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By Joe Klein
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THIS WHERE THE 20TH CENTURY to disintegrate--in this house," Richard Holbrooke said portentously, but not inaccurately, as he walked up the steps of Sarajevo's Konak House last Wednesday. It was a marvelous building and a lucky one, relatively free of bomb damage after nearly four years of war. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, had stayed at Konak House the night before they were assassinated by a Serb nationalist in 1914, the act that preeipi-hated World War I. Now Holbrooke was hoping it would be the site of a breakthrough in the negotiations to end the century's last Balkan war. "Isn't it ironic?" He shook his head and laughed. "The place just reeks of historic failure."
There were several ironies that day. Hol-brooke and his negotiating team had gathered, with much of official Sarajevo, for a ceremony: the installation of John Menzies as U.S. ambassador to Bosnia. Menzies had been one of a dozen Foreign Service officers who'd signed a famous letter protesting American indifference to Serb atrocities. Now America was "back," aggressively seeking a Balkan settlement--the policy Menzies had wanted--but the Bosnians were holding up the deal. Hol-brooke hoped to use the emotion of the moment to finally push the government toward a ceasefire. "We need to talk right after the ceremony," he told Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic.
They slipped into a side room, accompanied by Gen. Donald Carrick--an intelligence officer attached to the National Security Council and a member of Holbrooke'sshuttle-diplomacy team--and by Bosnian Foreign Minister Muhamed Sacirbey. "Are you ready for a ceasefire?" Holbrooke asked, for the second time that week. Izet-begovic said yes--but not yet.
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"Mr. President, this is a crucial moment," Holbrooke pressed, "and you are shooting craps with your country's destiny." But he was quietly encouraged: this Bosnian response was less firm than the fiat no he'd received two days earlier. Izetbegovic wanted to delay the ceasefire because his generals were optimistic about their chances for a breakthrough in western Bosnia. "That's not our understanding," Holbrooke said and turned the meeting over to General Carrick, who waved a piece of paper --a summary of U.S. intelligence reports--and said, "Our intelligence community is convinced you're in a very precarious position."
At which point, subtly and finally, the discussion moved to the terms of a cease-fire. Carrick raced out of the room and came back with copies of a draft agreement. "We'll need a few hours to think about this," Izetbegovic said.
"Hey, could we have a copy of that paper?" Sacirbey asked, pointing to Carrick's intelligence report.
Several nights earlier, Holbrooke had sat in a Belgrade hotel room, waiting to leave for yet another session with the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic--and conjuring up sports metaphors for his impossible situation. He tried football: his team had been moving down the field slowly, making first downs (limited, imprecise agreements on "general principles" among the parties, including a tentative lifting of the Sarajevo siege). "The question is whether to throw a Hail Mary pass and go for a general ceasefire and peace conference," he said. "A ceasefire by itself doesn't mean much. They've had ceasefires here before." Then he switched sports: "In tennis, they say the time to hit a serve is when the ball is suspended in the air, neither rising nor falling. We may have that sort of equilibrium on the battlefield now."
The trouble was convincing the Bosnians of that. Holbrooke's shuttle had come to resemble the last Democratic attempt at peacemaking: the negotiations leading to the Middle East peace treaty at Camp David in 1978. America's nominal allies, the Bosnians--like the Israelis--were dragging their feet on a settlement. They'd had a strong summer on the battlefield. Meanwhile, the Serbs--like the Egyptians--were suddenly anxious to make peace. And if Slobodan Milosevic wasn't nearly as courageous or charming as Anwar Sadat, the Americans certainly found him more colorful than the Bosnian leaders. "Take the sleaziest person you've ever met and give him an IQ of 160," said a Western diplomat in Belgrade, "and that's Slobo."
Actually, Milosevic had provided a key breakthrough that had allowed the U.S. negotiators to do their work. It came Aug. 30, on Holbrooke's first visit to the region after three members of his team had been killed when their armored personnel carrier crashed on the
Mount Igman road, heading into Sarajevo. At the funeral, President Clinton had given the reconstituted team a pep talk on the importance of their work -- but no one was very optimistic. The Bosnian government was refusing to negotiate with the Bosnian Serb leaders, several of whom were indicted war criminals. It seemed an insurmountable obstacle. But the Serbs, pounded by a fierce NATO air assault, were desperate fora solution. And so, on Aug. 30, Milosevic handed Holbrooke a document, signed by the Bosnian Serbs (including the dreadful Radovan Karadzic and the even worse Gen. Ratko Mladic), giving Milosevic the power to negotiate on their behalf. "As you can see," he said, "I've been very busy."
This launched a remarkable series of marathon meetings in Belgrade. Milosevic called the Americans "the Juice Men" because most of them wouldn't touch the powerful peach brandy he always sipped while negotiating. He insisted the American team join him in vast, endless, cholesterol-laden feasts. He surprised them with his knowledge of American culture (and his mastery of colloquial English: "bullshit" was his favorite expression). And then, during a 13-hour session at his suburban hunting lodge, he produced the Bosnian Serb leaders themselves. "The turning point came just as it was getting dark," said one of the Americans. "We were outside. Holbrooke and Milosevic had gone off to talk. [Lt. Gen. Wesley] Clark was reading aloud the proposed Sarajevo agreement."
