement deepened in October 1991 when, after Serbs and had violated nine EC-brokered cease-fires, then-UN Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar appointed former U.S. Secretary of State to be

11. Germany, for example, pressed for recognition of Croatia-despite the opinion of the EC's Badinter Commission, which was established to advise on recognition policy-because it had a large resident Croatian population, and because it associated Croatia's right to self-determination with that of the recently united Germany. See German Federal Foreign Office, Recognition of the Yugoslav Successor States, March 10,1993, issued by the German Embassy, London, July 16,1993; see also Richard Caplan, "Political Conditionality and Conflict Management: The EC Recognition of New States in Yugoslavia," Ph.D. dissertation, King's College, London, forthcoming 1998. 12. Jean Cot, ed., Dernike Guerre Bulkanique? (: L'Harmattan), p. 121, cited in Carole Hodge and Mladen Grbin, A Test for Europe (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1996), at p. 51. 13. See Chris Hedges, "Croatian's Confession Describes and Killing on Vast Scale," New York Times, September 5, 1997. 14. UN Security Council Resolution 713, September 25, 1991.

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his special envoy to Yugoslavia. Vance secured a cease-fire in January 1992, and in February the United Nations authorized peacekeepers to demilitarize three UN-designated protected areas in the Krajina region of Croatia.l5 Given that the JNA had recently ”cleansed” these enclaves of non-Serbs, MiloSevik welcomed UN troops to protect the remaining Serbs, thus freeing up the JNA for offensive operations elsewhere.

PHASE 4: THE WAR IN BOSNIA: SERBS ON THE OFFENSIVE The accelerating pressure (mainly from the EC) for independence in all the former Yugoslav republics, and the UN arms embargo’s likely impact on Bosnia, deeply troubled Izetbegovik. Believing that Bosnia was not ready for either self-governance or self-defense and that the Bosnian Serbs were poised to attack once Bosnia was forced into independence, Izetbegovik in October 1991 began to ask the United Nations and the EC for some kind of transitional authority and/or preventive troop deployments. Neither UN nor EC officials whom Izetbegovik approached, nor any western government, however, would help Bosnia at this stage, forcing Izetbegovik to turn to Iran for assistance.I6 The next injustice the west inflicted on Izetbegovik was the first of many proposals to divide Bosnia along ethnic lines, which emerged during the first half of 1992 when Portugal held the EC presidency. Carrington and the Portu- guese foreign minister, Jos6 Cutiliero, convened a conference on Bosnia in in late February, which by mid-March produced a plan to divide Bosnia into three ethnically based cantons. Predictably, Tudjman, MiloSevik, and Ra- dovan Karadiik (leader of the extremist faction of the Bosnian Serbs based in Pale) applauded the plan. Izetbegovik, however, was deeply concerned, be- cause it appeared that the EC sought to avert war by asking him to appease MiloSevik by sacrificing Bosnia just as it was about to become inde~endent.’~ In April 1992, as Izetbegovik had feared, recognition of Bosnia without any EC or UN support for either the administration or defense of the fledgling state unleashed a wave of systematic rape, murder, and evacuation of Croats and in those parts of Bosnia coveted by MiloSevik. These atrocities were carried out by a combination of Serb paramilitaries under the leadership of

15. LJN Security Council Resolution 743, February 21, 1992. 16. Iran supplied both men and matkriel during the war. See Maud S. Beelman, ”Dining with the Devil: America’s Tacit Cooperation with Iran in Arming the ,” Alice Patterson Foundation Reporter, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1997), pp. 23-32. 17. For more details on the Carrington-Cutiliero Plan, see James Gow, Triumph of the Lack of Will: International Diplomacy (London: Hurst and , 1997), pp. 77-89; and Tihomir Loza, ”Getting to Dayton: The History of ” (unpublished manuscript).

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Vojeslav kselj and ieliko RaianatoviC (also known as ""), the JNA, and their Bosnian Serb proxies under the command of General Radko MladiC." In May, under pressure from the EC, the new UN secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, sent then-UN Deputy Undersecretary for Peacekeeping Mar- rack Goulding to Bosnia to assess conditions for a peacekeeping operation. Goulding advised against sending UN forces on the grounds that there was manifestly no peace to keep; the level of violence was already very high; Sarajevo was under siege; and the Serbs were creating ethnically pure cantons as depicted in (and encouraged by) the Camngton-Cutileiro Plan." The UN Security Council ignored Goulding and voted to send UN peacekeepers with a mandate to protect convoys of humanitarian aid?' With insufficient military capability for enforcement, however, the UNPROFOR could deliver food aid only at the pleasure of the local warlords and sometimes even then only after paying exorbitant "protection" fees." In any event, the main problem was not a humanitarian crisis to be alleviated by the delivery of food and medicine: it was a that needed to be stopped. Yet even when journalists discovered the Serbs' concentration camps in northern Bosnia in June 1992, no government was willing to intervene militarily to stop the genocide. At this stage several observers compared the west's policy toward the Serbs with Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler at in 1939.22 CROATS ON THE OFFENSIVE.At the beginning of the Serb offensive against Bosnia, some observers expected moderate Croats would form an alliance with Bosnian mu slim^.'^ The Croation Democratic Union was the political party to which most Bosnian Croats belonged, and until 1991 it had been led by Stjepan Kljucic. (Kljucic was a firm adherent of Bosnian unity and, as such, was an ally of Izetbegovik, who headed the Party of Democratic Action [SDA], the main party to which Bosnian Muslims belonged.) In January 1992, in a move widely believed to have been engineered by Tudjman in , , a Croat extremist from Herzegovina, assumed control of the Croatian Democratic

18. For accounts of this stage of the war, see Laura Silber and Alan Little, of Yugoslavia (London: Penguin BBC, 1995), pp. 239-244. 19. Goulding's advice against sending peacekeepers to Bosnia is in UN Document S/23900, May 12,1992. 20. UN Security Council Resolutions 770, August 13,1992, and 776, September 14,1992. 21. Cow, Lack of Will, p.114. 22. See, for example, British Field Marshall Richard Vincent, chief of Defense Staff and later chairman of NATO's Military Committee, cited in Andrew Marr, "Politicians Let NATO Down over Bosnia," The Independent, July 21, 1993. 23. Croats in northern and central Bosnia tend to be more moderate than those in the western region of Herzeg-Bosnia.

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Union in Bosnia. In early July Boban declared the independent state of Herzeg-Bosnia. Thus, despite a formal alliance signed by Tudjman and Izetbe- goviC. in June 1992, bitter conflict soon erupted between the Croat and Muslim armies (the Croatian Defense Council [HVOI) and the Army of that continued intermittently until March 1994. HVO vandalism against centuries-old mosques and the destruction of the beautiful sixteenth- century cobalt bridge over the River Neverta in are well recorded. But the Croats were also guilty of appalling acts of genocide.24 WESTERN DIPLOMACY: THE VANCE-OWEN PLAN. The British government of Prime Minister began its six-month presidency of the EC on July 1, 1992, and in August convened an EC-UN conference in London, which in turn launched the International Conference on Former Yugoslavia (ICFY). Based in Geneva, the ICM was chaired by Cyrus Vance for the United Nations and former British Foreign Secretary , who replaced Carrington as the EC representative. In January 1993 Vance and Owen produced a peace plan that was a vast improvement over the Carrington-Cutileiro Plan, because it sought to maintain Bosnia’s multiethnic and multiconfessional character.25 All the local parties had accepted the proposal by May 2,1993, which seemed a perfect parting gft to Vance, who retired at the end of A~riI.2~The euphoria was short-lived, however, because the Clinton administration rejected the Vance-Owen Plan on the grounds that it was too pro-Serb (although Owen believes that Clinton rejected the plan because he and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were unwilling to provide sufficient U.S. troops to make it In an effort to maintain some momentum after Washington’s rejection of the Vance-Owen Plan, the western powers and Russia agreed to establish the International Criminal Tribunal on Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The declared hope was to deter further acts of genocide, but skeptics-including Bosnia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammed Sacirbey-laimed that the

24. For example, , UNPROFOR commander in 1993, expressed his outrage at the HVO massacre of residents of the Muslim village of Ahmibi in April 1993, which occurred less than a mile from his British base. See Stewart, Broken Lives: A Personal View of the Bosnian Conflict (London: Harper Collins, 1994). 25. For details of the Vance-Owen Plan, see David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (London: Victor Gollanz, 1995), p. 89; see also Report of the Secretary-General on the International Conference on the Former Yugoslazh, UN Document S/24795, November 11, 1992, pp. 1-24. 26. Thorvald Stoltenberg, a former Norwegian foreign minister, replaced Vance as cochair of ICFY and LJN special envoy to former Yugoslavia. 27. On U.S. reluctance to use force in general and in Bosnia in particular, see Kori Schake, American Thinking about the Use of Force after the Cold War (College Park, Md.: Occasional Paper No.1, May 1997); see also Colin Powell, My American journey (New York Random House), chapters 20,21.

