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 Ame
