The Bosnian War Cables

The 20th anniversary of the Dayton Peace Accords is a time to reflect on the power of American diplomacy.
But it is also a time for a reckoning of Americas dismal diplomatic response to genocide in the heart of
Europe.

BY COLUM LYNCH-NOVEMBER 22, 2015

Twenty years on, the Dayton Peace Accords continue to be invoked as a triumph of
American diplomacy, a bold display of superpower knuckle-busting that imposed a
political settlement on the Balkans bitterest of enemies.
Through a period of 20 days in November 1995, Richard Holbrooke, one of his
generations most distinguished diplomats, strong-armed Bosnian, Serb, and Croatian
leaders into ending the bloodiest post-Cold War conflict on European soil. It was an
imperfect deal: It broke the country of Bosnia-Herzegovina into a Bosnian Muslim and
Croatian federation, and a Bosnian Serb region under a shared federal authority. But it
ended a war that had killed approximately 100,000 people, the majority of them
Bosnian Muslims slaughtered in cold blood by Bosnian Serb forces under the
command of Gen. Ratko Mladic, dubbed the Butcher of Bosnia, who is being tried at
The Hague for war crimes and genocide.
Still, the triumph of Dayton masks the more unsettling story of American diplomatic
dysfunction and drift that defined the Clinton administrations approach to the Bosnian

War for nearly three years before Dayton. It would take the shock of the July 1995
massacre at Srebrenica, the worst act of mass slaughter on European soil since World
War II, to compel American policymakers and their allies to devise a coherent strategy
for ending the Bosnian War.
With the approach of the 20-year anniversary of the Dec. 14, 1995, signing of the
Dayton Accords in Paris, the National Security Archive and the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museums Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide are
publishing scores of declassified White House, State Department, and foreign
government cables detailing the diplomatic indecision and disarray.
The documents, some of which have never before been made public in full, detail the
series of U.S. half-measures from food airdrops to the establishment of
undefendable safe areas that shaped a policy intended to create the impression of
doing something, when, in fact, we were not willing to do anything seriously, Jenonne
Walker, the senior director for Europe on the National Security Council during the
Bosnian War, recalled during a conference of key participants and policymakers
organized by the Holocaust Memorial Museums genocide prevention program and
The Hague Institute for Global Justice in The Hague this past summer.
We thought it was folly to call something a safe area that we had no means or intent
of keeping safe, Walker said, according to a transcript of the Hague conference. But
we had zero political or moral credibility because we were not willing to participate
ourselves.
The documents, which were made available to Foreign Policy in advance of their
public release on Monday, also shed light on a critical agreement among the United
States, France, Britain, and the United Nations to secretly allow a pause in the NATO
bombing campaign in the spring of 1995 after Serb forces seized U.N. peacekeepers
as hostages. Weeks after the pause was agreed upon, the U.N.s military leadership
dismissed and delayed calls for air support for a tiny contingent of Dutch
peacekeepers who formed a final line of defense against the worst act of mass
slaughter since World War II. The decision to withhold air power, in the words of one
Dutch officer, Kees Matthijssen, was a game-changer that set the stage for the all-out
Serb offensive against Srebrenica.
A Fresh Start
During the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign, then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton
denounced President George H.W. Bushs handling of the Balkan war as lacking
moral leadership.
In the first month after he was sworn in, President Clinton authorized the use of
American planes to airdrop food, medicines, and other supplies in the eastern Bosnian
town of Srebrenica, which had become a hub for thousands of Bosnian Muslims driven
from surrounding villages by the Bosnian Serb Army. The Clinton administration
pressed for war crimes charges and reinforced sanctions.
Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and the

administrations most hawkish cabinet member, was growing increasingly frustrated by