The team members could see General Mladic -- a terrifying man who constantly (and ridiculously) tried to engage the Americans in staring contests -- slowly turning red. Finally he exploded, "The Serbs will never be humiliated this way." Holbrooke heard the explosion and quickly moved to take advantage. "He didn't confront Mladic," a team member recalled, "but he turned to Milosevic and said, 'Mr. President, we're at a crossroads. One road leads to negotiations. The other leads to war and disaster. It's time for you to choose'."
"Give us a moment," the Bosnian Serb leader Karadzic said. The Americans walked back toward the lodge, but could hear the Serbs screaming at each other. "When they came back to us," a team member said, "they were negotiating, and they've been negotiating ever since."
It was a turning point in more ways than one. Several of the team members had started off skeptical about their leader. General Clark had an infamous shouting match with Holbrooke over NATO expansion a year earlier. "Let's just say the ambassador has a strong personality," Clark said last week, as the team flew out from Sarajevo on a French transport plane. "But we've all been watching him in these meetings and it's something to see. He knows when to hang back and when to close the deal. He'll back 'em into a corner, and the trap snaps shut." An intense sense of solidarity had grown over time, especially after the tragedy on Mount Igman. The team members, worried at first by the ambassador's intuitive negotiating style, had gotten into the habit of trading Holbrooke stories -- replaying the negotiating sessions afterward, laughing at his chutzpah, impressed by his "ability to sense the music of these things," as one said.
But the music was far more complicated on the Bosnian side, where Izetbegovic, Sacirbey and Prime Minister Hafts Silajdzic not only had trouble making decisions, but continually disagreed with each other and often backed away from agreements the Americans considered long settled. At one point, after seeming to agree to a set of constitutional principles in New York, Sacirbey began to pull back -- and Warren Christopher, who had joined the negotiations, blew up. He refused to shake Sacirbey's hand and said to him, "What the hell is going on here?"
"We don't want a ceasefire that enables Mladic to say he stemmed the Bosnian advance in the West," Sacirbey said last week. By Monday, though, the Americans had intelligence that the Serbs were now advancing in heavy fighting and might soon be in position to threaten the town of Bosanski Petrovac, which would cut the government-held territory in half. That was the message General Carrick had delivered on Wednesday morning at Konak House. And when the Bosnians returned to the table that afternoon, they were ready to begin negotiating the specific terms of a ceasefire: the restoration of gas and electricity to Sarajevo, the opening of a road to the besieged city of Gorazde and -- still dreaming of a final battlefield victory-a five-day interval before the ceasefire was to begin. Holbrooke took these terms back to Belgrade that night. An open phone line was established to Sarajevo, where Holbrooke's deputy Christopher Hill was reviewing specific provisions with Sacirbey and, after six hours of haggling, Milosevic signed the two-page agreement.
It was a hard-won document and arguably significant, but not exactly ironclad. The Americans had gotten more than just a ceasefire -- all sides agreed to attend a peace conference -- but the deal was a disturbingly flimsy contraption. Indeed, the initial stage of the peace conference would be an elaborate Kabuki in which the opposing sides would meet . . . but not in the same room. At these so-called proximity talks, the Serbs, Croats and Bosnians would setup in separate buildings (at a site to be determined), with the Americans still shuttling between them. "I wish we had more of a set agenda for this thing," said one of the American negotiators, "but what else is new?" And Holbrooke himself seemed more daunted than celebratory. "I predict at least two major crises between now and the conference," he told his team.
The most serious potential crises were on the ground. There was a possibility the ceasefire would fall apart before it even began, especially if one side or the other had a battlefield success. Holbrooke also worried that the U.N. peacekeepers wouldn't act vigorously enough to enforce the agreement. As of last Friday, UNProFor still hadn't opened the road from Sarajevo to Kiseljak, part of the deal that had been announced Sept. 14. During an impromptu meeting at the Sarajevo airport last week with Gens. Rupert Smith and Jean-Rene Bachelet, commanders of the U.N. force, Holbrooke had seemed perturbed: "If Bosnian trucks aren't moving on the Kiseljak road, we aren't really testing this agreement," he said, "and this agreement is the model for the general ceasefire."
The generals sat quietly, unconvinced. They had seen ceasefires come and go. They weren't ready to risk an incident that might taunt the Serbs into a reaction; they weren't ready to risk their troops again in the same old shooting gallery; and they certainly weren't ready to believe that if the Holbrooke team did manage to arrange a peace that lasted past winter, the United States would have the gumption to enforce it. They had a point: there were rumblings -- even in Sarajevo -- that Congress might not go along with Bill Clinton's pledge to send 25,000 peacekeepers to Bosnia, especially in an election year.
It was easy for the negotiators to lose perspective shuttling among the Balkan capitals, expending great energy and remarkable skill to bridge chasms that had seemed unimaginable in August. The Serbs, Croats and Bosnians had reached agreement four times in little more than a month. But these were still people, as one team member said, "who could go to war over the difference between 'the' and 'that'." Holbrooke's real achievement hadn't been the making of a peace; that was still far off, and highly improbable. It was, simply, to have avoided failure -- in failure's native land.
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