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FOREIGN AFFAIRS, Volume 74 No.2
March/April 1995

THE LAST AMBASSADOR -- A MEMOIR OF THE COLLAPSE OF YUGOSLAVIA
By Warren Zimmermann

    Zimmermann was Ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1989 to 1992.
    He is now a Senior Consultant at RAND.

    In early 1989, shortly after I was confirmed as the new -- and as
it turned out the last -- U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, I sought out
Lawrence Eagleburger. Eagleburger had been named deputy secretary of
state for the incoming Bush administration but had not yet been
approved by the Senate. His temporary office was in the small back
room adjoining the opulent deputy secretary's office, and there he
could be found inhaling a cigarette, which, as an asthma sufferer,
he was not supposed to have.

   Larry Eagleburger remains one of the foremost American experts on
the Balkans. Like an unusually large number of Foreign Service
officers -- myself included -- he served twice in Yugoslavia. He and
I shared a love of the country and its people. As we talked, we
discovered a mutual view that the traditional American approach to
Yugoslavia no longer made sense, given the revolutionary changes
sweeping Europe.

   By 1989 the world had changed dramatically. The Cold War was over
and the Soviet Union wqas breaking up. The East European countries had
already slipped Moscow's leash, and Poland and Hungary had achieved
quasi-Western political systems, with Czechoslovakia soon to follow.
In such circumstances, Eagleburger and I agreed that in my
introductory calls in Belgrade and the republican capitals, I would
deliver a new message: Yugoslavia no longer enjoyed the geopolitical
importance that the United States had given it during the Cold War.
Then, Marshal Josip Tito had made Yugoslavia a model for independence
from the Soviet Union as well as for a brand of communism that was
more open politically and less centralized economically.

   Now Yugoslavia had been surpassed by both Poland and Hungary in
economic and political openness. In addition, human rights had become
a major element of U.S. policy, and Yugoslavia's record on that issue
was not good -- particularly in the province of Kosovo, where an
authoritarian Serbian regime was systematically depriving the Albanian
majority of its basic civil liberties.

   Finally, I was to reassert the traditional mantra of U.S. support
for Yugoslavia's unity, independence, and territorial integrity. But
I would add that the United States could only support unity in the
context of democracy; it would strongly oppose unity imposed or
preserved by force.

   Thus equipped, my wife and I arrived in Belgrade on March 9, 1989,
after an absence of 21 years. The city had not changed much from the
dusty half-Slav, half-Turkish town we remembered. Everybody still
talked politics in the outdoor cafes, shaded by splendid chestnut
trees. Belgrade was an acquired taste, and I had acquired it. What
had changed was the character of the Serbian politics that people were
busy discussing. Slobodan Milosevic, an ambitious and ruthless
communist party official, had clawed his way to power several years
before. In early 1989, his efforts were focused on Kosovo.

   Kosovo is to Serbs what Israel is to Jews -- a sacred ancestral
homeland. In the postwar period, the Albanians in Kosovo -- about 90
percent of the population -- had carved out a dominant position in the
province. Milogevic was intent on wresting back that control, and he
had no qualms about doing it unconstitutionally. Working through the
intimidating powers of the communist apparatus, he took over or
suspended Kosovo's governing bodies. He replaced bureaucratic and
party incumbents with Serbs or pliant Albanians, one of whom, party
chief Rahman Morina, sweated through his shirt during each of my
meetings with him. Morina was later carried off prematurely by a
heart attack brought on, no doubt, by stress.

   On Kosovo, the message that Eagleburger and I had worked out was
simple: if Yugoslavia wanted to continue its close relations with the
United States, it would have to curb human rights abuses in the
province. The point was naturally welcomed by the Albanians in Kosovo
and also by Slovenia, an already democratic republic, which was
proclaiming that Kosovo was the most egregious example of Milogevic's
dictatorial rule. Milosevic, on the other hand, took my criticism
personally; he later cited it as the reason he waited nearly a year
before agreeing to meet me.

AN OBSESSION WITH HISTORY

   Milosevic's Serbia was at the heart of the complex of issues that
destroyed Yugoslavia. Serbs are a naturally talented and ebullient
people with an instinctive liking for Americans that is based partly
on a shared garrulity and partly on a military alliance spanning both
world wars. Their tragic defect is an obsession with their own
history; their hearts are in the past, not the future. In the
Balkans, intellectuals tend to be the standard-bearers of nationalism;
in Serbia, this is carried to fetishistic lengths.

   A lugubrious, paranoid, and Serbo-centric view of the past enables
the Serbs to blame everyone but themselves for whatever goes wrong.
They had a real grievance against Tito, in some measure justified, for
creating a postwar Yugoslavia that denied them a role that they
believed their large population (40 percent of the nation-similar to
Russians in the old Soviet Union) and historical mission entitled
them. When Tito died, leaving a Yugoslavia too decentralized for any
ethnic group to dominate, it became inevitable that a Serbian
nationalist would rise up to redress the perceived wrongs dealt his
people. It was a tragedy for Serbia, its neighbors, and Europe as a
whole that the nationalist turned out to be Slobodan Milogevic.

   After the year from the spring of 1989 to 1990 in which Milogevic
left me cooling my heels, I grew to know him well. We had many long
conversations, all of them contentious but none of them shouting
matches. "You see, Mr. Zimmermann," he would say, "only we Serbs
really believe in Yugoslavia. We're not trying to secede like the
Croats and Slovenes and we're not trying to create an Islamic state
like the Muslims in Bosnia. They all fought against you in World War
II. We were your allies." On Kosovo' Milosevic painted a picture
without shadings: "Kosovo has always been Serbian, except for a brief
period during World War II. Yet we have given the Albanians their
own government, their own parliament, their own national library, and
their own schools [none of these assertions was true at the time he
made them to me]. We have even given them their own academy of
sciences. Have you Americans given your blacks their own academy of
sciences?"

