Bosnia and the Dayton Agreement - 24 November 1995

Of course the big bracing news of the week came to us quite suddenly last Tuesday evening, when the Secretary of State, Mr Warren Christopher appeared at a lectern in Dayton, Ohio, where the Balkan leaders had been haggling for three weeks and announced the quite unbelievable news that the Serb, Bosnian and Croatian leaders had signed a peace treaty.

I say unbelievable, because on Monday night, the American assistant secretary of state, who's been what they call, the American "point man" – that's to say the one who's done all the intervening and arguing and proposing on behalf of the United States – Mr Richard Holbrooke, went to bed a deeply disheartened man. The three protagonists, and antagonists rather, had turned down what had been thought essential concessions. No peace treaty has ever been agreed on that didn't require the contending parties to give up much of what they wanted, but Mr Holbrooke said later, that on Monday evening, he'd received from each of the three leaders final declarations of what they could concede and that the concessions fell far short of an agreement.

What made the outlook bleaker still at that point, was that the previous weekend, Mr Holbrooke's word from Dayton was that the talks had broken down and everybody was ready to go home and probably renew all the random slaughter. So Secretary Christopher was called on. He was off in Japan to try and fill in for President Clinton on trade talks that were meant to have the prestige of an American Japanese summit meeting, but Mr Clinton had to cancel his trip since the government, the American government was, if you pardon the expression, out of business, shutdown and giving no signs of starting up again. Mr Christopher did his best presumably in Tokyo and flew back home to the dismal scene in Dayton.

By the way, I'm sure that lots of listeners are wondering how on earth this grave peace conference was being held in Dayton Ohio. The short sort of crossword answer is that Dayton was the middle western city where in 1903, the Wright Brothers invented the first airplane to stay in flight, not for many minutes, but long enough to give to the world the idea that one day people might use airplanes for travel, just as they used ships and trains. The more relevant answer is that because of the fame, the Wright Brothers brought to Dayton as a pioneer centre of aviation, it has been developed as such. Not only does it have an incomparable air force museum, but one of the great American air force bases, well equipped to fly statesmen in from anywhere on earth, and built to accommodate the main quarters, as comfortable as any first class hotel. So I say Secretary of State Christopher landed at Dayton, and then at once went into 22 hours of continuous talks before managing an hour and a half of sleep after which, he got up to hear that the talks were dead and done with. But he roused himself to persuade them to hang in there. And for all his pleading and the occasional telephone intervention of President Clinton, the chances of a settlement seemed hopeless.

By Tuesday morning, a great deal of detailed demands and issues had been traded back and forth and many conceded, but none of the three principals was ready to move beyond a truce, to a common defined peace treaty.

When Mr Holbrooke woke up, he received three statements from the three leaders, they had talked overnight and by happenstance or a fluke or the grace of God, they had astonishingly said yes, they were ready to sign a draft treaty and commit themselves to a Bosnia remapped as a weak single state divided into ethnic entities. The whole thing, the final exchange, the change of mind the agreement, took, said Mr Holbrooke, about half an hour. When he was asked which issues or which details had been the last to be resolved, he made clear that there were even debatable issues that still require common consent in action, but the terms came through what he called, not any agreement on tactics, but through the exercise of political will. The implication was that all three had looked at the likely alternative after four years of slaughter or massacres, of the dreaded ethnic cleansing, or rape and starvation, and the endless mooching possession of hundreds of thousands of the homeless, the civilian exposure to snipers everywhere, the lack over many hundreds of miles of water, power, food, sewage, and possibly after the unaccustomed calm and comfort of the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, they concluded they no longer wanted more of the same.

The actual agreement is so riddled with questions, hopes, decisions open to debate, even to a solution by more fighting, that just reading them you can grow dizzy if not demented. But what you want to hear about is the part the United States is to play in keeping or enforcing the peace. There's no question on any of the three sides that the continuous intervention of the White House, after three years of a maddening hesitation waltz, was the move that eventually welded an agreement. And it had better be said now, if the peace holds, if it's enforced and the peacekeepers in a year or so leave a pretty ruined but peaceful land, if there's one human most responsible, the most deserving candidate for a Nobel Peace Prize, it is the American Assistant Secretary of State Mr Richard Holbrooke who will now have to make the case for the intervention of American troops as peacekeepers before committees of Congress next week.

And here we come up against what, to Americans, to a suspicious Congress most of all, has been the looming problem all the time: the entry into the Balkan War under anybody's auspices of American ground forces.

First of all, let's look at what Nato has in mind, and let's not forget that United Nations peacekeeping troops, so called, are still there and it's admitted on all sides that they woefully failed to keep the peace. There were nasty reasons for this, not their own fault why they failed, mainly, I believe that for the first time in the history of the United Nations, a combatant decided to treat the UN men not as policemen but as combatants and wilfully endangered them, shot them, killed them. The U.N. peacekeepers were never meant to be ever, never military equipped, to be a fighting force.

Anyway, the Congress of the United States was quicker than anybody to deplore this misfortune as a sure sign of the United Nations bungling inefficiency and advertised far and wide that to enter any war as partners of the U.N. was to walk into a death trap.

Now however, the rescue party is to be Nato. It has planned for 60,000 troops. Forty thousand made up of the combined forces of 20 countries, the remaining, and the Nato Command says the essential force, to be 20,000 Americans. In all, the Nato job will be to patrol a buffer zone a few miles wide, 600 miles long, occupied now by several factions, many of them still unappeased still itching for a fight. The Nato forces will be there to pacify them, to see through the delivery of food and medicine, to restore water supplies and power and sewage, to remove unexploded land mines and the toughest chore of all, to try and bring some order in to the returning march of hundreds of thousands of refugees back to what most of them consider their homeland, though the new, agreed on map may surprise their understanding and hurt their pride. Toughest of all, the Nato forces will have to survive the brutal Balkan winter.

Now the Pentagon, under orders from President Clinton as commander in chief, intends to send the first armoured division with tanks, fighting vehicles and attack helicopters. This division alone will require 300,000 gallons of fuel a day, 1,500 tons of food and 160,000 gallons of water for its troops. Other materials, spare parts, barbed wire, Land Rovers etc. will come in from Germany where American troops have been rehearsing the mission and all its hazards, as of land mines, snipers, foul weather.

Now President Clinton has pledged these troops and as commander in chief of all American forces, he has the legal power to send them without a declaration of war, but since the tragedy of Vietnam, Congress has rebelled against the presidential habit – since the Second War – of waging war without Congress's constitutional approval. It's calculated that the Balkan operation will take at least a year and cost one and a half billion dollars and the House could deny the money. The House voted only the other week to deny the president the despatch of any American troops. Mr Gingrich, the speaker and leading opponent of the president in the House, now says that Congress ought to hear the president's exposition of the peace treaty and then presumably vote again.

At the moment, the rebellious sentiment has not softened, it seems a strong majority is against any intervention. Why? We don't hear about parliamentary rebellions in Britain or France the two other main military contributors. Well never forget that Vietnam was so much of a trauma that President Bush got only hair's breadth congressional support for the desert war. In the past few years a strange conviction has seized the Congress, a bizarre reflection on the present morale of a great power, it's the determination to see that in this conflict and, perhaps in any other conflict abroad, American soldiers must never, as we used to say, go to war or as patriotic Congressman say, be put in harm's way, which some naive people think is what in the first place a soldier enlists to do.

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