The French Way (33 page)

The collapse of Yugoslavia into civil war during 1991-92 seemed an opportunity for the Europeans to tend to troubles in their own backyard without recourse to NATO. France, in particular, obstructed NATO involvement in the hope of deterring the alliance from engaging in out-of-area activities and allowing the Europeans to develop their operational capabilities. Yet the Europeans were not eager to enter the conflict directly. The French and the British, among others, sought to avoid using military force and preferred to try to mediate a political settlement among the various factions. They assumed that they could guarantee humanitarian assistance and end the hostilities through diplomacy. Mitterrand commented that “adding war to war will solve nothing.”
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France preferred what it called a noncoercive approach and sought to work through the UN and the EU. These organizations were deemed more suitable frameworks for multilateral intervention than NATO, which, it was feared, would further militarize the chaos and might also antagonize the Russians. By relying on the UN, France would also legitimate its seat on the Security Council and avoid being overshadowed by the Americans.
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Paris justified intervention in the Balkans by invoking what Foreign Minister Juppe said were “essential” if not “vital” interests, referring to “the risks of contagion” and the danger posed to the expansion of the EU.
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The Europeans got off to a discordant start when, to the dismay of France, Germany recognized the independence of Croatia and Slovenia, which, it seemed, would only hasten the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

For its part Washington had barely terminated combat operations in the Persian Gulf and was not eager to enter another conflict, especially one in which it was not evident that vital national interests were at stake. The Bush administration, wary of being drawn into another Vietnam-like quagmire, preferred to step aside and let the Europeans take charge. It also realized that the Russians opposed NATO's intervention, which had no authority in the Balkans, in the region.
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At first the Clinton White House continued its predecessor's passivity. Clinton's team, divided internally over intervening and facing strong opposition from both the U.S. Congress and the public against military action, was satisfied with passing UN resolutions and letting its European allies enforce them. Both sides misjudged the situation or, as Richard Holbrooke, assistant secretary of state for European affairs in 1994-95, would later observe, “Europe and the United States proved to be equally misguided. Europe believed it could solve Yugoslavia without the United States; Washington believed that, with the Cold War over, it could leave Yugoslavia to Europe….It would take four years to undo these mistakes.”
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The Europeans took the lead in making the UN the principal international actor: it adopted resolutions aimed at promoting peace and dialog in Yugoslavia and in 1992 it also created the United Nations Protection Force, or UNPROFOR, which provided security for both those supplying relief and for specified safe areas, but otherwise engaged only in self-defense. UNPROFOR, whose mandate divided Europeans, was a small, lightly armed, multinational force that ultimately proved unable either to provide security to enclaves under its protection or to prevent an escalation of fighting. Until 1993 NATO, except for enforcing a no-fly zone, watched from the sidelines.

France assumed a prominent role in implementing UN resolutions: it supplied the largest number of peacekeeping troops, helped enforce an arms embargo on Yugoslavia as well as the no-fly zone, and provided overall command of the UN's Blue Helmet troops. But the French and the Americans did not agree on how to pacify
the region. Whereas France counted on a robust performance from UNPROFOR, the arms embargo, and diplomacy, Clinton's foreign policy team, led by Secretary of State Warren Christopher, advised the Europeans to adopt a “lift and strike” option as an alternative to UNPROFOR—meaning they should lift the embargo that prevented the arming of the Muslims in Bosnia and use air power selectively against Bosnian Serb positions. Such advice antagonized the French and the British, who had troops on the ground and feared the American approach would not only be ineffective but would also endanger their soldiers by inciting the Serbs to seek revenge and escalate the fighting between Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Serbs. They rebuffed Christopher during his visit to Europe in 1993 and opposed the American plan in the UN Security Council. Mitterrand grumbled that “the Americans are always at an altitude of 12,000 meters and we are in the valleys.” In private Clinton spoke of the “hypocrisy” of the French and the British, using “their troops on the ground as a shield to preside over the slow dismemberment of Bosnia,”
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but he accepted their veto over “lift and strike.”

