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Peacemaking: Success on the Danube Region of Croatia the Erdut Agreement

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Peacemaking: Success on the Danube Region of Croatia the Erdut Agreement chapter 11 Peacemaking: Success on the Danube Region of Croatia The Erdut Agreement The Erdut Agreement for the Danube region of Croatia was one of the great successes of United Nations peacemaking in the former Yugoslavia. Thorvald Stoltenberg is the undoubted father of this agreement. icfy’s main efforts on Croatia had been to put down building blocks for peace one by one and to help work out autonomy regimes for the Croatian Serbs that would guarantee them respect for internationally respected stan- dards of human rights and the rights of minorities. Great credit for the drafting of such a regime must go to our dear departed friend Paul Szasz, who bore the brunt of the drafting of this and many other documents in his capacity as Legal Adviser to the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia. This effort to work out a regime of autonomy for the Croatian Serbs would come to naught in the end. Tudjman clearly wanted no part of it because he wanted full integration of the Serbs inside a unitary Croatia. As for Milosevic, when the plan was first presented to him and he had studied it, he told Stoltenberg and Owen, “Gentlemen, please do not ruin today ideas that might work in five years time in the future.” He also had other ideas in mind and prob- ably wanted to negotiate with Tudjman an exchange of territory in which he would incorporate into Serbia especially the eastern enclave which was sepa- rated from Serbia merely by a river. icfy, without a doubt, made foundation contributions to the building of peace in Croatia. The Cease-fire Agreement of 29 March, 1994 was one of its important peacebuilding planks. After the cease-fire agreement, which undoubtedly saved many lives, the issue then arose: how to advance on the political front? The Croatian Government was determined to bring the United Nations Protected Areas within the Croatian constitutional and legal order and let it be known openly that they would go to war to achieve their aims unless progress came through negotiations. President Milosevic of Serbia took the view, formally, that it was a matter between the Croatian Government and the Croatian Serbs. He seemed, however, to be playing for time – to put off having to face the moment when he would have to tell the Croatian Serbs that their future lay within Croatia. The one time he gave a glimpse into his thinking, he told Lord Owen and Stoltenberg that he had in mind an autonomous Croatian © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004245907_015 Peacemaking: Success On The Danube Region Of Croatia 167 Serb republic within the Republic of Croatia. Whether that would include Sector East he did not say. The Croatian Serbs, as did President Milosevic, encouraged icfy to address issues of economic cooperation and normalisation of economic life in the United Nations Protected Areas with the thesis that the more there was normalisation and economic cooperation, the more the search for political solutions would be facilitated. The Croatian Government, the Croatian Serbs, and President Milosevic all agreed that following the cease-fire, one should address economic cooperation and political solutions. The Croatian Government wanted these issues taken in tandem. The Croatian Serbs and President Milosevic wanted them taken sequen- tially, with economic cooperation coming first and thereafter discussion of polit- ical solutions. In the final analysis, icfy did manage to conclude an Economic Agreement on 2 December, which brought in marked improvements in the qual- ity of life for the population of Sectors North, South, and West in particular. Even as we were working on the economic agreement, and before it as well, the Co-Chairmen had been discussing with their icfy colleagues, ideas for a political solution for the four United Nations Protected Areas. They focused on ideas which saw them as integral parts of Croatia but would make arrange- ments for the protection of human and minority rights and provide for a mea- sure of autonomy with regard to educational and cultural matters. icfy colleagues, spearheaded by Ambassador Geert Ahrens of Germany and Kai Eide of Norway, assisted by icfy legal expert, Paul Szasz, developed detailed ideas on these and other topics. As icfy was doing this, and as contacts were taking place with Zagreb, Knin and Belgrade, the American and Russian Ambassadors in Zagreb became involved and the Co-Chairmen eventually decided to constitute an informal group that came to be known as the Z-4 Group, comprising icfy Ambassador Ahrens and Eide, American Ambassador Peter Galbraith and the Russian Ambassador. By the autumn of 1994 a detailed blueprint had been worked out and the question was when it would be presented to the parties. The Croatian Government had a fairly good idea of what was being worked upon and began to send signals that there was no need to rush with the presentation. It favoured an integrationist approach and seemed to think that the ideas being developed provided for too much autonomy for the Croatian Serbs. President Milosevic for his part strongly counselled against presenting the proposals to the parties. His reasoning was that ideas that could be sold with more time could be killed by presenting them prematurely. The American and German governments, however, became more and more insistent that the Z-4 ideas be presented to the parties and, following signature .
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