David Rieff
The weaknesses of the agreement are moral ones. It ratifies ethnic cleansing and it confirms the results of the battlefield -- the Serbs get half of Bosnia. You could make a similar argument about the Croats. Only the Bosnian government was interested in a state based on citizenship rather than ethnic identity, and the Sarajevo government is the big loser. This may not be permanent; if the peace endures and the Bosnian federation receives a great deal of aid, then maybe economic interests rather than ideological ones will prevail and Bosnia will be stitched back together. I think that's a very distant hope.
But there was no better alternative to the one that Richard Holbrooke put together in Dayton. I continue to think that intervention on the side of the Sarajevo government would have been the right thing to have done. But the great powers, particularly ourselves, were no more willing to do that than the great powers were willing to stop aggression in Spain in 1936. That's the reality, so given the reality, I think this was, unfortunately, the best one could have hoped for.
Without engaging in a kind of simple domino theory, there's no doubt that this sets a very bad and dangerous precedent. It makes the chances of wars like this more rather than less likely. The Bosnian precedent -- if you start a campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass murder, the chances are more likely that you'll be rewarded than punished and stopped -- is an extremely bad precedent for Europe. But I don't think Europe has learned anything from this. The next crisis, frankly, will be dealt with no more competently than this one -- unless America is willing to do it. But given the difficulty of this deployment, I wonder if some future Bosnia erupts whether the Americans will be all that interested.
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Laura Silber
Much depends on how much attention is paid to implementing the agreement. There are a lot of unresolved details -- from the question of refugees, to the protection of Serbs, Croats and Muslims, to how the new government will function. Also, the United Nations and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) have to get involved in humanitarian aid; and the United States and others have to be willing to pay for it.
The biggest weakness in the short term is the Bosnian-Croat federation on which we rely so much. It's very weak. Since the '94 accord, not one specific provision has been carried out -- except that the two sides are not killing each other. The lines of the federation are not delineated. Because the Muslims got less land under the Dayton agreement than they could have had under earlier plans, will they now turn against the Croats to get more?
The great weakness is that we are trying to be all things to three different sides. We need to satisfy the Bosnian aspirations for a unified country. But we have to satisfy the Serbs and Croats by promising autonomy and statelets inside Bosnia. So, what exactly are we trying to build?
I think the peace plan will work -- for a year. There will be glitches. Soldiers will be killed, so the U.S. had better get ready for it. I'm skeptical about it lasting for more than a year, unless we invest a lot more -- and are prepared to stay for longer than a year -- in order to build democratic institutions throughout the region. There has to be a broad commitment to minority and human rights, and to a free press, free elections, and other democratic norms. We can't, for example, just focus on Bosnia while ignoring Croatia, which has so far escaped sanctions for its flagrant breaches of human rights.
All three -- Serbia and Croatia, as well as Bosnia -- want to be part of the outside world. If so, they will all have to play by the democratic rules -- in a region that hasn't show much tendency to play by such rules.
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Robert D. Kaplan
The peace accord is more like a divorce agreement than a peace agreement, a messy, incomplete divorce agreement. The Muslim-Croat alliance is fragile. If the Croats pull out while we're there, it's going to create enormous problems. Also, while we're supposed to be be promoting multi ethnic harmony in our foreign policy around the world, we're stuck with 20,000 troops who will be essentially apartheid cops keeping the Muslims and the Serbs apart.
However, the alternative is worse. We're stuck with this. We have to go along. There is a strong case that if we can just stop the fighting for a year, a whole new dynamic will set in that might help improve communal relations. Never underestimate the change that can come about simply by having no fighting for eight months or so. This is the awful reality of the world we're in. We believe in multi-ethnicity, but what we're finding around the world is the states that work best are the ones that have done their ethnic cleansing earlier in history -- in one form or another.
But the issue is much bigger than the Balkans. It involves the continuation and even the life of NATO, and our relations with the French, the Brits and others. Also there is the possibility of further eruptions, not just in Kosovo and Macedonia, but in Greece and Turkey, both of which are bristling with arms, and both of which we have defense agreements with. Turkey at the moment has about the weakest government since the military coup there in 1980. The Greek prime minister is near death, and the Greek party system is in disarray. The possibility of eruptions in those places goes down, not up, if we deploy troops. To pull the rug out from under NATO and not deploy troops would really send a tidal wave of worry and create a power vacuum throughout the region.
Tom Gjelten:
It's entirely possible that the outcome will be vastly better than the situation is now, but it is going to be a long haul, believe me. All I can say with authority is that it sets in motion a whole series of very unpredictable events. In a sense, peace will be even more destabilizing than war for a lot of key actors -- black marketeers, arms traders, profiteers and propagandists of various kinds -- whose operations are only sustainable in wartime. We are likely to see some fairly significant changes in the Serbs' political leadership, which has been kept in power by war, and will have a hard time holding on in peace.
NATO is bound to have a profound effect on the situation. It is deploying a very large, very powerful force that has all the authority of an occupying army. But there is still a fairly strong likelihood of some kind of armed confrontation in some places. Every reporter who talks to Serbs in Sarajevo hears defiance. The United States keeps saying it expects (Serb president Slobodan) Milosevic to deliver these guys, but he hasn't made any move to dislodge the leadership of the Bosnian Serb army since the agreement was signed.
Over the longer term, the political and diplomatic aspects of the agreement are inherently not viable, I think. In five years, the organizational structure of Bosnia will probably bear little resemblance to the Dayton agreement. One of the more incredible thoughts is that we have endorsed a separate Serb republic inside a supposedly multi-ethnic country -- a sort of "White People's State" set up by and for the Serbs alone. In South Africa, we call that apartheid. I also think it was a concession that had to be made in order to stop the war.
