A Diplomatic Graveyard

Unlike his many predecessors who represented the international community in the former and present Yugoslavia over the past few years, Gonzales got angry up front. Actually, his bad experience with resolving problems in these parts prompted him to say "no thanks" to any would-be offers in the future.

His refusal to take matters in the Balkans into his own hands once again is a precedent: He is the first politician to turn down a seemingly tempting offer to make a name for himself in the Balkans. Since 1991, many prominent and less prominent politicians visited former Yugoslavia with high hopes of making an impact on political developments in the Balkans. The vast majority of them left with a bitter taste of failure in their mouths.

Lord Peter Carrington is at the top of this peculiar list. He became a special envoy for matters in the former Yugoslavia at a time when the post-cold war order was coming into effect in Europe. While celebrating the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989, the European administration had no idea what it would be dealing with in a country which was much closer to western than eastern Europe not only in terms of geography. The former Yugoslavia was virtually knocking on Europe's doors, which is why growing tension in the country and the eventual consequences were not being taken seriously.

The first resignation: It is fair to say that world diplomacy had its representatives here before Lord Carrington's arrival. Eminent foreign ministers such as Hans Dietrich Genscher and James Baker were accompanied by teams of three, consisting of the former, the present and the next CSCE and EU presidents. In those early days of the Balkan crisis, Dutch foreign minister Hans van den Broek and his Italian counterpart Gianni de Michelis were remembered for their activities in the former Yugoslavia more than any other politician.

Lord Carrington, who was officially named Chairman of the Conference on Yugoslavia, dented and eventually lost his reputation of being the ultimate negotiator and the reconciler of the irreconcilable (he brokered peace in the Zimbabwe civil war in 1979). In the Balkans, he laid down his weapons and admitted defeat on the eve of the London conference on Yugoslavia in August 1992. He resigned after exactly a year of futile attempts to stop a war which broke out and escalated in the meantime. Shortly before leaving, he told reporters he was tired of promises made by local politicians who never had any intention of keeping them, and deplored the ease they were given and broken with. He said he was no longer willing to invest all-day efforts in the arduous task of reconciling the quarrelling Balkan nations, for it was a task with an uncertain outcome.

Just for the record, it is worth saying that his plan for resolving the crisis in the former Yugoslavia was probably the best possible solution to prevent the tragedy which followed. Lord Carrington's plan was rejected only by Slobodan Milosevic who represented Serbia, for even the Montenegrin president Momir Bulatovic voted for it and shocked federal representatives Bora Jovic and Branko Kostic. Had it been accepted, the former Yugoslavia would have probably become a loose federation of its republics in which ethnic minorities such as the Serbs in Croatia and the Kosovo Albanians would be given broad autonomy.

Rumours have it that Lord Carrington used to spend hours in exhausting talks with Slobodan Milosevic, often in four eyes, regardless of his bad experience with this hardline and inflexible politician. Lord Carrington was succeeded by another ambitious British "player", Lord David Owen, whose role in the Balkans we shall review a little later. He started out as the Chairman of the Conference on Yugoslavia, an organization which became a permanent Geneva-based institution after its London convention.

The synonym for division: The presidency of the European Community went to Portugal on January 1, 1992, which is why Jose Cutilleiro, a not too famous but respected Portuguese diplomat, became the European mediator in the Bosnian conflict. At a time when the crisis spilled over from Croatia into Bosnia, confronting three ethnic parties - the Serbian Democratic Party, the Croatian Democratic Union and the Party of Democratic Action rallying Moslems, Cutilleiro was on a mission in France.

Immediately upon the outbreak of the Yugoslav crisis, Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia appealed on the EC to recognize them as sovereign states. In the fall of 1991, the central republic of Bosnia joined the club. Bosnia failed to get what it wanted the first time round, for the EC recognized only Slovenia and Croatia as independent states on January 15, 1992. The organization had put forward a set of additional demands to Macedonia and Bosnia, having assessed that Bosnia could be given independence only if all three of its ethnic groups went along. Lord Peter Carrington then asked Cutilleiro to mediate between Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, Moslem leader Alija Izetbegovic and the leader of the Bosnian Croats Mate Boban, and broker a political solution in Bosnia.

The Portuguese diplomat was doing such a good job that his name soon became a synonym for the division of Bosnia and - in many people's opinion - the international community's shameful role in the conflict.

Cutilleiro persuaded the three leaders to sign a political deal known as the Lisbon treaty. The treaty envisaged an internal division of Bosnia into three ethnic entities bound by loose confederal ties. The treaty was brokered early in March in Lisbon and signed on March 18 in Sarajevo. However, all three leaders took their signatures back only a week and a half later, because they were all unhappy with the size and quality of the territories given to their respective ethnic groups. Naturally, all three of them came up with various excuses why they would no longer play ball. Jose Cutilleiro was relieved of his duties at the London conference on the former Yugoslavia in August 1992, along with his patron Lord Peter Carrington. They both became very unpopular with all three ethnic groups in Bosnia, who just couldn't come to terms with the idea that their beloved republic should be reduced to what media in Sarajevo called Bantu-like statelets. Both Carrington and Cutilleiro thought none of the three Bosnian nations should have felt the way they did.

