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ia comprising Serbia

and Montenegro. He then made a show of withdrawing his army from Bosnia, while leaving

armaments, supplies, and Bosnian Serb soldiers under the leadership of his handpicked

commander, Ratko Mladic. The fighting and killing raged throughout 199

United States to turn the issue over to Europe instead of NATO, and the

confused and passive European response. To Holbrooke’s list I would add a sixth factor: some

European leaders were not eager to have a Muslim state in the heart of the Balkans, fearing it

might become a base for exporting extremism, a result that their neglect made more, not less,

likely.

My own options were constrained by the dug-in positions I found when I took office. For

example, I was reluctant to go along with Senator Dole in unilaterally lifting the arms

embargo, for fear of weakening the United Nations (though we later did so in effect, by

declining to enforce it). I also didn’t want to divide the NATO alliance by unilaterally

bombing Serb military positions, especially since there were European, but no American,

soldiers on the ground with the UN mis

2, with European

Community leaders struggling to contain it and the Bush administration, uncertain of what to

do and unwilling to take on another problem in an election year, content to leave the matter in

Europe’s hands.

To its credit, the Bush administration did urge the United Nations to impose economic

sanctions on Serbia, a measure initially opposed by Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali,

the French, and the British, who said they wanted to give Milosevic a chance to stop the very

violence he had incited. Finally, sanctions were imposed in late May, but with little effect, as

supplies continued to reach the Serbs from friendly neighbors. The United Nations also

continued to maintain the arms embargo against the Bosnian government that originally had

been imposed against all Yugoslavia in late 1991. The problem with the embargo was that the

Serbs had enough weapons and ammunition on hand to fight for years; therefore, the only

consequence of maintaining the embargo was to make it virtually impossible for the Bosnians

to defend themselves. Somehow they managed to hold out throughout 1992, acquiring some

arms by capturing them from Serb forces, or in small shipments from Croatia that managed to

evade the NATO blockade of the Croatian coast.

In the summer of 1992, as television and print media finally brought the horror of a Serb-run

detention camp in northern Bosnia home to Europeans and Americans, I spoke out in favor of

NATO air strikes with U.S. involvement. Later, when it became clear that the Serbs were

engaging in the systematic slaughter of Bosnian Muslims, especially targeting local leaders

for extermination, I suggested lifting the arms embargo. Instead, the Europeans focused on

ending the violence. British prime minister John Major attempted to get the Serbs to lift the

siege of Bosnian towns and put their heavy weapons under UN supervision. At the same time,

many private and government humanitarian missions were launched to provide food and

medicine, and the United Nations sent in eight thousand troops to protect the aid convoys.

In late October, just before our election, Lord David Owen, the new European negotiator, and

the UN negotiator, former U.S. secretary of state Cyrus Vance, put forward a proposal to turn

Bosnia into a number of autonomous provinces that would be responsible for all government

functions except defense and foreign affairs, which would be handled by a weak central

government. The cantons were sufficiently numerous, with the dominant ethnic groups

geographically divided in a way that Vance and Owen thought would make it impossible for

the Serb-controlled areas to merge with Milosevic’s Yugoslavia to form a Greater Serbia.

There were several problems with their plan, the two largest of which were that the sweeping

powers of the canton governments made it clear that Muslims couldn’t safely return to their

homes in Serb-controlled areas, and that the vagueness of the canton boundaries invited

continued Serb aggression intended to expand their areas, as well as the ongoing, though less

severe, conflict between Croats and Muslims.

By the time I became President, the arms embargo and European support for the Vance-Owen

plan had weakened Muslim resistance to the Serbs, even as evidence of their slaughter of

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Muslim civilians and violations of human rights in detention camps continued to surface. In

early February, I decided not to endorse the Vance-Owen plan. On the fifth, I met with Prime

Minister Brian Mulroney of Canada and was pleased to hear him say he didn’t like it either. A

few days later, we completed a Bosnian policy review, with Warren Christopher announcing

that the United States would like to negotiate a new agreement and would be willing to help

enforce it.

On February 23, UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali agreed with me on an emergency plan

to airdrop humanitarian supplies to the Bosnians. The next day, in my first meeting with John

Major, he too supported the airdrops. The airdrops would help a lot of people stay alive, but

would do nothing to address the causes of the crisis.

By March, we seemed to be making some progress. Economic sanctions had been

strengthened and seemed to be hurting the Serbs, who were also concerned about the

possibility of military action by NATO. But we were a long way from a unified policy. On the

ninth, in my first meeting with French president François Mitterrand, he made clear to me

that, although he had sent five thousand French troops to Bosnia as part of a UN humanitarian

force to deliver aid and contain the violence, he was more sympathetic to the Serbs than I was,

and less willing to see a Muslim-led unified Bosnia.

On the twenty-sixth, I met with Helmut Kohl, who deplored what was happening and who,

like me, had favored lifting the arms embargo. But we couldn’t budge the British and French,

who felt lifting the embargo would only prolong the war and endanger the UN forces on the

ground that included their troops but not ours. Izetbegovic was also in the White House on the

twenty-sixth to meet with Al Gore, whose national security aide, Leon Fuerth, was

responsible for our success in making the embargo more effective. Both Kohl and I told

Izetbegovic we were doing our best to get the Europeans to take a stronger stand to support

him. Five days later, we succeeded in getting the United Nations to extend a “no fly” zone

over all of Bosnia, to at least deprive the Serbs of the benefit of their monopoly on airpower.

It was a good thing to do, but it didn’t slow the killing much.

In April, a team of U.S. military, diplomatic, and humanitarian aid personnel returned from

Bosnia urging that we intervene militarily to stop the suffering. On the sixteenth, the United

Nations accepted our recommendation for declaring a “safe area” around Srebrenica, a town

in eastern Bosnia where Serb killing and ethnic cleansing had been especially outrageous. On

the twenty-second, at the dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust

survivor Elie Wiesel publicly pleaded with me to do more to stop the violence. By the end of

the month, my foreign policy team recommended that if we could not secure a Serbian ceasefire, we should lift the arms embargo against the Muslims and launch air strikes against Serb

military targets. As Warren Christopher left for Europe to seek support for this policy, the

Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, hoping to avoid the air strikes, finally signed the UN

peace plan, even though his assembly had rejected it just six days earlier. I didn’t believe for a

minute that his signature signaled a change in his long-term objectives.

At the end of our first one hundred days, we were nowhere near a satisfactory solution to the

Bosnian crisis. The British and French rebuffed Warren Christopher’s overtures and

reaffirmed their right to take the lead in dealing with the situation. The problem with their

position, of course, was that if the Serbs could take the economic hit of the tough sanctions,

they could continue their aggressive ethnic cleansing without fear of further punishment. The

Bosnian tragedy would drag on for more than two years, leaving more than 250,000 dead and

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2.5 million driven from their homes, until NATO air attacks, aided by Serb military losses on

the ground, led to an American diplomatic initiative that would bring the war to an end.

I had stepped into what Dick Holbrooke called “the greatest collective security failure of the

West since the 1930s.” In his bookTo End a War, Holbrooke ascribes the failure to five

factors: (1) a misreading of Balkan history, holding that the ethnic strife was too ancient and

ingrained to be prevented by outsiders; (2) the apparent loss of Yugoslavia’s strategic

importance after the end of the Cold War; (3) the triumph of nationalism over democracy as

the dominant ideology of post-Communist Yugoslavia; (4) the reluctance of the Bush

administration to undertake another military commitment so soon after the 

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