The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (54 page)

Producing even a temporary halt in a fault line war usually depends on two developments. The first is exhaustion of the primary participants. At some point when the casualties have mounted into tens of thousands, refugees into the hundreds of thousands, and cities—Beirut, Grozny, Vukovar—reduced to rubble, people cry “madness, madness, enough is enough,” the radicals on both sides are no longer able to mobilize popular fury, negotiations which have sputtered along unproductively for years come to life, and moderates reassert themselves and reach some sort of agreement for a halt to the carnage. By the spring of 1994 the six-year war over Nagorno-Karabakh had “exhausted” both Armenians and Azerbaijanis and hence they agreed to a truce. In the fall of 1995 it was similarly reported that in Bosnia “All sides are exhausted,” and the Dayton accords materialized.
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Such halts, however, are self-limiting. They enable both sides to rest and replenish their resources. Then when one side sees the opportunity for gain, the war is renewed.

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Achieving a temporary pause also requires a second factor: the involvement of nonprimary level participants with the interest and the clout to bring the fighters together. Fault line wars are almost never halted by direct negotiations between primary parties alone and only rarely by the mediation of disinterested parties. The cultural distance, intense hatreds, and mutual violence they have inflicted on each other make it extremely difficult for primary parties to sit down and engage in productive discussion looking toward some form of ceasefire. The underlying political issues, who controls what territory and people on what terms, keep surfacing and prevent agreement on more limited questions.

Conflicts between countries or groups with a common culture can at times be resolved through mediation by a disinterested third party who shares that culture, has recognized legitimacy within that culture, and hence can be trusted by both parties to find a solution rooted in the values of that culture. The Pope could successfully mediate the Argentine-Chilean boundary dispute. In conflicts between groups from different civilizations, however, there are no disinterested parties. Finding an individual, institution, or state whom both parties think trustworthy is extremely difficult. Any potential mediator belongs to one of the conflicting civilizations or to a third civilization with still another culture and other interests which inspire trust in neither party to the conflict. The Pope will not be called in by Chechens and Russians or by Tamils and Sinhalese. International organizations also usually fail because they lack the ability to impose significant costs on or to offer significant benefits to the parties.

Fault line wars are ended not by disinterested individuals, groups, or organizations but by interested secondary and tertiary parties who have rallied to the support of their kin and have the capability to negotiate agreements with their counterparts, on the one hand, and to induce their kin to accept those agreements, on the other. While rallying intensifies and prolongs the war, it generally is also a necessary although not sufficient condition for limiting and halting the war. Secondary and tertiary ralliers usually do not want to be transformed into primary level fighters and hence try to keep the war under control. They also have more diversified interests than primary participants, who are exclusively focused on the war, and they are concerned with other issues in their relations with each other. Hence at some point they are likely to see it in their interest to stop the fighting. Because they have rallied behind their kin, they have leverage over their kin. Ralliers thus become restrainers and halters.

Wars with no secondary or tertiary parties are less likely to expand than others but more difficult to bring to a halt, as are wars between groups from civilizations lacking core states. Fault line wars that involve an insurgency within an established state and that lack significant rallying also pose special problems. If the war continues for any length of time the demands of the insurgents tend to escalate from some form of autonomy to complete independence, which the government rejects. The government usually demands that the insurgents give up their arms as the first step toward stopping the fighting,
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which the insurgents reject. The government, also quite naturally, resists the involvement by outsiders in what it considers a purely internal problem involving “criminal elements.” Defining it as an internal matter also gives other states an excuse for not becoming involved, as has been the case of the Western powers and Chechnya.

