{"id":3039,"date":"2025-11-20T14:29:03","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T14:29:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/?p=3039"},"modified":"2025-11-20T14:29:03","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T14:29:03","slug":"diplomatic-lessons-from-negotiating-the-end-of-the-bosnian-civil-war-at-dayton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/?p=3039","title":{"rendered":"Diplomatic Lessons From Negotiating the End of the Bosnian Civil War at Dayton"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Three decades ago, the Dayton Accords ended Bosnia\u2019s savage civil war. Amid ongoing bloodletting in Ukraine and the Middle East today, this success offers enduring lessons in the very human nature of diplomacy.<\/p>\n

I was at Dayton, Ohio, inside the high wire fence of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base with my late husband, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Negotiations lasted 21 dramatic days. On some of them, I helped Richard and his team cajole, browbeat, and ultimately compel the assembled Balkan warlords to make peace.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Three decades ago, the Dayton Accords ended Bosnia\u2019s savage civil war. Amid ongoing bloodletting in Ukraine and the Middle East today, this success offers enduring lessons in the very human nature of diplomacy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I was at Dayton, Ohio, inside the high wire fence of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base with my late husband, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Negotiations lasted 21 dramatic days. On some of them, I helped Richard and his team cajole, browbeat, and ultimately compel the assembled Balkan warlords to make peace.<\/p>\n

Dayton remains an imperfect settlement. Richard always had a Dayton II in mind. He was eager to keep Europeans and Americans focused on the region to address its unresolved problems, from corruption to continued ethnic tension. But his sudden death in 2010 prevented him from realizing this plan.<\/p>\n

Now, the United States, NATO, and the European Union continue to enforce the original accords in a somewhat desultory manner amid a host of challenges and criticism. But in 1995, the killing stopped. When we arrived at Dayton, Sarajevo had been under siege by Serbian forces for 42 months. U.S. diplomacy lifted the siege, and today, the city has been rebuilt. Bosnia\u2019s political struggles continue, but the guns remain silent.<\/p>\n

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\n <\/span>
Five men sit around a low coffee table, some on a couch, others in chairs, looking at two maps spread out on the table.<\/figcaption>

An all-night session with Richard Holbrooke and his team, including Wesley Clark, James Pardew, and Donald Kerrick, in Dayton, Ohio, in 1995.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What I observed in Dayton was not the made-for-media performances of heads of state in gilded chambers. It was actual diplomacy, the hard work of spending long days and nights in the company of very bad people\u2014those who start wars and can consequently end them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Diplomacy is a human enterprise that takes time and absolute focus. The diplomats\u2019 familiarity with the warring parties\u2019 personalities and their nations\u2019 histories are essential to success.<\/p>\n

Whether in Ukraine, the Balkans, or the Middle East, history is continuous. Negotiators who approach peacemaking with a knowledge base drawn merely from recent headlines are doomed to fail. Diplomacy is like jazz, Richard used to say\u2014you improvise on a theme. But you need judgment based on years of experience and the ability to seize opportunities as they arise. You need to understand the players across the table. You cannot do that in a formal setting. Richard\u2019s every \u201cspontaneous\u201d move was intended to get closer to the goal of peace. Sometimes we even rehearsed his tantrums.<\/p>\n

The negotiations at Dayton were called \u201cproximity talks,\u201d and the warring parties\u2019 proximity to each other inside the air base was crucial to their success. Weeks of intense daily interaction beyond the conference rooms and away from the media\u2019s glare, in the confines of modest shared barracks, over meals, and at Packy\u2019s Sports Bar\u2014the delegates\u2019 preferred after-hours retreat\u2014made avoiding human interaction almost impossible. This also enabled the diplomats to observe the players and develop relationships hard to imagine around a conference table.<\/p>\n

The talks\u2014held in the Midwestern U.S. town of Dayton, Ohio\u2014would be an American enterprise. \u201cWe know how to fight wars, but watch us make peace,\u201d was the negotiators\u2019 implied message. Ending this war, in which around 100,000 people had already lost their lives<\/a>, was a test of the United States as both a political and moral leader. What is the point of NATO, if it can\u2019t stop a festering European war?<\/p>\n

I was there not as a journalist but as the recently wed wife of the chief negotiator\u2014who wanted me by his side. A determined, creative diplomat, Richard used any available instrument to reach his goal.<\/p>\n

At times, he used me. \u201cMake them talk to each other,\u201d was my first assignment from my new husband. The \u201cthem<\/em>\u201d were Slobodan Milosevic, the Serb autocrat who lit the torch of racist nationalism that exploded into vicious civil war, and Alija Izetbegovic, the president of the Bosnian Muslims\u2014Milosevic\u2019s bitter foe. In the wake of the horrifying discovery of the Serb\u2019s massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, Izetbegovic had every reason to maintain his stony silence in Milosevic\u2019s presence.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There was, however, no way that I was going to fail at my first diplomatic assignment. At Dayton\u2019s formal opening dinner, held in a vast hangar, Richard seated us beneath a gigantic B-2 bomber, a reminder that if diplomacy failed, the United States had other tools. My dinner partners fixed their gazes on the far distance\u2014determined to ignore each other. Milosevic beat time with his spoon to the songs of the Glenn Miller-style Air Force band.<\/p>\n

