by Stephen J. Hedges; Peter Cary; Bruce B. Auster; Tim Zimmermann


On a December afternoon in 1992, just a month after George Bush was defeated at the polls by Bill Clinton, Lawrence Eagleburger received a visit from Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Bush's secretary of state welcomed the legendary human-rights activist into his ornate seventh-floor office, and within minutes the two men were engaged in an intense discussion of the definition of genocide. America had to take a stand against the horrible crimes being committed in Bosnia, Wiesel argued. The State Department's lawyers were uncomfortable with the term genocide, Eagleburger shot back. Fine, Wiesel said: Call them crimes against humanity then, but whatever you do, America can no longer remain silent about the atrocities being committed in the former Yugoslavia. Eagleburger, frustrated and exhausted, relented. "[Wiesel] made me look in the mirror and decide, `Goddamn it, we just can't stay silent.'" Four days later, Eagleburger rose to speak at a meeting of European foreign ministers in Geneva. The worst of the Bosnian Serb leaders, Eagleburger told the ministers, should be tried at a "second Nuremberg" tribunal for crimes against humanity. "The fact of the matter is [the Serbs] were doing some things that were pretty goddamned awful," Eagleburger says today. "And we ought to have been saying something about it. And we probably should have been saying something about it a lot sooner." Eagleburger paused, then added: "I also knew it wasn't going to produce anything." 

        Unlike Bill Clinton's foreign-policy team, George Bush and his top aides were determined not to intervene in Bosnia. Where Bush resolutely avoided involvement in Bosnia, Clinton promised engagement, saying it was in America's "interest in standing up against the principle of ethnic cleansing." But Clinton, in the end, has delivered little more than Bush. A detailed review of the Bosnia policies pursued by both the Bush and Clinton administrations reveals a pattern of inaction, confusion and contradictory objectives that has left the United States embarrassed and sharply at odds with its European allies, as well as a dangerously weakened North Atlantic Treaty Organization and United Nations. On the ground in the former Yugoslavia today, the prospects for a wider conflict are greater than ever. The review by U.S. News is based on more than 50 interviews with government leaders and diplomats in the United States and in Europe. 

        Breaking up. For the Bush administration, the Bosnia crisis came as no surprise. The CIA had provided early and detailed warnings of the breakup of Yugoslavia. In Communist Yugoslavia, minorities in the republics were not persecuted. But a breakup would create new, independent states in which Serbs feared repression. Serbian leaders promised violence in the event of a breakup. Secretary of State James Baker met privately with the leaders of all the Yugoslav republics and warned them against a split. A fractured Yugoslavia, Baker said, would lead to "the damnedest civil war you've ever seen." But Washington and its allies offered the Yugoslav republics few inducements to stay together -- and no threats if they started to fight. 

        When Yugoslavia fell apart, Baker persuaded the Europeans to place an embargo on all of Yugoslavia. One effect, however, was that the embargo kept the Croatians and Bosnians from getting the arms they needed to defend themselves from well-armed Serbian rebels. In the fall of 1991, the Serbs bombarded the Croatian cities of Dubrovnik and Vukovar. The Croatians begged for help. Flush with victory in the Persian Gulf, the Pentagon saw good reason not to respond. Only a massive deployment of ground forces, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell warned, would be certain to end the conflict. Not everyone agreed. Intelligence reports at the time characterized the Serbian Army as a dispirited ragtag force. Some in the Pentagon thought airstrikes might stop the bombardments and perhaps stop the war in its infancy. Gen. John Galvin, the NATO commander, urged approval of airstrikes, but NATO ministers refused. Instead, the United Nations deployed a small cadre of peacekeeping troops. Washington supported the move, but critics saw it as a convenient substitute for real action. 

