Just What Went Wrong in Bosnia? Almost Everything : Balkans: The world’s noble intentions proved no match for the hard realities of an unforgiving region.

BRUSSELS —  It was the first day of summer, 1991, when Secretary of State James A. Baker III flew to Belgrade for a look at Yugoslavia on the brink.

Frustrated European Community diplomats had already failed to find a formula for keeping the country together. But here was a superpower’s emissary, the man who had just helped manage the end of the Cold War, shape German unification and assemble the international army that had crushed Saddam Hussein’s finest in the Iraqi desert.

But this time, Baker kept his distance. He met with the presidents of each of the Yugoslav federation’s six constituent republics for an hour. He warned them that “history could repeat itself”--a reference to the animosities that triggered World War I. To his critics’ dismay, he did little else.

Then he left.

Four days later, the Yugoslav federation began to disintegrate.

First Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence. Nine months later came the secession of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a move that triggered a dirty, stubborn war in the heart of the Balkans and gave the world a new synonym for barbarity: Bosnia.

The messy confusion of the war itself--a conflict that pits the country’s majority Muslims and minority Croats against an ill-disciplined but brazen rogue army of Bosnian Serbs--has been matched only by the equally messy attempts by the international community to end it.

What went wrong can be summed up in just two words--almost everything.

How these efforts failed is not a tale of evil people and evil deeds but of bright, well-intentioned men and women, some of them overly idealistic, some of them arrogant, running afoul of the hard realities at critical moments in a part of the world that does not forgive those who err.

The price of their failure at these turning points has been high. In Bosnia itself, more than 200,000 people have died and 10 times that number have been displaced. The war has scorned the world’s mightiest military alliance, discredited the United Nations, frustrated the United States, complicated U.S. ties with Russia and strained its links with Europe, and ended the illusion among Europeans that they had somehow managed to progress beyond such brutality.

It has also thrown America’s leadership and that of its President into question.

Before his inauguration, Bill Clinton defined the war in Bosnia as a modern-day Holocaust, a moral challenge that the United States could not duck. “The legitimacy of ‘ethnic cleansing’ cannot stand,” he declared, referring to the Bosnian Serbs’ systematic murder and expulsion of Bosnian Muslims from nearly three-quarters of the country.

Nearly two years later, Clinton has spent more time on Bosnia than on any other foreign crisis but has painfully little to show for his efforts beyond a steady erosion of U.S. credibility.

Today, after a dizzying series of policy zigzags, the President endorses a peace plan that would allow the Bosnian Serbs to keep most of their conquests, and he seems to be ready to give in to other demands.

“It’s a disaster,” one Clinton adviser acknowledged.

Another U.S. official added, “We took a bad situation and arguably made it worse.”

The President and his team were not alone.

The late NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner, a German who in his youth bitterly accused his parents of doing too little to oppose Nazi atrocities, took on the challenge of bringing Western military might to bear in Bosnia as a personal mission.

Dying of cancer, he twice left his hospital bed earlier this year to chair crucial North Atlantic Treaty Organization meetings that delivered tough-sounding “retreat-or-else” ultimatums to Bosnian Serbs.

His efforts delivered the alliance into the swamp of Bosnia’s political contradictions. The Bosnian Serbs retreated only partially, and the “or else” never happened. Soon enough, the Bosnian Serbs, with help from the United Nations, were effectively ordering around an impotent NATO.

“He was convinced NATO could make the difference,” said a colleague who knew Woerner well. “In the end, he was bitterly disillusioned.”

He had reason to be.

Even within the confines of the alliance headquarters here, it is hard to argue against the hard assessment made recently by Senate Republican leader Bob Dole of Kansas: “If you want a classic failure, this is a classic failure, where NATO has been tied in knots--they’ve almost become irrelevant.”

Leading figures within the European Union who saw the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the resulting war in Bosnia as their first great military challenge of the post-Cold War era have worked tirelessly on diplomatic solutions, backed a U.N. peacekeeping force and then provided many of its troops. But Europe’s diplomacy has run into the sand, and the 24,000-strong U.N. force in Bosnia is a thinly veiled fiasco.

