Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies: A Scholars' Initiative

The Internati onal Community and the FRY /Belligerents, 1989-1997

5 Dušan Janjić, team leader Matjaž Klemenčič, team leader Vlado Azinović Alfred Bing Sumantra Bose Daniele Conversi Dušan Djordjevich Keith Doubt John Fine Zlatko Hadžidedić Marko Attila Hoare Charles Ingrao Constantin Iordachi A. Ross Johnson Emil Kerenji Vladimir Klemenčič Miloš Ković Vladimir Petrović Nikola Samardžić Brendan Simms Principal author Matjaž Klemenčič acknowledges the extensive input by team members, including several pages of text contributed by Marko Attila Hoare, Charles Ingrao and Alfred Bing. Funding from the National Endowment for Democracy and the Slovenian Research Council facilitated Prof. Klemenčič’s research, including numerous interviews with Slovenian government officials and former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker. Profs. Klemenčič and Dušan Janjić assumed team leadership from John A. Fine (2001-2003) in order to streamline the team’s internet communication . An initial draft was submitted for project-wide review in November 2003, which mandated considerable expansion in the chapter’s length and research base. Although the text was adopted following project-wide review in April 2005, further revisions were undertaken in 2008 to address concerns raised by two of the four outside referees. The chapter cites several confidential interviews conducted by SI scholars with several current and former officials from the U.S. State Department and IFOR military; in each case their identities have been recorded and stored in the Purdue University archives for later release, upon request, consistent with terms negotiated with each individual. 153 The International Community and the FRY/Belligerents, 1989-1997 ◆ Matjaž Klemenčič ◆ For almost four decades after World War II, the international community supported socialist nonaligned Yugoslavia as a symbolic and even strategic crossroads between the polar world of the cold war. Billions of dollars of aid flooded the country in the belief that it was important to support Tito’s Yugoslav experiment .1 When the crises leading to Yugoslavia’s dissolution mounted in the last years of the 1980s, both the United States and the Soviet Union/Russian Federation tried to maintain the status quo and hold together a Yugoslavia that had become an empty shell. Instead of seeking to facilitate a peaceful transformation of the country’s dissolution, the international community attempted to support a unified Yugoslavia and thus arguably bears some responsibility for the violence and insecurity that followed. Both the United States and Russia, along with other states, ignored the basic truth that no state, whatever its origins, can expect to survive without the support and at least the passive allegiance of most of its citizenry .2 What role did the international community play in the Yugoslav crisis in the first half of the 1990s? Could the bloody demise of Yugoslavia have been prevented if the international community had reacted sooner? Scholars disagree in their assessments of the real intentions of the world powers toward Yugoslavia . According to most Western authors, in the late 1980s political leaders from most of Europe and also the U.S. desperately wanted to preserve the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia. In contrast, others (and also almost all the pro-Milošević Serb politicians) suggest that the breakup of Yugoslavia was the ultimate goal of the West.3 Slobodan Milošević started his defense in The Hague by blaming foreigners for the breakup.4 Some authors, such as Russian historian Elena Guskova and Polish political scientist Marek Waldenberg, blame the West not only for the dissolution but also for the violent nature of the breakup.5 One can argue that the 154   ◆   MATJAž Klemenčič dissolution was unavoidable, but one can also contend that the process might have been more peaceful if the international community had acted differently. The U.S. was closely involved in the international diplomacy related to the dissolution of Yugoslavia, although its policy toward Yugoslavia was inconsistent from the very beginning. Three phases characterize U.S. policy: (1) an initial reluctance to interfere in a primarily European problem, (2) an attempt at diplomacy , and finally, (3) armed intervention.6 Its policy was in part determined by domestic public opinion polls and the actions of the U.S. Congress. Interestingly, the ethnic background of members of Congress and their constituencies played a role, as did activities in the United States of the leaders of different immigrant ethnic groups from the territories of the former Yugoslavia. How aware were U.S. politicians of the situation in Yugoslavia? The CIA predicted in an October...