        Lost opportunities. Through 1992, there were other chances to end the conflict. Early in the year, Serb-controlled army units withdrew from Croatia under a shaky cease-fire, but they left their arms with Bosnian rebels who launched a Serbian land- grab in Bosnia. Their first target was Sarajevo. It was the perfect opportunity, some say, for airstrikes to send a message that a wider war in Bosnia would not be tolerated. Gen. Merrill McPeak, the Air Force chief of staff, would later testify that airstrikes could have knocked out artillery around Sarajevo, but at the White House, sources say, the option was deemed too risky. If America bombed Bosnian Serb guns, the Serbs might overrun Sarajevo with infantry. Says one top Bush aide: "The option always was, do you give up being able to feed the people for the possibility of taking out the guns in the mountains?" 

        There was one other option. The Pentagon's policy planning office was quietly urging that the arms embargo be lifted so the Croatians and Bosnian Muslims could fight for themselves against the more heavily armed Serbs. Bush, heeding European objections, rejected that plan. But after his defeat, his team changed its mind. "What the hell," Eagleburger remembers thinking. "We're going out of office. Let's try it." In Geneva, Eagleburger pitched the idea of lifting the embargo, even though he was not sold on the idea. He now admits, "I didn't try very hard." 

        Two principles. Bill Clinton's engagement in the Bosnian conflict appeared, at first, to hold more promise. On Feb. 1, 1993, just days after Clinton took office, his secretary of state, Warren Christopher, sat down in a New York conference room with Cyrus Vance, who was secretary of state in the Carter administration, and British diplomat Lord David Owen. Vance and Owen had come up with a U.N.-sanctioned peace plan for Bosnia, one that divided the country into 10 provinces. It gave the Serbs 43 percent of the land, the Bosnian Muslims 31 percent and the Croats 26 percent. The Vance-Owen plan was far from perfect, but it was the only one on the table. 

        If it was to have a chance, Vance and Owen knew, it needed Clinton's support. But Christopher and others in the new administration had been publicly critical of Vance-Owen. As Vance and Owen began explaining the more technical aspects of the proposal to Christopher, a knowledgeable source says, the meeting turned into "a disaster." Vance-Owen had been on the table for three months, Bill Clinton had made Bosnia a high-profile campaign issue and Christopher had had two months of transition time to study it. Yet as the discussion progressed, the source says, it became clear that Christopher "didn't understand the plan. The basic key elements of the plan had to be explained to him." 

        Bosnian leaders didn't like Vance-Owen. And Clinton aides had been urging them to wait until the White House came up with its own proposal. Muhamed Sacirbey, Bosnia's ambassador to the U.N., says White House aides told him, "Maybe it's in your interests to know what we can deliver before you do anything." White House aides deny urging the Bosnians to wait. "They may have hoped that," says one aide. "People hear what they hope to hear." 

        The Bosnians waited for the White House to come up with a plan. In a late January meeting with his top advisers, Clinton agreed to build a Bosnia policy around two principles: The Bosnian government would not be forced to sign a peace pact it didn't like, and the United States would commit troops to enforce a peace only after an agreement was signed. 

        The Clinton plan was fleshed out in the days that followed. On Feb. 10, 1993, Christopher stepped before a podium to explain it. The president, he pronounced, was bringing the "full weight of American diplomacy to bear" on the Bosnian crisis. He promised a special envoy to negotiate the Vance-Owen plan and urged economic sanctions and strict enforcement of the no-fly zone over Bosnia. He also called on the warring parties to stop fighting and negotiate. 

        The Bosnians were outraged. Not only was Clinton supporting Vance-Owen, he was calling for negotiation even as Serbian shells fell on Sarajevo. Where was the pressure forcing the Serbs to negotiate? "The Clinton people were surprised," says Sacirbey, "that we weren't pleased." In Sarajevo, Bosnian Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic was so depressed he slept for 20 hours. The Serbs did not sleep. They knew weakness when they saw it and stepped up their bombardment of Sarajevo. 

