In Memoriam: Richard Holbrooke on Dayton Agreement

It is a great pleasure for me, a true privilege to introduce my friend, former Ambassador to Germany, our leader at Dayton, one of the great diplomats of the 20th century, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, recipient of the 2005 Dayton Peace Prize. Thank you. Saturday, November 18, 1995 from a book I hope you'll all buy, if you haven't already. Negotiations, this is ten years ago tomorrow of course, negotiations have a certain pathology, a kind of life cycle, almost like living organisms. At a certain point, which one might not recognize until later, the focus and momentum needed to get an agreement can disappear. Something can happen to break a single-minded commitment, either endless squabbles over small details would now replace the larger search for peace, or the Europeans would leave, publicly signaling an impending failure. We worried that if we were still at Wright-Patterson over the Thanksgiving Holiday, only a few days away, it would create the impression we had stayed too long and accomplished too little. Don Kerrick, the General who was the White House Representative was bleak in his daily report to President Clinton. Endgame, personal dynamics is taking a downward spiral. Milosevic and the Bosnian Serbs are never seen together, they rarely speak. Izibegovich, Mohamed Sacherbay, Harris Eladich, continue to amaze all of us with their desire to torpedo one another and perhaps a peace agreement. So that's where we were ten years ago today, and yet we stand here tonight, we sit here tonight with this extraordinary gathering in this city, and I cannot thank you enough for the honor you pay me, and what you've done to make this event possible, and I don't just mean the event here tonight, I mean the agreement itself, so before I talk about the Dayton Peace Agreement, I want to talk about Dayton the city. I want to thank the mayor, and the mayor of Sarajevo, both of whom are here with us tonight, and I also want to acknowledge Oscar Bunshav and Doris Ponitz and Hans Chuden and Charles and Anne Simms, for their enormous contributions. (Applause) I also want to say a word about my friend Bruce Hetchner. It is true, it is literally true and it must be acknowledged that if Bruce were not part of this process, if he hadn't energized this process early on when he was with the University of Dayton and continuing his efforts from Tufts, this event would not have taken place, so Bruce, I congratulate you for your role as well. Dayton was, as Doris said, something of an accident, but not entirely. Of course, I had never been to Dayton before, I came here on October 31st, 1995, but we knew certain things. I had said from the beginning that I would never go to a city like Geneva, the ultimate symbol of failed diplomatic missions, a place where people are cynical, cold bureaucrats, and everything leaks to the press and to each other. I had simply told the White House as the shuttle progressed that we wouldn't go to Geneva. Most of the people in the White House and in the State Department wanted the negotiation to take place in Europe. It's very important because so many of you in this room are students of diplomacy. It's very important to understand what had happened here. The war was so terrible, it was tearing Europe apart, American diplomacy under both the Bush and Clinton administrations had been such a failure, European diplomacy had been such a failure despite the efforts of the people like Wolfgang Ischinger and I'll get to his role in a minute, that there was a feeling despite the fact the shuttle was beginning to define the issues, lower the differences, we'd already gotten a cease-fire, we had bombed to stop the bombing, there was a feeling that we took too big a risk holding it on American soil. I took the opposite position. We were a totally invested and controlling the negotiation, controlling the site, controlling the agenda was absolutely essential to maximize our chances for success, and nine of the ten people on the National Security Council opposed this position, including the Secretary of State, but to Warren Christopher's credit, even though he opposed holding it in the U.S., he said he would back the negotiator, and he switched. Al Gore supported me from the beginning, and President Clinton said, "Let's do it in the U.S.," and then we started looking for a site. Camp David itself, the site of the most famous and most successful negotiation in the last 30 years, the 1978 negotiation that President Carter did between the (name unclear) and Anwar Saddat was simply not big enough, we have here in the room today a veteran of the Camp David court and the former Assistant Secretary colleague of mine in the State Department, Hal Saunders, and I consulted with him at length on Camp David, it just wasn't big enough, we had 800 people in the end (word unclear), they had about 50 maximum at Camp David, and we had three major national delegations, Bosnian, Croat, and Serb, plus the Europeans, so it was a very different, much more complicated negotiation, so with Camp David out, we looked everywhere, we looked at Newport, as Senator Pell said, "Why don't you use the breakers at Newport," so we looked at that, it was kind of cute, but not quite right. We looked at Pachatico, the Rockefeller State, which was a wonderful site, and we could have sealed it off, but we didn't have enough bedrooms, and finally my assistant, Rosemary Pauley, went out around the country