Milosevic (42 page)

Despite the hundreds of journalists outside the perimeter fence, the airbase was sealed off from the media, and the three leaders were virtually locked in. The message from Washington was clear: this was their last chance. Asked how confident he was that the talks would succeed, Milosevic had said on arrival: ‘Well, I am [an] optimist. I believe the talks will succeed. We attach the greatest importance to [the] peace initiative of the United States.'
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Warren Christopher, the US Secretary of State, had even coaxed the three leaders into a handshake for the cameras.

Nominally, the Dayton conference, as it became known, had three
co-chairmen: Carl Bildt, the European envoy, the Russian Igor Ivanov and Richard Holbrooke. But in diplomacy it is the host country that counts, and everyone understood that this was primarily an American show, in the main run by Holbrooke. The Americans took the credit, but the Dayton conference was not conjured up out of nowhere. It was the final stage in the years of diplomatic wrangling that had marked attempts to bring peace to Bosnia, stretching back to Europe's involvement in the early 1990s when the Bush administration had taken a back seat, believing that the US did not ‘have a dog in this fight'. But ultimately only America, it seemed, had the power and will to lock the Balkan leaders in an airbase – albeit a luxuriously fitted one – until they signed up for peace. The choice of venue was significant – a deliberate reminder of American air power, coming just a few weeks after NATO's air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs.

Milosevic came to Dayton ready to sign. He was weak on the military, diplomatic and home fronts. His control of Serbia's state broadcast media could not temper Serb anger about the disasters that had befallen them. Serbia was a comparatively small country, and many of its inhabitants had relatives or friends among the refugees from Croatia and Bosnia. In 1991 football fans had lauded Milosevic as a great Serb leader and defender of its people: The terraces swayed to ‘Serbian Slobo, Serbia is with you'. Now they chanted ‘Slobo, you have betrayed Krajina'.

Milosevic knew he could survive the fallout from operations Flash and Storm, but they still sent aftershocks through his government. When, after the fall of Krajina, the children of Yugoslav prime minister Radoje Kontic told him that they ‘pissed on his premiership', Kontic had retreated to his office with a bottle of cognac. The massacre at Srebrenica had shown Milosevic that General Mladic was out of control. Who knew what horrors he might carry out next, and what the consequences might be for Serbia?

But first, it was dinner time. Holbrooke took Milosevic to the all-American on-base restaurant, Packy's All-Sports Bar.
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The walls were covered with pictures of Bob Hope. Four giant television screens showed news and sports channels. This was the America that Milosevic had so admired on his trips to Wall Street and to the IMF meetings, where he had so dazzled the world's bankers with his command of capitalism. He was entranced by the slick technology, the smooth efficiency, the sheer luxurious availability of everything. Most of all, it seemed, he was
impressed by a Tomahawk Cruise Missile, on display at the base museum. Just a few weeks before, a fusillade of the twenty-foot long projectiles had helped destroy much of the Bosnian Serb army's communications systems in western Bosnia. ‘So much damage from such a little thing,' he said.
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At Packy's Milosevic turned on the charm. He soon had his own favourite waitress. He asked her name, and where she was from. Vicky became ‘Waitress Wicky', as Milosevic pronounced her name, and always served the Serb leader. At more formal dinners at the Officers' Club restaurant, Milosevic even invited one of the waiters to come and work for him in Belgrade.

The Americans made great efforts to warm up the – unsurprisingly – glacial atmosphere between Milosevic and the Bosnian government delegation, with sometimes bizarre results. With hindsight it is clear that it may have been more tactful to stick to diplomatic rather than social business: the Bosnians were in no mood for socialising, especially with the man they saw as the killer of their country. When a dinner was organised at the Officers' Club, Holbrooke seated his wife, the Hungarian writer Kati Marton, between Milosevic and Izetbegovic. The Bosnian President could barely stand to look at Milosevic, let alone break bread with him. ‘Three black women sergeants performed as the Andrews Sisters', recorded Holbrooke, ‘and as they sang “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”, Milosevic sang along, while Izetbegovic sat sullenly.'
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Milosevic's immediate concern was the lifting of sanctions. Six days into Dayton, Milosevic asked for twenty-three thousand tons of heating oil, and for natural gas supplies to be resumed. By this time winter had set in in Belgrade. Milosevic realised that if he was to sign away much of Bosnia, he needed to deliver something concrete for the home front. He also understood that the Americans would probably be willing to make this kind of concession – which was important for him, but relatively irrelevant to the overall Dayton strategy – as a goodwill gesture. Milosevic drafted unlikely allies for his request: Izetbegovic himself and the Bosnian prime minister, Haris Silajdzic. They agreed, pointing out that the 5 October ceasefire was supposed to turn the heating on in Belgrade as well as Sarajevo. After Milosevic's request, it did.

