The White House has finally begun to lead on Bosnia, and last week it also began to pay in the usual coin of global leadership: blood. The highest-ranking victim in the weekend accident, special envoy Robert Frasure, was mourned by colleagues as a tough, pragmatic negotiator who at last had in hand an equally tough, pragmatic proposal for bringing peace to the region. His main task: winning over Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. After long hours of talks, Frasure had come to see Milosevic as a high-stakes gambler who has done well but sees it’s time to quit. The Serbian leader has politically and demographically rearranged Bosnia–his problem now is to get as many chips off the table as he can. “He wants an exit strategy,” Frasure said recently. The diplomat died providing one.
It was the kind of senseless tragedy that this summer convinced the White House that the Balkan status quo is untenable. “It’s an accident that wouldn’t have occurred if people didn’t have to cram into an armored personnel carrier just to go talk to the government of a U.N. member nation,” said a spokesman for the United Nations’ new Rapid Reaction Force. NEWSWEEK’S Rod Nordland, who recently ran off the same stretch of road in an armored Land Rover, filed this report:
The three dead Americans join a long list of Bosnian civilians, U.N. peacekeepers and aid workers who gambled their lives to reach the Bosnian capital and lost. During one week earlier this summer, 24 people died in separate incidents there. Some were hit by the Serbs’ 40-mm antiaircraft cannon; others were rattled by the constant Serb firing and ran off the edge. Travelers regularly debate which is more dangerous–running the gantlet during the day, when the Serb gunners can see, or without lights at night, when the shooters are as blind as the drivers.
But even on the Mount Igman road the Serbs aren’t solely to blame for the risk. Intransigence by the Bosnian Muslim government has made it harder for British and French troops to protect the road. For weeks, their full deployment has been held up by the government’s refusal to grant transit permission. French heavy guns that could destroy the Serbs’ bases at the foot of Igman didn’t arrive until last weekend, too late to prevent the tragedy. And U.N. officials reported that both the Muslims and the Serbs delayed issuing flight clearances for medevac helicopters.
The tragedy could well hold up a diplomatic deal. Richard Holbrooke, the top U.S. negotiator in the region, planned to cut short his mission and return to Washington, otficials said. But the underlying calculus remains. The plan Frasure helped craft still looked like the most promising way out of the Balkan quagmire yet put forward. It’s “sad, but true,” a top Clinton aide observed, that all the parties in the Balkans may now be willing to settle because the former Yugoslavia has been almost entirely divided into separate ethnic enclaves. What its architects aren’t trumpeting is that the new package, a combination of promises and threats, abandons previous efforts to reverse “ethnic cleansing” through complicated constitutional formulas. That’s a concession by a president who declared as a candidate that “you can’t allow the mass extermination of people and just sit by and watch it happen.” “To achieve peace should be seen as achieving peace, not as ratifying ethnic cleansing,” said a senior administration official, sounding a bit defensive. Still, after nearly two weeks of meetings in Europe, Russia and the embattled region, none of the key players had rejected the new proposal out of hand. That’s a far cry from a deal–but it’s better than any other Balkan initiative has fared.