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ICTY served primarily as an alibi to avoid undertaking the serious military intervention needed to end the war.28The Clinton administration also began to promote the ”lift and strike” idea that was first proposed by Izetbegovik in the fall of 1992, namely, to lift the arms embargo on independent Croatia and Bosnia so they could defend themselves, and to limit western intervention to air strikes against Serb positions. When then-Secretary of State Warren Chris- topher went to Europe to sell lift and strike to the United States’ NATO allies, he found Germany somewhat sympathetic, but Britain and France claimed that lifting the embargo would prolong the war and that air strikes put their UNPROFOR troops at risk. Clinton in the meantime had read Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts, which argues that conflict in the was inevitable, thus convincing Clinton that containment was the only policy worth pursuing in Bosnia.29Thereafter Clin- ton pulled away from lift and strike and, to be in line with his new containment policy, dispatched 315 U.S. troops to join the 700 Nordics running the UN Preventive Deployment on the Serb-Macedonian border?’ Still in reactive mode and pressed by Russia’s more proactive foreign min- ister, , Clinton latched on to another plan that had been floated the previous year: the creation of “safe areas” for Muslims modeled on those established for in northern after the ?l The UN Security Council had already designated a safe area in response to a particu- larly harsh attack by General Mladics forces in March.32Safe areas were part of the joint action plan launched by the United States, Russia, Spain, France, and Britain on May 22; and on June 4 the United Nations designated five additional safe areas: Bihak, Goraide, Sarajevo, , and iepa. No UN member state offered troops to protect the safe areas, however, despite esti- mates that some 35,000 additional troops would be required.

28. Walter G. Landrey, ”War Crimes Tribunal: More than a Figleaf?”St. Petersburg Times, September 14, 1994; and Mohammed Sacirbey, Puce International Law Review, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Winter 1994-95), p. 5. 29. Elizabeth Drew, On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency (New York Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 157. 30. Steven Bowman, Bosnia and Macedonia: US.Military Operations (Washington, D.C.: Congres- sional Research Service, Congressional Issue Brief IB93056, June 1993). 31. In October 1992 the president of the International Red Cross, Comelio Sommaruga, proposed safe areas to protect Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina who were especially vulnerable to ethnic cleansing by Serb forces. At that time none of the major UN troop contributors considered safe areas defensible. See Owen, Bulkan Odyssey, pp. 66-68. 32. UN Security Council Resolution 819, April 16, 1992.

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Vance (from retirement) and Owen (at ICFY headquarters in Geneva) con- demned the joint action plan, because it reverted to the Carrington-Cutileiro model of dividing Bosnia along ethnic lines, thereby rewarding Serb aggression and endorsing the genocidal practice of ethnic cleansing. Owen told reporters that U.S. endorsement of partition meant that negotiating an honorable agree- ment would no longer be possible. And indeed, all subsequent peace plans were based on ethnic partition and were shaped largely by the territorial aspirations of MiloSevi6 and Tudjman; these included the Owen-Stoltenberg Plan drawn up in September 1993, the EU Action Plan stemming from a Franco-German initiative in November, the various plans offered by the five- state Contact Group (comprised of the United States, Germany, France, Britain, and Russia), in 1994-95, and the 1995 Dayton ag1-eement.3~ In late 1993 Yasushi Akashi, the Japanese diplomat who had previously headed the UN Transition Authority in Cambodia, assumed the role of special representative of the UN secretary-general from Thorvald Stoltenberg. Akashi was a source of great irritation to the United States, as more than any other UN official, he appeared to block proposals for serious military action against the Serbs during 1994 and the first half of 1995. Stoltenberg continued to cochair the ICFY, but he and Owen were no longer pivotal to the peace negotiations because both Russia and the United States had begun to take a more active diplomatic role. In early 1994 the ICFY gave way to the Contact Group. Progress was slow, however, because on most issues Russia, France, and Britain were sensitive to Serb interests, while Germany and the United States leaned toward Croatia and to a much lesser extent toward Bosnia.34 In March 1994 the United States engineered a Muslim-Croat federation as a way of combining forces against the Serbs. This helped change the military balance and allowed the Croats and Bosnians to recover lost territory. On the downside, however, the federation left no political space for moderate Serbs who wanted to remain in a multiethnic Bosnia, thus moving Bosnia even further down the path of partition. Worse yet, the arming and training of

33. The Contact Group was comprised of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Russia. Since 1995 they have served as a quasi-steering group of the Peace Implementation Council that oversees the implementation of the Dayton agreement. 34. The split in the Contact Group evokes in part the alliances established in World War 11, in which Serbia sided with Britain, France, and Russia, and Croatia with Germany. Russia supported the Serbs in part because of Slavic solidarity, but also because Russia wanted a big-power role in the region. Germany had close ties to Croatia on many levels, not least tourism. US. support for Croatia was based primarily on balancing against Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs, which Washington saw as the main aggressors.

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Croatian forces by U.S. mercenaries (i.e., the Virginia-based Military Profes- sional Resources Incorporated) made the Clinton administration appear com- plicit in the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from the Krajina region in the summer of 1995. An offshoot of the creation of the Muslim-Croat federation was the decision to ask the European Union (EU, formerly the EC) to administer Mostar for two years, so that the Muslim and Croat halves of the city could be re~nited.3~The EU's foreign ministers appointed Hans Koschnick, a former mayor of Bremen, as the first EU administrator in late March 1994. Koschnick made a valiant effort to carry out his mandate, but was thwarted by the willful obstruction of the Croat mafia in West Mostar and by a lack of support from both the EU and his own government in Bonn. Koschnick was particularly frustrated by Italian Foreign Minister Susanna Agnelli, who, during the Italian presidency of the EU, tended to submit his proposals on Mostar to Zagreb for Tudjman's approval.36The EU invested DM 260 million in Mostar and recon- structed much of the physical infrastructure, but made little progress either in reuniting the Muslims and Croats or in restoring public order in the city. The EU's failure in Mostar is not a good omen for the future of the federation not least because it has undermined Muslim confidence in the west's commitment to integration.

PHASE 5: GETl'ING TO DAYTON The Clinton administration was in the process of reviewing its Bosnia policy when Srebrenica fell in July 1995. The western powers' impotence to prevent the massacre of some 8,000 Muslims in one of the so-called safe areas con- vinced Clinton of the need to engage the Serbs militaril~?~NATO had con- ducted pinprick air strikes and had issued threats to the Serbs before; without serious U.S. backing, however, these assaults had been meaningless. In late July officials presented MiloSevii. and Mladii. with a list of targets that NATO would bomb the next time Serb forces struck in Bosnia.% The precipitating event for NATO action was the mortar attack on the Sarajevo market on August 28.39Backed by NATO military operations, and with the White House

35. Proposals for international administration of Sarajevo and Mostar were also a feature of the Owen-Stoltenberg Plan. 36. On the frustrations of Koschnick in Mostar, see Diane Paul, "High Noon: The Good Sheriff Has Been Run Out of Town," War Report, No. 41 (May 1996), p. 7. 37. Bob Woodward, The Choice (New York: Simon and Schuster), pp. 256-270. 38. Serb army units were in evidence during the attack on Srebrenica in July, and Bosnian Serb troops were paid directly from Belgrade throughout the war. 39. The tragic death of three senior State Department officers on Mt. Ipnin mid-August also played a role in galvanizing the Clinton administration to take Bosnia seriously.

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now focused on Bosnia, Holbrooke, who had been given the Bosnia brief in August, began an intense diplomatic mission. In September he brought the three foreign ministers of Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina together in New York to sign a set of principles on which a peace settlement would be based. A sixty-day cease-fire was agreed on October 5 and came into effect October 12. Proximity talks began in Dayton, Ohio, on November 1; and a peace agreement was signed on November 21, after which Holbrooke left government service for a career on Wall Street. US. military force was the crucial ingredient in ending the war, but credit must also be given to , the British commander who was instrumental in generating a rapid reaction capability for UNPFOROR in the summer of 1995.40As a result, in contrast to earlier com- plaints from London and Paris that NATO air strikes would endanger their peacekeepers, from August 1995 British and French troops supported NATO strikes with offensive operations on the ground.

Structural Problems in the Dayton Agreement

Three weeks in Dayton was clearly not enough time to resolve all the differ- ences among Bosnia’s warring parties. Four structural problems stemming from the Dayton negotiations continue to hamper implementation of the agree- ment. These are: (1) unrealistic timing, especially with respect to exit strategy and the election schedule; (2) conflicting objectives of integration versus partition; (3) tension between the agreement’s arms control provisions and the U.S. promise to arm and train the federation armies; and (4)a lack of coordination between the military and civilian aspects of the agreement.

UNREALISTIC TIMING Rebuilding war-torn societies requires extraordinary effort and long-term com- mitment. In the long run, Bosnians will have to conduct their own affairs, but just as individuals suffering severe trauma are not expected to heal themselves, neither can war-torn and collapsed states recuperate without careful nurturing over many years. We know from other postwar rebuilding operations that former belligerents need help from outside to build bridges before serious reconciliation can begin. The first stage of that process requires an outside

40. On Smith and the rapid reaction force, see Tiomir Loza, “From Hostages to Hostiles,” War Report, No. 43 (Tuly 1995), pp. 28-38; and Tim Ripley, “A Deliberate Force on the Mountain,’’ International Defence Mew, No. 10 (1995), pp. 27-30.