These problems are compounded when the civilizations involved lack core states. The war in Sudan, for instance, which began in 1956, was brought to a halt in 1972, when the parties were exhausted, and the World Council of Churches and the All African Council of Churches, in a virtually unique achievement for nongovernmental international organizations, successfully negotiated the Addis Ababa agreement providing autonomy for southern Sudan. A decade later, however, the government abrogated the agreement, the war resumed, the goals of the insurgents escalated, the position of the government hardened, and efforts to negotiate another halt failed. Neither the Arab world nor Africa had core states with the interest and the clout to pressure the participants. Mediation efforts by Jimmy Carter and various African leaders did not succeed nor did the efforts of a committee of East African states consisting of Kenya, Eritrea, Uganda, and Ethiopia. The United States, which has deeply antagonistic relations with Sudan, could not act directly; nor could it ask Iran, Iraq, or Libya, which have close relationships with Sudan, to play useful roles; hence it was reduced to enlisting Saudi Arabia, but Saudi influence over Sudan also was limited.
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In general, cease-fire negotiations are furthered to the extent that there is relative parallel and equal involvement of secondary and tertiary parties from both sides. In some circumstances, however, a single core state may be powerful enough to bring about a halt. In 1992 the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) attempted to mediate the Armenian-Azerbaijani war. A committee, the Minsk Group, was created that included the primary, secondary, and tertiary parties to the conflict (Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Turkey) plus France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Belarus, and the United States. Apart from the United States and France, with sizable Armenian diasporas, these latter countries had little interest in producing and little or no capability to produce an end to the war. When the two tertiary parties, Russia and Turkey, plus the United States agreed on a plan, it was rejected by the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians. Russia, however, independently sponsored a long series of negotiations in Moscow between Armenia and Azerbaijan which “created an alternative to the Minsk Group, and . . . thus dissipated the effort of the international community.”
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In the end, after the primary contestants had become exhausted and the Russians had secured Iran’s backing of the negotiations, the Russian effort produced a cease-fire agreement. As secondary parties, Russia and Iran also cooperated in the intermittently successful attempts to arrange a cease-fire in Tajikistan.

Russia will be a continuing presence in the Transcaucasus and will have the
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capability to enforce the cease-fire it sponsored so long as it has an interest in doing so. This contrasts with the situation of the United States with respect to Bosnia. The Dayton accords built on proposals that had been developed by the Contact Group of interested core states (Germany, Britain, France, Russia, and the United States), but none of the other tertiary parties were intimately involved in working out the final agreement, and two of the three primary parties to the war were on the margins of the negotiations. Enforcement of the agreement rests with an American-dominated NATO force. If the United States withdraws its troops from Bosnia, neither the European powers nor Russia will have incentives to continue to implement the agreement, the Bosnian government, Serbs, and Croats will have every incentive to renew the fighting once they have refreshed themselves, and the Serbian and Croatian governments will be tempted to seize the opportunity to realize their dreams of a Greater Serbia and a Greater Croatia.

Robert Putnam has highlighted the extent to which negotiations between states are “two level games” in which diplomats negotiate simultaneously with constituencies within their country and with their counterparts from the other country. In a parallel analysis, Huntington showed how reformers in an authoritarian government negotiating a transition to democracy with moderates in the opposition must also negotiate with or counter the hard-liners within the government while the moderates must do the same with the radicals in the opposition.
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These two level games involve at a minimum four parties and at least three and often four relations between them. A complex fault line war, however, is a three level game with at least six parties and at least seven relations among them. (See
Figure 11.1
) Horizontal relations across the fault lines exist between pairs of primary, secondary, and tertiary parties. Vertical relations exist between the parties on different levels within each civilization. Achieving a halt in the fighting in a “full model” war thus is likely to require:

 
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  active involvement of secondary and tertiary parties;

 
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  negotiation by the tertiary parties of the broad terms for stopping the fighting;

 
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  use by the tertiary parties of carrots and sticks to get the secondary parties to accept these terms and to pressure the primary parties to accept them;

 
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  withdrawal of support from and, in effect, the betrayal of the primary parties by the secondary parties; and

 
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  as a result of this pressure, acceptance of the terms by the primary parties, which, of course, they subvert when they see it in their interest to do so.