American inaction, arguing that it undermined U.S. credibility in the world and
encouraged the Bosnian Serbs to commit atrocities. The presidents high-minded
campaign pledge added up to empty rhetoric without concrete action aimed at
stopping the killing.
On April 14, three months after Clinton was sworn in as Americas 42nd president,
Albright proposed establishing a series of U.N. protection enclaves in Bosnia that
would be defended by U.S., NATO, and Russian ground forces with the support of
American air power. The model, she said, would emulate the security zones set up in
1991 by the United States and its allies in Kurdish sections of northern Iraq following
the Gulf War.
We have never tested the proposition that American military intervention might
intimidate the Bosnian Serb militia and their patrons in Belgrade, she wrote in a
memorandum to the national security advisor, Anthony Lake. I understand that
deciding to use American forces in Bosnia would be crossing the Rubicon. But we
should think about whether sweeping the problem under the rug creates more
problems. If we say we would never impose a settlement we are blessing ethnic
cleansing.
But Albright had few allies. On Feb. 5, 1993, Clintons advisors agreed to a plan to use
U.S. military force in Bosnia, but only after the warring parties agreed to a political
settlement. American firepower would not be used to protect civilians at risk of
violence.
Killing a Peace Plan With Feint Praise
Yet even as the administration stepped up its role in the Balkans, Clintons national
security team largely dismissed what it viewed as an unimplementable U.N.- and
European-backed diplomatic initiative the Vance-Owen plan designed to stop the
fighting and bring the war to an end. A U.S. national intelligence assessment in 1993
concluded that the Vance-Owen plan which called for dividing Bosnia into 10
semiautonomous regions representing the countrys Muslims, Croatians, and Serbs
holds little prospect of preserving a unitary Bosnia in the long run.
Vance-Owen has a terrible map and would require lots of American blood and
treasure, Vice President Al Gore groused at a Feb. 5, 1993, White House principals
meeting. The American people will not want to send our boys there.
Despite Washingtons misgivings, U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher argued
that we should not throw out Vance-Owen at this point and do it ourselves, citing
concern about alienating key European allies, like Britain and France, that had
peacekeepers in Bosnia, influential members of U.S. Congress, and Russia. In the
end, the Bosnian Serbs refused to sign the deal, essentially killing it off, leaving the
West with no alternative in its place to end the war. The collapse of the Vance-Owen
plan in the spring of 1993 left behind a policy vacuum that was not filled until the
aftermath of Srebrenica with the American-led diplomatic initiative that resulted in the

Dayton peace agreement, according to a report from the conference in The Hague
this past summer.
In its place, the United States backed a number of initiatives including the
establishment of safe areas, the lifting of a U.N. arms embargo on the Bosnian
Muslims, airstrikes against Bosnian Serb forces that either failed to gain backing
from the U.N. or its European allies or were viewed by many in the administration as
woefully inadequate. In August 1993, the U.S. national intelligence officer for
Europe warned the CIAs chief, James Woolsey, that unilateral U.S. airstrikes against
the Serbs would break the international coalition and lead to a split in the U.N.
Security Council among the United States, its Western allies, and Russia.
With the collapse of the Vance-Owen plan, the focus of attention shifted from ending
the war to protecting its civilian victims.
While Albrights proposal of using U.S., European, and Russian soldiers to provide
security for protected areas never got off the ground, Washington and other key
powers settled on a far more limited plan for protecting civilians with lightly armed U.N.
peacekeepers in a series of Bosnian Muslim enclaves.
In May 1993, the United States, Britain, France, Spain, and Russia reached
agreement on a joint action program that called for the establishment of safe areas
throughout Bosnia to protect Muslim villagers. It set the stage for the passage of a
U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the establishment of six safe areas,
including Srebrenica.
Behind closed doors, U.S. policymakers expressed little confidence in the U.N.s
capacity to defend the safe areas. At a May 17, 1993, White Housemeeting, Clintons
principal national security advisors concluded that we will not agree to use air
power to help defend safe havens that contain allied forces, citing as necessary our
basic reservations about the limits of air power and the lack of an end point to the safe
haven strategy.
It was a fake policy designed to create the appearance that the U.S. was doing
something it wasnt doing, said Walker, the former National Security Council staffer.
Many of us thought it was an embarrassment.
During the same meeting, the principals vowed to continue to press for an end to the
U.N. arms embargo on Bosnia and for airstrikes, making clear our reasons for
believing it is the best course but will not press it to the point of shattering relations
with Allies or the Russians.
The NATO Air Campaign Runs Aground
Throughout the war, the United States had pressed the U.N. and its European allies to
adopt a strike and lift strategy. First, the United Nations would lift the U.N. arms
embargo on the Bosnian Muslims, permitting them to import weapons to defend
themselves. Next, NATO fighters would step up airstrikes against the Bosnian Serbs in
an effort to prevent them from ethnic-cleansing Bosnian Muslims and to push them to