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military presence to oversee the dismantling of forces, to restore freedom of movement, and to build confidence and trust. This can take several years, yet the Dayton agreement assumed that the NATO (IFOR) would withdraw after only twelve months. Far from building confidence, this schedule discouraged reconciliation and simply encouraged former enemies to prepare for the next battle. At the eleventh hour (immediately after the U.S. elections in November 19961, President Clinton extended the mandate for U.S. troops to remain in Bosnia for another eighteen months as part of the NATO stabilization force (SFOR), but by then a full year of potential confidence building had been wasted. During 1996 the sense of foreboding about what would happen if NATO left in December as scheduled was exacerbated by the premature election date set by the agreement. The Clinton administration ignored advice from OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) observers that condi- tions were neither free nor fair, and insisted that elections proceed as scheduled in September 1996. Thus for another two years, Bosnia was left in the hands of the same nationalist parties who fought the war for Tudjman and MiloSeviC, neither of whom had much interest in implementing any of the Dayton pro- visions leading to integration. The results were predictable. The nationalists blocked reconciliation and integration, forcing revision of NATO exit dates and municipal election sched- ules, and delaying important decisions not made at Dayton. The most difficult of these was who should control the sensitive area around Brfko, a town that had been the most contested strategic prize during the war and remains a potential flash point because it links Serbia with the two halves of Republika Srspka; it is also the main route connecting the federation to the River and Croatia. The parties at Dayton agreed to submit the control of Brfko to arbitration, but as the town was predominantly Muslim before the Serbs "cleansed" it in 1992, the Bosniacs are unlikely to tolerate long-term Serb contro1.4l

INTEGRATION VERSUS PARTITION Dayton is based on the Contact Group plan that divided Bosnia into two entities, allotting 51 percent of Bosnian territory to the Muslim-Croat federa-

41. The term "Bosniac" used to refer to Bosnians who eschewed an ethnic identification because they believed in a single multiethnic, multiconfessional Bosnia. Increasingly it has come to mean Bosnian Muslims.

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tion and 49 percent to Republika Srspka. Once the United States committed to the peace process, Holbrooke was able to cement the agreement and strengthen the provisions that would allow the two entities to be stitched together in the event that non-nationalist leaders emerged in the not-too-distant future. None of the current leaders is satisfied with the Dayton deal, however, and all are pursuing different goals. The Bosniac SDA wants to reunite the country by encouraging displaced Muslims to return to their former homes in Republika Srspka and in the predominantly Croat parts of the federation. The separatist Bosnian Serbs, on the other hand, are trying to keep all non-Serbs out of their entity. The Croats in Herzeg-Bosnia mirror the Serbs in attempting to separate themselves from the Muslims, albeit within the federation that is supposed to bind them together. Each focuses on those provisions in Dayton that further its own goals!2 By emphasizing different provisions of the Dayton agreement, each nationalist group has been able to pursue its own objectives. Provisions in the Dayton agreement that tend to harden the between the two political entities include Annex 1-A (on the Military Aspects of the Peace Settlement), Annex I-B (on Regional Stabilization), Annex 2 (on the Inter-entity Boundary Line and Related Issues), and Annex 3 (on Elections). These provisions had the positive effect of stabilizing the October 1995 cease- fire by separating the warring factions, by exchanging prisoners, and by con- cluding two sets of arms control agreements. Provisions that would move the country toward reconciliation and eventual integration received less attention (both from the local parties and from the guarantor states) during the first two years of implementation; these are: Annex 4 (on the Constitution of a Reintegrated Bosnia-Herzegovina), Annex 5 (on Arbitration), Annex 6 (on Human Rights), and Annex 7 (on Repatriation of Refugees and Displaced Persons). Recalcitrance on implementing these provisions provoked a transatlantic row in May 1996 when Holbrooke accused unnamed European governments of backsliding on the Dayton agreement!3 Pauline Neville-Jones, leader of the British team at Dayton, countered Hol- brooke, reminding him that it was the Europeans who insisted on strong

42. The British historian, Noel Malcolm, captures the confusion when he describes the Dayton agreement as the geopolitical equivalent of an artwork by Damien Hirst: “We have learned to live with conceptualist, postmodern, or deconstructionist art; now at last we are being offered a conceptualist state with a deconstructionist constitution.” Noel Malcolm, ”Bosnia Deconstructed,” Prospect, January 1996, pp. 8-10. 43. According to Holbrooke, “Some important European officials are privately writing off Day- ton’s political provisions and preparing the ground for de facto partition next year.” See , ”Backsliding in Bosnia,” Time, May 20,1996, p. 26.

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provisions for central institutions for Bosnia, not least to provide appropriate channels for reconstruction aid.44

ARMS CONTROL VERSUS ”TRAIN AND EQUIP” A major dispute between the United States and Europe throughout the war concerned lifting the arms embargo on Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia once they became independent. The Europeans were outraged that the United States ignored violations of the embargo by Iran and other Muslim states (e.g., Saudi Arabia and Malaysia) and that retired U.S. servicemen were encouraged to train the . The United States wanted a just peace, whereas the Europeans wanted peace as soon as possible-which meant peace on Serb terms. These differences reemerged in Dayton when Britain and France op- posed the United States’ promise to arm and train the federation armies. John Major‘s government tended to oppose programs that discriminated against Republika Srspka, but most European governments agreed with London that arming the Muslims after the war was unwise because the SDA, as the least satisfied with Dayton, was the most likely to be tempted to return to war. From the U.S. perspective, it was precisely because Dayton was so unfair to the Bosniacs (by rewarding Serb aggression with an autonomous Serb statelet) that some compensation was required. As the legal adviser to the Bosnian delegation made clear, Izetbegovit would not have signed the Dayton agree- ment without a promise to arm and trai11.4~ The Clinton administration also argued that if the United States and its partners did not arm and train the federation armies, the Bosnian Muslims would again turn to Iran for help. British and French opposition to the arm-and-train program was so strong, however, that the Americans would not write the promise into the text of the Dayton agreement. Izetbegovit had to be content with a verbal commitment from Holbrooke and Christopher, although a U.S. congressional resolution in December 1995 committed the Clinton administration to keeping its promise. Arm and train in its softer-sounding version of “train and equip” nevertheless cast a shadow over implementation of the Dayton agreement; it undermined not only the confidence-building measures and the subregional arms control agreement mandated by Annex 1-B, but also the reintegration of the federation and Republika Srspka armies, an important precondition for an integrated Bosnia.&

44. Pauliie Neville-Jones,“Don’t Blame the Europeans,” , May 17, 1996. 45. Paul Williams, ”Promise Them Anything,” Bosnia Report, No. 14 (February-March 1996). 46. For a more detailed analysis, see Jane M.O. Sharp, ”Tension in the Dayton Agreement: Train and Equip, Arms Control, and Integration” (unpublished manuscript).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.22.3.101 by guest on 24 September 2021 SEPARATION OF MILITARY AND CIVILIAN ASPECTS The contrast between the failure to implement Dayton and the highly success- ful UN Transitional Authority in Eastern Slavonia (UNTAES) is in~tructive.~~ For example, the Dayton agreement separates authority for its military and civilian provisions, whereas UNTAES was administered by an individual (Am- bassador Jacques Klein) who is unambiguously in of all aspects of the operation. Dayton provides a U.S. commander in chief for the NATO imple- mentation forces and a High Representative to coordinate, rather than enforce, the civilian aspects of the agreement!’ Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister (who served as the EU mediator in Bosnia after Owen retired in 1995) was High Representative from January 1996 until mid-1997.49Bildt’s responsi- bilities included maintaining contact with the United Nations, the OSCE, the EU, the World Bank, and the Contact Group.50 He was also expected to coordinate his activities with those of the NATO commander of IFOR, but relations between IFOR and the Office of the High Representative (OHR) were never smooth. In mid-1997, after serving as Bildt’s deputy for eighteen months, Michael Steiner urged the international community to adopt the UNTAES model for Bosnia:51”Jacques Klein rules there over one structure that unites both military and civilian issues. In Bosnia-Herzegovina we tried to cope with a multiplicity of institutions (e.g., IFOR, IPTF, UN, OHR, UNHCR, and many others) by having so-called principals meetings as often as possible. That slowed things down.”52It also meant that the local parties saw NATO troops as being in Bosnia to enforce only the military aspects of the Dayton agreement, not the annexes dealing with civilian and constitutional issues and repatriati~n.~~The gulf between the OHR and the IFOR had two hugely negative consequences. One was a law enforcement gap, which meant there was no mechanism to

47. Tim Ripley, “A Fragile Peace Emerges from the Rubble of Eastern Slavonia,” lane’s Intelligence Revim, July 1997, pp. 294-297. 48. Annex 10, Article 1.2 of the Dayton agreement. 49. Carlos Westendorp, former foreign minister of Spain, succeeded Bildt as High Representative. 50. The UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), which had been the lead agency during the war, was subordinate to NATO during the peace. The Dayton accords gave the UNHCR responsibility for repatriating refugees from abroad and displaced persons within Bosnia. The UN was responsible for the IITF; the OSCE was charged with coordinating elections; and the EU and the World Bank were primarily concerned with economic reconstruction. 51. UN Security Council Resolution 1037 established UNTAES on January 15, 1996, with five hundred UN troops backed by NATO air power under Klein’s command. The UNTAES mandate was to demilitarize the region, assist in the return of refugees, organize elections, and keep the peace. 52. Steiner, “Don’t Fool Around with Principles,” p. 39. 53. Edward Mortimer, ”Bosnia’s Fault Lines,” Financial Times, May 22, 1996.

