Holbrooke Praises, Criticizes Bosnia in University Speech
University of Sarajevo
Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Friday, October 27, 2000
SPEECH BY UNITED STATES AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED NATIONS RICHARD
HOLBROOKE
AMBASSADOR HOLBROOKE: Thank you so much Rector Tihi and colleagues, I
am honored to be a member of your faculty. We'll have a class tomorrow
morning at eight a.m. to discuss the Dayton Peace Agreements and I've
always wanted to be a professor. Can I give grades, too, your
Excellency? I'll start by giving grades to my own staff. I am deeply
grateful to you for this enormous honor to be an honorary member of
this great faculty, which stayed alive during the war and which has
rebuilt itself up to twenty six thousand students, which is
extraordinary. And, I'm very honored to be here after several delays
and re-schedulings for this first formal speech I have ever given here
in this city.
What a pleasure to be back in Sarajevo! This is not something I used
to say a few years ago but today, five years after Dayton, it is true.
This is the tenth time I have returned to Sarajevo since Dayton, and I
am delighted to see this city rebuild itself, step-by-step,
day-by-day. You symbolize the progress made and the challenges that
still remain - during the half decade since peace was hammered out at
Dayton. And I also was deeply honored earlier today to receive the key
to the city of Sarajevo - another singular honor which means a great
deal to me. I look around the room and see so many friends who were in
Dayton with whom I've worked here. And it is a great, great honor and
I will mention many of them as I continue to speak.
Five years ago, this city lay under siege. It was one of the most
tragic and god-forsaken places on earth. But you, the people of
Sarajevo, persevered with courage and fortitude. When our delegation
arrived back in Sarajevo yesterday morning, the first place we went
was to the Tunnel under the Sarajevo airport - one of the great
enduring symbols of your courage and your struggle. For three years
that tunnel was your lifeline to the outside world. Everything went
through that tunnel - food and supplies, wounded troops, even
President Izetbegovic, who is here today with us and his colleagues
Vice President Ganic, Mr. Zubak, Mr. Tomic and so many other friends
of mine who I worked with and all of whom used that difficult tunnel.
And I was particularly honored that President Izetbegovic showed me
the tunnel personally yesterday and is here with us today. And I'm
also delighted that the family who risked their lives to build and
maintain the tunnel, Mr. and Mrs. Kolar and their sons, are here. I
hope those of you who have not visited the tunnel will do so and the
small museum next to it. And it's very important that that tunnel be
preserved so that generations of young people growing up in Sarajevo
who did not have to live through this terrible war will know what it
was like between 1992 and 1995.
But today, you no longer have to tunnel to freedom, you no longer have
to tunnel under terror. Now, the city is at peace and filled with
hope.
Where were each of you five years ago today? Can you remember? I can
remember exactly where I was. The bombing of the Bosnian Serbs had
just ended and the bombing had led to an uneasy cease-fire, the first
in Sarajevo, then in the whole country of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The guns
and the mortars that surrounded and terrorized this city had been
silenced and had withdrawn. After enduring over nine hundred days of a
terrible siege, Sarajevo finally had electricity, gas and heat. You
all remember when the lights started flickering on, the gas started
coming in from the pipes from Russia - the dangers that the gas might
explode if it was backed up in the kitchens. The thrill as the city
began to get heat and electricity.
But the end of the war was still far from certain. People worried that
this cease-fire which was the thirty-fourth cease-fire for Sarajevo
would not hold. After all, we had agreed to only a sixty-day cease
fire. And on this exact day, October 27, 1995, my colleagues and I,
some of whom are here today with me, Jim Pardew, Rosemarie Pauli;
General Clark and others who are not here. We were in the State
Department, preparing for the Dayton Peace Agreement - working around
the clock with our NATO allies - to fashion the first drafts of what
would become on November 21 the Dayton Peace Agreement. We were only a
few days from Dayton and we didn't know what to expect.