The Bosnian peace process involved all these elements. Efforts by individual actors, the United States, Russia, the European Union, to produce agreement were notably lacking in success. The Western powers were reluctant to include Russia as a full partner in the process. The Russians vigorously protested their
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exclusion, arguing that they had historic ties with the Serbs and also more direct interests in the Balkans than any other major power. Russia insisted that it be a full player in the efforts to resolve the conflicts and vigorously denounced the “tendency on the part of the United States to dictate its own terms.” The need to include the Russians became clear in February 1994. Without consulting Russia, NATO issued an ultimatum to the Bosnian Serbs to remove their heavy weapons from around Sarajevo or face air attacks. The Serbs resisted this demand, and a violent encounter with NATO seemed likely. Yeltsin warned that “Some people are trying to resolve the Bosnian question without the participation of Russia” and “We will not allow this.” The Russian government then seized the initiative and persuaded the Serbs to withdraw their weapons if Russia deployed peacekeeping troops to the Sarajevo area. This diplomatic coup prevented escalation of the violence, demonstrated to the West Russian clout with the Serbs, and brought Russian troops to the heart of the disputed area between Bosnian Muslims and Serbs.
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Through this maneuver Russia effectively established its claim to “equal partnership” with the West in dealing with Bosnia.

In April, however, NATO again authorized the bombing of Serbian positions without consulting Russia. This produced an immense negative reaction across the Russian political spectrum and strengthened the nationalist opposition to Yeltsin and Kozyrev. Immediately thereafter, the relevant tertiary powers—Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States—formed the Contact Group to devise a settlement. In June 1994 the group produced a plan which assigned 51 percent of Bosnia to a Muslim-Croat federation and 49 percent to the Bosnian Serbs and which became the basis of the subsequent Dayton agreement. The following year it was necessary to work out arrangements for the participation of Russian troops in the enforcement of the Dayton agreements.

Agreements among the tertiary parties have to be sold to the secondary and primary actors. The Americans, as Russian diplomat Vitaly Churkin said, must lean on the Bosnians, the Germans on the Croats, and the Russians on the Serbs.
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In the early stages of the Yugoslav wars, Russia had made a momentous concession in agreeing to economic sanctions against Serbia. As a kin country which the Serbs could trust, Russia was also at times able to impose constraints on the Serbs and pressure them to accept compromises they would otherwise reject. In 1995, for instance, Russia along with Greece interceded with the Bosnian Serbs to secure the release of Dutch peacekeepers they held hostage. On occasion, however, the Bosnian Serbs reneged on agreements they had made under Russian pressure and thereby embarrassed Russia for not being able to deliver its kin. In April 1994, for example, Russia secured agreement from the Bosnian Serbs to end their attack on the Gorazde, but the Serbs then broke the agreement. The Russians were furious: the Bosnian Serbs have “become mad on war,” declared one Russian diplomat, Yeltsin insisted that
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“Serbian leadership must fulfill the obligation it has given to Russia,” and Russia withdrew its objections to NATO air strikes.
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While supporting and strengthening Croatia, Germany and other Western states were also able to constrain Croatian behavior. President Tudjman was deeply anxious for his Catholic country to be accepted as a European country and to be admitted into European organizations. The Western powers exploited both the diplomatic, economic, and military support they provided Croatia and the Croatian desire to be accepted into the “club,” to induce Tudjman to compromise on many issues. In March 1995 the case was made to Tudjman that if he wanted to be part of the West he had to allow the U.N. Protection Force to stay in Krajina. “Joining the West,” one European diplomat said, “is very important to Tudjman. He doesn’t want to be left alone with the Serbs and the Russians.” He was also warned to restrict ethnic cleansing as his troops conquered territory in the Krajina and elsewhere peopled by Serbs and to refrain from extending his offensive into Eastern Slavonia. On another issue, the Croatians were told that if they did not join the federation with the Muslims, “the door to the West will be shut to them forever,” as one U.S. official put it.
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As the principal external source of financial support for Croatia, Germany was in a particularly strong position to influence Croatian behavior. The close relation that the United States developed with Croatia also helped to prevent, at least through 1995, Tudjman from implementing his oft-expressed desire to partition Bosnia-Herzegovina between Croatia and Serbia.