        "Back burner." In the White House, Clinton's aides were divided. National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, foreign-policy aide Jennone Walker and Madeleine Albright, Clinton's ambassador to the U.N., had been pressing for tough action, even airstrikes, to halt the Serbian shelling. The Pentagon wanted none of that. Neither did Christopher. Soon after Clinton became president, several high-level State Department officials say, they were summoned to a meeting and told that domestic policy would dominate the new administration. Bosnia would go "on the back burner." One official was told that "Clinton doesn't want to hear about Bosnia for three months." 

        While the president focused on health care reform and other issues, the Bosnia problem was passed to Reginald Bartholomew, the U.S. ambassador to NATO. Despite the White House policy not to force the Bosnians to sign Vance-Owen, Bartholomew launched a hard sell to do just that. The Bosnians, under pressure from their mightiest ally, signed. Bosnian Vice President Ejup Ganic recalls Bartholomew's pitch: "We are your friends. We want to help you. And in order to help you, you have to help us." The Serbs refused to sign. And the violence did not end. Owen blames Clinton's lukewarm endorsement of Vance-Owen, saying it sent a clear signal to the Serbs that America would not intervene. Of the Clinton policy, Owen says: "To the day I go to my grave, I will not understand it." 

        With the prospect for peace receding, Clinton's top foreign- policy advisers were more deeply divided than ever. By most accounts, Clinton wanted to do something, but it had to be at minimum risk. "What could we reasonably do?" was how Clinton phrased the question. The answer: Lift the arms embargo. The only problem with "lift," as the idea became known, was the Europeans. With troops on the ground, they were firmly against it. In early April 1993, Clinton dispatched Bartholomew and Army Lt. Gen. Barry McCaffrey to London to sound the British out. The British stood firm. But they countered with an idea: airstrikes that would destroy the Serbs' big guns. In Washington, the president and his top military advisers balked. The problem was "exit point": Where does the bombing end? What if the Serbs retaliate? 

        It fell to Anthony Lake to craft a compromise: "Lift and Strike." Lake envisioned a lifting of the embargo and strategic airstrikes that would hold the Serbs in check until the arms were flowing. In early May 1993, Clinton dispatched Christopher to Europe to pitch the idea -- even though British and French diplomats in Washington warned that their governments would never go for "lift." 

        It was left to the Serbs to turn the trip into farce. A day after Christopher's departure, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic announced that he had agreed to the Vance-Owen plan. But, he said, the Serb assembly would also have to approve it. Karadzic's timing was perfect: His announcement made Lift and Strike seem excessive. Everywhere he went in Europe, Christopher got the same answer: No to Lift and Strike. Four days into the trip, Karadzic delivered the coup de grace when the Serbian assembly rejected Vance-Owen. 

        Clinton and his aides stuck to Lift and Strike, but by doing so they missed their best opportunity to take united military action with their European partners. There would be no lift, and "strike" would occur only months later -- and in halting fashion -- when the Serbs were once again mounting a bloody offensive. The Christopher trip to Europe was such a public-relations fiasco that it put the chill on any new Bosnia initiatives. Instead, representatives of Russia, France, Britain and Spain converged on Washington and crafted a new plan. It declared six safe areas in Bosnia that would be under U.N. protection. It was a half measure and everyone admitted it. Clinton himself predicted the areas would become "shooting galleries." Why did he sign on to the plan? "They showed up in town with the plan," says one top Clinton aide, "and he had no choice." 

        A European problem. The White House began washing its hands of Bosnia. On May 18, Christopher asked the State Department's Balkan Desk if it could come up with examples of Bosnian Muslim atrocities. The desk officers angrily declined. There were Muslim atrocities, to be sure. But they paled in comparison with the atrocities committed by the Serbs. Unfazed, Christopher went to Congress later that day and laid out the new Clinton line on Bosnia: There were atrocities on all sides, he said. "It's easy to analogize [Bosnia] to the Holocaust," Christopher testified. "But I never heard of any genocide by the Jews against the German people." Where in February Bosnia was an issue Washington could no longer ignore, it was now, Christopher said, a "European problem." 