No one saw then what we now know. Most people thought that our drafts
were way too ambitious. People thought we should only have a two or
three page draft agreement. We produced a two hundred page agreement
that covered everything. Few people predicted that we could do what we
set out to do at Dayton. Few predicted that there would be success
from the weeks - the twenty-one days on the quiet, wind swept plains
of the Wright-Patterson Air Base in Dayton, Ohio. But the world
watched and held its breath as the negotiations rose and fell and rose
and fell and almost died. And then finally, in dramatic fashion on the
morning of November 21, 1995 in an historic decision by President
Izetbegovic, we reached a final agreement and laid the foundation for
the history that you - the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina - are making
today.
Today, new post-Dayton leaders are emerging. The three main leaders
who signed the Dayton Peace Agreements are no longer in power. They
have all left the posts they held as recently as the beginning of this
year: one has died, one has been overthrown in a peaceful revolution,
and one, the man who is with us today, Alija Izetbegovic, has taken
honorable retirement from the Presidency of your country although he
remains active. This is an historic transition.
I want to say a word about Alija Izetbegovic, my friend who has
exercised his leadership with impressive bravery and determination
throughout the war. Without his steadfast vision and courage, I do not
believe that this country would exist today. I am proud to call him my
friend and I wish him a happy and fruitful retirement with his
daughter and granddaughter.
In Croatia, President Mesic is working to make his country into a
democratic and peaceful neighbor. I pay tribute also to my friend Mr.
Zubak, President Zubak, when he was at Dayton - a President of the
Federation whose courage and leadership also deserves recognition and
whose role at Dayton was absolutely critical. And I recognize former
Vice President Ganic who was only prevented from being at Dayton
because of his automobile accident but who we kept fully informed
through diplomatic envoys while he was in a hospital in Austria.
And in Serbia - what about Serbia? Well, we didn't know it when this
trip was originally planned but we now can say that the arsonist of
the Balkans is finally gone. The overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic was a
classic example of people power - one of the most dramatic in the
world in the last fifteen years - to rank with the peaceful overthrow
of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and the overthrow of Communism
that swept Central and Eastern Europe but did not reach Belgrade in a
final form until last month.
To President Kostunica, we extend the hand of hope and friendship, and
look forward to a future of peace and cooperation. We will not agree
on everything, but this is in the nature of democracy and the removal
of his predecessor is an earthquake for the region. Everything in this
region will be affected by the change in Belgrade. Everything. And I
don't think the people of this region, as I traveled around it, have
yet fully absorbed the meaning of what happened in Belgrade a few
weeks ago. But it's hard to absorb that after eleven years in which
every issue was defined in reaction to what Slobodan Milosevic was
doing. I applaud the step that President Kostunica took in meeting
with the Co-Presidency at the Sarajevo Airport last weekend. And I
hope that his trip to Moscow today has been fruitful. I hope that his
gesture in coming here will be matched soon by similar trips by the
Bosnian Presidency and other leaders of this country to Belgrade.
Two days ago, I met him in Skopje, and was impressed by his commitment
to democracy, to regional cooperation, and to full implementation of
the Dayton Peace Agreement. I was especially pleased as well to learn
that, based on his statements, Yugoslavia appears poised to join the
UN soon as an equal successor state alongside Slovenia, Croatia,
Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. This ends or will soon end a long,
bitter dispute at the United Nations that's gone on eight years. It
will open many other doors for regional cooperation.
But President Kostunica and the people of Yugoslavia have an enormous
amount of work to do. He is still forming a government - he does not
have any ministers yet - and he has many questions left to deal with.
He has many difficult decisions ahead and a critical election in
Serbia on December 23.
The historic transformation throughout the region illustrates a
significant accomplishment: the beginning of a return to normality in
the Balkans. For the last five years, you, the people of
Bosnia-Herzegovina, have been able to live free from war. But, refugee
returns - while they have doubled to minority areas - are still
moving too slowly. You are beginning to privatize your economy but
again too slowly. You have begun to reestablish your careers and
establish friendships that existed before the war across ethnic lines.
You are creating a new government here in Sarajevo and strengthening
public and private institutions. You are holding democratic elections
-- the municipal election last April and the critical national
election November 11. And you are rebuilding your communities, your
neighborhoods, your families and your identities.
