Wesley Clark

Thanks and it's my deep honor to... Many times as an emcee you are given the job of introducing somebody and the old standard phrase is this person needs no introduction. In reference to why we are here tonight, this gentleman certainly doesn't, but I'm going to give him one anyway. For example, he happened to be heading the U.S. military during the Dayton negotiations, and served as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO from 1997-2000, during that time he commanded Operation Allied Force, and also the Kosovo conflict. We are so proud to have him here tonight, General Wesley Clark. Carl, Thank you very much for that kind introduction, and it is really an honor to be here and a real pleasure to be back in Dayton. This is my first trip back to the museum and to Dayton in 10 years. And it's an amazing experience for me personally to come back into this whole, I remember the dinner, I remember being with Slobodan Milosevic and at that time, I think right over here, there was a tomahawk cruise missile, and I pointed out the missile to him, and he said "Yes, General Clark, I know what that is." A few years later he learned much better what it could do, but this is a time of congratulations. It really is, and I want to give thanks first to the community of Dayton for memorializing this event here. You know, when we were engaged in the negotiations, we didn't have Dayton in mind, it was just at some point we decided we had to get everybody together and we looked for an air base or some military installation where there were some barracks that were empty where we could confine people. And so Dayton became, it was a... It was a place intended to be a place of confinement, and isolation, and it was in the middle of the country, so people couldn't run back and forth to Washington, and it turned out to be a great place not only because it fulfilled its purpose in that we could really focus on the peace process, but it also had an incredibly warm and supportive group of people around this community who gave us their hospitality and their support and their hearts, and I just want to tell you, as one of the people who was here, how grateful all of us were then and even more so today to the people of Dayton. Thank you for that. Of course, I have to thank the factions themselves. We call them the "warring factions", but the WFs, but they're no longer warring, but they came here Tudjman, Izetbegovich, Milosevic, with their teams, I saw Ambassador Zujou a few moments ago, and Miritz (name undetermined), and others that were here, they were here then, they sat in the room, we did the opening ceremony, and none of us knew whether we'd succeed or fail. We knew it would be memorable because there'd been previous peace conferences and they were always memorable because the failures were always talked about. There was no guarantee of success. It began in a tough way because Milosevic called the American delegation aside, at least he got Holbrooke and me in a room and he said: "You, you set up your press, you set up your newspapers, look at this nasty article about me in TIME magazine. You did this. You," and he pointed at Holbrooke. Of course, we hadn't done it. He had done it to himself by being the kind of person he was, but it began in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust, and somehow the factions themselves hung with it, stayed with it. Tudjman went away and came back. Every day, Izetbegovich and Milosevic stayed with it. And their supporters, and we worked the issues, we had map discussions, we had structure discussions, we set up a police annex, we argued, we had our European Union friends there, I had my British friends and German friends, Wolfgang Issinger was here, those of you who participated in the workshops have been through all the issues associated with Bosnia, but it still is something that I look back on, I think, you know, it took a lot of courage for the people who had been bitter enemies and fought and whose reputations and very lives were on the line to come together in this place and call an end to the fighting. And so I want to recognize the factions and the people who were there, the people from Croatia and Serbia and the Bosnians of all the ethnic groups who came here and participated in this because they did make an agreement, and I want to thank the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina. I was there; I'm one of the many here who has had to live with the agreement. Not only did I help write the military annex and do the map, but I actually, as the Supreme Allied Commander, I had to adjudicate it and enforce it, and the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina were amazing. It actually worked. You know we've never had a single American killed. We never had a shot fired at our troops. We never established a... Well, we never established a secret detention center. We never put people away. It was with great reluctance that we did arrest a few of the indicted war criminals, and they're in The Hague right now undergoing a trial, not in secret, but in public, and there are a lot of people who say that that's the wrong way to go about it, because look at Milosevic. He's still there and he's still undergoing trial, and will