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impose public order, to bring war criminals to justice, or to create safe condi- tions for the repatriation of refugees and displaced persons. The other was the lack of effective coordination of aid projects, because there was no way to make judicious use of carrots and sticks.

The Law Enforcement Gap: Maintaining Public Order

In stark contrast to Annex 1-A of the Dayton agreement, which stipulates specific tasks and schedules for the NATO implementation forces, Annex 11, which sets up the IPTF, has a vague mandate and no timetable. Thus, during 1996 the armies of the former warring factions were under the tight control of 60,000 NATO-led troops, but the police were being monitored by less than 2,000 unarmed IPTF personnel. This would not have been so serious if the local police had been trained in law enforcement and public service. Most Bosnian police, however, were former paramilitaries who switched uniforms but re- tained their weapons and remained answerable to local warlords. Their man- date was more to preserve the status quo than to serve the public interest. Indeed, a UN report suggested that the local police either condoned or inflicted 70 percent of all human rights abuses committed in Bosnia during 1996.54 The unarmed and ill-equipped IPTF was no match for these rogues. With little equipment available and no sign of any serious planning for the force at UN headquarters in New York, IPTF officers complained they were the poor relations of the Dayton process. Recruitment was a problem during 1996, as was funding; as a result, the task force remained very uneven. Many recruits had to be sent home immediately-some because they had no language skills, others because they could not drive, some even because they could not func- tion after dark for fear of evil ~pirits.5~ The well-armed and well-equipped IFOR troops could certainly have im- posed order, but despite language in Annex 1-A of Dayton that mandates NATO forces ”to respond appropriately to deliberate violence to life or per- most NATO commanders refused to take on any policing tasks. The result was a lack of public order and individual safety. This was evident in early 1996 when the Bosnian Serb police and other thugs forced fellow Serbs out of the Sarajevo suburbs that had reverted to federation control under the

54. UN report cited by James Schear, “Bosnia’s Public Security Deficit: Can It Be Filled?” (unpub- lished manuscript). 55. hid. 56. Article 6, para. 3, of the Dayton Agreement

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Dayton accords. The authorities in Sarajevo hoped that Serbs living there would stay, as their presence would help restore the multiethnic and multi- confessional character of the city. The Serb authorities in Pale, however, plied the residents of the Ilidia and Gravica suburbs with gruesome stories about what would happen to them under federation control. Serbs in Ilidia who did not want to move out asked the United Nations and IFOR to impose a curfew to protect them, but they were rebuffed.57At a meeting on March 9 in Ilidia, residents protesting the lack of police protection became incredulous when IPTF Commissioner Peter Fitzgerald told them, “The function of enforcing the law is a matter for the local police [who at the time were doing most of the damage]. Despite what you might wish, we simply do not have the authority to arrest people.”58Armed groups of Serb agitators torched buildings in full view of UN police monitors and heavily armed-but completely passive- IFOR personnel. Similar scenes occurred in April and May during the Muslim feast of Kurban Bajram, when Serbs attacked Muslims visiting family graves in in the north, and Trnovo, south of Sarajev0.5~

BRINGING WAR CRIMINALS TO JUSTICE The ICTY’s mandate is “to prosecute individuals responsible for serious viola- tions of international humanitarian law in the former Yugoslavia from January of 1991.”60By mid-October 1997 seventy-four public indictments and an un- known number of secret ones had been handed down, but only nineteen suspects had been taken into custody6’ Of the known indictments, sixty-one were Bosnian Serbs (forty-eight residing in Republika Srspka), three Yugoslav Serbs, seven Croats or Bosnian Croats, and three Bosnian Muslims. The ICTY, established under chapter 7 of the UN Charter, authorizes the use of force to arrest suspects.62 The western delegates at Dayton, however, demonstrated

57. Chris Hedges, ”NATO Forces Have to Watch as Sarajevo District Bums,” New York Times, March 18, 1996. 58. Fitzgerald cited in Maud S. Beelman, “Pitfalls of Peace in Bosnia,” Alice Patterson Foundation Reporter, Vol. 17, No. 4 (1996). 59. Chris Cviic, ”Running Late: But Is Dayton Still On Track?” The World Today, June 1996, pp. 144-146; see also Mike OConner,” UN Police Monitors Faltering in Bosnia: Unit Unable to Prevent Abuse by Serbs,” International Herald Tribune, July 27, 1996. 60. UN Security Council Resolution 827, May 25, 1993. 61. Secret indictments were an innovation of who succeeded Robert Goldstone as ICTY chief prosecutor in late 1996. 62. UN Security Council Resolution 808 stipulates that ”all states shall take all measures necessary under their domestic law to implement the provisions of the present resolution and the statute including the obligation of states to comply with requests for assistance or orders issued by a trial chamber for the arrest detention or surrender of persons accused.”

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little enthusiasm for specifying ICTY arrest pr0cedures.6~The agreement stipu- lates that indicted war criminals may not hold public office or run for election, but Contact Group delegates rejected proposals from the Bosnian delegation for tough arrest procedures and for detailed vetting of police and military personnel to weed out indictees. As a result, several local police forces re- mained under the control of indicted war criminals for two years after Dayton. Article 9 of the agreement obliges all parties to cooperate in the investigation and persecution of war crimes and other violations of international law. The responsibility to arrest also stems from UN Security Council Resolution 808, which requires states to take any measures necessary under their domestic law to implement the resolution's provisions. Nevertheless, in the absence of any pressure from Dayton, neither the local parties nor the NATO-led imple- mentation forces felt obliged to make arrests or to otherwise cooperate with the ICTY. Republika Srspka has the largest group of indicted citizens; among them are General Mladik and former President Karadiik, who have been indicted on several counts of genocide including responsibility for the massacre of some 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica in July 1995. Of the local parties, Republika Srspka is the most hostile to the ICTY and the least cooperative. Biljana PlavSiC., who succeeded KaradiiC. as president in 1996 when he was persuaded to step down, has been particularly obstructionist, claiming inter alia that the Serb entity bans extradition. PlavSiC. also has told UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan that the ICTY's indictments were no longer valid once the war was over.61 Officials in the former Republic of Yugoslavia, comprising Serbia and Mon- tenegro, also plead lack of appropriate domestic legislation to extradite in- dicted war criminals. MiloSeviC. refuses to hand over indicted JNA officers and permits both Karadiik and MladiC. to travel freely in the former republic. On June 24,1997, for example, Mladik hosted a party for three hundred guests at the in Belgrade to celebrate his son's wedding, and in October KaradiiC. attended his niece's wedding in Montenegr0.6~ Croatia has a mixed record. General Tihomir BlaSkiC., who was indicted for "cleansing" ethnic Serbs from the Krajina region, gave himself up, but only

63. Paul R. Williams and Scott R. Borden, "Bringing War Criminals to Justice," in Sharp, Imple- menting Dayton. 64. PlavSik cited in Human Rights Watch, "he Unindicted: Reaping the Rewards of Ethnic Cleansing, Vol. 9, No. 1 (D) (January 1997). 65. Chris Stephen, "NATO Plans Karadzic Swoop," Sunday Times (London), August 17, 1997.