Yet the escalation of violence, which included Bosnian Serbs shelling cities like Sarajevo and harassing UN aid convoys, convinced the Europeans that their efforts at mediating a peace were failing and that UNPROFOR needed help from NATO. Washington, London, and Paris argued about how to introduce air power and at one marathon meeting of the North Atlantic Council in 1993 agreement was reached, but, according to one American official, only after “as bitter and rancorous a discussion as has ever taken place in the alliance.”
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France and the United Kingdom acceded to limited NATO air strikes for specific targets in, for example, the support of humanitarian aid or lifting the siege of Sarajevo, but they insisted on prior approval by the Security Council, which meant they retained control over targeting. This “dual key” arrangement that required UN authorization hampered the delivery of NATO air power, and the intermittent air attacks that followed did nothing to interrupt the fighting.

A major issue, besides air strikes and the arms embargo, was boots on the ground. The Clinton administration was unwilling to send American combat units: it insisted that an end to military operations and a peace agreement come first. The Americans, from a French perspective, meddled from the outside while the Europeans put their military at risk as peacekeepers. Elisabeth Guigou, the French minister for Europe, compared President Mitterrand's visit to embattled Sarajevo in 1992 to the do-nothing rhetoric of Washington: “We in France prefer to remain sober and act.”
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When in 1993 the Europeans attempted to broker a peace initiative, the Vance-Owen Peace Plan, which divided Bosnia along ethnic lines, Washington objected, arguing that it would be impossible to enforce and that it ratified gains made by the Bosnian Serbs through ethnic cleansing.
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The French suggested the Americans could be of more use by sending troops than by trying to show up the Europeans and UNPROFOR. American sniping riled the French, who had by then lost over twenty soldiers and had hundreds wounded. In the National Assembly Juppe attacked “governments that want to give us lessons when they have not lifted a little finger to put even one man on the ground.”
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The alliance was at an impasse in 1993-94. While the U.S. Congress lobbied the White House to force the “lift and strike” strategy on unwilling Europeans, the latter in turn threatened to remove their peacekeeping units if the embargo was suspended.
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The Clinton administration announced in November 1994 that it could no longer enforce the UN embargo and turned a blind eye on arms transfers by third parties to the Bosnian Muslims. The Quai d'Orsay rebuked the U.S. government for tampering with the embargo, asserting that the Americans would be responsible if the fighting spread.
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Washington tried to deal with Bosnia from afar, hoping to broker an agreement among the warring factions without serious military engagement. Otherwise it drifted. Vedrine told Mitterrand that the Americans had no idea of how to help the unfortunate people coexist peacefully; they were interested only in the “good Bosnian Muslims” as a way of fighting
“the communist and fascist Serbs….Compared to the fury of the political and military leaders of the three parties in conflict, the American attitude is undoubtedly the second cause for the continuation of the war.”
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Washington's recommendations that NATO expand air attacks to stop the Bosnian Serbs from escalating the violence were not welcome by the Europeans. Recriminations crisscrossed the Atlantic over who was at fault for failing to stop the bloodshed. The quarreling over strategies, “lift and strike” as opposed to UNPROFOR, and the arms embargo became so nasty that some believe the alliance came closer to imploding during 1994 than it had at any time since the Suez Crisis of 1956.
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Presidential elections in April-May 1995 brought Jacques Chirac to the Elysee and ended the fourteen-year presidency of Francois Mitterrand. Not only had the conservatives gained power, but “the bulldozer,” as he was nicknamed, had arrived and with him came a major shift in transatlantic affairs. Chirac named Alain Juppe as his prime minister and Herve de Charette as foreign minister. The new president, unlike his predecessor, immediately began urging Clinton to intervene more actively in Bosnia: his forcefulness and his candor impressed Washington and transformed relations between the White House and the Elysee.