looking, we wanted something fairly close to Washington but not too close, away from the press but accessible so we could fly senior officials out here as required, and we had no idea what we were getting in for, and she came back, and said it's right, Patterson Air Base, so we came out here, the Air Force Commanders did a wonderful job of fixing up the place, and they used the, of course, perfect military story, once we were coming, they used our presence to do things they always wanted to do but didn't have money, spent a couple hundred thousand dollars to upgrade stuff, blaming it on us, which was great but then they tried to send us the bill later, that we wouldn't agree to, so here we came to Dayton. And although one of my close friends, whose aunt is in the room tonight, Strobe Talbot, then Deputy Secretary of State, was from Dayton, I'd never been out here, and every time I'd been to Dayton I usually start by saying, "Would all those people in the audience who are not relatives of Strobe Talbot raise their hands?" Because everybody seems to be his relative. So we came out here. It was wonderful. The Air Force did a fantastic job, they constructed barbed-wire fences, they gave us security within security, they did everything you could ever want, there could not be, I'm sure Wolfgang Ischinger would agree, it's not possible to conceive of a better negotiating situation, not possible, and if you compare it to the shambles of the 1999 negotiations at the Chateau Vrambie outside Paris, which I think you were also involved in, where the French trying to match Dayton created a situation where the Press was wandering around the courtyard with the Secretary of State and the Albanians, you could never get things going, you could see the value of a site that works. That's all clear, and those of you who are students of negotiation should consider the physical attributes of negotiations matter, but what none of us expected was the city, the people, there were peace vigils. There were extraordinary manifestations of support, a people formed a human link around the base, some of you are probably here tonight, and well you didn't have enough people to quite surround it because it was about, I don't know, eight or ten thousand acres, but you did a pretty good job. Every time we left the base there were people with signs, praying, people put candles in the windows, when we went to restaurants in town, L'Auberge was the one we went to the most often, it was a pretty good restaurant. We, people would congratulate us. I walked in to a restaurant once with Warren Christopher in town, and people stood and applauded him. As I wrote here, in the book, Daytonians were proud to be part of history. Large signs at the commercial airports hailed Dayton as the temporary center of international peace. When we went into restaurants, people crowded around saying they were praying for us. Families at the air base placed candles for peace. A second point: Ohio's famous ethnic diversity was also on display, none of this as Doris said, none of this was intended. All of it had a tremendous additional value. We did everything possible to emphasize the fact that in the American heartland, here in Ohio, people from every part of Southeastern Europe lived together in peace, their competition restricted to softball games, church rivalries, and the occasional bar room fight. Actually, I was told it was every Saturday night, but I didn't put that in. Once as Milosevic and I were taking a walk, about 100 Albanian-Americans came to the outer fence of Wright-Patterson with megaphones to plead the case for Kosovo. I suggested we walk over to chat with them but Milosevic refused, saying testily they were obviously being paid by a foreign power, and Kosovo was an internal problem, a position with which I strongly disagree, of course I wrote this book before Kosovo triggered the events that led to the second bombing, the liberation of Kosovo, and Milosevic's incarceration a year later in the Hague. So that was Dayton to us, an extraordinary place, a place which to me is just for me, my second favorite city in the U.S. after my hometown of New York. There's no way this could have happened if it was in Geneva or Washington or some jaded city, and I thank you all, enormously, and so I wanted to say in accepting this tremendous award tonight, that I had come here intending to give the full amount to some refugee organizations which had taken me to Bosnia for the first time in 1991-92, but tonight I met Ralph Dahl, and he told me about the Dayton International Peace museum, so I want to change this a bit and offer Ralph, who doesn't know what I'm going to say, I want to give a portion of this award to this great museum. Ralph, where are you? Your decision, Bruce, Ralph, the Mayor, the citizens of Dayton, to keep the spirit of Dayton alive, Doris said that they researched and found that no other city had ever done this after a peace agreement, I think that's probably right, I have the same impression, is fantastic and to me coming from well, New York is a bit different and I live in New York, but Washington is a cynical town, it really is, and in the worst sense of the word, and I don't just mean the stuff you hear on television, I mean the attitudes of people in Washington, I don't feel comfortable there, even though it's where I do the work that I care about most, that's why when I'm not in the government Kati and I tend to live, try to live in New York, which is a much friendlier town, but