A Shift in U.S. Policy towards BiH

“It is estimated that more than 100,000 people were killed, and two million people, more than half the population, were forced to flee their homes. The Bosnian war was considered the greatest collective security failure of the West [in Europe] since the 1930s.Over 30 ceasefires had collapsed, and several peace proposals were rejected in Bosnia prior to the Dayton Peace Accords.

At the time we began our shuttle diplomacy, no one in Washington imagined that the diplomatic effort would be accompanied by a NATO bombing campaign. That was a result of two events that occurred in the first few days of our travels: the death on Mount Igman on August 19 of three of the five members of my original negotiating team — Bob Frasure, Joe Kruzel, and Nelson Drew— and the Sarajevo marketplace shelling nine days later. These two events rocked the administration and changed, in intangible ways, Washington’s sense of personal involvement in the war. After the funerals, President Clinton immediately sent me back to the Balkans with a new team.

President Clinton decided on a strategy and assembled a U.S. Negotiations team headed by Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. The team–including Lieutenant General Clark, Rosemarie Pauli, Bob Frasure, Joe Kruzel, and Nelson Drew - flew to the Balkans to begin the negotiations that we hoped would end the war.”

(Excerpts from Richard Holbrooke’s book “To End a War”)