In May 1995, after a NATO air attack, the Bosnian Serbs took hundreds of Blue Helmet troops hostage, among whom were a hundred French soldiers, and threatened other safe havens like Gorazde and Srebrenica. The passivity and humiliation of French peacekeepers at the hands of the Serbs infuriated Chirac, who had been a trooper in the Algeria War. In July Serb units overran Srebrenica and massacred thousands of men and boys. In the midst of these events Chirac visited Washington, lobbying the U.S. Congress and pressing the hesitant White House to become more assertive, including mounting massive air attacks to protect UN safe havens like Gorazde. He also succeeded in convincing the Americans, other allies, and the Security Council to accept the deployment of a new military unit, the Rapid
Reaction Force, composed of heavily armed European troops, to protect UNPROFOR. The Clinton administration now had a European ally, one with troops on the ground, as it moved toward taking a more aggressive stance. Chirac's boldness stirred Washington.
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In August 1995 the Bosnian Serbs enraged international opinion by shelling a Sarajevo market crowded with civilians. Washington was convinced it had to act more forcefully. Several considerations weighed on the Clinton administration in the summer of 1995 including the possible collapse of UNPROFOR following the hostage crisis and the unwelcome prospect of deploying U.S. troops to rescue UN forces. Equally important was the credibility of the alliance in the post-Cold War era: American leadership was at risk.
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After his visit Chirac had shamed Washington by calling the leadership of the free world “vacant” and likened Western leaders to the appeasers at Munich. Clinton also worried, in a presidential election year, about appearing indecisive. The White House decided to engage through intensive air strikes. Once again London, Washington, and Paris were at odds over how to proceed, but the Clinton administration prevailed and imposed its plan for a vigorous air campaign to protect Sarajevo and Gorazde. NATO, finally unleashed from close supervision by the UN, intervened. Weeks of bombing sorties by NATO, mainly by American but also by French, British, and other European war planes, convinced the Bosnian Serbs and their backers in Belgrade that it was time for a settlement. The Serbs meanwhile had been chastened by the success of joint counterattacks by Croat ground forces and those of the newly armed Bosnian Muslims.

Alliance air power, which marked its first military action since its inception, proved instrumental in bringing about the cease-fire. But NATO's intrusion marked the marginalization of both France and the UN in running operations in Bosnia. Absence from the alliance's command structure, for example, meant that the French were excluded from participating in military decisions like selecting targets. More broadly, Bosnia buried French aspirations, at least in the short run,
for developing a European defense alternative to NATO. War in the former Yugoslavia exposed differences among the Europeans, their inability at projecting force without NATO, and the value of integrated command for multinational operations. Above all, Bosnia had proved that American military assistance could only be assured by working with NATO.
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One of Mitterrand's advisers admitted that ceding control to NATO had been a setback for the hopes of Europeans to develop their own means of defense.
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For the new president of France the first problem that claimed his attention was assisting in the resolution of the conflict in Bosnia. But the Americans took charge and Richard Holbrooke and his team of negotiators dictated the Dayton Peace Accord of November 1995, showing little concern for the allies attending the talks. At one point the Europeans threatened to walk out. Holbrooke later admitted he had been heavy-handed: “The French say that they were humiliated at Dayton and they were right.”
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Clinton was gracious and thanked Chirac for his “leadership” in organizing the talks, and Holbrooke spoke of Chirac as rendering “enormous service in forcing us to act.”
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At least the agreement reflected some French goals, like establishing a federal structure for an independent Bosnia and distributing territory equitably between a Croatian-Bosnian Muslim and a Serbian political entity. The Dayton Accord also created the Implementation Force led by NATO, to which France contributed the second largest contingent, and a civilian apparatus under EU direction. The Dayton Accord represented a reassertion of NATO supremacy because American officers would dominate the military occupation and the Europeans were relegated to economic reconstruction. Washington also initiated a program to equip and train the Bosnian Muslims. France, along with strong European support, stoutly opposed this move out of fear it would encourage a resumption of fighting, but it was ignored.
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American unilateralism had been on view in Dayton, Ohio, if more blatant than usual in the hands of Holbrooke. Chirac was discreet and voiced no grievances in public. He had been shut out except for protocol that
awarded Paris the venue for the final signing. France, which for over three years had contributed the most of any European nation to pacifying Bosnia, when it came to reconstruction was relegated to the role of a “backup mediator.”
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