   Milosevic makes a stunning first impression on those who do not
have the information to refute his often erroneous assertions. Many
is the U.S. senator or congressman who has reeled out of his office
exclaiming, "Why, he's not nearly as bad as I expected!" One
congressman even invited him to a White House prayer breakfast.
Milosevic knows how to act with Americans. He dresses in the Western
style (he spent considerable time in New York in his banking days),
drinks Scotch on the rocks, and smokes Italian cigarillos. His
cherubic cheeks do not fit the strongman image; in fact, he has to
work hard at looking tough for his public posters. His manner is
affable and displays his light side. Unfortunately, the man is almost
totally dominated by his dark side.

   Milosevic began his career as a communist apparatchik of extremely
authoritarian mien, even for Serbia. He rose to the leadership of the
Serbian party by betraying the man who gave him his chance in
politics, Ivan Stambolic, whose purge Milosevic organized. Milosevic
is an opportunist, not an ideologue, a man driven by power rather than
nationalism. He has made a Faustian pact with nationalism as a way to
gain and hold power.

   He is a man of extraordinary coldness. I never saw him moved by
an individual case of human suffering; for him, people are groups
(Serbs, Muslims) or simply abstractions. Nor did I ever hear him say
a charitable or generous word about any human being, not even a Serb.
This chilling personality trait made it possible for Milosevic to
condone, encourage, and even organize the unspeakable atrocities
committed by Serbian citizens in the Bosnian war. It also accounts
for his habitual mendacity, as in his outrageous distortion of Serbian
behavior in Kosovo. For Milosevic, truth has only a relative value.
If it serves his objectives, it is employed; if not, it can be
discarded.

   When the unity of Yugoslavia was threatened in the late 1980s by
Slovenia -- Yugoslavia's only Serbless republic -- Milosevic cast
himself as the apostle of unity. Not interested in unity per se,
he wanted a unity that Serbia could dominate, working through the
Yugoslav People's Army, whose officer corps was over 50 percent
Serbian. Milosevic's concept of unity did not extend to democracy
or power-sharing with other national groups.

   In fact, in his verbal attacks on Slovenia and Croatia and his
subsequent trade sanctions against them, he became the major
wrecker of Yugoslavia. When the Slovenian and Craotian independence
movements, together with Milosevic's own disruptive actions in the
name of unity, made the preservation of Yugoslavia impossible, he
fell back on an even more agressive approach. If Yugoslavia could not
encompass all Serbs, then Serbia would. The Serbian populations of
Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and possibly Macedonia would be
incorporated -- along with generous pieces of territory -- into a
Milosevic-dominated "Yugoslavia." His rallying cry was that all
Serbs have the right to live in a single state -- a doctrine that,
if applied globally, would cause the disintegration of dozens of
multinational states.

WORST-CASE SCENARIOS

   From the beginning of my ambassadorship in Yugoslavia, I pressed
the talented and highly professional group of political and economic
officers in the U.S. embassy in Belgrade and the consulate general in
Zagreb, Croatia, to consider worst-case scenarios for Yugoslavia. The
worst case we could think of was the breakup of the country. We
reported to washington that no breakup of Yugoslavia could happen
peacefully. The ethnic hatred sown by Milosevic and his ilk and the
mixture of ethnic groups in every republic except Slovenia meant that
Yugoslavia's shattering would lead to extreme violence, perhaps even
war. Thus we favored at least a loose unity while encouraging
democratic development. The new Yugoslav prime minister, Ante
Markovic, a dynamic Croatian committed to economic reform and other
Western policies, was pressing for both these objectives. The United
States supported him and persuaded the West European governments to do
so as well.

   The U.S. policy of unity and democracy was not controversial within
the Bush administration or initially in Western Europe. But it faced
vehement criticism, led by Senator Robert Dole (R-Kans.), in the U.S.
Congress. Critics of the policy charged that our efforts to hold
together a country that was fahing apart helped Milosevic and hurt the
democratic forces in Slovenia and Croatia. The critics did not
understand that democratic unity favored Markovic, not Milosevic, who
had no interest in unity on a democratic reformist basis. In the end,
the dissolution of Yugoslavia did lead to war (and to Serbian
territorial gains), and thus confirmed that unity and democracy were
the Siamese twins of Yugoslavia's fate. The loss of one meant that
the other would die.

   In January 1990, the communist party created by Tito breathed its
last; a party congress split by quarreling was adjourned, never to
meet again. Yugoslavia lurched into its first democratic elections.
The two most anti-Yugoslav republics, Slovenia and Croatia, were the
first to vote. By the end of the year the four southern republics had
voted as well. Even the Serbian government held elections, despite
Milosevic's occasional assertions to me that Serbia's needs were much
better met by a one-party system.

   The republican elections turned out to be a disaster for those who
hoped to keep Yugoslavia together in a democratic framework. People
had no opportunity to vote on a Yugoslavia-wide level once Prime
Minister Markovic failed to win approval for federal elections. They
vented their pent-up frustrations by voting for nationalists who
hammered on ethnic themes. The elections became a test of ethnic
loyalty. Ethnic parties won power in five of the six republics, all
but Macedonia.

NATIONALISM UNLEASHED

   By bringing nationalism to power almost everywhere, the elections
helped snuff out the very flame of democracy that they had kindled.
Nationalism is by nature uncivil, antidemocratic, and separatist
because it empowers one ethnic group over all others. If the
elections weakened the democratic element so necessary for Yugoslavia,
they also weakened the necessary unifying element. I visited all six
republics to evaluate the new leaders. I found that not only was the
country breaking up into different power centers, but each local
region was developing a nationalist ideology, each different from the
other. The age of naked nationalism had begun.

   Slovenian nationalists, now in power, quickly broke almost all
Slovenia's remaining political and econmic ties with the Yugoslav
government. The Slovene's sepratist nationalism was unique in
Yugoslavia -- it had no victims and no enemies; while the Slovenes
hated Milosevic, they built no ideology against him. They practiced
a "Garbo nationalism" -- they just wanted to be left alone. Their
virtue was a democracy and their vice was selfishness. In their
drive to separate from Yugoslavia they simply ignored the 22
million Yugoslavs who were not Slovenes. They bear considerable
responsibility for the bloodbath that followed their secession.