it ever end? But I'll stand here and tell you it's the right way to go about it, it's like that Patrick Henry statement, and that song about liberty, and about who we are as Americans. This was the process which reflected America's values at our best. We have a strong military, we have strong principles, we had great diplomats, we had a great leader with Richard Holbrooke, and a great team with Chris Hill and Jim Pardue, my colleague from the Pentagon, and Robert Owen, we lost some great people along the way, Bob Frazier from the State Department, Joe Cruzil from DOD, Nelson Drew from the White House, we picked up Don Kerrick, Jim... they were great people, and this is what America believed we knew how to do. We knew how to do diplomacy, How to establish law, and how to use our military the right way to back it up. We knew it was a political problem that couldn't be solved by force; it had to be solved by changing people's minds, by creating an expectation of peace. And I want to thank the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, because you made that possible. There is no war, and there is no expectation of war. That can only be won by leadership, by diplomacy, and by law, not just by force. When we began these negotiations in the summer of 1995, and Richard Holbrooke picked up our team, we were in London and we came down to Croatia and we went up to for a holiday, and we went into Bosnia on Mount Igman and we lost three members of our team, and Bill Clinton, our president, sent us back again. He was determined that we would stop a war, and it took a lot of courage, because when you're the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, you don't commit your prestige to stop a war through diplomacy unless you're very, very brave and very smart. And Bill Clinton was, and I honor him for that. Now we never knew whether we were, Holbrooke used to say, "Are we negotiating or are we mediating?" And we could never quite decide, we had a negotiation plan, and we would talk to the leaders and then they would complain and then we would bring it back and forth with each other. It was what Dick used to say, it was like a sym... It was like jazz rather than a symphony, because there wasn't a score that you could follow, you had to pick it up and play it, you had to run with it. We knew that the time was working against us. We were actually in the process, we bombed Milosevic a few days after the negotiations began, and I remember being with Milosevic in his villa as our forces were bombing in Bosnia, we were outside Belgrade, and I remember Milosevic called Holbrooke and me aside and he said, "Mr. Holbrooke," he said, "General Clark," he said, "You must stop this bombing," he said. "It's very bad for peace." Of course it was precisely what he needed because it gave him the incentive to settle, and he did. But we never knew, we never had a road map. We instead had determination and we had the skill and intuition of leaders like Richard Holbrooke and Bill Clinton, and Warren Christopher and many others who participated in this process. And I think it's important when you look to the future, to realize that human events aren't shaped by road maps. They're shaped by the courage, the convictions, the vision of the participants. In the case of Bosnia, that vision remains to be developed. I was there as Supreme Allied Commander with Karl Westendorf, and later Wolfgang Petrich. When we began to take the Dayton agreement and move it forward and Patty Ashdown's here tonight, and my hat's off to him, he's done a great job in following this forward, this process, and thank you very much, Patty, for that leadership that you've given us, but we're not done yet in Bosnia. We've still got 6,000 European Union troops there, and the agreement is still this, well, it was the best we could get at the time, but who ever heard of a state that had two armies, that had these entities, that had a tri-presidency, that said things that it didn't mean, but what we found was you had to get people to say them, and write them and commit them before they could mean them, and so step by step we used the language of Dayton to take the process forward. We did arrest war criminals, and we had moved the process forward, but we're a long way from being done yet. You see, what I'd like to see in Bosnia is really two things: That I discover, as I thought through it, that we could fix, if we're visionary enough now, and strong enough, and committed enough to the people of Bosnia, Bosnia's not back together yet because there are young people from Bosnia all over the world who have hopes, but they're not going back there, because the hopes aren't vested in Bosnia yet. It could be a beautiful country, great natural resources, wonderful location, tremendous history and condition, but it's not right yet, we've got to make it right. Two things need to be done above all, in my view. In the first place, we've got to move away from a party system in Bosnia that's based on national lists. When I got to Belgium as Supreme Allied Commander, one of my Belgian friends said, "We don't have democracy in Belgium." I said, "You don't?" They said, "No, we have partyocracy." My wife said, "What do you mean, what do they mean by that?" It's because