Over the course of their deployment, the peacekeepers have been reduced to objects of scorn and pity who have become de facto hostages of the Serbs.

The 1,200 Bangladeshi U.N. peacekeepers meant to deter a blood bath as Bosnian Serb forces began pressing into the northwestern enclave of Bihac last month were deployed to the area with no heating, no winter clothing, insufficient fuel and food, and one weapon for every four soldiers.

Last week, they suffered the ultimate indignity when their attempt to withdraw from Bihac was blocked--by the Serbs. “What is happening there is a disgrace for civilized Europe,” German Chancellor Helmut Kohl said of the Bosnian war in general.

Even Moscow’s attempts to nudge its Orthodox Christian Serb cousins ran aground, as Russia’s special emissary in Bosnia, Vitaly I. Churkin, found to his dismay earlier this year.

Usually composed and cool, Churkin seemed visibly shaken in the spring after discovering that Bosnian Serb leaders had consistently lied to him on crucial details regarding their agreed pullback from the town of Gorazde. “They are dealing with a great power and not a banana republic,” Churkin raged. “One cannot play with Russia, and one cannot play with the world community.”

But the Bosnian Serbs did just that. They continue to do so.

As international efforts to resolve the Bosnian conflict collapse into a series of accusations, recriminations and laments, one of the key factors keeping the U.N. force in the country at all is the complexity of getting them out.

“We’re talking about a major rescue operation with thousands of lightly armed troops maybe having to fight their way out,” said John Chipman, director of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. “The prospect of withdrawal is almost as chilling as the prospect of staying.”

While there is little argument that the disintegration of the Yugoslav federation and the resulting Bosnian war represent a major European crisis, it has been the relentless pictures and other accounts of the atrocities there that have kept the conflict a major public issue throughout the West.

But while those accounts generate enormous moral pressure “to do something” to end the carnage, other, more powerful, factors have worked to preclude action that might be effective.

In the end, three key factors neutralized the West:

* Public opinion. The schizophrenic nature of public opinion has demanded action but at minimal cost. At no time during the war has public sympathy in America or in Western Europe been strong enough to support the view that Bosnia is a cause worth sacrificing its own sons and daughters for.

The very nature of the conflict, a confusing affair with few ideological principles, no clearly defined “good guys” and the absence of compelling strategic interests, undercut the position of those pressing to do more.

In crucial discussions during the Clinton Administration’s first months, Secretary of State Warren Christopher privately passed around polls demonstrating the depth of public resistance to involvement in Bosnia, to discourage those counseling action.

* Military advice. There has been a near-universal rejection of the option of armed intervention among military leaders on both sides of the Atlantic. The idea of trying to separate and pacify three different but intertwined warring communities in forbidding, mountainous terrain far from any well-established bases was a recipe for disaster, the generals concluded.

* Political caution. Clinton and other Western leaders concluded that, however compelling the suffering in Bosnia and however disturbing the challenge to human values there, sending troops in a final attempt to end the war was not worth the risks.

“Nobody had the stomach to put in troops, so there was no sense in saying we were going to fix the problem. All we could do was manage it and reduce the suffering,” a Clinton adviser said.

Facing these realities, many turned to the United Nations as a convenient out.

Since September, 1991, the U.N. Security Council has adopted more than 100 resolutions and statements dealing with the crisis in the former Yugoslav federation, almost all focusing on Bosnia. There is little doubt that most were passed in order to quiet public opinion rather than out of any realistic hope that they would change the situation on the ground in Bosnia.

Jose Maria Mendiluce, the Basque who headed the U.N. relief program in Bosnia until about a year ago, once called the U.N. Bosnian mission an “alibi.” Governments could always point to the U.N. peacekeepers and humanitarian workers as proof they were doing something.

But if the word peacekeeper is an unfortunate misnomer, the official name--the U.N. Protection Force--is equally misleading. Its job is not to protect civilians from murder, rape or other violence. In fact, it is not allowed to protect people--as became dramatically clear on Jan. 8, 1993, when French peacekeepers stood by and watched Serbian gunmen assassinate Bosnian Vice Premier Hakija Turajlic in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.