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after threats to block a World Bank loan did Croatia send other indicted Croats to The Hague.& In the Muslim-Croat federation, Defense Minister Ante Jelavie, a Bosnian Croat, refused to cooperate with the ICTY in the Blagkie case. In general, however, the federation has a good record and has changed its domestic legislation to extradite those who have been indi~ted.6~Federation police arrested eight Bosnian Serbs as war criminals between January 20 and Febru- ary 2, 1996, based not on ICTY indictments but on evidence collected by the Bosnian government. Six of the eight were released, however, because the evidence met ICTY standards in only two cases.@

IFOR/SFOR AND THE ICTY Having not made a single arrest for the first eighteen months after Dayton, NATO appeared to offer virtual immunity to war criminals. ICTY prosecutors and human rights groups urged NATO to make arrests from January 1996; but without leadership on the issue from Washington, none of the sixteen NATO governments was willing to put their regular troops at risk. Despite unambiguous legal obligations for all UN member governments to arrest indicted war criminals, NATO commanders in Bosnia were issued guide- lines to arrest only indicted criminals whom they encountered, but not to engage in manhunts. However, even when IFOR troops encountered the most prominent indictees, they still made no arrests.69Increasingly frustrated by the lack of cooperation from both the local parties and western governments, ICTY prosecutors held several weeks of public hearings on the KaradiiC and MladiC indictments during the spring and summer of 1996; their hope was to embar- rass NATO governments into ordering arrests.70

66. Lee Hockstader, "10 Croats Surrender to War Crimes Tribunal," Washington Post, October 7, 1997. 67. These include Zejnil Delalif, Hazim Delif, and Esad Landzo, indicted for their role in the Celebici camps. See Mirko Klarin, "The Exceptional Case of the Celebicic Four," Tribunal, No. 8 (April-May 1997), p. 3. 68. General Djordje and Colonel Aleksa Krsmanovif were indicted for organizing the and were dispatched to The Hague for trial. See Associated Press, "Bosnia Wants Detained Serbs Charged with War Crimes," Wall Street Journal (Europe), February 7, 1996; Hamet Martin, " Row in Sarajevo," Financial Times, February 7, 1996; and Hamet Martin and Bruce Clarke, "Suspected War Criminals Extradicted to The Hague," Financial Times, February 13, 1996. 69. Robert Fox, "NATO Peace Force Under Fire over Bosnia Inaction," Daily Telegraph, May 2,1996. 70. Marlise Simons, "War Tribunal Paints an Ugly Picture of Two Wanted Serbs," International Herald Tribune, July 4, 1996.

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PERSUADING KARAD~I~TO "STEP DOWN" These public hearings may have had some influence, because in early July 1996 the United States, France, and Germany were reported to be close to agreement on the need to arrest KaradiiC, not least to have him out of the way before the September elections, as requested by Robert Frowick who was in charge of the OSCE election oversight project. Britain vetoed the idea, however, at an emer- gency Contact Group meeting in London on July ll.7' The Clinton administra- tion then recalled Richard Holbrooke from Wall Street to ask MiloSeviC to use his influence to get Karadiik to leave the country-essentially an offer of safe haven instead of arrest." MiloSevik, however, was only able to persuade Karadiik to transfer the presidency of Republika Srspka to PlavSik, which is hardly an improvement, as she was one of the most enthusiastic ethnic cleans- ers in Karadiics inner circle during the war and one of the most vociferously anti-Muslim fanatics in the Bosnian Serb leader~hip.~~Moreover, Karadiie remained secretary-general of the Serbian Democratic Party and continued to wield power in Pale, thus highlighting the impotence of the western guaran- tors of the Dayton accords.74 In September 1996 Chief Prosecutor Richard Goldstone complained that the ICTY had been "failed by the politicians who've been responsible for a highly inappropriate and pusillanimous policy in relation to Karadiics continued flaunting of power over the next twelve months and the Serb authorities' refusal to hand him over to the ICTY were increasingly embarrass- ing to the Clinton administration and the other NATO powers-none of whom had the stomach for an arrest that might draw blood. Instead, according to PlavSiC, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright went to on June 2, 1997, with another offer of safe haven for KaradiiC. PlavSiC conveyed the offer to Karadiik, who turned it down.76

71. Jon Swain, "Serbs Pledge to Fight to the Death for the Pariah of Pale," Sunday Times, July 21, 1996. 72. Elaine Sciolino, "U.S. to Send Holbrooke to Discuss Indicted Bosnian Serb Leaders," New York Times, July 14, 1996; Raymond Bonner, "U.S. to Tell Serbs They Face New Sanctions," New York Times, July 17, 1996; and Raymond Bonner, "US. Insists Karadzic Must Leave the Country" International Herald Tribune, July 18, 1996. 73. Ed Vulliamy, "Hardline Successor Dubbed "'Miss Necrophilia,"' Guardian, July 28, 1996. 74. Jonathan Eyal, "West Sidesteps Karadzic War Crimes as Bosnian Politics Overtakes Justice," Observer, July 21, 1996. 75. Goldstone, as cited by , in "Bosnia Judge- Condemns West," The Independent, September 17, 1996. 76. Guv-,- Dinmore. "Karadzic Refused US. Offer of Safe Haven Rival Claims," Financial Times, August 13,1997.

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Public pressure on NATO increased in late June after UNTAES troops helped an ICTY team arrest Slavko Drakmanovie in Vukovar.n Immediately after- ward, ICTY prosecutor Louise Arbour, while heaping praise on UNTAES, denounced the SFOR as an ”exercise in ~elf-defeat.”~~Whether humiliated by Arbour‘s criticism, out of patience with the Bosnian Serb leadership, or reacting to some internal policy change, NATO sanctioned the arrest of two indicted Bosnian Serbs (Operation Tango) by British Special Air Services forces on July 10, 1997. The British team arrested Milan Kovacevit in and shot and killed Simo Drljaca resisting arrest.79It was not clear, however, whether this was an isolated incident or the beginning of a concerted effort to round up all the indictees before the SFOR mandate runs out in June 1998.8’ The arrest was a setback for PlavSit, whom Karadiit and the Pale Serbs accused of working with SFOR against Republika Srspka and who was sub- sequently thrown out of the Serbian Democratic Party? Thereafter western governments threw their support behind PlavSit in her feud with Karadiie. The goal is obviously to undermine KaradiiFs authority; but the plan could well backfire because although PlavSik is “the enemy of our enemy,” she is far from being a friend of the west and is certainly not committed to an integrated, multiethnic, pluralistic Bosnia.

The West’s Role in Repatriation

A lack of public order and failure to apprehend war criminals during 1996 and 1997 had a devastating impact on the process of repatriation. With Karadiit still in charge of the Serb entity and other indicted war criminals continuing to control many communities throughout Bosnia, reconciliation among ethnic communities separated and alienated by the war remained unlikely. Minorities faced constant harassment, and their movements within and between entities were severely restricted. When refugees returned home to find themselves in

77. Drakmanovii. was indicted for the massacre of 260 hospital patients in Vukovar in October 1991. See Charles Trueheart, ”Tribunal Hails Arrest of Croatian Serb,” International Herald Tribune, July 2, 1997. 78. Louise Arbour, in a lecture at the Royal Institute for International Affairs, London, July 4, 1997. 79. Both were indicted for their role in the concentration camps in the Prijedor area in 1992. See Tim Kelsey, David Leppard, Jason Burke, and Dragan Cicic, “Dead or Alive,” Sunday Times (London), July 13, 1997; and Edward Mortimer ”Moment of Truth,” Financial Times, August 20, 1997. 80. As observed on July 11, it would require one arrest a week to clear up the published list of those indicted by June 1998. 81. Karen Coleman, ” Party Opponents Expel Bosnian Serb President,” Guardian, July 21, 1997.

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a minority, they would often find no ”freedom of stopping” either. Under these conditions, most refugees-if given a choice-would opt to stay in their coun- try of asylum. Unfortunately, however, several asylum countries were anxious to deport their Bosnian refugees as soon as possible after the signing of the peace agreement. Approximately one-half of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s prewar population of 4.3 million was displaced during the forty-three months of war. Some 1 million of those displaced remained within the country, and more than 1.2 million refu- gees were dispersed throughout twenty-five host states. Of the 700,000 refu- gees who fled to countries outside the former Yugoslavia, by far the largest number-345,000-went to Germany, which already had a resident commu- nity of immigrants from former Yugoslavia of almost 500,000.82 At the start of 1996, of the approximately 3 million people remaining in Bosnia, 80 percent (including the 1 million internally displaced) were devastated by the war and were dependent on some level of international humanitarian assistance. Annex 7 of the Dayton agreement, the Agreement on Refugees and Dis- placed Persons, establishes the rights of refugees and displaced persons to return home; to restore their prewar property rights, or to compensate them for property lost; and to allow the return of all citizens even if they have enjoyed temporary protection elsewhere. The parties must not subject return- ees to harassment, intimidation, or discrimination; they should take all steps to prevent activities that hinder the safe return of refugees; and they cannot interfere with the returnees’ choice of destination or compel them to return to areas with inadequate infrastructure. The UNHCR has the primary responsibility for implementing Annex 7, and according to the Dayton accords should have been able to anticipate NATO’s active cooperation in removing land mines, protecting the returnees’ freedom of movement, and preventing the outbreak of violence should disputes arise about property ownership or any other aspect of repatriation. The UNHCR also expected cooperation from the donor community to rebuild homes in communities likely to receive large numbers of returnees. Equally important, the UNHCR needed asylum countries to refrain from forcing refugees home prematurely into conditions that were unsafe. In any event, a combination of German impatience, inadequate shelter, and lack of NATO protection turned UNHCR into a reluctant accessory in the final stages of ethnic cleansing.