the negotiating table. But the French and British governments, which had the most
peacekeepers on the ground, were not willing to go along.
By August 1993, the United States had prevailed on the United Nations and European
governments to authorize the use of air power. But to secure backing from the U.N.
and allies, Washington agreed that NATO would place authority for authorizing
airstrikes in the hands of U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. For a while,
the strategy seemed to work.
On Feb. 5, 1994, Boutros-Ghali approved a request by Britain, France, and the United
States to bomb the Bosnian Serbs if they failed to meet a 10-day deadline to pull back
their heavy weapons from Sarajevo.
But when a U.N. commander in Bosnia ordered airstrikes on April 10 to halt a Bosnian
Serb offensive against the city of Gorazde, the Serbs seized 150 U.N. personnel as
hostages. The Bosnian Serb side quickly realized that it had the capacity to make
UNPROFOR [the U.N. Protection Force] pay an unacceptably high price if air power
was used on its behalf, recalled Shashi Tharoor, the U.N.s Bosnia desk officer at the
time.
The air campaign ran aground by May 1995.
The Serbs had withdrawn their heavy weapons from a U.N.-monitored collection point
that had been set up the previous year. The U.N. commander in Sarajevo, British Lt.
Gen. Rupert Smith, issued an ultimatum to return the weapons and on May 25
launched airstrikes when they didnt comply. But the Bosnian Serbs retaliated by
shelling several U.N. safe areas, including Srebrenica and Tuzla, and seizing some
400 U.N. personnel as hostages. Some were used as human shields to deter further
airstrikes.
The Secret Pause
The hostage crisis prompted a retreat by Western powers.
On May 27, 1995, Clinton, French President Jacques Chirac, and British Prime
Minister John Major spoke by telephone to discuss the hostage crisis.
Chirac later told Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic that he had secured President
Clintons agreement that air strikes should not occur if unacceptable to Chirac, as a
U.N. special representative recounted in a diplomatic cable.
On May 28, one day after Clinton spoke to his British and French counterparts,
Clintons top national security advisors met in the White House Situation Room, where
they agreed to a secret open-ended pause on airstrikes of an indefinite duration.
The U.S. will not press allies with troops on the ground for further strikes now, but
the possibility of further strikes will not be ruled out, according to an official account of
the principals meeting. [P]rivately we will accept a pause, but make no public
statement to that effect.
The United States also pledged to strongly support efforts by France and Britain to

bolster the U.N.s firepower and draw up tougher military rules of engagement, while
supporting an effort to regroup U.N. peacekeepers into more defensible positions to
reduce the risk.
Should strikes again become necessary, a more robust approach permitting the U.N.
and NATO to respond at the time and place of their own choosing should be followed,
according to the account.
But the White House ruled out the prospect of sending American ground forces into
Bosnia in support of their European allies.
It remains unclear precisely what orders were transmitted to the U.N. about the
decision to pause the use of air power. But the plan quickly filtered down to the U.N.s
French force commander, Gen. Bernard Janvier, who issued a fateful May 29
directive: The execution of the mandate is secondary to the security of U.N.
personnel. The intention is to avoid all loss of life in the defense of indispensable
positions and to avoid all hostage taking.
We are no longer able to use air power because of the obvious reason that our
soldiers are on the ground, Janvier subsequently told the U.N.s top political official,
Yasushi Akashi, and Smith, U.N. commander in Sarajevo. Whether we want it or not,
the Serbs are controlling the situation.
Robert Frasure, the deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian
affairs, singled out Clinton for abdicating leadership to Chirac,citing insufficient energy
and leadership at the White House of late which has handed control of this issue to
the impulsive, dynamic Chirac.
At the risk of sounding petulant, wrote Frasure, who died in an August 1995 car
accident in Bosnia, in a July 1, 1995, cable to Secretary of State Christopher, [u]p to
now we had four or five Bosnia policies all cohabitating amicably under the
administration with no sense of discipline.
Holbrooke was even more scathing. The Clinton administrations Bosnia policy, he
confided to the U.S. ambassador to Croatia, Peter Galbraith, was a shambles beyond
belief, according to an entry in Galbraiths contemporaneous diary, major portions of
which are being made public for the first time this weekend.
The Final Chapter
On July 6, 1995, the day Bosnian Serb forces began their notorious final assault on
the village of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia, Thom Karremans, the Dutch commander
of a small contingent of some 300 U.N. peacekeepers defending the town, issued a
desperate plea to his superior for NATO air support. By that stage, Srebrenica had
become a magnet for thousands of displaced Bosnian Muslims fleeing Bosnian Serb
attacks against their villages. Srebrenica was being defended by an outgunned
contingent of Bosnian Muslim forces, from the armys 28th Division. The western
section of the enclave, known as the Bandera Triangle, had become a staging ground
for Bosnians to mount raids against nearby Serbian villages to steal food.