Instead, the force’s job is to escort humanitarian aid when and where the warring parties agree, patrol six U.N.-designated “safe areas” and monitor heavy-weapons exclusion zones around Sarajevo and Gorazde.

Accepting these realities seemed to come more easily to Europeans than to Americans. Britain, France and Russia all had sympathies for the Serbs, who had fought with them in both world wars.

A strong moral streak in Clinton’s foreign policy also made it far more difficult for America to reject the idea of punishing the Bosnian Serbs with air strikes and lifting the arms embargo that hampered the outgunned Bosnian government’s ability to fight back.

These transatlantic differences bedeviled the search for peace.

While Europe doggedly pressed for a negotiated settlement, even if it meant rewarding Serbian aggression, the new Administration came to office troubled and deeply split on the idea.

Clinton and some of his senior advisers, including Vice President Al Gore and U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright, felt they had taken a moral position on “ethnic cleansing”--one that they did not want to abandon. After all, in the election campaign, Clinton had denounced then-President George Bush for doing too little in Bosnia and had called for possible air strikes against the Serbs.

But Christopher and then-Defense Secretary Les Aspin pressed home the realities of public opinion and the dead end of the military option.

According to Bosnian and U.S. officials, the divisions within the Administration ran so deep that in the spring of 1993, when State Department special envoy Reginald Bartholomew was urging Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic to sign a peace plan giving considerable territory to the Bosnian Serbs, White House aides were urging him to hold out for better terms.

These differences--within the Administration and across the Atlantic--proved disastrous in the search for peace. They sent conflicting signals at crucial moments. They gave the Bosnian government false hopes of a possible better deal and prepared the ground for damaging rifts between the Western allies that would extend deep into NATO and the United Nations.

In January, 1993, the European Community, as the EU then was known, threw its weight behind a plan drawn up by former Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance and Lord Owen, a former British foreign secretary, that proposed giving the Serbs 43% of Bosnia.

Vance and Owen had a strategy for winning acceptance of their plan: They would swiftly sign up the Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims and then generate enough international pressure to force the Bosnian Serbs to sign. The Bosnian Croats signed, but the Muslim-dominated Bosnian government hesitated.

U.N. officials are sure the Bosnian Muslims balked because they expected the Clinton Administration to denounce the plan and offer them something better. Certainly Clinton’s election had boosted Bosnian government spirits.

“I have a little hope in the Clinton Administration,” Haris Silajdzic, then Bosnia’s foreign minister and now its prime minister, said after the inauguration. “He strikes me as a humanist, while the Europeans are hopeless.”

But Clinton’s more cautious advisers, including Aspin and Christopher, were already warning him that his goals were going to be difficult to achieve.

In the end, the President listened to these advisers; Bartholomew, his special emissary, persuaded the Muslims to sign.

But three crucial months were lost. “Those three months let the Serbs off the hook,” said one official close to the talks.

Some are convinced that Clinton’s idealistic rhetoric and his initial refusal to back the Vance-Owen plan scuttled the last, best chance for a just settlement.

To be sure, even with the Muslim delay, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic nearly buckled under Western pressure. Bartholomew managed to persuade Russia for the first time to press the Bosnian Serbs; sanctions against Serbia itself were tightened, and the threat of air strikes to enforce recently established U.N.-designated safe areas seemed real.

Seeing no way out, Karadzic signed the Vance-Owen plan. But sensing divisions and doubt within the West on its willingness to follow through on its threats, the Bosnian Serb leader quickly subjected the accord to ratification by a self-styled Serbian parliament and the Bosnian Serb electorate, both of which rejected it.

The Vance-Owen plan was dead.

Western credibility would soon share a similar fate.

The U.S.-led hard talk and threat of air power against the Bosnian Serbs if they rejected Vance-Owen suddenly melted in the warmth of the war’s second spring. Christopher, dispatched by Clinton to Europe to drum up support for a U.S. plan to lift the arms embargo against the Bosnian government and punish the Bosnian Serbs with air strikes, was universally snubbed.

It was a humiliating rejection for the new President, who quickly changed course. He joined with Russia, Spain, France and Britain to present a new peace plan, revised to the dominant rebel Serbs’ liking.

