Six-year-old Igor Jovanovic still doesn’t know the truth about his mother, Jadranka. He knew she had gone out for cigarettes – and pleaded with his grandmother to take him to the market to find her. “There was blood up to the knees, and both of us saw that,” says Igor’s grandmother, who hurried him home before they could locate Jadranka. That fell to her brother, Slobodan Minic, who finally tracked her down at the morgue. “When I came back, I told Igor she was only wounded, and he was so joyful,” says Minic. Igor’s father knows he’ll have to tell him soon about his mother. “In a moment, life has changed completely,” Minic reflects. “We can even say the war has ended for us now.”
The end may be nearer for all Bosnians, if NATO has its way. Sickened by the market massacre and chagrined at its own inability to stem the violence, the Western Alliance finally got tough last week. it issued a stark warning to the Serbs to stop the shelling and withdraw their heavy weapons to a 12.5-mile radius from Sarajevo within 10 days – or face airstrikes. Dozens of NATO attack planes, stationed at bases in Italy and France, and on carriers in the Adriatic Sea, stood ready. The United States has on hand at least 63 strike and support aircraft, including F-16s, F/A-18s and AC-130 gunships; their targets would be tanks and artillery, as well as ammunition stockpiles. “We hope that Bosnian Serb actions will make airstrikes unnecessary,” said President Clinton, who leaned on European leaders to support strong action. “But no one should doubt NATO’s resolve.” That apparently included the Bosnian Muslims, whom the president exhorted to seek a negotiated settlement, observing that there has been “an awful lot of fighting and an awful lot of dying going on now over relatively small patches of land.”
Clinton wasn’t trivializing the war. He was articulating the new shape of a serious policy toward Bosnia. During his election campaign, the president even spoke of a multilateral team to “shoot its way into the Sarajevo airport.” But U.S. action never came close to meeting his rhetoric. The administration worried about dragging the country into a conflict many Americans didn’t understand and an open-ended military commitment most people wouldn’t support. And so Washington improvised, hitting on halfway measures that were out of step with the situation on the ground – humanitarian airlifts that kept victims alive long enough to be slaughtered; promises to enforce a completely unenforceable peace plan; bouts of wishful thinking that if the administration ignored the Bosnian problem, it would go away. But the war only worsened. Recognizing that the Muslims could never win, the White House has finally had to back down from its opposition to a European plan to partition the country that would ratify “ethnic cleansing.” A two-pronged strategy has gradually emerged: threaten to bomb the Serbs in order to halt their atrocities, and nudge the Bosnians into a political settlement.
Clinton’s first impulse after the massacre, NEWSWEEK has learned, was to take a retaliatory swipe at the Bosnian Serbs. National-security adviser Anthony Lake raised the option only hours after the Saturday shelling. Clinton was intrigued, asking, “If we don’t use airstrikes now, when will we use them?” The next day, oval Office talk shifted to prospective strikes if the Serbs pulled anything like the mortar attack again. U.N. experts couldn’t pin the blame on them absolutely because the shell detonated before it hit the ground, preventing crater analysis. By Monday, Clinton’s foreign-policy team had agreed on the new initiative. “We realized, after the marketsquare massacre, that unless we involved ourselves diplomatically, we would face increasing pressure to involve ourselves militarily,” says a senior U.S. official. Lake flew to Shreveport, La., where the president was to give a speech on health care. After an hour long discussion at 11 p.m. in Clinton’s hotel suite, the president signed off on the plan, saying, “This is good.” Now they had to persuade NATO allies, who feared that military action would lead to a wider war, to agree to a credible threat of airstrikes.
Secretary of State Warren Christopher had already prepared the ground. Last month he met with the French and British foreign ministers, who impressed on him the need for a reinvigorated approach to the negotiations, and with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who suggested that the stalled peace process could be jump-started only by the United States. “The Europeans were pleading with us not to turn away from the problem,” says a senior administration official. In the week leading up to Sarajevo’s bloodbath, Christopher worked separately on Lake, Defense Secretary William Perry and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. John Shalikashvili, enlisting their support for the diplomatic push. He spent hours on the phone fine-tuning the plan with his European counterparts. The tragedy in the marketplace proved to be a perversely appropriate catalyst for the new American proposal.
LAST WEEK’S NATO MEETING IN Brussels – a 14-hour marathon – produced an extraordinarily blunt declaration against the Serbs and Man urgent expression of Western unity. It also masked profound dissension within the alliance. Britain and Canada, which have lightly armed troops in Bosnia, strongly opposed airstrikes and were prepared to vote against such action. Clinton’s phone calls to Prime Ministers John Major and Jean Chretien moved them to reconsider; direct appeals from NATO Secretary General Manfred Worner not to split the alliance, and “guarantees” that U.N. forces under fire would be rescued, sealed their support. Greece, Serbia’s most faithful ally, settled for a footnote to the NATO decision sheet that expressed its “reservations.”
