Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (15 page)

Holbrooke asked for a break and huddled with the team.

“Should we talk with them?”

Everyone agreed with should.

“Should I shake their hand?” Holbrooke asked. I thought it was about as inappropriate a question as I could imagine. Given how far we had gone in just two weeks, that we were standing on the cusp of ending years of brutal killing in the Balkans, and of lifting the siege of Sarajevo, how could he ask whether to shake the hand of people we knew would eventually be in prison if there were any justice in the process?

“Dick, for Christ sake, do it, and let’s get on with this and go home.” No one disagreed.

As Mladic and Karadzic walked in, each with his own awkward gait, they both looked to me like the Serb peasants they were: Mladic a short, murderous one, and Karadzic a tall, murderous one—the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt observed at the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in the early 1960s. Holbrooke greeted them as stiffly as possible, though he did shake hands with both. Later a journalist would ask me whether he shook hands with them, and I responded I hadn’t noticed.

Mladic acted as though he had been brought there under duress, with Karadzic acting as the conciliator, urging Mladic not to leave and occasionally offering his considered opinion that all the violence was caused by the Muslims and Croats. He explained that the Bosnian Serbs were the victims while maintaining a stranglehold on the lives of two hundred thousand people living in Sarajevo. He frequently invoked the name of Jimmy Carter, who had met with him and other Bosnian Serbs in their “capital” of Pale and made a statement after his talks that had convinced the Bosnian Serbs that he was their friend.

With no progress, the discussions broke for dinner, and I found myself sitting across from Mladic, who remained hunched over his food, chewing on a bone held in his hands, having dispensed with the knife and fork. We talked a little, but he was not interested in substance, asking me gruffly how it was I could speak some Serbian.

After dinner the delegations sat outside on a large veranda. After what we assumed was some prompting from Milosevic, Karadzic surprised us with a proposal that the U.S. side work on a document. If for no other reason than to get away from this miserable Bosnian Serb delegation, all of us—including Bob Owen, Don Kerrick, and Jim Pardew—worked on a statement that in effect meant the Bosnian Serbs would pull their forces from Sarajevo. Discussions over the document went to deep into the night, with Milosevic playing a passive role and Karadzic urging his military colleague to participate with General Wes Clark on defining
the weapons to be withdrawn. Holbrooke explained that the bombing would continue unless there was an agreement on Sarajevo. In fact, Admiral Bill Owens, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had told us a week before that almost all the targets had already been struck, and that at best there were just a few more days before aircrews would in effect be asked to “bomb rubble.” Holbrooke had asked for the pace of the attacks to be slowed, a gross interference in operations that was not well received within the military. We knew that unless there was a major decision to start hitting infrastructure and other targets, the bombing was going to be over soon. But Holbrooke wasn’t about to reveal that to the delegation.

At 2
A.M.
Wes Clark reported that the document was agreed to. Holbrooke had wisely resisted the Bosnian Serb demand that he sign; he did not have Washington’s authorization to negotiate such an instrument in the first place. If he tried to send it back for the dreaded clearance process in order to get permission to sign, it would have been returned with numerous proposed changes. But when it was done and sent in as final, no one in Washington, not even the wordsmithing NSC staff, tried to argue.

The Bosnians, however, were another story. When we met with them two days later in the war-torn city of Mostar, some two hours south of Sarajevo, President Izetbegovic and Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic were visibly angry that the bombing had been halted. I told Holbrooke that I thought they were not convinced that the pullback would be for real, and that their opposition would cool in the days ahead. Holbrooke was sufficiently alarmed that he asked Bob Owen and me to accompany Silajdzic back to Sarajevo over the same road that Bob Frasure and the others had been killed on a couple of weeks before. As we walked to the vehicle, Holbrooke gave Bob and me tips on how to handle Silajdzic, seemingly oblivious to the fact that we were being asked to go over a mountain road whose condition had caused the fatal accident involving our colleagues.

Bob and I sat with Silajdzic in the backseat of the SUV and talked about everything under the sun—his time in the United States, his interest in Turkey, even his academic work on Albanians, a subject on which
I was able to keep up my end of the discussion. We slowly made our way up to Mount Igman and then down to Sarajevo below, and stopped at the spot where the French armored personnel carrier had fallen off the road. I looked around at what a prosaic place it was; nothing special, as we looked at the scrub pine. The Bosnian leaders did not have much good to say about Frasure, because in trying to get something done, Bob had also talked to the other side. Reflecting on our conversations in Mostar, it looked like we were in for some of the same treatment. That evening we had dinner with Silajdzic at a Sarajevo restaurant where the U.S. ambassador, John Menzies, who had lived for months under Serb shelling, joined us.