But Gen. Kees Nicolai, a Dutch chief of staff for UNPROFOR in Sarajevo, declined to
send the request up the U.N. chain of command, certain it would be summarily
rejected. Nicolai explained to his compatriot that Janvier, the U.N. force commander,
had recently implemented new very restrictive conditions requiring that NATO air
power in Bosnia could be used only as a last resort, and in this instance it would only
be possible if the Dutch battalion in Srebrenica had first used their weapons.
Anticipating a bloody assault on the town, the two Dutch officers devised a ruse to
provoke the Bosnian Serbs who were threatening to overrun the Bosnian Muslim
enclave into engaging the peacekeepers in a firefight, providing a pretext for inviting
airstrikes. Karremans set up a series of blocking positions on the towns outskirts,
signaling to the Serbs that the U.N. was attempting to impede their plans to take the
town.
The Serbs took the bait, opening fire on U.N. positions at 6:30 p.m. on July 10 and
triggering another call for air support. This time Nicolai passed on the request to the
U.N. force commander, Janvier, at U.N. headquarters in Zagreb, Croatia. But the
massive display of air power that Karremans expected never came. Instead, two
NATO planes, including a Dutch F-16, showed up 18 hours later, dropping a single
bomb in the vicinity of a Serb tank, but ignoring some 40 other targets, including
artillery pieces and rocket launchers that Karremans had identified in advance.
The tepid military response, according to Dutch officers, sent a clear message to the
Bosnian Serbs that they could enter Srebrenica without facing the threat of NATO air
power. The Serbs quickly overran the town, setting the stage for the massacre of more
than 7,000 males, which would mark the worst act of mass killing in Europe since
World War II.
The Dutch government didnt learn until much later that the decision not to bomb the
Serbs more forcefully could be traced back weeks earlier to the telephone
conversation by Clinton with his French and British counterparts, which was
implemented by senior U.N. military officials.
The Dutch prime minister at the time, Wim Kok, said that the bombing pause was not
communicated to his government. It remains puzzling for me why this very important
decision to have a pause, an unqualified pause not forever, but at least for the time
being was completely undisclosed to the government of a country that had huge
responsibilities in Bosnia, and particularly in Srebrenica, he said at the conference in
The Hague this past summer.
The logic of politics: Things Have to Get Worse Before they Can Get Better
Gen. Mladics decision to execute 7,000 Bosnian Muslims exposed the fecklessness of
U.N. and Western pledges to protect civilians from mass abuses.
But it was also a disastrous strategic blunder, triggering a far more assertive military
response to the Bosnian Serbs, and setting the stage for reinvigorated U.S. and
European efforts to end the war.