Bosnia-Herzegovina is also taking small but significant steps to
become an active and positive player in the international community. I
salute you for the fact that right now, as we speak, a Bosnian
multi-ethnic United Nations civilian police contingent is serving in
far away East Timor. An additional twenty-nine police officers from
all three ethnic communities are in training to join them. Nineteen
military officers are preparing to serve in the UN Peacekeeping
Operations in Eritrea/Ethiopia. These positive steps are, from the
perspective of five years ago, simply breathtaking. They demonstrate
that Bosnia-Herzegovina not only receives assistance from the
international community; it is beginning to contribute as well.
Your progress has come without much public attention or fanfare. In
Washington, New York and London and Paris, events in Bosnia don't make
the headlines anymore the way they used to. The hordes of journalists
who used to cover the horrors of the war moved on. One of them, my
good friend Kurt Schork of Reuters, tragically lost his life last
summer in Sierra Leone. He asked that his ashes be buried here in
Sarajevo and they are. The attention of others has moved on to
conflicts in other regions - in Kosovo, in Africa, in East Timor,
and, in recent days, back to the Middle East. This underscores a
positive trend. Good news - like refugee returns, privatization, new
state-level ministries - doesn't exactly stop the presses worldwide.
But they do, I hope, command attention here in Bosnia and they signal
progress and they signal hope.
We're here today to bear witness to that progress and to remind you
that we will not forget Bosnia. While Bosnia's people deserve more
attention for the great strides that you have made over the past
half-decade, we must also recognize however that we cannot ignore the
challenges that still lie in front of us.
The Dayton Peace Agreement reflected compromises that were driven by
the overriding goal of ending the bloodshed. In that, Dayton was a
complete success. It ended the war. Equally important, Dayton
established Bosnia as an international, sovereign state.
In that sense, your very existence as an internationally recognized
state today stems from Dayton. Even though you had been a UN member
earlier, it was the Dayton Agreement that established you without
question as an internationally recognized state. That was the most
basic achievement of Dayton. It ended the war and created the
unambiguous international character of the State. And its borders were
also recognized by Dayton and that was equally important.
But Dayton was more ambitious than that. It also called for a
democratic, tolerant, and multi-ethnic state. Now, we must work to
achieve that. We must implement Dayton fully. This must start by
strengthening Bosnia-Herzegovina's central political structures. In
allocating power among two entities and three ethnic groups, as the
parties wanted at Dayton, the agreement created overlapping
authorities and jurisdictions and gaps. Even the simplest governing
decisions are therefore very difficult. The agreement allows the
extremist, separatist parties to block legislative approval of many
basic needs. It has allowed rejectionists, separatists and criminals
to hold up reforms and progress, even when the people they represent
are yearning for them.
Let me take just one example: the New York Declaration of November of
last year which was negotiated between the three Presidents of this
country and presented to the Security Council of the United Nations on
November 15. Its intent was to strengthen the central government,
completely consistent with the Dayton Agreements. It called for a
permanent civilian service staff for the joint presidency; a state
border service; funding for state ministries; adoption of the
Permanent Election Law; improved inter-entity military cooperation;
measures to increase returns of refugees and displaced persons;
creation of a national passport; and new measures to combat
corruption.
Unfortunately, only part of the New York Declaration has yet been
fulfilled. And much of that, a unified passport and a State Border
Service, was imposed by High Representative Petritsch - and I
congratulate him for this action - after the hard-line SDS deputies
in your legislature opposed these measures, and after they had been
submitted to the Security Council and approved formally by the United
Nations. Your leaders must fulfill their commitments to the
international community especially when they are made publicly to
Security Council. Even more important, they must fulfill their
commitments to you, the people of Bosnia. Those who fail to deliver
are not worthy of continuing in public offices.
We must expect more from those in the international community who are
responsible for helping implement Dayton. I call, as I have many times
before, for vigorous implementation by SFOR, by the High
Representative and by the United Nations and by the OSCE of Dayton in
its most broadly based and ambitious interpretation because that is
what the people of this country want and that is what the
international community needs. But I don't want to leave you with the
impression that the international community is basically to blame for
the remaining problems here in Bosnia. We need to do more than assign
blame. We need to analyze the problems and see how we can deal with
them.