Sarajevo was a proud city, one of the great sites of European civilization, a meeting between East and West; in less than thirty minutes one could have walked from the Habsburg Empire to the Ottoman Empire. But now whole parts of it lay in ruins. The old Turkish library was a pile of rubble after a direct hit by Serb artillery. The Hotel Evropa, my favorite place to stay when I visited during the 1970s, also was a ruin. I wondered if it would ever be rebuilt. The Holiday Inn, where I had spent a couple of days the previous January, was shot through by snipers firing automatic weapons from a street known as “sniper alley.” The president’s building, a stately old stone edifice built in a grand Habsburg style, was surrounded by sandbags and barriers. Nothing in the city had been painted in years, and many of the trees that had adorned its boulevards had been cut down for desperately needed firewood. Like a city hit by a natural calamity, it begged the question of whether it was worth rebuilding.

The next morning, an embassy vehicle drove us out to the airport, across the empty runway, still not cleared for aircraft use, and then back onto the dirt road, and finally up to the top of the mountain, where a French helicopter was waiting. We flew down from the mountain, hugging the tops of the trees as we made our way out to the Drina River valley and then the coast to meet up with a small military plane that would catch up to Holbrooke and the rest of the team, now arriving
in Belgrade, whom we could debrief about our conversations with the Bosnians.

Owen and I accompanied Holbrooke and the rest of the team back into Sarajevo two days later on the first plane to use the newly opened airport. With the cease-fire implemented, supplies began flowing into the city. As we emerged from the cars in front of the presidential building, a crowd had begun to form and we could hear applause as we made our way inside. By the time we emerged after a lengthy and again disagreeable meeting with Izetbegovic, who was demanding more NATO air action against the Serbs, the crowd outside roared its approval. We all were moved, Holbrooke almost to tears. I told him to wave at them, and he finally did, awkwardly and reluctantly. He knew, as did the rest of us, that there was much to be done before taking any bows.

By the end of October we had secured still another document: Further Agreed Principles. The document was similar in its brevity to the Agreed Principles, but instead of showing how Bosnia would be divided, this one demonstrated how the country would be united by joint institutions, including a collective presidency and a national parliament. The Serbs hated the draft, and the Bosnians were not enthusiastic either (largely because with every document the chance of restarting a bombing campaign receded), but by the time we had brought them all around a table, this time in New York, they had agreed. All that remained was to agree to a cease-fire and head to Wright-Patterson in Ohio, our chosen site for the peace talks.

The story of the Dayton Peace Accords, the cliffhangers, the all-nighters, has been told and retold, most authoritatively by Holbrooke himself in his book
To End a War
. The endgame in the Bosnian war that took us most of September and October to secure agreement on included the lifting of the siege of Sarajevo and a cease-fire as we got ready to head to peace talks in Dayton. In Dayton itself, we worked out the constitution to allow the agreed principles to be implemented, and finally agreed on a map and a unified Sarajevo.

Dayton had its painful moments. Holbrooke, to everyone’s consternation (especially Warren Christopher, who visited the talks several times), had invited his journalist wife, Kati Marton, to attend the negotiations, often sending her on walks with Haris Silajdzic and other senior interlocutors. And when David Rohde, a U.S. journalist back in Bosnia, had rented a vehicle to head into Bosnian Serb territory to look for mass grave sites, he was arrested by members of a local Bosnian Serb militia unit. We approached Milosevic for help in releasing the journalist, and he made calls back through his security services to find the hapless journalist and return him to Sarajevo. Holbrooke brought Kati to see Milosevic and seek his help in the name of the Committee for the Protection of Journalists.

At one morning staff meeting, after a particularly short night of sleep, Holbrooke mentioned an idea to which I responded, “We’ll put it in Kati’s talking points.” This sarcastic comment earned me a trip to the woodshed. As Holbrooke excoriated me, I did nothing except bite the inside of my cheek, shake my head, and walk out. He was in charge of the talks, and their failure would not be laid at anyone’s doorstep except his own. I respected that fact, but some of his actions were becoming hard to take.