   No Yugoslav republic was more transformed by the elections of
1990 than Croatia. The decisive victory of the Croatian Democratic
Union in May brought to the presidency an implacable nationaest,
Franjo Tudjman. I first met Tudjman in Zagreb on the morning of
his victory; before then I had avoided him because of the extreme
nature of some of his campaign statements. If Milosevic recalls a
slick con man, Tudjman resembles an inflexible schoolteacher. He is
a former general and communist, expelled from the party under Tito
and twice jailed for nationalism. Prim steel eyeglasses hang on a
square face whose natural expression is a scowl. His mouth
occasionally creases into a nervous chuckle or mirthless laugh.
In our first meeting, he treated the colleagues who accompanied him
with extreme disdain. Then, on the spot, he appointed two of them
to high-ranking positions -- to their surprise, since the venue for
this solemn act was the breakfast table of the American consul
general.

   Tudjman's temper flated when I asked him about his remark during
the campaign that he was glad his wife was neither a Serb nor a Jew.
He launched into a ten-minute defense of his ethnic humanity,
claiming, among other things, that some of his best friends were
Serbs. While he didn't profess similar affinities with Jews (and his
earlier writings had denigrated the Holocaust), he did promise to make
restitution to the Zagreb Jewish community for the destruction of its
synagogue by Croatian fascists during World War II. He kept that
promise.

   Unlike Milosevic, who is driven power, Tudjman is obsessed by
nationalism. His devotion to Croatia is of the most narrow-minded
sort, and he has never shown much understanding of or interest in
democratic values. He presided over serious violations of the rights
of Serbs, who made up 12 percent of the population of Croatia. They
were dismissed from work, required to take loyalty oaths, and
subjected to attacks on their homes and property. I have sat at
Tudjman's lunch table and listened to several of his ministers revile
Serbs in the most racist terms. He didn't join in, but he didn't stop
them either. He has also stifled the independence of the press as much
as Milosevic, and maybe even more.

   Tudjman's saving grace, which distinguishes him from Milosevic, is
that he really wants to be a Western statesman. He therefore listens
to Western expressions of concern and criticism and often does
something about them. For better or worse, Croatian nationalism is
defined by Tudjman -- intolerant, anti-Serb, and authoritarian. These
attributes -- together with an aura of wartime fascism, which Tudjman
has done nothing to dispel help explain why many Serbs in Croatia
reject Croatian rule and why the core hostility in the former
Yugoslavia is still between Serbs and Croats.

   During 1990, Serbian nationalism under Milosevic became even more
aggressive. No longer was it enough for Serbs living outside Serbia
to have their rights protected. They also had to own and control the
territory they inhabited, regardless of prior sovereignty. These
Serbian claims had no consistent principles behind them. Where Serbs
were a minority, as in Kosovo, they asserted a historical, rather than
a numerical, right to rule. Where no such historical right was
plausible, as in the Krajina area of Croatia, they claimed
self-determination on the majority principle. Revealingly, Milosevic
was unwilling to give the Albanians in Kosovo the same right of
self-determination that he demanded for Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia.

   In the Serbian elections of December 1990, Milosevic made
nationalism the litmus test: if you didn't vote for him, you were not
a good Serb. The Serbian opposition, overwhelmed by the superior
organization of Milosevic's still-intact communist apparatus and a
near-total media blackout, foundered on whether to play the
nationalist game or reject it. Milosevic won in a tainted but
convincing landslide. The one-party system, beloved by the Serbian
leader, survived. Milosevic simply modernized it by giving it
multiparty trimmings.

   Albanian nationalism was, like Croatian nationalism, to some
degree a reaction to Milosevic's aggressive tactics. As the Serbs
pressed, the Albanians stiffened. They boycotted the Serbian
elections, despite U.S. counsel that a determined parliamentary
minority could wield much political leverage. Milosevic's
strong-arm approach had launched the Albanians on a path of no
return toward complete independence from the Serbs. By December 1990,
there were few Kosovo Albanians who did not insist either on an
independent Kosovo or a Kosovo linked with Albania. The psychological
break was complete. Any provocation launched by either side had the
potential to blow the province apart. In these volatile circumstances,
I urged Milosevic to meet with the disciplined and impressive Albanian
leader Ibrahim Rugova, who was urging a policy of peaceful resistance.
Rugova agreed. Milosevic refused, saying of the leader of some two
million Albanian subjects of Serbia, "Who does he represent?"

   The most interesting opposition figure in Serbia was Vuk Draskovic,
a flamboyant and talented novelist, who leaped onto the political
stage as a pro-Serbian extremist, complete with Old Testament beard,
racist ideas, and the persona of a Serbian peasant. Once he found his
political sea legs, however, Dragkovic turned into a staunch defender
of an open political system and free press. On March 9, 1991, he used
his talent for motivating people to stage a mass rally in Belgrade
against Milosevic's control of the press. Clumsy handling by the
police and the army led to two deaths -- a demonstrator and a
policeman -- and to Dragkovic's arrest and brief detention. Many
observers felt that the rally, which has now entered Serbian folklore,
came close to dethroning Milosevic. While this is doubtful, the
courage of nearly 100,000 spontaneous demonstrators was a moving
tribute to the democratic vibrancy of many Serbs.

   Many new opposition figures within the former republics of
Yugoslavia took a clear stand against nationalism. In speaking out,
they paid a price in ransacked offices, bombings, death threats,
beatings, and arrests. With my strong support, Western human rights
groups helped many opposition organizations and publications to
survive. The investment, however long-term, wiU pay off one day.
The people being helped, and those who will succeed them, are part of
the "other Serbia" and the "other Croatia" -- the core of the
democratic revival that in time must replace the current nationalist
hysteria.

   Neither Milosevic or Tudjman could understand why we cared so much
about people who were murdered, tortured, abused or harassed.
Milosevic would listen patiently, then ask, "Why do you waste time on
these individuals, who are mostly criminals anyway, when we Serbs as a
nation have been abused for years?" Tudjman would often erupt in fury
when I had the temerity to suggest that Croatian authorities were not
always model democrats. When it came to results, however, Milosevic
almost never delivered; Tudjman sometimes did.