Persuading the Russians to go along proved more difficult. Early last week Christopher sent James Collins, Strobe Talbott’s successor as ambassador at large to the former Soviet republics, to Moscow to Jay out the new U.S. policy to Foreign Ministry officials. “We wanted to explain to the Russians that the choice about the use of force lies with the Serbs,” says a senior administration official. Moscow had repeatedly objected to any punitive measures against its Slavic brethren-and last week threatened to call an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council to express its displeasure over NATO’s threat to bomb the Serbs. Ultranationalists and reformers alike spoke darkly of the dangers of World War III. But much of the talk was bluster, a mechanical show of solidarity with a historical ally that means little in the post-Soviet era. “The Russians aren’t looking for a donnybrook over this,” says an administration official. Clinton’s inability to reach Boris Yeltsin for two days highlighted a communications problem; the White House cited technical and scheduling difficulties. When they spoke for half an hour last Friday, Clinton assured Yeltsin that any action would take place under existing U.N. resolutions; the Russian president didn’t insist on taking his case to the Security Council. By Saturday, Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev was calling NATO airstrikes “a possible, although not welcome . . . last resort.”
With the last political obstacles removed, will the West make good on the bombing threat? That depends on whether the Serbs lift their siege of Sarajevo. At the weekend, the capital was eerily quiet: a cease-fire, in place since midweek, lured hundreds of people into the streets. British Gen. Sir Michael Rose, the new U.N. commander in Bosnia, ordered 1,500 French Foreign Legionnaires to take up positions on the 40 miles of front lines ringing the city and separate the warring parties. Slowly, each side began surrendering heavy arms to U.N. forces. “It’s going one kilometer at a time,” says Rose, who has bullied Serbian and Bosnian commanders to stop the shooting. “It’s not like declaring a weapons amnesty in New York and the stuff all floods in.” Airstrikes will take place, he insists, if they’re needed – even outside Sarajevo. “I’ve got a nasty mind, and I’ve got all the angles, don’t worry,” he says.
But the Serbs are master practitioners of brinkmanship. Last August, when NATO issued its first threat, they partially withdrew from one mountain overlooking the capital, only to resume the siege weeks later. They might hide artillery or mortar launchers, or simply redeploy them elsewhere. They could test Western resolve by complying only partly with the latest ultimatum; they could challenge NATO strike aircraft with Soviet-made, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. NEWSWEEK has learned that the United States failed to persuade other NATO members to support a range of escalation options in response to retaliation by the Bosnian Serbs. Many what – if scenarios remain unresolved: What if the Serbs close Sarajevo’s airport? Attack U.N. forces? Block the distribution of relief? Take civilian hostages? Bring down planes? “It’s a crapshoot,” says John Collins, a military expert at the Congressional Research Service who has close ties to the Joint Chiefs. “if the Serbs fold up and go home, terrific. But Jimmy the Greek wouldn’t make book on it.”
CLINTON’S BIGGEST GAMBLE COULD he on the diplomatic front. Given repeated failures to deliver on promises to the Bosnians, can America now persuade them to make peace? “Washington has no leverage – economic, military or moral – to put pressure on us,” says Bosnian U.N. Ambassador Muhamed Sacirbey. “So why should we listen to them?” One answer comes from a senior administration official: “They are going to be told that this is their last chance, that if they turn down this final opportunity to settle, U.N. forces will pull out come March 31 and the U.S. will wash its hands of their plight.” The White House insists that it will work with the Bosnians – not impose a plan on them. The process is bound to create mutual exasperation and an escalating war of words. But the West has now made it clear that the choice – for all sides – is the bargaining table, or the bomb.
For the embattled country, a definitive map has proved as elusive as peace. International negotiators, working from the map below right, aim to give the Muslims a third of the country, and must resolve the fate of 15 “disputed areas.”
would help the Muslims economically. But that requires a road through the Serbian-held town of Brcko.
through the besieged eastern enclaves and the return of several “ethnically cleansed’ towns are two of the Muslims’ crucial demands.
may be demilitarized and put under U.N. control for several years; later it would become the capital of a Muslim-dominated state.
too, may be temporarily placed under U.N. administration. The Croats hope to make it the capital of their ministate.
is a nonnegotiable Muslim demand. The Muslims prefer the town Neum; the Croats have offered the port of Ploce.