Unlike many other politicians whose careers ended in Bosnia after they had failed to accomplish their missions, Cutilleiro moved up in the world after his Bosnian episode. He is now the secretary general of the military alliance known as the Western European Union (WEU).

US diplomat Cyrus Vance, the UN Secretary General's special envoy in the former Yugoslavia and former US secretary of state during Jimmy Carter's reign, was remembered as a "Serbian fan" in Sarajevo. The reason was simple and its nature was rather personal. When the crisis in Bosnia broke out, president Alija Izetbegovic wanted to bring as many UN troops as possible to Bosnia, hoping that the presence of the blue helmets would protect the republic from any kind of aggression. His demand was met only when it was too late to prevent the war in Bosnia. Once it broke out, Bosnian foreign minister Haris Silajdzic spilled to the press his bitter disappointment with Cyrus Vance and the belated UN reaction.

It seems that Vance had advised the UN Secretary General not to deploy troops in Sarajevo, believing that they couldn't remain neutral in case of an armed conflict and that they would become a political tool in Izetbegovic's hands.

In the meantime, Lord David Owen, another British politician with a brilliant career and an appetite for glory, became Peter Carrington's hardest critic. Time and again Owen scorned his compatriot and predecessor for being "too soft with the Serbs" and using "Chamberlain-styled compromising tactics", only to end up just like him. Lord Carrington lasted less than a year, while Cyrus Vance and David Owen held out three times as long both as a team and individually. Lord Carrington's "sins" were forgotten as quickly as the agreements he failed to broker and implement. Over the next three years, David Owen buckled under the rhetoric principles he used in 1992 to discredit Lord Carrington.

The bigger they are, the harder they fall: Arrogant as he was and hence quite unpopular in public, David Owen paid dearly for his diplomatic failures. He drew upon himself worldwide anger more successfully than all other envoys, especially after making a fatal public relations error by starting a fight with the Americans. He first accused the US administration of undermining all European efforts to negotiate a political solution to the Yugoslav crisis in order to keep a firm grip on its dominant position in Europe, and then tried to persuade the US media to support his approach to the Bosnian conflict. When he failed to win the support of the US media, he badly underestimated them as an opponent.

No one's reputation was dented in Bosnia as much as David Owen's. No politician so big fell so hard in the former Yugoslavia, with the possible exception of Yasuhi Akashi. The Japanese diplomat came to the former Yugoslavia with the reputation of carrying the UN to its only real success in recent history - the peace settlement in Cambodia, and perhaps with the ambition to succeed Boutros Boutros Ghali as the UN Secretary General. Had he succeeded, he would have been the first Japanese to head the organization. He was carrying Japan's high hopes of having a bigger say in current affairs, as Japan wanted an international role matching its financial support for UN peace missions all over the world.

When he first came to Belgrade in the winter of 1994, Akashi rallied a number of independent Yugoslav reporters and told them he knew that the Serbs were not the only guilty party in the Yugoslav conflict. He said he was aware of the "growing fundamentalism" among the Bosnian Moslems and its obvious dangers, adding that he thought the Serbian press was far more liberal and objective than Croatian. He was soon labeled as a pro-Serbian diplomat both in Belgrade and Zagreb. He is also remembered as a keeper of the UN-NATO double key treaty, stipulating that NATO could bomb Serb positions in Bosnia only with UN consent. Akashi never gave away the keys needed to drop the bombs, but the bombs were dropped on the Serbs when Akashi had the keys taken away from him by force, more precisely when Boutros Boutros Ghali was compelled to relieve his close aide and envoy of his duties.

Failure again: Thorwald Soltenberg of Norway came into the scene and became the co-chairman of the Conference on Yugoslavia once Cyrus Vance got out of the Balkan mess (David Owen decided to stay). Resolving the Yugoslav crisis was now a UN matter, Europe having the upper hand over the US. Roughly the same age as Owen with a vast experience like his British counterpart, Stoltenberg had the advantage of speaking Serbian. However, he too soon realized that even speaking the local language wasn't of much help, especially not in the proclaimed task of bringing peace and finding a solution to everyone's liking. The Owen-Stoltenberg team, in charge of diplomatic initiatives from 1993 to 1995, made barely any difference in the Balkan turmoil. The war in Bosnia was still raging, while the UN New York headquarters used a series of six-month terms to extend the organizations's mission in Croatia indefinitely. David Owen and Thorwald Stoltenberg did draft the reintegration of the self-declared Republic of Serb Krajina (RSK) into Croatia with a plan known as Z-4, which should have guaranteed the Serbs in Croatia broad autonomy. The Croatian authorities took the plan into consideration more than reluctantly, while those in the RSK capital of Knin refused to even look at it.

It is difficult to say who is to blame for the fact that all efforts invested by Owen and Stotltenberg resulted in nothing. Immediately after their departure the Croats launched two fierce offensives known as the "Lightning" and the "Storm", which resulted in the fall of the RSK and a mass Serb exodus from Croatia.