ELEVENTH-HOUR MANEUVERS

   The last year of Yugoslavia's existence -- 1991 -- saw the
unfolding of unilateral and conflicting nationalist strategies.
Slovenia, where a December 1990 referendum showed overwhelming
popular support for independence, announced its decision to secede
in June 1991 if a loose confederal solution was not found. Wittingly
making his republic a hostage to Slovenian policy, Tudjman said
Croatia would do what Slovenia did. Milosevic countered that the
breakup of Yugoslavia would lead to Serbia's incorporating all Serbs
into a single state. Bosnian leader Alija Izetbegovic argued that the
survival of Yugoslavia in some form was essential to Bosnia's survival
as well.

   Izetbegovic was mild-mannered, deferential, and perpetually
anxious; he wore the mantle of leadership with great discomfort. A
devout Muslim but no extremist, he consistently advocated the
preservation of a multinational Bosnia. Ironicafly, it was Milosevic
and Tudjman, in their professed desire for Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian
Croats to live apart from Muslims, who laid the philosophical
groundwork for a separate Muslim entity. Bosnia had a strong
multiethnic character and the highest percentage of ethnically mixed
marriages of any republic. While its history since the fifteenth-
century Turkish occupation was no more bloody than the history of
England or France, Bosnia was the major Balkan killing ground during
World War II. Izetbegovic was succinct with me: "If Croatia goes
independent, Bosnia will be destroyed."

   In early 1991, the supporters of a unified and democratic
Yugoslavia were becoming marginalized. The leaders of the two
republics with the most to lose from the breakup of Yugoslavia --
Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia and Kiro Gligorov of Macedonia --
proposed to hold it together in an even weaker configuration.
Milosevic gave their plan lip service; the Croats and Slovenes
rejected it flatly for leaving too many powers with the central
government.

   During this period the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA in its
Serbo-Croatian acronym) emerged as a major political player, an
unusual role for a communist army. I met regularly with the defense
minister, General Veljko Kadijevic, a brooding, humorless officer who
spoke with antipathy about Slovenes and Croats and with paranoia about
Germans, whom he saw as bent on incorporating the Balkans into a
Fourth Reich. The JNA enjoyed a proud tradition, with roots in Tito's
Partisan fighters, who stood up to the Germans in World War II. The
fifth-largest army in Europe, well supplied by the Soviet Union and an
enormous domestic arms industry, it was seen by many as the most
important unifying institution in Yugoslavia. Its officer corps,
however, had a Serbian majority who, when events forced them to
choose, followed Milosevic.

   The JNA was soon on a collision course with the breakaway
republics. Both Croatia and Slovenia were trying to create their own
military forces by calling on their young men to desert the JNA and by
weakening the JNA's control over the republican Territorial Defense
Forces, a sort of national guard. The JNA went berserk over this
proliferation of armies. "How many armies does the United States
have?" Kadijevic stormed at me. In early 1991, the JNA tried to force
the Yugoslav presidency -- a comically weak, collective, eight-person
chief-of-state -- to declare a national emergency and authorize the
army to disarm the Slovenian and Croatian militaries. This bid, which
amounted to a military coup, was frustrated politically by the
democratically inclined presidency members from Macedonia and
Slovenia, Vasil Tupurkovski and Janez Drnovsek. The defeat led
Milosevic to use the four votes he controlled in the eight-member
presidency to subvert the scheduled rotation of its "president" from
a Serb to a Croat. I asked Milosevic several days before the May 15
election by the presidency if he would block the accession of the
Croat Stipe Mesic, even though it was called for by constitutional
precedent. "Serbia will always act in the spirit of the highest
democratic principles," replied Milosevic, who was always at his most
mellifluous when expatiating on his devotion to democracy. "There
will be a democratic vote in the presidency."

   "But are you going to accept a fair transition from a Serb to a
Croat president?" I pursued. "Mr. Zimmermann," he said, "you can
tell your government that it has absolutely nothing to worry about."
I cabled Washington that Mesic was not a sure thing. Two days later
Milosevic's allies on the presidency blocked Mesic's ascension,
throwing Yugoslavia into a constitutional crisis. When I accused
Milosevic later of lying to me, he asserted that he had not actually
promised that Mesic would be named. The incident illustrated three
important traits of Milosevic's character: his cynicism about
Yugoslavia's unity and institutions, his natural mendacity, and the
pains he always took to avoid direct responsibility for aggressive
actions. The third trait was to become particularly relevant to
Milosevic's hidden hand in the Bosnia crisis.

ENTER BAKER

   It was in the context of Milosevic's move against the Yugoslav
presidency and its Croatian president-designate, Croatian actions
against the jobs and property of Serbs in Croatia, growing violence
between Serbs and Croats, and the threat by both Slovenia and Croatia
to withdraw from Yugoslavia at midyear that Secretary of State James
Baker arrived in Belgrade on June 21, 1991.

   During his one-day visit Baker had nine consecutive meetings: with
the Albanian leaders from Kosovo, with all six republican leaders, and
twice with Yugoslav Prime Minister Ante Markovic and Foreign Minister
Budimir Loncar. Listening to Baker deal with these complex and
irascible personalities, I felt that I had rarely, if ever, heard a
secretary of state make a more skillful or reasonable presentation.
Baker's failure was due not to his message but to the fact that the
different parts of Yugoslavia were on a collision course.

   Baker expressed the American hope that Yugoslavia would hold
together behind the reformist Markovic, who by that time was seen
increasingly as a figurehead or, even worse, a fig leaf Baker said
that it was up to the people of Yugoslavia to determine their future
governing structures; the United States would support any arrangement
on which they could peacefully agree. Baker told Croatian President
Franjo Tudjman and Slovene President Milan Kucan that the United
States would not encourage or support unilateral secession; he hoped
they would not secede, but if they had to leave, he urged them to
leave by negotiated agreement. He argued that self-determination
cannot be unilateral but must be pursued by dialogue and peaceful
means. To Milosevic and (indirectly) the army, Baker made clear that
the United States strongly opposed any use of force, intimidation, or
incitement to violence that would block democratic change. Yugoslavia
could not be held together at gunpoint. In his encounter with
Milosevic -- the most contentious of the nine meetings -- Baker
hammered the Serb leader on his human rights violations in Kosovo,
urged his acquiescence to a looser constitutional arrangement for
Yugoslavia, and pressed him to stop destabilizing the Yugoslav
presidency.