82. Full details of refugee distribution can be found in the ICG report, Going Nowhere Fast, Sarajevo, 1997.

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Contingent on security, funding, reconstruction, and demining, the UNHCR assumed at the beginning of 1996 that up to 500,000 internally displaced persons would return to their homes and 370,000 refugees (170,000 from the immediate region and 200,000 from other countries) would repatriate during the year.83 Not only did repatriation fall far short of these expectations, but during 1996 an additional 80,000 people were displaced as a result of the transfer of territories between the two entities provided for in the Dayton agreement. Only some 250,000 refugees and internally displaced persons re- turned to their homes or home areas in 1996-almost exclusively to areas where the returnees were part of the majority group. The low number of returns resulted mainly from the local parties’ refusal to welcome minority refugees back into their home communities. The donor community could have made a much greater effort to provide shelter and remove mines, but IFOR was the most disappointing international agency in doing so little to provide either freedom of movement or protection for returnees, even in areas where NATO troops were thick on the ground. A major effort to facilitate minority returns was made with the establishment of the Zone of Separation (ZOS) Return Program,@ a high-profile effort to support the return of Bosniacs to their prewar homes on the Republika Srspka side of the interentity border line. Because of hostility to Bosniac returns deeper into Bosnian Serb territory, the UNHCR and other international agencies fo- cused on the ZOS, which in 1996 was well patrolled by IFOR. The assumption here was that NATO troops would prevent the Serbian police from harassing returnees. The first returnees to the suburbs of Omerbegovaca and Diidarusa, on the southern outskirts of BrZko, encountered no major security problems. In April, however, the Bosnian Serbs chose to see the ZOS returns as an attempt to establish strategic “facts on the ground.” They responded by sending crews and materials to start roofing damaged houses for Bosnian Serbs who had been displaced to BrZko. Thus began a Bosniac-Serb ”housing race,” which led IFOR commanders in BrZko to impose a two-week moratorium on construction in mid-June. To minimize the possibilities for conflict, an International Housing Commission (IHC), comprised of representatives from UNHCR, OHR, IFOR, and IPTF, established a screening process that would verify the prewar link

83. This section draws on interviews with UNHCR officials and the ICG report Going Nowhere Fast. 84. The ZOS is an area extending two kilometers along either side of the agreed cease-fire line. See Annex 1-A Article 4.2.b.

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between each prospective returnee and the property in question. The guide- lines were simple: only prewar owners were to be cleared to return to the Serb side of the ZOS; and as an initial pacing measure, an arbitrary limit of twenty approvals for cross-interentity borderline returns per week was set as the commission’s target. No applications from active military or police were to be approved, and returnees were explicitly barred from bringing weapons into the ZOS. Several aspects of the IHC process troubled its creators, however; for exam- ple, the returnees received no safety guarantees; they had no promise that financial assistance would be automatically forthcoming as a result of the approval; and once on Republika Srspka territory, they would be subject to local law. Worse yet, IFOR insisted all along that although it would provide ”area security” to prevent a general outbreak of hostilities, it would not be responsible for guaranteeing the security of individuals. Similarly, the appli- cants had to acknowledge that being cleared to return to the ZOS did not carry any expectation of financial assistance. Bosniacs grew increasingly frustrated with the IHC procedures. For them, returning to the ZOS was simply returning home, albeit often to piles of rubble and fields strewn with land mines. Given that the Dayton agreement already had promised them the right to return, the IHC process seemed an unneces- sary, painfully slow, and deeply frustrating impediment. Returns were mini- mal. In 1996 some 4,500 applications were approved under the IHC procedure, covering about 10,000 people; but according to the UNHCR, as of March 1997, only 811 Bosniacs had returned to the Serb side of the ZOS and only 211 using the IHC procedures. In the absence of a more determined SFOR effort to ensure security, many international workers involved in the ZOS return process began to question its utility. Nearly all those who returned to the side of the ZOS faced grim living conditions-generally without electricity or running water-and were subject to severe harassment. The ZOS had been a frontline area during the war, was still laced with minefields and wrecked houses, and could easily become a battlefield again. Demining is always difficult, but particularly so in Bosnia because the minefields were not adequately mapped during the war. The United Nations estimates a definite mine threat over 300 square kilometers, but fears another 200 square kilometers may be at risk. Despite the obvious need to remove the mines-to bring communities back to civilian life, to encourage repatriation, and to revive the agricultural sector-during 1996 and 1997 NATO, in risk-

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averse mode, removed only mines that threatened its own forces. General mine clearance was left to amateur demining operations riddled with petty compe- tition and political rivalries.85The UN Mine Action Center initially coordinated international demining projects organized by the UN Department of Humani- tarian Affairs and a number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Local demining programs were overseen by the Bosnian Mine Protection and Re- moval Agency, which awarded contracts to political cronies with little regard for competence. By mid-1997 the United Nations reported that only 1 percent of the estimated number of mines had been cleared. The neglect of demining by NATO countries-especially Germany-that are anxious to accelerate refu- gee returns is hard to understand. UNHCR would have preferred repatriation to be phased in over a longer period to allow for demining, the rebuilding of adequate housing, and the restoration of public order; but anticipation of IFORs withdrawal in December 1996 and the asylum countries’ growing impatience with returning the refu- gees forced the pace. As the most hospitable asylum power in terms of taking in refugees, Germany bore a hugely disproportionate share of the refugee burden and was the most anxious EU state to improve conditions for repatria- tion. Some German states were more aggressive than others to accelerate refugee returns, notably Bavaria, which claimed to have taken in more than 60,000 new refugees during 1996.% In September 1996 Berlin threatened to return refugees by force after October 1, if necessary.87Others, including North Rhine-Westphalia, were more relaxed and promised not to expel refugees until the spring of 1997. In December 1996 the UN High Commission for Refugees reluctantly ac- cepted that certain categories of refugees benefiting from temporary protection in could be encouraged to return to Bosnia, but only as long as such repatriation was on a voluntary basis. UNHCR would not object to accelerated repatriation if refugees were returning to majority areas-that is, where they would not be subject to harassment as minorities. This represented a drastic watering down of the rights that Dayton promised refugees and displaced persons only twelve months earlier.

~~ 85. ICG, Ridding Bosnia of Land Mines: The Urgent Need for a Sustainable Policy, Sarajevo: July 18, 1997. 86. Alan Cowell, “Bavaria Begins Ouster of Yugoslav Refugees” International Herald Tribune, Oc- tober 10, 1996. 87. , “Bosnians in Germany Face Forced Returns,” International Herald Tribune, September 21-22, 1996.

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More Effective Use of Economic Aid

Only when the international community of donors makes specific demands, with penalties and incentives clearly set out, will the local parties understand the costs of noncompliance with Dayton and the benefits of compliance. Given the war‘s devastating impact on the economy and the need for reconstruction funds, the donors should have been able to exert economic leverage on those in power, so that the communities at large, not just special interests, received the funds. Compared with prewar levels, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s economy had suffered tremendously. For example, at the beginning of 1996, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s gross national product had declined to 10 percent of its prewar size; its per capita income was down to 25 percent; more than 70 percent of the industrial plant had been demolished; and unemployment stood at 80 percent and was rising as troops were demobilized. Complicating this already bleak picture, Bosnia had to restructure from a centrally planned to a market economy-all this with three separate currencies (four counting the ), no central bank, and no system in place to collect taxes or customs duties.88 Nevertheless, the first year after Dayton saw industrial output in the federation rise by 70 percent, net wages quadruple, and unemployment fall to 65 per- ~ent.8~In the spring of 1997, Christine Wallich, the World Bank’s country director for Bosnia-Herzegovina in Washington, claimed that its program in Bosnia was one of the most successful of any postwar reconstruction efforts.” It is true that in some regions the economy was visibly better, especially around IFOR encampments where donor countries carefulIy target funds to support local projects. In addition, once Annex 1-A was implemented on schedule in the spring of 1996, NATO troops began to help with reconstruction tasks such as building roads and bridges. Despite these obvious successes on the economic front, many aid workers and monitoring organizations on the ground in Bosnia observed that the donor countries were not making the best use of aid as leverage to further the peace process. The EU experience in Mostar should have taught West European

88. Nebojsa Vukadinovib, “Rebuilding Bosnia, “War Report, May 1997, pp. 19-23. 89. International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Strategic Survey 7996-2997 (London: IISS), pp. 134-139. 90. Christine Wallich, ”World Bank Record Is Good in Bosnia,” International Herald Tribune, May 23, 1997.