That plan too would eventually be rejected. But the exposure of the West’s divisions and the U.S. failure to gain European support for its tough stance against the Bosnian Serbs in the spring of 1993 proved to be a turning point. For Karadzic, the message was suddenly clear: The Western allies were unwilling to confront his undisciplined army militarily. They would not follow through with other threats.

The ability to sway the Bosnian Serbs had diminished sharply.

The Clinton about-face also left the Bosnian government devastated. Instead of the President bending Europeans to his will, the opposite had occurred. “He promised things and he promised in such a way that he had no excuse for not fulfilling those promises,” Bosnian Vice President Ejup Ganic noted bitterly in a June, 1993, interview. “It is American foreign policy and the American ideal of democracy that is losing here.”

About this time, the United Nations turned to NATO for help in protecting its peacekeepers from increasing Bosnian Serb attacks. The United Nations also wanted alliance help to protect the six U.N.-designated safe areas established as havens for Muslim refugees.

Enthusiastically supported by the United States, NATO agreed.

But at an important Aug. 9, 1993, meeting of NATO ambassadors in Brussels, those nations with peacekeepers on the ground--led by Britain, France, Norway and Canada--argued that any NATO attack must also be approved by the U.N. commander on the ground.

That decision would turn the use of Western air power into a tragicomic farce, chill ties between the United Nations and NATO and drive a wedge into alliance unity. “It seemed logical at the time,” said one of those present at the meeting. “We all thought we were on the same side.”

They weren’t.

Inside and outside NATO, the United States again found itself at odds with its European allies. The U.S. desire to punish Bosnian Serb violations was countered by European concern that NATO air strikes could lead to reprisals against peacekeepers on the ground.

The obvious soon became clear: The United Nations and NATO had conflicting agendas. The immediate concern of U.N. commanders and senior civilian officials was not punishing aggression but keeping the peacekeepers safe.

When NATO last February wanted to strike at Bosnian Serb artillery pieces still inside a weapons exclusion zone around Sarajevo after an alliance ultimatum to remove them expired, the U.N. commander in Bosnia, British Lt. Gen. Michael Rose, refused, declaring the Serbs “in effective compliance.”

Karadzic again understood that the world’s mightiest air force posed little threat to his forces.

In the months since, NATO requests for air strikes have frequently been denied. When the United Nations has agreed, its conditions have made the job of alliance pilots difficult and dangerous.

One final transatlantic clash occurred within the alliance on Thanksgiving Day, when France vetoed a U.S. plan for greater use of NATO air power. The intensity of that confrontation left diplomats so shaken that they agreed to back away from the issue.

Now, NATO’s primary task is no longer pressing for air strikes against Bosnian Serbs but planning how to rescue the United Nations’ peacekeepers from a country they never saw at peace.

As NATO’s drama with the United Nations played out, the major powers launched one final diplomatic initiative. The so-called Contact Group--made up of Russia, Britain, Germany, France and the United States--presented the warring parties with a map that, this time, gave the Bosnian Serbs 49% of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

They attached a July 20 deadline for acceptance, again threatening dire consequences unless all signed. The Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats, who had since reconciled, reluctantly said yes. The Bosnian Serbs, as expected, said no. Increasingly confident and having taken 70% of Bosnian territory, they had little reason to do otherwise.

Earlier this month, the five Contact Group foreign ministers met again in Brussels amid reports they were ready to sweeten the settlement for the Bosnian Serbs, even allowing them to annex their territory to Serbia.

Instead, the five could agree only to press the Bosnian Serbs to accept the existing plan.

“We don’t see any other road to take,” Christopher said at a late-night news conference.

Five of the world’s most powerful nations had run out of ideas.

The Clinton Administration had also apparently come full circle.

From Clinton’s initial soaring statements, Defense Secretary William J. Perry now drew a more modest assessment of U.S. involvement in the crisis, saying the Administration had defended the nation’s interests.

“Our national interests are to stop the spread of war and to limit the violence,” he said.

Beth Knobel of The Times’ Moscow Bureau also contributed to this report.

More on Bosnia

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