the cynicism is in such contrast, and every time I come out here, this is my fifth trip in the last ten years, I just, it's inspiring, and I go back home and try to tell people about it, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart and I congratulate Farida Masonivich also for sharing the evening with me. Congratulations. Now, Dayton itself. Ten years ago we ended the war. If you go back and read the press, that took place around November 21st and afterwards, you will be astonished. Without, with almost no exception people predicted that we were partitioning Bosnia into two separate countries, which didn't happen, it is divided, and I'm not happy about that, and I'll get back in a moment to the issue, you will read that there will be heavy American casualties, our own sector defense, Bill Parry said that publicly, body bags were prepared at the Rammstein Air Base at Frankfurt to receive the bodies, you will read that it was the 36th peace cease-fire agreement and the first 35 had failed, you will read that 70 percent of the American public in poll after poll opposed President Clinton's courageous decision to send 20,000 American troops to Bosnia as part of a 60,000 troop NATO deployment because of course everyone expected casualties, you will read most distinguished people in American public life, including Henry Kissinger, who was then as now probably the most respected statesman saying, either we shouldn't be involved or it won't work, or the troops should be on the line dividing the Serb and the Croat/Muslim parts of the country, which everyone thought would be like the Korean demilitarized zone. Well, none of it happened. No Americans were killed, no NATO forces were killed, the 20,000 U.S. troops are down to 150 today, the 60,000 NATO troops are down to I think 2,000 or less, the demarcation line between the two parts of Bosnia is about the same as going from Ohio to Pennsylvania, you don't slow down, there are no check points, there are still a lot of problems and I'll get to those in a moment, but the country is one country divided into two or three administrations, it is an administrative mess and there were plenty of problems at Dayton and I'll get back to how those can hopefully be fixed in a minute, but the underlying point is that our goal was to end a war, actually, that's a pretty good phrase, I think I might write a book called "End the War". Our goal was to end the war and by god, we did it with your help here at Dayton, and the war never resumed. The Congress voted 3 to 1, the House, the Newt Gingrich Republican Congress voted 3 to 1 to oppose the Dayton Agreement, and I mention that because it's very relevant to the current context of what's going on in Washington right now. Our administration didn't accuse them of disloyalty or treason or aiding and abetting the enemy, we just fought publicly against that position, President Clinton used his commander-in-chief authority to deploy, we got UN support after the fact, with the support of friends like Wolfgang Ischinger, and we just went forward, and I don't, I don't appreciate the fact that people who disagree with an administration get attacked the way they were in the last week by the administration whether you supported Iraq or not, it's just when Robert Livingston opposed his violent way, remember he was the man who succeeded Gingrich, we didn't accuse him of treason, we argued with him .We won people over. We took 120 members of the House of Representatives to Bosnia on trips to prove to them it mattered. We fought it out and we turned public opinion around and we sustained the peace. Now, we're all very proud of that, it was a successful agreement and it achieved our objectives, and Wolfgang Ischinger was an integral part of that, it wasn't easy to be a European at Dayton for those three weeks, it was very very frustrating, there was a British representative, a French representative, a German representative, Ambassador Ischinger, but there were also European Union representative, this former Swedish Prime Minister, and the relationship between the E.U. senior person and the other three was complicated and confusing, but Wolfgang stayed the course, had his instructions from his government, carried them out beautifully under a tremendously difficult situation, and our friendship, which predated that, was even deepened here, and has continued ever since in many different guises. But at the end of that process we moved from the agreement itself to its implementation. Now, in all the interviews I did today, there were constant questions, is the agreement, what's wrong with the agreement, you did this, you did that, you divided the country, too weak central government, so on, and I think I surprised every interviewer by agreeing with every negative criticism. I agree the agreement was deeply flawed. In 21 days, going down to the last hours of the last day, you couldn't get a perfect agreement. You just couldn't. You had to choose between an imperfect peace and a resumption of the war, and it came down to the last few hours. We went to sleep on the night of November 20th, this wonderful videotape says 20 days, but I must quibble it was 21 days, and on the 20th day, we were, we were at the wall, and around midnight, Izibegovich, the Bosnian president, rejected our final offer, which was 95 percent of what he wanted, and we went to sleep expecting failure, and the next morning, but I sent three of my team, General Clark, who you will see tomorrow, Chris Hill, who