To my mind, there are four key issues to address as we continue to
implement Dayton:
First, corruption, lack of transparency and accountability remain a
major problem. To be sure, corruption is endemic in most
post-Communist countries, but it seems especially acute in Bosnia
because of the way power has been divided. It is a simple fact that
this country will not be able to strengthen its economy - or become a
full part of Europe - until it fights, successfully, economic and
political corruption. We need to end the culture of criminality.
Too many state institutions and companies remain neither transparent
nor accountable. Those who head state corporations in Bosnia need to
keep in mind that they work for you - and it is your assets that they
are managing, not their own. It's your assets they're stealing - not
their own. This is why our emphasis on privatization and the push to
eliminate the payments bureaus by the end of the year is so important.
We must get the ledgers out in the open so that they are available as
they are in every other country that holds to international standards.
We must stop the back-door sweetheart deals that enrich only the few.
You all know, in this room, who we are talking about. And, we must
strengthen the legal system to fight corruption and organized crime --
and you all know who we are talking about.
Secondly: refugee returns. This, as I said earlier, is one of the most
important barometers of Bosnia's future. Yesterday in Mostar, in the
middle of Mostar, we visited two families - one Bosniak Muslim and
one Croat - who are returning to a new apartment building located
where they had originally lived. It was a welcome sign of hope in a
place that has seen so much hardship. Now, the pace of returns has
dramatically improved this year, as we saw in Mostar, but much more
needs to be done.
While the numbers are up, they still lag in urban areas because
leaders in this country are not implementing property legislation. And
in some areas, local criminal leaders are impeding returns. We saw
that clearly yesterday in Srebrenica, admittedly perhaps the most
difficult spot in this country but one that commands international
attention. Ten Muslims have now returned to that city of tragedy and
bloodshed. Thousands of Serbs have come there from other parts of the
country. The Serbs, many of whom or most of whom want to come back to
their original homes in places like Ilidza and Grbavica and elsewhere,
should be allowed to come home. And the Muslims must be allowed to
return to Srebrenica. One woman I talked to yesterday has twice built
her house and twice it has been firebombed by local thugs. Everyone in
the town knows who did it and the people must be held accountable. It
may seem like a small thing - one brave woman in Srebrenica but the
world will notice these things and she is brave and the people who
blew up or burned her house twice in the middle of the night are
cowards. They should stop doing it and they should be caught and put
where they belong - in jail.
Third, it is essential to strengthen the freedom of the press.
Politically-motivated efforts to intimidate and harass media are
simply not tolerable. Raiding newspapers at four in the morning under
the pretense that they are violating tax codes reminds one of old-line
tactics in Communist societies. The maiming of courageous journalists
like Zeljko Kopanja is reminiscent of the worst forms of political
terror. I had an interview with Mr. Kopanja last night. He will be
coming to New York next month to be honored by the leading institution
in the world on protecting journalists in danger - the Committee to
Protect Journalists. And I'm proud to say my wife, who was the
Chairwoman of the Committee to Protect Journalists, will be giving Mr.
Kopanja an award on behalf of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
But, I hope that we don't have to honor more journalists in Bosnia. I
hope Mr. Kopanja is the last journalist who needs to be so honored
because that would mean that you are emerging as a modern society in a
modern, twenty-first century Europe.
And last, but as important as anything else we've talked about, is the
apprehension of war criminals. The arrest of Momcilo Krajisnik last
April sent a message to all the indicted war criminals that they will
be held accountable for their crimes. I applaud the growing
aggressiveness of SFOR in apprehending war criminals. Of the
ninety-four publicly indicted war criminals, only twenty-six remain at
large. However, that twenty-six includes Radovan Karadzic and Ratko
Mladic. Their continued presence at large is a symbol of defiance
against the international community and undermines the efforts to
implement Dayton. And I hope that they will understand this and do the
right thing which would be to surrender voluntarily rather than remain
hunted criminals.