It seemed a good omen for the broader principles being thrashed out. The Dayton conference followed a period of intense US-led
shuttle diplomacy through September 1995, after which Milosevic and Izetbegovic had agreed on a set of basic political principles to decide Bosnia's future. These were that Bosnia would remain a single, internationally-recognised state, with its borders intact. Zagreb would not annex Herzegovina, and nor would Belgrade carve off eastern Bosnia. The Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats would stay within Bosnia.

The price, for President Izetbegovic and his government, was high, and one which is still being paid. Within its international borders, Bosnia would be split into two ‘entities', as they became known: the Bosnian Croat-Muslim Federation, which would get 51 per cent of its territory, and the Bosnian Serb Republic, which would take 49 per cent. Both entities would remain nominally under the authority of a multinational government in Sarajevo, and one currency would be in use, the convertible mark. But the ‘Federation' – as the Croat-Muslim territory became known – and the Bosnian Serb Republic would retain their own armies, police forces, political structures and judiciaries. This was the ultimate victory of the Bosnian Serbs, that a country where all three nations had lived in mixed towns and villages would now be divided into two, on ethnic lines. The Bosnian Serb Republic would remain in existence, would even keep its name of ‘Republika Srpska' and its foundations of ethnic cleansing would be legitimised.

The European diplomats worked out the details of Bosnia's future constitution. The Americans oversaw the wrangling about the map. Bosnia-Herzegovina had been ruled by the Ottoman Sultans, the Habsburg emperors, the King of Yugoslavia, and then Tito. Now it was about to become – in effect – an international protectorate, its fate decided not in Istanbul or Vienna, but on an American airbase. Over the next week the brief co-operation over heating Belgrade evaporated. By day sixteen no agreement had been reached and time was running out. A major sticking point was the city of Gorazde, in eastern Bosnia. Gorazde was a government-held town surrounded by the Bosnian Serbs. Like Srebrenica, Gorazde was a UN Safe Area. Unlike Srebrenica, despite repeated attacks by Mladic's forces, Gorazde had not fallen. The city had been kept alive by a thin lifeline of weapons and supplies that were brought in down a perilous mountain track from Sarajevo. For years government soldiers had trekked nightly into the city past Bosnian Serb frontlines that were so near they could hear the enemy talking and see the red tips of their cigarettes glowing.

The Bosnian government had paid for Gorazde in blood, and would
not surrender the city. But as Gorazde was an enclave, it needed a land-link, a safe corridor, to the capital Sarajevo. Corridor negotiations were the nightmare of any Bosnian peace plan. The length and width of the corridor were merely the starting point in the long litany of subsidiary questions. How many metres from the edge of the actual road would the territory of the corridor stretch? Would the road itself be dirt or metal? Would the corridor by supervised by UN troops? Would there be crossing points or junctions, and who would administer them, and so on, and so forth.