is now the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs, and as we speak, in Beijing negotiating with the North Koreans, and he calls us once in a while and says, "We're going to do what we did in Dayton, lock 'em up," and I say "You'll never lock the North Koreans up," and one other person, I sent them over to Milosevic's in the middle of the night and said "This is it, we're going to close down in the morning," we told President Clinton, he supported us, we woke up in the morning and had a staff meeting. I said "You've done your best," Warren Christopher said "You've done your best," we wrote our failure statements, 800 journalists who had heard the rumor that we had failed were camped outside, and as we were meeting, my wife Kati who is here with me today came running into the meeting and said Milosevic is out in the parking lot where it was snowing and he needs to see you right away, and Milosevic came in and said, "O.K. I will make a compromise on the last unresolved issue," which was status of a town called Birchko on the Croatian-Bosnian border, and Warren Christopher and I went over to see Izibegovich and said to him, "Milosevic is willing to give up his claim to Birchko and turn it over to us and we'll decide it in 12 months." And this is it, you know, we're going to go out, we're going to go public in less than an hour. There was a long pause, Izibegovich was sitting in one of the rooms at the BOQs at Wright-Pat, and he had his Izibegovich, his foreign minister, and his Prime Minister, who was, you saw from the thing I quoted earlier, weren't talking to each other very much. And after a long pause, Izibegovich said, "It is not a just peace," and then he paused and we just didn't know where he was going to go, and he said, "But my country needs peace." And just then I could see the foreign minister and the prime minister were about to jump and start arguing with him and so I said to Warren Christopher, "Let's get the hell out of here fast," and we shook his hand and said, "You've got a deal," we ran to the phone, we called President Clinton, and said "Go out and announce this thing before it falls apart." That's the last day here in Dayton, which we'll celebrate the 10th anniversary of on Monday. The point to this story is that we knew it was an imperfect peace, but we ended the war and we got what we came for. But we left behind some unresolved problems. Now, in analyzing what happened next you must distinguish between the agreement and its implementation and many people don't. The number-one failure in the last ten years had nothing to do with what happened at Dayton, it was the failure to capture capture Radovan Karadzic and Vlatko Mladic. That was authorized by Dayton, and many other war criminals were captured, but for reasons that we can't analyze and no one fully understands, we failed to capture those two men, and Karadzic could have been picked up right after the Dayton Agreement when his green Mercedes Benz was parked outsize his office in Pale easily, but the American commanding Admiral, yes we had an Admiral in a land command, but that's the way the military works sometimes, simply refused to do it, and that act, which President Clinton later told me he considered an act of insubordination allowed Karadzic to slip out from under our grasp when we had him, and now for 10 years he's been on the run, and he's probably, my guess is he's hiding in a monastery somewhere in the eastern part of Bosnia or in Montenegro, protected by paramilitary, ultra-Serb nationalist crooks. And, but that failure had nothing to do with Dayton, it was a failure of implementation, but there were mistakes in Dayton, we allowed three armies to exist in a single country, because NATO didn't want to integrate them. We allowed two separate police forces because this took place at the time that the Congress had closed down the U.S. government, you may remember November 1995 was a traumatic month because the Gingrich Contract With America and the tax cuts and the fight over the budget resulted in a shutdown of the U.S. government so we didn't have the money to pay for the police, and we got a bad deal on the police. The central government was too weak, we allowed three presidents in the country, a Bosnian Muslim, a Bosnian Croat, and a Bosnian Serb. A country shouldn't have three ethnically-based presidents, we knew that but the people at Dayton wanted 9 presidents, and the Yugoslav model, and to get them down to three, as Wolfgang will remember, was a tremendous achievement, as my friend Zuzzhou who was on the Croatian delegation, later became his country's foreign minister will remember, your president was a moderate, he only wanted 7 presidents, whereas Izibegovich wanted nine, right? I'll never forget it, so getting him down to three was an achievement, but it's not right, they should only have one president, we knew that we were creating a system that would not solve all the problems, and by the way, I need to underscore here a key point, when we say ethnic, which is a nice artful term you read in the payroll at the time, what we're really talking about is racism, it's just a fancy name for racism, racism which by the way is not based on any racial difference. There's no difference between Muslims, Croats, and Serbs, they went their different ways through the last 800 years in the Balkans. But they all intermarried; they all came from the same place, and so on, and now. For the last ten years, very little was done to fix those