   Never was a green light given or implied to Milosevic or the army
to invade the seceding republics, as has since been alleged in some
press accounts. But was there a red light? Not as such, because the
United States had given no consideration to using force to stop a
Serbian/JNA attack on Slovenia or Croatia. Nor, at that point, had a
single member of Congress, as far as I know, advocated the
introduction of American military power. Baker did, however, leave
a strong political message. He said to Prime Minister Markovic, a
conduit to the army, "If you force the United States to choose between
unity and democracy, we will always choose democracy."

   Baker's message was the right one, but it came too late. If a
mistake was made, it was that the secretary of state had not come six
months earlier, a time that unfortunately coincided with the massive
American preparations for the Persian Gulf War. By June 1991, Baker
was making a last-ditch effort. Even so, it is not clear that an
earlier visit by Baker would have made a difference. The aggressive
nationalism emanating like noxious fumes from the leaders of Serbia
and Croatia and their even more extreme advisers, officials, media
manipulators, and allies had cast the die for disintegration and
violence.

   The breakup of Yugoslavia is a classic example of nationalism from
the top down -- a manipulated nationalism in a region where peace has
historically prevailed more than war and in which a quarter of the
population were in mixed marriages. The manipulators condoned and
even provoked local ethnic violence in order to engender animosities
that could then be magnified by the press, leading to further
violence. Milosevic gave prime television time to fanatic
nationalists like Vojislav geselj, who once said that the way to deal
wich the Kosovo Albanians was to kill them all. Tudjman also used his
control of the media to sow hate. Nationalist "intellectuals,"
wrapped in the mantle of august academies of sciences, expounded their
pseudo-history of the victimization of Serbs (or Croats) through the
ages. One of them seriously asserted to me that Serbs had committed
no crimes or moral transgressions at any point in their long history.
Worst of all, the media, under the thumb of most republican regimes,
spewed an endless daily torrent of violence and enmity. As a reporter
for Vreme, one of the few independent magazines left in the former
Yugoslavia, said, "You Americans would become nationalists and racists
too if your media were totally in the hands of the Ku Klux Klan."

SECESSION AND WAR

   In late June 1991, just a few days after Baker's departure from
Belgrade and almost exactly according to their timetable, Croatia and
Slovenia declared independence. Fighting began in Slovenia almost
immediately. Contrary to the general view, it was the Slovenes who
started the war. Their independence declaration, which had not been
preceded by even the most token effort to negotiate, effectively put
under their control all the border and customs posts between Slovenia
and its two neighbors, Italy and Austria. This meant that Slovenia,
the only international gateway between the West and Yugoslavia, had
unilaterally appropriated the right to goods destined for other
republics, as well as customs revenues estimated at some 75 percent
of the Yugoslav federal budget. Even an army less primitive than the
JNA would have reacted. Worst of all, the Slovenes' understandable
desire to be independent condemned the rest of Yugoslavia to war.

   The Yugoslav generals, thinking they could intimidate the Slovenes,
roared their tanks through peaceful Slovenian streets, slapping aside
compact cars as they lumbered through. The Slovenes, trained by the
JNA itself in territorial defense, fought back. After ten days, at
Milosevic's direction or with his acquiescence, the JNA withdrew from
Slovenia, leaving the republic effectively independent. Compared to
the Croatian and Bosnian wars that followed, the casualty figures in
Slovenia seem ludicrously small: 37 JNA and 12 Slovenes killed. They
do not bear out the generally held assumption that the Yugoslav army
waged an extermination campaign in Slovenia. In provoking war, the
Slovenes won the support of the world's television viewers and
consolidated their entire population behind independence. Unlike the
JNA, they welcomed foreign journalists, to whome they retailed the
epic struggle of their tiny republic against the Yugoslav colossus. It
was the most brilliant public relations coup in the history of
Yugoslavia.

   It was no surprise to me that Milosevic was willing to let Slovenia
go. His policy since 1989 provoked the Slovenes to secede by making it
clear that he would not tolerate their liberal, independent ways. With
Slovenia out of the game, he and the JNA were now free to take on a
Croatia no longer able to count on Slovenia's support.

   The fighting in Croatia began with the illusion of even-handedness.
The Yugoslav army would step in to separate the Serbian and Croatian
combatants. During the summer of 1991, however, it soon became clear
that the JNA, while claiming neutrality, was in fact turning territory
over to Serbs. The war in Croatia had become a war of aggression.

   As the war grew more bitter through the summer of 1991, the
European Community (EC) and the United Nations launched a joint effort
to achieve a cease-fire and an agreement among all the Yugoslav
republics. Special U.N. envoys Cyrus Vance and Lord Peter Carrington,
two former foreign ministers and old friends, shared the Sisyphean
task of achieving a peaceful outcome. The determined Vance won the
trust of the JNA and succeeded on January 3, 1992 in producing a
cease-fire that froze both the military and political status quo in
Croatia. The fighting stopped, but the Serbs were left holding about
a quarter of the republic. The freeze was unwittingly stabilized by
U.N. peacekeepers who arrived in March 1992.

   Carrington's job was to get the feuding Yugoslav republics to
define the relationship they were prepared to have with each other.
He and Vance both argued -- as did the U.S. government -- that there
should be no Western recognition of the independence of any Yugoslav
republic until all had agreed on their mutual relationships. If this
simple principle had been maintained, less blood would have been shed
in Bosnia.

   During the fall of 1991, while Vance and Carrington were launching
their diplomatic efforts, the JNA shelled the Croatian cities of
Vukovar and Dubrovnik, the first major war crimes in Yugoslavia since
World War II. The pretty Croatian city of Vukovar, with a mixed
population, of which over a third was Serb, first came under JNA
shelling in August, apparently because of its location on the Danube
River between Serbia and Croatia. For three months the army,
shrinking from an attack that might have cost it casualties, sat
outside the city and shelled it to pieces. The civilian population
of the city -- Serbs and Croats alike -- huddled in cellars. Over
2,000 civilians were killed before the JNA finally "liberated" the
city.