By the second course, I was out of small talk, so I plunged in: \u201cHow did this war start, anyway?\u201d<\/p>\n

Suddenly engaged, even as they argued, they slipped into calling each other \u201cSlobo\u201d and \u201cAlija.\u201d I flashed a triumphant smile across the hangar at Richard. Remarkably, the two men who had unleashed this bloody war expressed their shock\u2014shock\u2014at its subsequent length and brutality. Still, the two enemies were now talking to each other!<\/p>\n

\u201cMake them talk about their hopes for their children and grandchildren,\u201d was my second assignment. The talks had hit a wall, and Richard asked me to cross the quadrangle that separated the Americans\u2019 barracks from those of our Balkan guests.<\/p>\n

The result was a series of walks with the Bosnians and the Serbs, during which I learned a lesson about autocrats: Milosevic was prepared to torch the whole Yugoslav experiment with his nationalist poison for only one reason: to maintain his personal power. Nor were his Muslim or Croatian counterparts concerned about their peoples\u2019 future. In fact, they simply could not envision their people having a future if they were not in charge.<\/p>\n

This leads to another crucial lesson: You must forge peace with those who lit the flame of war, but they shouldn\u2019t stick around when the war is over. When Milosevic started another war in Kosovo in 1998, NATO responded forcefully. And, by encouraging internationally monitored elections in Serbia, Washington ultimately helped set the stage for his ouster.<\/p>\n

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\n \"Five
\n <\/span>
Five men and one woman sit around a table with wine glasses and water bottles on it. Two men with lanyards stand partly out of frame at right.<\/figcaption>

Marton with Holbrooke (left) and Milosevic (seated at far right) during a meeting in their room in the barracks in Dayton in 1995. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Keeping a group of preening dictators and high-powered EU representatives focused on peacemaking for weeks\u2014virtual prisoners in a wintry setting, with few worldly distractions\u2014was a high-wire act. Richard was the controlling and remorseless impresario who only left the base to occasionally wine and dine an intractable president or two.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark, Ambassador Chris Hill, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and the others, he had a remarkable and dedicated team. The walls in our dormitory were thin, and\u2014late at night\u2014I could hear Richard and his team bent over maps, arguing with the Balkan chieftains over inches of territory. Names such as Prijedor; Brcko; Mostar; Pale; and, of course, Sarajevo are forever etched in my memory of those exhilarating days and nights.<\/p>\n

Toward the end of the negotiations, a Bosnian Serb militia took American journalist\u2014David Rohde\u2014hostage just as he was about to reveal the full story of the Srebrenica genocide. Richard halted the talks.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou would do that for a reporter<\/em>?\u201d the astonished Milosevic asked him.<\/p>\n

Richard answered in the affirmative and allowed me to represent the Committee to Protect Journalists in talks with Milosevic. I threatened the Serb with the full wrath of world media if our colleague was not released. Rhode was soon freed. The talks resumed.<\/p>\n

As the daughter of journalists jailed by the Hungarian communists for merely doing their jobs, I was immensely proud to be a very junior member of this U.S. effort. I also learned another pointed lesson about diplomacy: As Richard told the Balkan warlords, notorious abusers of the rights of journalists, \u201cWe do things differently here.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n \"Marton
\n <\/span>
Marton faces Milosevic as he walks with four other men walking around them in a small parking lot. One holds an umbrella. A light dusting of snow is seen on top of parked cars as well as bushes and trees in front of a brick building nearby.<\/figcaption>

Marton (second from left) with Milosevic (center) and his staff in the barracks courtyard in Dayton in 1995. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On Nov. 20, nearly three weeks into the peace talks, negotiations broke down over control of the Serb-held but largely Muslim-populated city of Brcko. All sides were exhausted, and as Richard prepared his closing statement, I had never seen him so deflated.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Looking out our window, I noticed the dark bulk of Milosevic idling in the icy quad. Instinctively, I grabbed my coat, ran outside, and literally pulled him into our room.<\/p>\n

\u201cOK, OK,\u201d Milosevic mumbled, \u201cI will walk an extra mile for peace.\u201d Still shivering from the cold, he agreed to defer any decisions on Brcko for some time in the future.<\/p>\n

Wasting no time for second thoughts, Richard and Christopher sprinted to Izetbegovic\u2019s suite across the courtyard.<\/p>\n

\u201cWill you accept the offer?\u201d they demanded of the startled Izetbegovic.<\/p>\n

The normally indecisive warlord sighed deeply. \u201cIt\u2019s an unjust peace,\u201d he reluctantly answered, \u201cbut my people need peace.\u201d<\/p>\n

Grabbing Christopher\u2019s arm, Richard whispered, \u201cLet\u2019s get the hell out of here.\u201d \n <\/p>\n


\n \"Two
\n <\/span>
Two photos side by side of a woman and man hugging, both dressed in formal business attire. In the left photo they hold each other close and grin; in the right photo, he holds a phone to his ear with a serious expression.<\/figcaption>

Marton hugs Holbrooke as the Dayton Peace Accords are signed and while he makes a call to share the news with U.S. President Bill Clinton, saying \u201cWe have peace!\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n


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