CAPTAIN HOLBROOKE HEADS FOR THE LIFEBOATS — BUT FAILS TO SOUND THE ALARM AS THE DAYTON SHIP GOES DOWN

(Washington, D.C.): Today marks the last day in
office of Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke,
the prime-mover behind the Dayton agreement that promised
peace for Bosnia and committed 20,000 U.S. forces to
“enforcing” that peace. Unfortunately, as the
evidence mounts that the Dayton deal is — as predicted href=”96-D18.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾ —
“taking on water,” Captain Holbrooke is not
only abandoning ship; he is encouraging the band to play
on as he does so.

‘What, Me Worry?’

Consider, for example, Mr. Holbrooke’s remarks in the
aftermath of last weekend’s hastily arranged summit
meeting in Rome with Balkan leaders — a transparent,
desperate bid to perform sufficient damage-control to
allow him to make an orderly departure for Wall Street:

“In Rome, we have avoided a crisis by
smoothing out and indeed perhaps eliminating some of
those bumps in the road that we have encountered. We
prevented a situation that could have jeopardized the
Dayton agreement. This was Dayton’s first real test,
a real challenge on several fronts, and I believe
that we passed the test, but it wasn’t easy.”

Two days later, on 20 February, he told CNN:

“The situation [in Bosnia] is actually
going quite well…The Mostar situation calmed
down today, and all over the country things are
happening which neither [the press] nor any of us
would have imagined possible last fall…I tell you
one thing, [the situation in Bosnia] is not going to
slide back to the nightmares and horrors of last
fall, the years of Srebrenica and Sarajevo under
siege…I know we’re going to have — we’re not
going to have war a year from now, but whether
we’ll have real peace or not is an issue on which the
jury’s still out.”

Meanwhile Back at the Ranch…

In fact, there are many not-so-smoothed-out bumps,
yea emerging mountains, on the road to peace in
Bosnia. These include the following:

• The Islamic Foreign Legion is being allowed
  largely to remain in place in Bosnia — deepening
  its penetration of the Bosnian government and
  increasing the threat it poses to American and
  other NATO personnel. Since the original
  Dayton accord was signed, the Clinton
  Administration has been aware of the presence of
  and influence enjoyed by Islamic (notably,
  Iranian) mujahedeen among the highest levels of
  the Bosnian Muslim politico-military hierarchy. href=”96-D18.html#N_2_”>⁽²⁾
• Richard Holbrooke has been party to obscuring
  this fact, evidently in the belief that — were
  the full truth to become known to the American
  people and Congress — what little support
  existed for the IFOR mission would have quickly
  evaporated. For the same reason, the recent,
  highly publicized seizure of one terrorist
  training facility will apparently not be repeated
  any time soon as part of a larger effort to root
  out these threatening elements.
• IFOR is similarly rendering indicted and
  suspected war criminals effectively immune from
  prosecution. Virtually everyone understands
  that, if there is to be any prospect for peace in
  a post-IFOR Bosnia, such individuals must be
  brought to justice. The belated
  distribution of blurry and smeared photographs
  accompanied by inaccurate data — undertaken by a
  NATO embarrassed by media revelations concerning
  the free movement through IFOR-controlled
  territory of one such criminal, Bosnian Serb
  leader Radovan Karadzic — is symptomatic of the
  lack of any real commitment to seizing and
  prosecuting those responsible for the worst
  genocidal atrocities to occur on the European
  continent since World War II. Mr. Holbrooke’s
  embrace of the conflict’s foremost war criminal,
  Slobodan Milosevic, preordained this outcome.
• The Bosnian and Croat Federation is in the
  process of unraveling, in part as a result of
  intense antagonism concerning the reunification
  of Mostar. Even though cantons of the city
  are being redefined and the control of housing
  projects has shifted somewhat, these events have
  been accompanied by violent clashes between the
  Muslim and Croat sides. There is little evident
  interest in a genuine accommodation between the
  two factions whose fighting has despoiled this
  once beautiful city. It says much about the
  unhealthy state of the dynamic in Mostar that
  Richard Holbrooke would feel constrained on his
  way out the door to describe the situation there
  as “calmed down today” — by no
  means a positive prognosis for the future.
• Another key ingredient to the survival of a
  post-IFOR Bosnia state is the Clinton
  Administration’s pledge to equip and train the
  Bosnian government’s armed forces. And yet,
  here again, the Clinton team has been indecisive
  at best and at worst perfidious with respect to
  the modalities of this critical undertaking.
  Wracked by its self-imposed obligation to be
  simultaneously neutral and supportive of
  aiding the Muslim forces, the Administration has
  seemed paralyzed. By so doing, it risks allowing
  the window of opportunity for providing needed
  defensive capabilities to the Bosnian government
  to pass — increasing the prospects for a renewed
  bloodbath for the Muslims in post-IFOR Bosnia.
  Those risks are only intensified by the rearming
  of the Bosnian Serb and Croat forces by Slobodan
  Milosevic’s Serbia and Franjo Tudjman’s Croatia,
  respectively.
• The Russian participation in Bosnian
  peacekeeping — now being overseen by the
  Kremlin’s shrewdest totalitarian thug, Yevgeny
  Primakov ⁽³⁾
  — is a recipe for potentially debilitating
  mischief in so tenuous and incendiary an
  environment. Mr. Holbrooke and other
  Administration officials who actively
  encouraged this development can count on efforts
  by Moscow to garner chits for use in other
  strategic locales, and to distract American
  attention from the Kremlin’s violations of the
  Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, its
  predations in the oil-rich Caspian basin, etc.

The Bottom Line

Richard Holbrooke is universally regarded as an
aggressive, creative and determined diplomat. He has,
however, succumbed to the all-too-common temptation of
those who transform despots, thugs and criminals into
“statesmen” so as to negotiate arms control or
peace accords with them: When — as is routinely the case
— their negotiating partners violate such agreements,
the diplomats wind up serving as apologists for the
perpetrators, minimizing, concealing and/or excusing
their violations.

If Mr. Holbrooke had to choose as the moment to
depart public office the juncture when his handiwork in
Dayton has begun to unravel, the least that he could do
is be candid with the American people about the real
situation in Bosnia — and the true prospects for peace.
If such deflating honesty happened to conflict with his
transparent bid for the Nobel Peace Prize, at least it
would provide a valuable “heads up” to those
who will have to effect without him a rapid change of
course for U.S. policy in Bosnia.

(1) See the Center’s recent Press
Release entitled ‘Peace for Our Time’ in Bosnia
(No. 95-P 97, 21
November 1995).

(2) For more on the Islamic
Foreign Legionnaires, see the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
Train and Arm the Bosnians — But Ensure That the
Islamic ‘Foreign Legion’ is Sent Packing! ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=95-D_101″>No. 95-D 101, 7 December
1995).

(3) For more on Primakov and his
agenda, see the Center’s recent Decision Brief
entitled Restoration Watch #7: Primakov’s Promotion
Marks Major Step on the Road ‘Back to the USSR’ ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-D_02″>No. 96-D 2, 10 January 1996).