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governments the importance of aid conditionality, but according to the New York-based Human Rights Watch, donor countries lifted sanctions on the Republika Srspka before local authorities had given any hint they were com- plying with Dayton. The British Overseas Development Agency, for example, channeled a large portion of its €344.5 million allocated to Bosnia in 1996, to Prijedor, a town still run by the same individuals responsible for the and Prijedor concentration camps that western journalists discovered in 1992.9' Thus, despite Prime Minister Major's promises at the Peace Implementation Council meeting in London in December 1996 that British aid would be con- ditional on compliance with the Dayton accords, in 1996 and 1997 indicted war criminals in the Prijedor area were using British funds to run enterprises they had stolen from Muslims during the war. To address this problem, Britain's new foreign secretary, , demanded better accounting of aid funds from both Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat federation on his first visit there in July 1997.9' A December 1996 report from the Centre d'ktudes et de Recherches Interna- tionales (CERI) in Paris found that the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the EU, as well as individual country donors, all tended to work in a bilateral framework with recipients, not as part of a coordinated plan. Aid was often tied to enterprises in the donor country; mafia enterprises siphoned off funds earmarked for construction; and an economic logic had emerged that directly benefited the most corrupt elites. In addition, IFOR personnel contin- ued the same reprehensible UNPROFOR tradition of paying protection money to the most thuggish elements in Republika Srspka and West M0star.9~ The International Crisis Group (ICG) reported similar findings in May 1997, deploring the fact that most of the money directed to Bosnia had been squan- dered with so little effect. The ICG urged the donor community to make more strategic use of economic aid to force the local parties to comply with Dayton.94 This is the kind of conditionality BiIdt promised in early 1996 when he ac- knowledged the important role of the international community of donor na- tions: "We must not neglect the role we can play ourselves, if we offer the

91. Human Rights Watch, The Unindicted. 92. Jon Swain, "Bosnian Aid Millions Go Missing," Sunday Times, July 27, 1997. 93. Nebojsa Vukadinovi6, La construction de la Bosnie-Hercegovine:Aide infernafionaleet acteurs locale [The reconstruction of Bosnia-Herzegovina: International Aid and Local Actors] (Paris: Les fitudes du CERI, No. 21 (December 1996). 94. ICG, Compliance with Dayton: The Question of Economic Condifionality (Sarajevo: May 1997).

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carrots and if we are willing to use the But there was little or no judicious use of economic aid during 1996 and 1997. Blame for misuse of aid funds should not be laid exclusively at Bildt's door, although he was not a forceful practitioner of his own principle^.^^ His diffident approach was almost certainly tied to the knowledge that his Euro- pean partners had not given him a strong mandate to take a hard line with the Serbs. Differences in attitudes toward aid conditionality mirrored transat- lantic differences toward the protagonists during the war. Europeans by and large (and Britain and France in particular) wanted reconstruction funds spread more evenly across both entities, whereas the United States, Germany, and Japan were more inclined to impose tough rules of conditionality. The problem was that, just as in the war, American and German policies did not match their rhetoric. Both governments continued to pour funds into Croatia despite repeated violations of the Dayton accords by Tudjman and his associ- ates in Croatia and in Herzeg-Bosnia.

Prospects for a Recommitment to the Dayton Process

After the poor record of compliance with the Dayton agreement during 1996, it was clear that drastic changes were needed to save the peace process. At the Peace Implementation Council meetings in London in December 1996, in Sintra in May 1997, and in in July 1997, western powers exhorted the local parties to do better, but their own failings were hardly a~knowledged.~~Harsh criticism of the west came from the Bosnian government in April 1997, how- ever, when in a letter to the heads of state of the Contact Group, Izetbegovik (chair of the presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina) and Haris Silajdiik (cochair of the Council of Ministers) claimed that not a single annex of the Dayton agreement had been implemented satisfa~torily.~~ In addition, dissatisfaction within IzetbegoviCs predominantly Muslim SDA party emerged during the spring of 1997 in increasingly open debate about renegotiating the Dayton map. Loss of faith in western support for an inte-

95. Carl Bildt, "Help the Bosnian Parties to Make the Dayton Process Work," International Herald Tribune, April 3, 1996. 96. George Soros, "Where There's No Will, There's No Way," War Report (July 1996). 97. OHR, "The Political Declaration from the Ministerial Meeting of the Steering Board of the Peace Implementation Council-Sintra, 30 May 1997," reprinted in Bosnia Report, No. 19 (June- August 1997), pp. 9-11. 98. The Izetbegovit-Siladiik Letter to Heads of State is reprinted as "Dayton Is Not Being Imple- mented," in Bosnia Report, No. 18 (London) (February-May 1997), pp. 1-2.

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grated Bosnia-Herzegovina heightened SDA's desire for a much bigger slice of the prewar state of Bosnia-Herzegovina than half the territory allotted to the Muslim-Croat federation at Dayton. In April 1997 the Sarajevo journal Dani published a map that awarded the western half of Republika Srspka to a new Bosnian Muslim state and assumed that Herzeg-Bosnia would revert to a Greater Croatia.99This was not a solution that appealed to western interests, not least because achieving such a new Muslim state would mean another war, and maintaining it would require the kind of protection that the United States has felt obliged to provide Israel for the past fifty years. Emboldened by the U.S. train-and-equip program, the Bosniacs might believe they could take western Republika Srspka by force of arms, but a more cost-effective, long- term strategy for the western donor countries would be to work harder at implementing those provisions of the Dayton agreement that further inte- gration. Peace without justice will be an increasingly fragile peace. Thus, if the western powers are as serious about moving beyond de facto partition toward a single integrated multiethnic Bosnia as their rhetoric suggests, they must correct the structural problems in the Dayton agreement and adhere more strictly to fundamental principles of international law. The first task is to reverse the policy of destabilizing short-term exit strategies and recognize the reality that postwar reconstruction is a long-term process. Success requires an appropriate commitment of political, economic, and military resources, includ- ing a broader NATO mandate to create safe conditions for repatriation. Second, action must replace rhetoric with respect to support for the ICTY and the need to arrest indicted war criminals. Third, NATO must replace the current repres- sive and corrupt police forces with police trained in law enforcement and public service. Finally, the donor community must appoint a credible High Representative who can exert effective economic leverage on the local parties and has the authority to call on NATO troops to enforce compliance with the Dayton agreement.

PLANNING A LONG-TERM IMPLEMENTATION FORCE Bosnia will need an international military presence for several more years. The most credible, confidence-building post-SFOR deterrent to new fighting will

99. Senad Pecanin (editor of Dani), "Planning for Partition," War Report (May 1997), p. 6; "Another Bosnia Carve-up," The Economist, April 19-25, 1997, p. 48; and Julian Borger, "Peace Troops Face from Here to Eternity in Bosnia," Guardian, May 22, 1997.

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be another U.S.-led NATO combined joint task force. Such a force would require President Clinton to backtrack on the June 1998 exit date, and do so at the same time that he is seeking ratification of NATO enlargement. Burden sharing will be an issue in both debates, and congressional approval for U.S. participation in a post-SFOR force cannot be taken for granted. Secretary of State Albright and congressional leaders, including Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), the ranking member on the House International Relations Committee, were al- ready making the case for a post-SFOR U.S. presence in early 1997."' In late September National Security Adviser Sandy Berger also indicated the need for a post-SFOR presence."' But this campaign also requires the focused determi- nation of a president who must overcome a well-deserved reputation for dithering on Bosnia. Rebuilding war-torn societies takes much longer than the schedule envis- aged in Dayton. With or without U.S. troops on the ground, NATO should deploy a combined joint task force for at least five more years to give peace a chance. A European-led task force would stretch the capabilities of the Euro- pean powers, but is materially possible if the political will can be mustered.'02 Many U.S. policy and opinion makers see the willingness of Europe to take the initiative in organizing a post-SFOR force as a test of the hitherto elusive European security and defense identity. In London and Paris, however, while both governments are willing to remain in Bosnia in a U.S.-led task force, they refuse to participate in another military operation in which US. troops do not share the risks on the ground. Europeans will therefore be lobbying for a continuing U.S. presence in Bosnia, for which the quid pro quo is likely to be a greater European share of the expense of taking on new NATO members. The mere presence of NATO in Bosnia after June 1998 will be a strong deterrent to starting a new war, but NATO troops idling in their barracks will not further the peace process. An effective post-SFOR force needs to broaden its mandate to remove mines and guarantee freedom of movement for civil- ians-two tasks that NATO largely evaded in 1996 and 1997. The first com- mander in chief of IFOR, U.S. Leighton Smith, on taking up his post in December 1995, said that securing freedom of movement throughout Bosnia

100. Steven Erlanger, "On Bosnia, Clinton Supports Albright against Cohen View," New York Times, June 12, 1997; and Lee Hamilton, "The Crucial US Role in Bosnia," International Herald Tribune, May 20, 1997. 101. Clifford Krause, "Security Aide Sees Presence in Bosnia beyond Deadline," New York Times, September 24, 1997. 102. Michael Clarke, "Planning for a Post-SFOR Combined Joint Task Force" (unpublished manu- script).