issues. A little bit under Clinton, not enough. And then for the last four years nothing at all, and then about five months ago, the new administration at the State Department in the second term made a very important change in policy, and one that I find very encouraging, the new Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice effectively reversed the policy of the last four years. Now, because she 's a very close to President Bush, and because she's very disciplined and loyal, if she were here tonight she'd say we didn't make any change at all, but of course, it is a major change. But she, she would say that it's no change while making the change, that's the essence of being a good political diplomat in Washington. The policy changed dramatically and she did something that Wolfgang and I and others in this room are all very pleased with, she put the new Undersecretary of State, Nick Burns, in charge of the policy. Burns had been at Dayton as Warren Christopher's spokesman. He had been Ambassador to Greece and to NATO, so he really knew the region, and he was put in charge of Balkan policy, and this combination has resulted in a dramatic change, so instead of simply celebrating what happened here 10 years ago, as those of you who've been at the symposium out of the Hope Hotel know today, there is an actual process now resumed after four years of total neglect. That process will culminate on Monday and Tuesday in Washington when the Secretary of State will spend more time on this issue than anyone has since Madeleine Albright left her job. Condoleezza Rice will give events, Nick Burns is working very hard on this, and one of the key negotiators on all this, Don Hayes, who's worked with me in Germany, at the United Nations, and in the State Department, and was the deputy of Paddy Ashdown, as Deputy High Representative in Sarajevo and is here with us tonight, is the real battering ram who is pushing hard for progress. So the military problem I mentioned earlier has already been resolved, there's military reform and a lot of integration, the police issue is moving forward, I'll leave it to Don and the Secretary of State and Nick Burns to work out the final details, but even if they fall short of where I think they should go, at least they have re-engaged the U.S. in the region after four years of nearly complete neglect. Had I been standing here a year ago, I would be very, very critical of the administration, not on political grounds but simply on policy grounds. But this is not a partisan political issue, the nation benefits, and not every foreign policy issue should be the subject of partisan debate. And now that the administration is re-engaged in the region, something that I believe is essential for the national interest of the U.S. and for U.S.-European relations, now that they're working closely again with people like Wolfgang Ischinger, I am personally very pleased about it, and so we will see next week what comes out of the Secretary of State and Nick Burns and Don Hayes's efforts. Supported very heavily, I might add, and I would emphasize, by the European Union, but I want to leave you with this point: Not until the U.S. re-engaged, going back to what Ambassador Ischinger said about the United States role, not until the U.S. re-engaged in roughly May, April-May of this year, was any movement going on. I don't say this because I'm criticizing the Europeans, the way you often hear in Washington, this is just a fact of life that Wolfgang and I have talked about many, many times: the U.S. needs to be engaged in certain parts of the world where it has a special role to play, not as a unilateral force, but as a partner taking a lead, and when the U.S. told the Europeans in the United Nations that we were going to re-engage in the Balkans, and by the way, I want to stress that Burns's job includes Kosovo, and what has to happen in Kosovo is going to be far, far more difficult than what we're talking about today because the status of Kosovo is completely unresolved and it's going to be a brutal negotiation, and the United Nations has appointed Monty Attasaari, the former Finnish President to negotiate, and the U.S. is about to appoint a senior negotiator to assist him, and that's going to be brutal, but in both cases, Bosnia and Kosovo, when we finally re-engage, everyone else started to move, and in this case the re-engagement wasn't unilateral, so the standard criticism of the Bush administration regarding Iraq and other parts of the world simply doesn't apply in this area anymore. And I think that's a very good thing, and I'm very pleased to see it, and the conference you're having here now is a perfect scene-setter because everything you're doing here through Don Hayes and Paddy Ashdown, and Wolfgang Ischinger who's without question the most popular ambassador in Washington, with (word undetermined) the best German ambassador in at least the last 40 years, I've known most of... (Audio cuts out) hank you again for this fantastic award, for something that really does exist in my mind, the spirit of Dayton, and I urge you to continue to keep the special feeling that this wonderful small American city is, represents, Dayton, of course, is now a shorthand word for a certain kind of negotiation, but it also, to me, represents a certain unique quality about the American spirit at its very best, and in that, in that context, I thank you again from the bottom of my heart for what you've honored me and Kati with this evening. Thank you.