Holbrooke told Haris Silajdzic that Milosevic wanted to come over to his table to talk to him about Gorazde. Silajdzic refused. By this time Dayton had descended into an acrimonious ‘zero-sum' game. Any concession, no matter how tiny, was seen as a defeat by those making it, and a victory for those receiving it. Silajdzic recalled: ‘The fact that he comes to my table, gives him, in a way, a psychological advantage, that he is doing something, that he is making a concession and so on. So I said, no, I'll go to his table. These are our small Balkan ways.'
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The Bosnian prime minister and Milosevic eventually reached an agreement. NATO would build a road, under international control, linking the enclave of Gorazde to the main Federation territory. With agreement reached in principle on the corridor, the next question was its width: that is, how much territory would the Bosnian Serbs need to surrender? Which was the cue for the biggest video game in the world: known as ‘Power Scene', a digital imaging system which had stored the whole topography of Bosnia in a 3-D ‘virtual reality machine', as Holbrooke described it. ‘We had an aerial photograph of the entire country and you could fly with the joystick over any part of the country, stop, look straight down, look sideways, go up, go down.'
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Milosevic arrived at 11.00 p.m. and was soon entranced with his virtual reality journey through Bosnia. Fuelled by considerable amounts of Scotch, he spent hours ‘flying' around Bosnia as he discussed the future shape and size of the corridor. General Wesley Clark, who in three years' time would meet Milosevic in a much less agreeable atmosphere, drew up a plan for one version of the corridor. Milosevic proposed some alterations. Eventually, agreement was found. At 2.00 a.m. Milosevic knocked back his last glass for the night, shook hands all round and exclaimed, ‘We have found our road.'
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This was later dubbed the ‘Scotch corridor'.

The personal chemistry between Milosevic and the Americans, especially
Richard Holbrooke, was a significant factor in finalising the Dayton accords. He was probably the most popular of the three leaders. Franjo Tudjman was seen as a febrile bore who lectured and hectored about Croatia's centuries of glorious history, glossing over his own tolerance of the rehabilitation of the symbolism of the Ustasha regime. Alija Izetbegovic sat dour and unforgiving. His severe countenance was a moral reproach to the western leaders who had stood by while Bosnia was being destroyed. He made people feel guilty, and uncomfortable.

Milosevic was much smarter. He was one of the guys. Milosevic knew and liked the United States and Americans, and understood how to interact with them. As one western official, present at the Dayton talks, noted: ‘Milosevic was only instantly available to Richard Holbrooke. He even ate with the Americans, or on his own.' Milosevic took care to humanise himself, and behave like an ebullient, rumbustious Serb, instead of a sinister fanatic like General Mladic or Momcilo Krajisnik. This was clever, as there were some moral qualms about negotiating with the man dubbed by many the ‘Butcher of the Balkans'.

His tactics were effective. ‘Milosevic knew us very well as a people, he was able to play with us. He knew what our red lines and bottom lines were, maybe even more than we did. He learned this during his time in the US in dealing with us,' said one senior US official who had extensive dealings over the years with the Serbian leader. ‘He had an uncanny ability to judge how serious we were, and in most cases he would be right. He was a real student of human nature. We might say ten times that he had to do X, Y and Z. He knew the one time out of ten when there would be consequences if he did not.'
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As Tibor Varady, once Yugoslav minister for justice, had noted, Milosevic exerted a powerful aura, which drew many diplomats into his orbit. When dozens of politicians and advisors are locked up together for weeks on end, the human factor can be decisive. Aware of the rivalry and intermittent tension between the Americans and the Europeans, Milosevic skilfully played off one side against the other. He chose a surprising but effective weapon: humour. Not only could Slobo sing, it seemed he could conjure up a whole range of impersonations as well. As ever, he picked his audience carefully, recalled David Austin. ‘He took great pleasure in mimicking Carl Bildt and his Swedish accent, according to the Americans. But when he was with us, he would mock the Americans. He was playing a game with us all the time, and even then it was divide and rule.'
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The Bosnian government delegation was also weakened by ‘small Balkan ways'. Its bitter internal factionalising did not help Sarajevo's cause. Izetbegovic had encouraged Silajdzic, who possessed a better sense of realpolitik, to negotiate alone with Milosevic over Gorazde. But he had not been pleased with the success of these negotiations, which boosted his prime minister's standing with the Americans. At the time, Holbrooke noted down that the Bosnian delegation is ‘divided and confused. Silajdzic told me that he had not spoken to Izetbegovic in over twenty-four hours. They have let other opportunities for peace slip away before. It could happen again.'
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The most curious feature of the Dayton negotiations was the utter contempt with which Milosevic treated the Bosnian Serbs. Milosevic had forced Karadzic to give him a mandate to negotiate for the Bosnian Serbs, but they still sent their own delegation, headed by Momcilo Krajisnik, a sinister figure whose eyebrows met in the middle. Milosevic had loathed Krajisnik ever since he supported Radovan Karadzic's rejection of the Vance-Owen peace plan in 1993.