Every time I come back to this once-lovely city, I hope something has really changed–that the United States and the Western world have finally found the formula for resolving the five years of terrible war here.
Surely the city is better off, even from a year ago. People go in peace among the bombed and burned-out buildings. There is a modicum of trade and things to buy. The United States has some of its most impressive diplomats, military men and civilian officials working around the clock all through these mountains and valleys of central Bosnia.
And yet, once again I find that resolution of the conflict is as elusive as the wind and that “peace” a word that marks a yawning irresolution. The tragic, disgraceful central truth about Bosnia today is that, despite 35,000 NATO troops here and billions of dollars spent, nothing has really been resolved.
In truth, this should not surprise anyone, because the United States, even while it deployed troops and appeared to be finally using force, essentially bought right into the United Nations’ and the Western Europeans’ thoroughly failed policy, neutralist in spirit, of “nobody wins, nobody loses,” and “nobody’s innocent, nobody’s guilty.” It continues to deploy “forces” that are so overly bureaucratized and restricted by law that they actually are powerless.
Take the Office of the High Representative, which is the office formed by the 1995 Dayton Accords to oversee the civilian implementation of the “peace” those accords were supposed to bring.
“We don’t have the power,” said Ambassador Jacques Klein, the American who has become legendary here for his earlier work in Vukovar and who now is second in charge of the OHR. “OHR can only cajole. That is one of the dilemmas. We should have had a proconsul with power to lead 14 to 15 agencies. As to the military, we only coordinate with them; we can’t call them and ask them even to get a roadblock out of the way.”
As to the military itself, one feels here a strange mood of self-imposed impotence. Almost all of the American troops are deployed outside the cities in camps where most of their time is spent protecting themselves and an insanely wary Washington from one single Bosnian casualty.
Meanwhile, Washington still woos Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who began the war that has taken 250,000 lives, thinking one day surely he will help us all make real peace. And so, when we look over the region, we see: Milosevic still in full power in Belgrade, war criminals still in power in Srpska, worse violence than ever by the Serbs against the Albanians in Kosovo, and no real resolution of the problem of how to integrate the Muslim Bosnians with the Serbs.
Indeed, the big discussion in Washington these days is whether to leave any troops at all in Bosnia when the mandate ends next June. The really daring position–even considered a trifle “warlike”–is to leave a much-reduced number there.
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Finally we come to the answer for the present Washington debate over “what to do in Bosnia.” It is actually to do what we came to Bosnia to do: arrest war criminals, reform the police, protect refugees in returning . . .
Ambassador James Pardew, the able American colonel-diplomat now in charge of training and arming the Bosnian army, tells of speaking recently to the organization of new American brigadier generals in Washington.
“Their first question about Bosnia was, `When are we leaving?’ I told them, `You’re not. Only when Dayton is implemented, and war criminals are arrested and . . .’ You know, they liked it. The message was clear and strong. And it’s not what they’re hearing from the top.”
And that’s the real remaining question: Will they ever hear it from a “top” convinced that impotent neutralism is a policy and that, although 250,000 died, “Nobody’s guilty?”