Trading the Airmen

On Tuesday December 12, a French government plane took off from the Yugoslav air base in Batajnica. That plane was carrying Jean Philippe Duan, the French army's joint chiefs chairman and air force officers Captain Frederic Chiffault and Lieutenant Jose Souvignet who spent 104 days as prisoners of the Bosnian Serb Army (BSA). They were carrying farewell messages from Yugoslav Chief of Staff General Momcilo Perisic to "the French army and French people" and an apple from General Ratko Mladic.

That was the anti-climax in the drama that started on August 20 when their Mirage 2000 was shot down during a raid on Pale. The proportions of the drama grew and at one moment it seemed even the Dayton agreement depended on its outcome. A number of unhappy coincidences and one wrong assessment raised the price of the two French airmen's lives to the cost of peace in Bosnia.

VREME wrote about what happened to the airmen when their Mirage was brought down during the NATO air strikes against Bosnian Serb targets: Chiffault and Souvignet were captured by farmer Petar Cosovic from the village of Gornja Sjetlina near Pale and turned over to the BSA. Soon afterwards, they were seen recovering in a hospital in Sokolac (both were injured when they ejected) and then they disappeared. The BSA made no statement and there was a lot of contradictory information from unofficial sources.

On October 18, the day the French Foreign Minister visited Belgrade, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic broke silence with a statement that the airmen were kidnapped by unknown armed men who were assumed to be either Moslems or NATO troops and that an investigation was underway. The French government said the statement was grotesque and stepped up its pressure on Pale and Belgrade in an effort to get the issue solved finally.

Karadzic's statement was more forced than grotesque. He found himself isolated after Dayton, he missed the limelight and wanted to remind Belgrade and the international community that he has to be asked about some things. His bitterness stemmed from the fact that he really did not know where the airmen were.

Sources close to the BSA said the airmen were in Mladic's hands from the start and that he persistently refused to inform Karadzic about them. The same sources said the airmen were taken from hospital to Prace, in eastern Bosnia. Since then they were moved three times to prevent possible attempts to free or kidnap them but never far from Mladic's headquarters in Han Pijesak: they were in Podromanija and Rogatica and on December 1 they were moved to a farm two kilometers south of Zepa. "The rescue missions never came closer than 12 kilometers from the airmen," the source said.

The prisoners were guarded by a special BSA battalion under the command of Lt. Colonel Dragomir Pecina, a BSA intelligence officer and close associate of Mladic's intelligence chief Zdravko Tolimir. They made sure the operation was covert: the troops weren't told what they were guarding and just three of the guards saw the airmen. "The impossible happened; the Serbs showed that they could keep a secret for three months," a western diplomat said.

Those security measures showed the importance Mladic attached to the airmen: obviously he believed he could get a huge political concession for their release. Just to get negotiations on their release started, the BSA commander wanted France to apologize for bombing the Serbs. That condition was conveyed to French emissaries who traveled to Belgrade in secret.

Diplomatic sources reported that there were several emissaries in Belgrade from October to December and all went home having achieved nothing.

Mladic's assessment that the airmen are a valuable negotiating chip was based on the fuss the Americans raised over their pilot Scott O'Grady who was featured in headline news for days. But French public opinion is different and the French don't view the capture of their troops that dramatically. The photographs in Paris Match captured some interest but not even close to what Mladic was counting on.

The families of the airmen shared Mladic's discontent with the media attention and they looked to the O'Grady case. They accused the government of being passive, started a campaign including paid TV advertisements and gathered almost 100,000 signatures of support. They hired a prominent lawyer who launched proceedings against the Bosnian Serbs for abduction (French law covers crimes against French citizens wherever they occur). That brought results given the problems at home, diplomatic troubles over the nuclear tests in the Pacific and the shadow of America's triumphalism after Dayton, President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Allain Juppe realized that the release of the airmen prior to December 14 when the agreement was to be signed in Paris would strengthen their position at home and abroad. They decided to step up efforts to get the airmen home but not the way Mladic expected. Instead of apologizing, they stepped up pressure on Milosevic who, up to that moment, had shown no will to delve deeper into the mess.

Paris also indicated that refusal to cooperate could cast doubts on the ceremony in Paris which would destroy everything the Americans achieved.

And finally, the Russians got involved in the form of a statement by their Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev on December 10. Kozyrev first asked the war crimes tribunal in the Hague to put a temporary freeze on proceedings against Karadzic and Mladic, adding to the rumor (both at home and abroad) that the Russians are historic allies of the Serbs. In another part of that statement, Kozyrev made a barely veiled threat. "I think the Serb leaders have every reason to reveal the fate of the pilots," he said. "If they are alive, I recommend that they turn them over to the French." Similar recommendations were conveyed to Mladic through confidential channels from the Russian general staff.

So on Sunday night, the combined pressure from Paris and Moscow and partly Washington, yielded results.

A French government plane landed in Belgrade that day, indicating the problem would be solved soon. The plane brought French joint chiefs chairman Jean Philippe Duan to Belgrade for a meeting with President Milosevic on Monday. The General's resistance was finally crushed in a phone call from Milosevic in which, according to a tape from US intelligence sources handed to ABC TV, he told Mladic that he could face arrest if he remained stubborn.

The rest was technique and ceremony. This time Momcilo Perisic, the Yugoslav Army chief, played the role of intelligence chief Jovica Stanisic. The three army chiefs were first scheduled to meet in Karadjordjevo but the meeting place was changed to the Vidikovac hotel in Zvornik at the last moment.

The meeting was held behind closed doors. VREME sources said Mladic made six demands, three to Paris and three to Belgrade. He wanted the French to apologize, pay damages for the NATO strikes and pay for the education of Serb children who lost parents in the strikes. Mladic wanted Milosevic to negotiate changes in the Dayton agreement on Sarajevo, immediate confederal links between the Bosnian Serb Republic and FR Yugoslavia and guarantees that no Bosnian Serb would be handed over to the war crimes tribunal. Mladic exempted himself from that last request saying he was ready to go to the Hague and defend himself. That is all the Bosnian Serb leaders dare hope for now.

Those demands were more Mladic's wish list than real expectations. All he got was a promise that pressure would be stepped up on Izetbegovic to find a transitional solution for Serb Sarajevo and that France won't insist on including the hiding of prisoners in the charges against Mladic. All the other demands were rejected or postponed for some time in the future. Mladic had no choice but to accept what was on offer consoling himself that things could have been worse; his refusal to hand over the airmen would have reduced him to the same status as a Hizbollah leader and the subsequent canceling of payments for BSA salaries, deliveries of fuel, ammunition and spare parts would have finished him completely. He did have the satisfaction of talking face to face with the commander of the French army.

The next day, December 12, the airmen were formally handed over to General Duan in front of the privileged cameras of Serb TVs. The TV pictures aired that evening showed the airmen were scared but no one paid any attention to them; the French general seemed to be having trouble accepting the embarrassing situation international diplomats had put him in as did Perisic. Mladic played the Serb hero, host and friend: he shouted orders into a radio, recited epic poetry and patted the shoulders of everyone who stood near him.

So everyone profited in some way from the crisis. Chirac got the airmen back when he needed them most; Mladic got his 15 minutes of glory; Milosevic, through Chirac's public message of thanks, confirmed his status as strongman of the Balkans and showed that Perisic obeys him; the Russians got caught in a positive spotlight; the airmen will spend Christmas at home. The only loser is Radovan Karadzic who was caught lying again in an attempt to trade someone else's goods.