   One of the employees in our embassy residence, a young Croatian
woman named Danijela Hajnal, was from Vukovar; her mother was trapped
in a cellar during the siege. During her stay with my wife and me
after Vukovar fell, Danijela's mother described the relations between
Serbs and Croats during the attack: "There were a hundred people in
that cellar," she said, "half of us Croats and half Serbs. We were
friends when we went into the cellar, and three months later when we
came out, we were still friends." About the same time I asked Danijela
how many Serbs and Croats were in her high school class in Vukovar.
She replied that she didn't have the faintest idea. These vignettes,
which could be multiplied thousands of times over, show how natural it
was for Yugoslavs to get along with each other, despite the ranting of
their leaders.

   Notwithstanding solemn guarantees by General Kadijevic, the JNA in
October 1991 also shelled Dubrovnik from the hills and the sea. This
medieval town, which glowed in the Adriatic like a piece of pink
marble, had withstood the depredations of Turks, Venetians, and many
other would-be conquerors. Now it was falling under the guns of an
army whose constitutional duty was to defend it. Dubrovnik was not
destroyed, but the damage inflicted by the Yugoslav army exceeded the
best efforts of any previous marauder. Only Milosevic pretended that
there was any military objective in Dubrovnik. Denying, as usual, any
personal responsibility for what the army did, he told me with a
straight face that there were foreign mercenaries hiding in the city.
Kadijevic didn't even pretend that Dubrovnik was a military target.
"I give you my word," he told me, "that the shelling of Dubrovnik was
unauthorized. Those who did it will be punished." My repeated requests
for the details of their punishment went unanswered.

   Shelling civilian populations is a war crime. Vukovar and Dubrovnik
led directly to the merciless attacks on Sarajevo and other Bosnian
cities. Yet no Western government at the time called on NATO's
military force to get the JNA to stop shelling Dubrovnik, although
NATO's supreme commander, General John Galvin, had prepared
contingency plans for doing so. The use of force was simply too big
a step to consider in late 1991. I did not recommend it myself -- a
major mistake. The JNA's artillery on the hills surrounding Dubrovnik
and its small craft on the water would have been easy targets. Not
only would damage to the city have been averted, but the Serbs would
have been taught a lesson about Western resolve that might have
deterred at least some of their aggression against Bosnia. As it was,
the Serbs learned another lesson -- that there was no Western resolve,
and that they could push about as far as their power could take them.

A TAR BABY IN WASHINGTON

   Secretary of State Baker's failure to head off the Slovenian and
Croatian declarations of independence cooled whatever ardor he may
have had for projecting the United States into the Yugoslav imbroglio.
During the summer of 1991, it had been fair enough to give the EC a
chance to deal with what it called a "European problem." But by
autumn, the Serbian/JNA plan for taking over parts of Croatia had
crystallized in the attacks on Vukovar and Dubrovnik. Threats to the
integrity of Bosnia were growing, and the EC, under German cajoling,
was stumbling toward recognition of the break-away republics. Even
without threatening force, the United States could have thrown more
weight behind the effort to prevent greater violence. However,
between July 1991 and March 1992, the United States was not a major
factor in the Yugoslav crisis. In the fall of 1991, at a U.S.
ambassadors meeting in Berlin, a friend from the State Department's
European Bureau told me that Yugoslavia had become a tar baby in
Washington. Nobody wanted to touch it. With the American
presidential election just a year away, it was seen as a loser.

   Unfortunately, American immobility coincided with growing pressure
on coincidence with growing pressure on Bosnia. Neither Milosevic nor
Tudjman made any effort to conceal their designs on Bosnia from me.
As a place where Serbs, Croats, and Muslims had coexisted more or less
peacefully for centuries, Bosnia was an affront and a challenge to
these two ethnic supremacists.

   At the end of a long meeting with me, Tudjman erupted into a
diatribe against Izetbegovic and the Muslims of Bosnia. "They're
dangerous fundamentalists," he charged, "and they're using Bosnia as
a beachhead to spread their ideology throughout Europe and even to
the United States. The civilized nations should join together to
repel this threat. Bosnia has never had any real existence. It should
be divided between Serbia and Croatia."

   I was flabbergasted at this outburst and got the impression that
Tudjman's aides who were present were equally surprised. With some
heat I asked, "Mr. President, how can you expect the West to help you
get back the parts of Croatia taken by the Serbs when you yourself
are advancing naked and unsupported claims on a neighboring republic?"
There was no answer. I added, "And how can you expect Milosevic to
respect a deal with you to divide Bosnia when he's trying to annex
part of Croatia?" Amazingly, Tudjman answered, "Because I can trust
Milosevic." On the way down the stairs after this surreal discussion,
I asked one of Tudjman's aides if I had gotten too emotional in
defending the integrity of Bosnia. "Oh no," he said, "You were just
fine."

   Milosevic's strategy for Bosnia, unlike Tudjman's, was calculating
rather than emotional. When Slovenia and Croatia declared
independence and stopped participating in the Yugoslav government,
Milosevic, notwithstanding all he had done to destroy Yugoslavia, now
claimed to be its heir. He contended that all those who wanted to it
remain" in Yugoslavia should have the right to do so. This included,
of course, the Serbs of Croatia and the Serbs of Bosnia. As Milosevic
explained this to me, he added that while the Muslims in Bosnia tended
to live in cities, the Serbs were a rural people living on 70 percent
of the land, to which they therefore had a right. Thus, at least six
months before the Bosnian Serb army and the irregulars from Serbia
shattered the peace in Bosnia, Milosevic was laying the groundwork for
a Serbian claim. From that moment, in every conversation I had with
him I emphasized the strong U.S. opposition to any Serbian power play
in Bosnia.