On July 21, 1995, the U.S. and other major powers gathered in London, where they
delivered an ultimatum to halt an ongoing offensive. Boutros-Ghali relinquished the
authority to approve all NATO airstrikes, delegating that power to his commanders.
France and Britain established a rapid reaction force with the military capacity to fight.
Backed by NATO air strikes, the U.N. force ultimately helped break the Bosnian Serb
siege of Sarajevo.
At the Hague this past summer, Lt. Gen. Rupert Smith described the change in
attitude towards the use of force: During the July 1995 London Conference, Prime
Minister John Major urged Smith to respond forcefully to future Bosnian Serb
challenges. The next time there is an attack on Gorazde, on the British battalion, we
are going to bomb, Smith recalled Major telling him. We are going to bomb and not
stop bombing, and you Smith are going to hold the key.
The United States, meanwhile, was making progress on another front. In March 1994,
the U.S. had brokered an agreement between the Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian
Croats to join forces against the Bosnian Serbs. The following month, the U.S. assured
Croatian President Franjo Tudjman that Washington had no objection to a clandestine
arms channel that was ferrying arms from Iran, Turkey, and other Arab governments to
the Bosnian Muslims, thereby intensifying the flow of weapons.
In late July 1995, Galbraith delivered a secret diplomatic demarche to the Croatian
government indicating support for a new Croatia plan, dubbed Operation Storm, to
launch a major offensive to retake Kraijina, a Serbian controlled swath of Croatia, and
to help the Bosnian Muslims break the siege across the border in Bihac.
With the Serbs attacking the Bihac enclave from Croatian territory, and the Sarajevo
[government] requesting your assistance, we cannot dispute your right to intervene
[militarily] to repel the Serbs, according to the U.S. demarche, which was cited in
Galbraiths diary. We appreciateyour willingness to help defend the Bosnians.
Croatias Operation Storm, which began on Aug. 4, 1995, routed the Kraijina Serb
defenses within days, breaking the Bosnian Serb siege of Bihac. The operation
fundamentally altered the balance of power in the region, setting off the flight of more
than 150,000 Croatian Serb civilians to Serbia, and bringing the Serbs to the peace
table.
The Serb leadership understood that the time had come to sit down at the negotiating
table, said Joris Voorhoeve, the Dutch Defense Minister from 1994 to 1998. My wish,
of course is that the policies that helped save Gorazde, including the threat and use of
real military power, had been applied five weeks earlier.
That might have made a difference to the 8,000 people who were killed in
Srebrenica, he added. There is an unfortunate logic in politics: things sometimes
have to get worse before they get better. They have to get worse to make everybody
understand that muddling through will not work any more and something radically
different is necessary.

A lingering question for the participants at the Srebrenica conference in the Hague this
past summer centered on whether the slaughter at Srebrenica could have been
averted if the international community had confronted the Bosnian Serbs with credible
air strikes.
David Harland, the head of U.N. civil affairs during the Bosnian war, told the Hague
gathering last summer that he is convinced the Bosnian Serbs would have halted their
assault on Srebrenica if the U.N. had approved the Dutch request for air support.
People who are now dead would be alive if [the U.N. peacekeeping mission] had
done those things it was mandated to do but did not have the political will to do.
Prince Zeid Raad Al-Hussein, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, and a
former political officer with the U.N. in Bosnia during the war, said investigators with
the International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) concluded that Gen.
Mladic had not initially intend to overrun Srebrenica, but simply to force the Bosnian
Muslims into an easily controlled area in the enclaves urban core. The decision to
seize the town was taken on July 9, 1995 three days after U.N. headquarters
declined the Dutch contingents request for air support. The Bosnian Serbs continued
the mass killing, Zeid said, after realizing they were not being exposed, because day
by day the U.N. was not saying anything.
Gen. Smith speculated that Mladic gave the order for the mass killing because he
lacked the manpower to oversee thousands of male prisoners while fighting the
Bosnian Muslim forces in the enclave. The simple solution is: kill the prisoners, Smith
said.
But Muhamed Durakovic, the one survivor of the Srebrenica massacre at the Hague
conference, said it was clear to him the killing was part of a well-thought plan to
cleanse eastern Bosnia of its Muslim population.
If someone wanted to just kill a few thousand prisoners and get rid of them, they did
not have to chase us around for months and kill everyone they found, he said.
Photo Credit: Elvis Barukcic/ AFP/ Getty Images
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