The Holbrooke era: The one person who stormed through the Balkans, did his job and went on was Richard Holbrooke. This controversial US diplomat, with an affinity for both business and politics, made a name for himself in the history of world diplomacy very quickly. Holbrooke virtually forced Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, Croatian president Franjo Tudjman and Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovic to sign the Dayton accords in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995. The treaty, which was later ratified in Paris effectively ended the war in Bosnia and - in the opinion of many observers - stands a good chance of holding.

The Dayton treaty was signed four years after the war in the former Yugoslavia broke out, when all sides to the conflict were exhausted. It came a few months after NATO aircraft bombed Serb positions in Bosnia, after three and a half years of fierce fighting in this former Yugoslav republic. However, there is no doubt that the treaty came as a result of Holbrooke's vast energy and patience, as well as his skill of doing business and negotiating solutions even with the most difficult partners. His success lies partly in his intriguing personality, described by many of his acquaintances as one "wanting to achieve everything, most of all in matters he knows nothing about".

Apart from the Bosnian conflict, also being resolved in Dayton was the fate of Croatian territory still controlled by UN troops (UNTAES). Vreme's sources say that Tudjman had asked for a NATO intervention in those areas too. Holbrooke was well aware that NATO could not send troops there, but came up with a solution even the great Solomon himself would have been proud of. He remembered his encounter with an elderly US general in an American air base in Germany, a certain gentleman called Jacques Klein. Klein was quickly promoted to a ranking NATO officer and sent to Croatia's predominantly Serb-populated region of Eastern Slavonia as a NATO representative in command of a UN mission. The mission is days away from ending as the most successful UN operation ever.

Richard Holbrooke is now on another mission in Cyprus. He will always be remembered in the Balkans as one of the authors of the famous "whisky corridor" between Gorazde and Sarajevo. The time he spent in the former Yugoslavia on diplomatic missions is now called the Holbrooke era, while his way of brokering solutions earned him the reputation of being the ultimate negotiator.

Fed up: Karl Bildt of Sweden is another diplomatic veteran of the Balkan crisis. Unlike many of his counterparts who came to the former Yugoslavia towards the end of their careers, Bildt spent some of the best years of his life in these parts (he was 47 when he arrived). He acted as an ambitious, efficient and pragmatic character when he came, but looked pretty much fed up with everything when he left. Although the Dayton treaty was signed during his co-chairmanship, Bildt is probably unhappy more than anyone else with the results of his negotiating activities. His efforts were rewarded when he was named special representative in Bosnia, a post which might even acquire the dimensions of a protectorate during the reign of his successor Carlos Westendorp. Fighting did stop in Bosnia during Bildt's era because the military part of the Dayton treaty worked, but the civil accords turned out to be a dead letter (remember the Serb exodus from Sarajevo). Bildt failed to accomplish his most important objective partly because he got no support from his patrons, partly because he had very little authority, and last but not least because he was indecisive when instant decisions were needed.

It is hard to list the names of all politicians and diplomats who tried to mediate in the Bosnian conflict. The former Yugoslav republic was visited by the likes of Jimmy Carter, Vitaly Churkin, Reginald Bartholomew, Igor Ivanov, Kai Eide, Tadeusz Mazowiecky and many others. Most of them had almost no authority and acted as messengers, but took the fall when something went wrong. That is probably why many a diplomat said good bye to politics after the Balkan experience.

Felipe Gonzales

The former Spanish prime minister Felipe Gonzales stayed in Belgrade in December 1996, when the crisis in Serbia was at its peak because of rigged elections. In the capacity of a special CSCE representative, Gonzales had met with all the sides to the conflict, looked into all the documents concerning the elections and submitted his report.

In the report he confirmed that the ruling socialists had rigged the elections and recommended that the results be reverted in favour of the opposition. Although most of the world maintains that Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic has met the requirements of the Gonzales report, including more freedom for the media and more democracy in Serbia, (the two principle demands on which Gonzales conditioned the acceptance of the special CSCE envoy offer), this is simply not true. Milosevic failed to meet a single requirement, he only made some concessions with a lex specialis which mentioned neither election rigging nor the Gonzales report. He adopted a special law by decree in order to ease the growing political tension in Serbia, and offered no explanation for what happened. In case others have forgotten what happened, Felipe Gonzales certainly hasn't.

Lord Carrinton and Jose Cutilleiro

Both Lord Carrinton and Jose Cutilleiro advocated the theory that the Bosnian conflict was actually a civil war, but neither had the guts to say it in public. Shortly before he was relieved of his duties, a dejected and offended Cutilleiro said the following to a Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje reporter in Brussels: "You say that the division of Bosnia is impossible. In that case, I have to ask you whether war is an option. Is division better or worse than war?" Shortly after he was relieved of his duties, Cutilleiro continued to defend his theory in the International Herald Tribune. He said the Moslems were not nearly as innocent as they claimed to be, adding that any treaty on Bosnia must satisfy all three sides to the conflict as much as possible. Among the Bosnian Moslems, he earned the reputation of being too soft with the Serbs along with Lord Carrington.