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would be the test for the success or failure of the entire mission. By these lights both IFOR and SFOR failed in 1996 and 1997. On the other hand, results were dramatic in those isolated instances where individual IFOR and SFOR com- manders interpreted their mandate to offer protection to returning refugees and displaced persons. During 1996 U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Tony Cucolo prevented Serbs from harassing Muslim refugees returning home to the BrEko area, and U.S. Colonel Gregory Fotenot built economic bridges between the two entities by clearing mines and building basic infrastructure for an open-air market in the ZOS. In 1997, in response to a request from a senior State Department official, U.S. General Montgomery Meigs provided twenty-four- hour protection for Muslims and Croats returning to their homes in a few Serb-controlled villages in the BrEko area.lo3 According to Dayton, this kind of protection should be routinely available wherever refugees and displaced persons want to return to their former homes. Yet in 1997 SFOR troops continued passive observance of violence against returnees: for example, in August, Croats harassed some three hundred Muslims returning to in Central Bosnia, and Muslims taunted Serbs returning to the Sarajevo suburb of Vogosca.lM

SUPPORT THE ICTY AND BRING WAR CRIMINALS TO JUSTICE As NATO's Secretary-General said after the Prijedor arrest in July, NATO's Bosnian mission will not be completed until all war criminals have been delivered to The Hague. Only then will war-scarred Bosnians feel able to begin the process of reconciliation and reconstruction. Western governments gave only lukewarm support to the ICTY from its establishment in 1993 until mid-1997, but in 1997 Albright's replacement of Christopher as Secretary of State, and the displacement of the manifestly pro-Serb Tories by a Labor government in Britain, brought fundamentally different perspectives on the importance of human rights and the rule of law. Both Albright and Cook articulated strong support for the ICTY and a tough line on war criminals.105

~ ~~ 103. Mike o%onnor," Quiet US Protection in Brtko," International Herald Tribune, July 30, 1997. 104. The Economist, "Bosnia: Not Hopeless," August 9,1997, pp. 29-30; and Ian Mather and Askold Krushelnycky, "Croats Drive Out Muslims," The European, August 7-13,1997, pp. 8-19. 105. Steven Lee Myer, "Albright Chides Balkan Chiefs on Flouting of Peace Accord," New York Times, June 1, 1997; Michael Dobbs, "Tact Aside: Albright Berates Balkan Leaders," International Herald Tribune, June 2, 1997; Guy Dinmore, "Albright Warning in Balkans," Financial Times, June 2, 1997; "Cook's Tour," The Economist, May 17, 1997; Ian Traynor, "Cook Reads Bosnia Riot Act," Guardian, July 25, 1997; John Kampfner, "UK Takes Leaders in Bosnia to Task," Financial Times, July 30,1997; and Hugo Young, "Robin Cook Steps into a Land of Hatred," Guardian, July 29,1997.

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Cook also pledged €330 million to ICTY to build a third trial court in addition to the two already operating at The Hague. The appointments of Carlos Westendorp as High Representative and General Wesley Clarke as Supreme Allied Commander Europe could also bring more robust action by the OHR and NATO, respectively. Tough White House leadership will be needed to overcome Pentagon and NATO skeptics on arrests, however. Many senior officials in Washington and Brussels maintain a risk-averse and combat-shy approach to SFOR and reject a police role for NATO troops. In mid-June 1997 at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Klaus Naumann (the German officer heading NATO’s Military Com- mittee) still judged a NATO arrest of KaradiiC. and MladiC. to be too risky.’06 In August retiring Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs General John Shalikashvili opposed the use of any U.S. troops in capturing war criminal^.'^^ The arrest of an indicted war criminal in July by British troops revealed that in other SFOR troop-contributing countries were prepared to act, but the United States will have to lead on this issue if all the indicted war criminals are to be arrested.

REFORMING THE POLICE Serious support for the ICTY will also create a mood conducive to police reform. Jacques Klein’s handling of the police problem in Eastern Slavonia provides a useful model for Bosnia. UNTAES troops there took on law enforce- ment tasks while the local police were sent to an international police academy in Budapest for retraining. An augmented IPTF, or the EU, could provide a transitional police force in Bosnia, although an EU police commissioner would have to insist on better support from EU governments than Hans Koschnick received as administrator of Mostar in 1994-96. By mid-1997 the IPTF was beginning to make some headway in reforming the federation police: trying to end the bifurcation on ethnic lines, introducing new common uniforms, downsizing toward the goal of 10,000 officers from the immediate postwar level of 34,000, screening out the worst criminal ele- ments, and removing the most offensive weapons from police stockpiles.lo8 Nevertheless, in mid-1997 federation police were still obstructing minority

106. William Drodziak, ”NATO Rejects Hunting Crimes Suspects,” International Herald Tribune, June 14-15, 1997. 107. Shalikashvili cited in Philip Shenon, ” No G.I. Role Seen in Arrests of Bosnian War Suspects, New York Times, August 29, 1997. 108. Schear, in Sharp, Rebuilding War-Torn Societies.

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refugee returns. In , in the Croatian part of the federation, for example, not only the police but also the mayor helped organize the torching of homes to prevent the return of former Serb residents.'@) Police reform in Republika Srspka is a greater challenge because it requires disarming and disbanding thousands of paramilitary special forces assigned to protect indicted war criminals. In August 1997 Holbrooke, in one of his periodic troubleshooting trips to Bosnia, insisted that all paramilitary and police forces be placed firmly under the control of either the SFOR or the IPTF, or disbanded."' This sensible action should have been taken some eighteen months earlier when the Serb police disgraced themselves in the suburbs of Sarajevo; and might it have been had Holbrooke been the High Representative.

A TOUGHER ROLE FOR THE HIGH REPRESENTATIVE A successful campaign of coordinated aid in a few key areas could transform the peace process in Bosnia. The critical requirement is for an individual who can coordinate the programs not only of donor governments and international organizations like the World Bank and the EU but also of NGOs with sig- nificant aid projects. The High Representative must be firm with recalcitrant locals and have access to NATO forces or an IPTF with more well-trained, well-armed personnel who have the authority to arrest lawbreakers, especially violators of the Dayton agreement. Holbrooke would be ideal, but calling him back for a few days of troubleshooting every six months is not the answer. That simply undermines the High Representative's authority and leaves the basic problems unsolved.

Conclusion

The main impediment to the prevention and resolution of the wars in former Yugoslavia in 1991-95 was the reluctance of the western democracies to use force. This overview of the Dayton process has tried to demonstrate that the tendency to appease rather than punish the aggression still drove western policy in trying to consolidate the peace in Bosnia during 1996 and 1997.

109. Chris Bennett, House Burnings: Obstruction ofthe Right to Return in Drvur, ICG Report, Sarajevo, June 9,1997. 110. Vulliamy, "Net Finally Closes"; see also Guy Dinmore, "The End of the Road for Karadzic," Financial Times, August 16-17, 1997; and Jonathan Steele, "NATO Gets Tough with Karadzic's Private Guard," Guardian, August 9,1997.

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NATO implementation and stabilization forces have not provided freedom of movement as mandated by the Dayton agreement, and have offered virtual immunity to the more than seventy war criminals indicted by the ICTY in The Hague. Nor has the donor community used its economic power to pressure recalcitrant local parties to meet their Dayton obligations. Members of the western security community, comprising NATO and the EU, take pride in not resorting to the use of force to settle disputes among themselves. But eschew- ing the use of force and economic leverage to protect fragile democracies from extremists like MiloSevi6, Tudjman, and Karadiit is nothing to be proud of. The condoning of ethnic cleansing by MiloSeviFs forces in 1991-92 set the tone for western involvement in Yugoslavia and encouraged Tudjman to pur- sue a similar policy in Croatia and the Croatian parts of Bosnia-Herzogovina. The acceptance by the western powers in 1995 of a peace settlement in Dayton that rewarded Milogevie and Tudjman with what amounted to the de facto partition of Bosnia did not lead to a stable peace. On the contrary, in 1997 the dissatisfied and increasingly radicalized Muslims in President IzetbegoviFs SDA party were thinking aloud about redrawing the Dayton map. The analysis presented here suggests that the only way to stabilize the current state of nonwar into a durable peace is for the western guarantors of Dayton to recommit to those provisions in the agreement that would lead to the reintegration of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This means making a long-term com- mitment to keep NATO forces in Bosnia to provide freedom of movement for civilians and returning refugees; a concerted effort to bring indicted war criminals to justice; a greatly enhanced effort to retrain the local police in law enforcement and public service; and tight coordination of the currently frag- mented aid and reconstruction programs. Overcoming the grim legacy of western appeasement and indifference in Bosnia will not be easy, but the western democracies cannot afford to fail there if they want a stable Europe. NATO has already embarked on a transition from an alliance solely concerned with the defense of its own members to an organization that provides security for a wide Europe. Failure in Bosnia will not only unsettle the new democracies aspiring to join NATO, but could also trigger a more serious breakdown within the alliance. The critical factor will be U.S. leadership, as it was in ending the war in 1995. If the Clinton administration commits forces to Bosnia until peace has stabi- lized, there is no question that the major European powers will enthusiastically follow. If the president’s interest remains episodic, however, it is by no means certain that the Europeans will muster the political will to act without the

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United States. The nine EU countries that are full members of the Western European Union in theory constitute the European pillar of NATO, and are capable of leading combined joint task forces in which the United States does not want to participate. But few believe that a WEU-led implementation force in Bosnia would have the credibility to deter new fighting. The sad fact is that the EU and the WEU are much less than the sum of their parts. Only if and when the EU becomes a can it expect to have a coherent foreign and security policy. Until then it will remain the junior partner in the western alliance and the United States must call the shots in Bosnia as elsewhere.

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