        The situation quickly went from bad to worse. On one day in July 1993, 3,777 artillery shells fell on Sarajevo. Clinton, in Asia for an economic summit, was outraged. He asked Lake to come up with a plan to break the siege. Lake phoned Defense Secretary Les Aspin, who had the brass run the numbers. On July 13, the Pentagon delivered an answer: 80,000 U.S. troops. That was too many -- Clinton and Lake had been figuring perhaps 10,000. 

        By January 1994, pressure was building for Clinton to act.  Warren Zimmermann, the former ambassador to Yugoslavia who was running the refugee relief effort, quit in protest. "I had reached the conclusion," Zimmermann says, "that the humanitarian element for which I was responsible was being used as a cover for the lack of a real policy toward Bosnia." 

        The pressure, finally, brought results. On the morning of February 5, a Saturday, Christopher was showing a new Bosnia proposal around the White House. It was a simple plan: The allies would end the siege of Sarajevo, with airstrikes if necessary. From there, the same formula would be used in other U.N. safe areas. 

        Forced hand. That same morning, in Sarajevo's crowded central market, a single mortar shell killed 68 people. Within minutes, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe was on the phone to Christopher. The United States, Juppe implored, must act. Christopher agreed -- and within days the new plan was enacted. The White House would portray it as a Clinton initiative. 

        A new special envoy, Charles Redman, would broker an agreement between the Croatian and Bosnian governments. The accord contained a framework for real peace. It remained only to persuade the Serbs to sign. By the end of February, the siege of Sarajevo had ended. Peace was beginning to look like a possibility. 

        A month later, that prospect was very much in doubt. Bosnian Serb forces had begun shelling the city of Gorazde, a U.N. safe area. NATO jets flew several air raids, to no effect. "I don't know how we can afford to lose Gorazde," a top White House official said at the time. But that is precisely what happened. What was gained in Sarajevo was lost in NATO's Gorazde initiative. Says Bosnian Vice President Ejup Ganic: "We are going to die of these initiatives." 

        Today, the Gorazde script is being rewritten in another safe area, Bihac. Serbian guns are ripping a small Bosnian community to shreds, Washington is calling for new diplomacy and the United Nations and NATO are haggling over the use of force while not really using any. The events of the past week eerily reflect a classified Pentagon memo on Bosnia produced more than a year ago. The memo was provided to U.S. News. Reform in Russia and the preservation of NATO are more important than Bosnia, it says. Bosnia should be partitioned and the conflict simply contained. "This will turn Bosnia into a running sore and make the Muslims the new Palestinians." Even so, the memo says, "We should not make peace in Bosnia the goal of our efforts. It is not something we can achieve."


1991. OCTOBER ASSAULT ON DUBROVNIK Serbian shelling of the historical Croatian port city prompted calls for a tough response from Washington, but President George Bush, Secretary of State James Baker and Deputy Secreatary Lawrence Eagleburger vowed not to be drawn into the conflict. Critics now contend that an early -- and perhaps the best -- chance to prevent the widening of the conflict in Bosnia was missed.

1993. WINTER SIEGE OF SARAJEVO Bosnian Serb artillery in the hills around the Bosnian capital pounded the city despite testimony by a top U.S. Air Force official that airstrikes could knock out the guns. Gen. Colin Powell questioned where the United States would find an "exit point" from the Bosnian conflict and whether U.S. troops might be needed there. President Clinton decided not to authorized airstrikes, and the Serbian guns continued their assault.

1994. SERBIAN ATACK ON SARAJEVO MARKET SQUARE On a sunny Saturday morning, a single artillery shell fell in a central square of the Bosnian capital, killing 68 people and injuring dozens more. President Clinton and the European allies vowed to stop the violence. The threat of airstrikes soon brought calm to the beleaguered city.

1994. SERBS TAKE MUSLIM SAFE AREA, GORAZDE Situated in eastern Bosnia, the Muslim-held town was designated a United Nations safe area. NATO airstrikes intended to stop the Serbian shelling of the city had little effect. The gains of Sarajevo were lost in Gorazde. The fighting has since increased in intesity.