FATAL RECOGNITION

   When Croatia opted for independence in mid-1992, Bosnian President
Izetbegovic saw the writing on the wall for his republic. He scurried
throughout Europe scurried throughout Europe and the United States
looking for ways to head off disaster. He pushed, without success,
the dying Izetbegovic-Gligorov plan for a loosely connected
Yugoslavia. He asked for and got EC observers in Bosnia. He asked
for, but did not get, U.N. peacekeepers there. Vance and the U.N.
leadership in New York took the traditional if puzzling line that
peacekeepers are used after a conflict, not before. The U.S.
government did not support lzetbegovic on the request for
peacekeepers either. In a cable to Washington I urged this
innovative step, but did not press for it as hard as I should have.
As an unsatisfactory compromise, when the U.N. peacekeepers arrived in
Croatia in March 1992, they set up their headquarters in Sarajevo.

   In the fall of 1991, German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher
pressed hiS EC colleagues to recognize Slovenia and Croatia and to
offer recognition to Bosnia and Macedonia. Izetbegovic, briefed by
the German ambassador to Yugoslavia oii how to make his point with
Genscher that EC recognition would bring violence to Bosnia,
unaccountably failed to do so in his November meeting with the German
foreign minister. The omission can only have led Genscher to assume
that he had a green light from Izetbegovic for recognition.

   I was urging Washington to defer recognition, as the EC ambassadors
in Belgrade were urging their governments. Although Washington was
opposed to premature recognition, U.S. appeals to EC governments were
perfunctory. On December 17, 1991, an EC summit decided to grant
recognition. Carrington and Vance both complained loudly and
publicly. The State Department's statement, to avoid ruffling the
EC, was nuanced. War in Bosnia, which had until then been probable,
now became virtually inevitable.

   A few days after the EC's decision, I had lunch in Belgrade with
Izetbegovic's deputy, Ejup Ganic, a Muslim hard-liner who had trained
at MIT. I asked him, "Is Bosnia really going to ask for recognition
in the face of all the dangers Izetbegovic has repeatedly warned
about? Wouldn't it be better to tell the European Community that you
need more time to work out the political issues involved?" Ganic
looked at me as if I had just dropped out of the sky. He said, "Of
course we're going to move ahead on recognition. With Croatia and
Slovenia now gone, we can't consign Bosnia to a truncated Yugoslavia
controlled by Serbia."

   I concluded from the abrupt change of tack by Ganic that
Izetbegovic was now playing a double game. With the European
Community heading toward recognition, he thought he could get away
with it under the guns of the Serbs. Perhaps he counted on Western
military support, though nobody had promised him that. Whatever his
motives, it was a disastrous political mistake. Serbia, Bosnia's
vastly more powerful neighbor, now had the pretext it needed to strike
-- the claim that 1.3 million Serbs were being taken out of
"Yugoslavia" against their will. I believe that Milosevic and Bosnian
Serb leader Radovan Karadzic had already decided to annex the majority
of Bosnia by military force (Milosevic had spoken to me of 70 percent).
The EC's irresponsibility, the United States' passivity, and
Izetbegovic's miscalculation made their job easier.


   Events took their inexorable course following the EC's recognition
decision. Hardly anybody noticed the December 20 resignation of
Markovic, so powerless had Yugoslavia's last prime minister become.
Although defeated by an ad hoc cabal of nationalists, from the liberal
Slovenes to the neo-communist Serbs, Markovic still departed as a
symbol of everything his country needed: a modern, stable economy, the
rule of law, and ethnic tolerance. He had treated Yugoslavia like a
patient with a serious cancer-nationalism. A semi-heroic, semi-tragic
figure, Markovic failed, but at least he had fought the cancer instead
of adjusting to it. He had aspired to be Yugoslavia's savior.
Instead, he turned out to be the Yugoslavian equivalent of Russia's
last leader before the Bolshevik deluge, Aleksandr Kerensky. The war
in Croatia, the impending war in Bosnia, and a future that promised a
generation of violence in the Balkans were the results of Yugoslavia's
demise.

PARTNERS IN CRIME

   During the first few months of 1992, events in Bosnia careened down
two parallel tracks. On one, the Izetbegovic government, following
the EC lead, prepared for independence. Its referendum on February 29
and March 1 produced predictable results. Practically all the Muslims
and Croats voted for independence, yielding a 64-percent majority,
while practically all the Serbs boycotted the election. On the other
track, the leaders of the Serbian minority prepared for secession and
war. Since the 1990 Bosnian election, I had paid periodic visits to
Karadzic. The Bosnian serb leader is a large man with flamboyant hair,
an outwardly friendly manner, and the unlikely profession of
psychiatry. In the great tradition of nationalists who do not come
from their nation (Hitler, Napoleon, Stalin), Karadzic is from
Montenegro, not Bosnia. I learned from experience that his
outstanding characteristics were his stubbornness and deep-seated
hostility to Muslims, Croats, and any other non-Serb ethnic group in
his neighborhood.

   I was startled to hear the extravagance of Karad@ic's claims on
behalf of the Serbs. He told me that "Serbs have a right to territory
not only where they're now living but also where they're buried, since
the earth they lie in was taken unjustly from them." When I asked
whether he would accept parallel claims on behalf of Croats or
Muslims, he answered, "No, because Croats are fascists and Muslims are
Islamic fanatics." His disdain for the truth was absolute; he insisted
that "Sarajevo is a Serbian city," which it has never been. His
apartheid philosophy was as extreme as anything concocted in South
Africa. He was the architect of massacres in the Muslim villages,
ethnic cleansing, and artillery attacks on civilian populations. In
his fanaticism, ruthlessness, and contempt for human values, he
invites comparison with a monster from another generation, Heinrich
Himmler.

    Karadizic and Milosevic both made an elaborate pretense to me of
not knowing each other very well and having no operational contacts.
Milosevic always reacted with cherubic innocence when I accosted him
over Bosnia. "But why do you come to me, Mr. Zimmermann? Serbia has
nothing to do with Bosnia. It's not our problem." This fiction suited
each leader -- Milosevic to escape responibility for aggression,
Karadzic to avoid the charge that he was a henchman of Milosevic's
rather than a Serbian folk hero in his own right.                      The attack on Bosnia showed that

   There is no doubt, however, that the two were partners in war
crimes. Copying Milosevic's strategy in Croatia, Karadzic's followers
-- beginning a year before the Bosnian war broke out -- declared three
"Serb Autonomous Regions" in Bosnia, began an arms supply relationship
with the JNA, and accepted JNA intervention in September to define
their borders. They established artillery positions around Sarajevo
and other towns, created a "Bosnian Serb" army (effectively a branch
of the JNA, commanded by a JNA general and using JNA-supplied heavy
artillery, tanks, and air power), established their own parliament,
and attempted a putsch in Sarajevo on March 2, 1992. In March 1992 --
before any country had recognized the independence of Bosnia -- they
declared a "Serbian Republic." These steps, particularly those
involving the JNA, would not have been possible without Milosevic's
direct involvement.