Dayton was Holbrooke’s signature work. One of the greatest diplomats of his time would be known for an agreement among warring factions in a Balkan country no one had ever heard of before or has much since. Yet Holbrooke understood, and had the capacity to make others understand, the importance of what he was doing in a broader context. With Europe and the United States drifting apart, he brought them closer together. With questions emerging about U.S. leadership in the world, he demonstrated it was alive and well. With concepts of universal justice emerging on the international stage, he brought them to the practical world, where they have to live. And to diplomats everywhere, he showed that the profession was also alive and well, and that courageous and driven individuals like Dick Holbrooke could make a huge difference.

An hour before the initialing of the agreement, Holbrooke asked me to make sure all was good with the Serb delegation, which had made the
most last-minute concessions. I went over to Milosevic’s suite and asked him how the Serb delegation was holding up.

“Well, I’m very happy,” Milosevic said, “but [the head of the Bosnian Serbs, Momcilo] Krajisnic is not.”

“Where is he?” I asked.

“In a coma,” he said with a shrug. “It’s all right, not your problem.”

I told Holbrooke that everything was a go. Krajisnic was not pleased, but Milosevic would initial for the Serb delegation and he acted like he couldn’t care less what the Bosnian Serb leader was thinking. The deal was done. A war that had seen hundreds of thousands of people killed and wounded and millions displaced from their homes was over.

“Then let’s get over to the ceremony,” Holbrooke responded while putting his tie on, fumbling with it in the anticipation of something we had waited so long for.

We walked out excitedly from the building that housed our delegation. “Are we late?” Holbrooke asked as we picked up the pace. The day-in, day-out tension of the last few months wouldn’t allow us to relax. We began to jog the three hundred yards to the building, and then, for no apparent reason, with a hundred yards to go we started sprinting, racing each other until we got to the entrance, exhausted again.

H
olbrooke kept on running and soon left the government after Dayton, waiting for another job in the Clinton administration, which finally came when he was named U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1999. I remained as the director for the Balkans in the State Department and turned my attention to preparing for my next assignment as the first U.S. ambassador to Macedonia. I began reading everything I could get my hands on about Macedonia, truly an example of what Churchill had once said of the Balkans, that it has produced more history than can be consumed. I started a Slavic language course, the purpose of which was to convert my Serbian into Macedonian, but the consequence of which seemed more that I lost my Serbian without gaining an equal amount of Macedonian. But as the implementation of the Dayton Peace Accords got under way, my office and I were pulled into helping the team turn hastily drafted accords into a functioning agreement on the ground, and shepherding visitors.

Since the United States was a major part of the agreement, contributing the largest troop contingent and providing key civilian personnel, soon
planeloads of members of Congress and staff delegations began to descend on Bosnia, especially on Tuzla, where most of the U.S. troops were based.

Tuzla is a historic Bosnian town, an industrial city some two hours’ drive north of Sarajevo. Many of its Ottoman Turkish roots are very much exposed in the form of medieval architecture, narrow stone streets, high walls and large mosques and tall minarets. During Ottoman times it was a major producer of salt. It was not far from Serb lines to the east, now renamed the inter-entity boundary line, but unlike Sarajevo, Tuzla had not been damaged during the war. The U.S. chose to make Tuzla the main base for several technical reasons, but primarily because of its long airstrip, a legacy of the Yugoslav air force. I had been there two months before, in January 1996, when President Clinton came for an early visit with the troops and to meet the Bosnian government leadership. During that visit, he sensed the bleakness of the base and its immediate surrounds on the outskirts of the city, recalling for the troops the movie
Groundhog Day
to express empathy for the boredom they must all be enduring at seeing every day pretty much as the previous. What I saw in January was a military base that was very much a work in progress. It was abuzz with the sound of truckloads of gravel being dumped on the ubiquitous mud that seemed knee-deep everywhere, augmented by a midwinter thaw. The mud was a metaphor for the quagmire that many pundits and opposition politicians believed that our participation in Dayton Peace Accords would become. The administration had assured critics of Dayton that U.S. troops would remain in country for only twelve months (a departure date that would have conveniently coincided with the November 1996 presidential elections), but a quick glance at the buildup in Tuzla made clear that we were planning to stay much longer.