there were lists of people on parties, you didn't vote for your representative and your representative wasn't accountable for what he brought home to the district. You voted for parties and then they picked people off the list and put them in positions. Sadly, when we did the Dayton Peace Accord, the best we could get were the nationalist parties, and this representation off national lists. Can't we do better than that now? Can't we have electoral districts and have single-member constituencies where somebody actually has to represent the interests of the people to the national government and bring home the jobs and the educations and the skill of training and the healthcare, and the environmental protection and the roads, can't we have somebody who stands up for the people directly to the government? It is the essence of what we believe democracy's about in America. I just commended it to you because even though there are still many European countries who don't do this, I think the experience of the countries that do do it is that government is much more responsive to the needs of the people, and I think the second lesson, the lesson I learned the hard way in Bosnia, I went to the member of the, I was going to see the new member of the Tribe presidency, he was a Croat, and I said, "Where should we meet," and he said, "Come to Mostar." He said, "Come to," I said, "Where are we going to meet in Mostar," he said, "Come to my bank," I said, "Your bank?" He said, "Yes, come to my bank." So we drove up to the bank, and I said, "This is your bank," and he said, "Yes, I started this bank," and I said, "Do you still own it," and he said, "Of course I own it." Well, in the United States, we found that it's better if you can separate private interests from public interests, and that if you're charged with executing the public's interests, that you have to separate those interests from personal and private interests. So we began a process of financial disclosure documents. We did it for the military in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but it's a process that needs to go all the way through, and not only in Bosnia, but through much of the developing world. People have to know the difference when they're looking at their leadership, whether the motives behind it are for the public good or for the private good. There's nothing wrong with people taking actions for the private good, but not when they're in public office charged with executing responsibilities for the public good, and without financial disclosure statements, there's no way of knowing. So I think we've got a little bit of work to do, and I know the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina will do it, and I know the people of Dayton will support it, and certainly those of us who've been involved in the process will follow it with great interest. We want to invest in Bosnia. We think it's a great country, and I want my friends to come over there and create jobs for people in Bosnia. I don't know if the time's right yet. I hope it is, we're looking at it now, but I know it can be made so much better, and we'll ask for you all to do it, but I think the lessons of this 10th anniversary go well beyond he Balkans. I think they go to the events in the world at large. It is a time of enormous challenge for the United States, for our friends and allies abroad, really for people around the world. Force has been used. The armies of the United States, the Marines, some of the hardware you see in this room have been committed, and a great struggle is underway in Iraq, and in many other places. The lesson of Dayton is, that great struggles aren't won by force of arms alone, that great struggles are won by changing the ideas that motivate people. By reaching the ideas, by reaching their hearts, by touching their spirit, by giving them hope, by taking away the expectation of fear, by treating them with respect, by reaching out and building communities. I'd be the last one to tell you that the military doesn't have a role to play. It does, and I was proud to play that role on behalf of the military here at Dayton. I had maps, and I argued with Milosevic, and we brought the views of the Joint Chiefs of Staff into the discussion, talked about troop deployments and how to make a military presence effective, but I never once fooled myself that that was the deciding factor in what's happened in Bosnia. And it won't be the deciding factor in what happens elsewhere either. Winning a struggle involves winning people's hearts and minds. There's no other way that conflict ends. We've ended it in the Balkans; we've got a lot left to do. I hope that people around the world will take a look at this 10th anniversary of Dayton, will remember the pain of 200-250,000 dead. Two million displaced. Billions of dollars lost. The anguish that gripped Europe and understand that what's been resolved over 10 years was resolved not by force of arms alone, but by wise leadership, by diplomacy, by insistence on the rule of law, by bringing people together, and by changing what's in their hearts. That is the lesson of Dayton, and that's the lesson that should go out from this conference. It's been a great honor to be with you, thank you so much. Thank you.