   In response to the evidence of Serbian collusion and the results
of the Bosnian referendum, and in hopes that recognition might deter
a Serb attack, the United States and other NATO countries recognized
Bosnia in eraly April 1992. However, a few days before, Serbs had
launched an attack from Serbia across the Drina River, which forms the
broder between serbia and Bosnia. Milosevic, Karadzic, and their
spokesmen have asserted that the Western recognition of Bosnia had
forced the Serbs to move. I doubt this. The two Serbian leaders
already had a joint strategy for dividing Bosnia and they were going
to carry it out, regardless of what the rest of the world did.

   The attack on Bosnia showed that Milosevic and Karadzic are
apostles of the most aggressive form of nationalism. Milosevic-style
nationalism has proven singularly resistant to economic inducements,
penalties, or any other pressures short of force. Unfortunately,
neither the Bush nor Clinton administration was willing to step up to
the challenge of using force in Bosnia, despite significant American
interests in the Balkans. Moreover, the two serbian strongmen, behind
their propaganda espouse the doctrine of a single nation-state, a
deeply uncivilized concept. Nation-states have nothing to unify them
but their nationalism, and power within them will naturally gravitate
to the most strident nationalists. Multinational states, a majority
in the world, can be deeply conflicted, as Yugoslavia proves. But they
can also be schools of tolerance, since the need to take account of
minority interests moderates behavior. Yugoslavia had its democrats
as well as its demagogues. The attackers across the Drina, however,
were barbarians, pure and simple.

   The Serbian attack was directed at towns with large Muslim
majorities. Gangsters from Serbia proper, including the notorious
Arkan, who had left a trail of murder and pillage during the Croatian
war, were displayed on Belgrade television swaggering on the debris of
Bijeljina and other Muslim towns. Those Serbia-based marauders
accounted for the high volume of atrocities committed in the early
days of the war -- the gang rapes, ethnic cleansing, and wanton murder
of Muslim villagers. The presence in Bosnia of irregulars from Serbia
drained all credibility from Milogevic's assertion that Serbia had
nothing to do with what was going on there.

   During one of the meetings in which, on Washington's instructions,
I accused Milosevic of aggression in Bosnia, he asserted, "There isn't
a single Serb from Serbia involved in the fighting in Bosnia."

   "But," I said, "I saw Arkan on your own Belgrade television
boasting about his capture of Bosnian villages."

   "Our television is free to broadcast whatever it wants," said
Milosevic. "You shouldn't take it so seriously. Besides, you needn't
worry about trouble in Bosnia. Serbs have no serious grievances in
Bosnia; they're not being abused there. This is a big difference with
Serbs in Croatia." Via this backhanded compliment to the Izetbegovic
government, Milosevic reduced the Serbian argument for naked
aggression to the assumption that Serbs had a right to murder,
torture, and expel simply because they did not want to live under an
independent multiethnic government that was not abusing them.

LAST WORDS

   Just a few weeks before I was recalled in protest against the
Serbian aggression in Bosnia, I had my last talk with Karadzic in
Belgrade, where he was pretending not to see Milosevic. He came to
the U.S. embassy, bringing with him as usual his deputy and pilot
fish, Nikola Koljevic, a Bosnian Serb who had taught in the United
States and was an expert on Shakespeare. Koljevic's specialty was
sidling up to me after my meetings with Karadiic and portraying
himself as the humane influence on Bosnian Serb policy. Several
months after my departure from Belgrade, I saw a photograph of
Koljevic directing artillery fire on the civilian population of
Sarajevo from a hill above the city.

   Perhaps it was fitting that I should have one of my last meetings
in doomed Yugoslavia with this macabre pair, the professor of English
literature and the psychiatrist. At least Shakespeare and Freud would
have understood the power of the irrational that provoked these and
other madmen to destroy the human fabric of Yugoslavia.

   Karadzic began the conversation by running down his usual litany of
criticisms of the Europeans, attacks on Izetbegovic's character and
ideology, and laments that the United States should be so blind as to
abandon its traditional Serbian allies. He then launched into a
stream-of-consciousness justification for everything he was doing.
"You have to understand Serbs, Mr. Zimmermann. They have been betrayed
for centuries. Today they cannot live with other nations. They must
have their own separate existence. They are a warrior race and they
can trust only themselves to take by force what is their due. But
this doesn't mean that Serbs can hate. Serbs are incapable of
hatred."

   I sought to pin him down. "What sort of Bosnian Serb republic do
you have in mind?" I asked. "Will it be a part of Serbia?"

   "That will be for the Bosnian Serb people to decide," he said.
"But our first goal is independence, so we can live separately from
others."

   "Where will your capital be?" I asked.

   "Why, Sarajevo, of course."

   "But how can a city which is nearly 50 percent Muslim and only 30
percent Serb be the capital for the Serbs alone?"

   Karadiic had a ready answer. "The city will be divided into
Muslim, Serbian, and Croatian sections, so that no ethnic groups will
have to live or work together."

   "Just how will it be divided?"

   "By walls," he said matter-of-factly. "Of course people will be
able to pass from one part of the city to another, as long as they
have permission and go through the checkpoints."

   I thought of Sarajevo, which for centuries had been a moving symbol
of the civility that comes from people of different ethnicities living
in harmony. Then I thought of Berlin, where the wall, which had
symbolized all the hatreds and divisions of the Cold War, had been
torn down just over a year before.

   "Do you mean," I asked, "that Sarajevo will be like Berlin before
the wall was destroyed?"

   "Yes," he answered, "our vision of Sarajevo is like Berlin when the
wall was still standing."