This issue is first and foremost about justice. But it is also about
bringing about closure to all those who are suffering. They need to
get on with their lives. We need to also search out the missing. We
should support dedicated organizations - the International Commission
on Missing Persons - headed by Senator Robert Dole, which is
conducting DNA testing of the victims from Srebrenica and elsewhere.
We need to do all we can to ensure that those victims receive a
dignified resting place. Yesterday at Potocari, we visited the site
which High Representative Petritsch had announced two days ago. I
applaud his initiative and I urge all of you to support what he is
doing.
So, to sum up: five years after Dayton, the report card has improved,
but remains mixed. However, I am able to say for the first time now
what I would not say on my previous trips - that the glass is finally
half full - not just half empty. The trend is in the right direction.
You will have an important decision to make on November 11. This will
be the fourth election since Dayton. The stakes are high. Although you
have achieved much in the last five years, Bosnia remains torn between
the forces of progress and the forces of extreme nationalism and
hatred - in short, between those who are trapped in the past and
those who embrace the future.
This is a democracy; and who people in Bosnia-Herzegovina vote for is
entirely your own choice in a secret ballot. But I urge you - and I
speak here as a friend of your country who has devoted the last six
years of his life to the problem - I urge you to consider your choice
very carefully. I urge you to elect leaders who strive to build a
Bosnia based on integration, on freedom and tolerance - and who care
about the people - not just enriching themselves.
Bosnia has gone down the path of hatred, ethnic separation and
violence already. Where did it get you? Were your lives better? Were
your communities stronger, jobs and schools better, children safer? Do
you think the policies of separation and extremism worked? Can they
possibly make your economy stronger? Can they possibly succeed against
the will of the international community and the will of the people?
Does anyone really think extremist leaders like Radovan Karadzic will
bring peace, prosperity and honest leadership to this country?
I think the answer is clear. These so-called nationalist leaders are
really extremists - particularly the Bosnian Serbs - who did extreme
damage to the very people they pretended to represent. Their extremism
and hate did nothing to improve your lives. I hope and I pray that the
Bosnian people on November 11 will demonstrate again as they have in
recent elections that they reject extremists, separatists and
criminals. There are too many leaders who only pay lip-service to
unity, claim they support Dayton but actually are separatists. I hope
that the Bosnian people, all of them in all parts of this country,
will reject these hard-line, rejectionist forces - parties like SDS
and all those people in all three ethnic groups who offer still
extreme ethnically-based solutions for a country that can only survive
as a multi-ethnic society. Such parties have used the government to
put up roadblocks against progress to protect their own special
corrupt interests and undermine the vision of Dayton.
I stress to you that with recent events in Zagreb and Belgrade,
Croatia and now even Yugoslavia are moving forward towards an
integrated unified Europe. Does Bosnia wish to be left behind?
In coming months, the coming weeks, there is another election - one
in the United States in only eleven days. Of course, the next
Administration and the next Congress will set the specific policy
direction for the United States. But I want to make clear my own deep
personal belief that the United States has an indispensable role here
in Bosnia. America's power and influence was critical in bringing
peace to Bosnia. And it will continue to be so in the mid-term future.
All that has happened since Dayton proves this. America is a European
power, whether people like it or not, America has stakes on this great
continent and an obligation to work with our allies in NATO and with
other friends including Russia in areas of mutual interest. Let me be
clear: a Bosnia at peace with itself and its neighbors, a Bosnia that
is part of a united, integrated Europe is certainly an American
interest although the primary decision must be made by you.
Does the country hope that someday Bosnia will be healed to the point
that it will be able to live on its own, without the presence of the
international community and NATO? Of course. But we've seen the risks
of premature disengagement before. The approach of the international
community toward the crisis here before the summer of 1995 was a
failure. As I said at the time, it represented the greatest collective
failure of the West in Europe since the end of World War II. We should
not go back to this era. Make no mistake: the United States and NATO
do have a strategy for leaving this region eventually. It is through
the full implementation of Dayton and assisting you in building
democratic multi-ethnic institutions and closer ties to the
organizations and institutions of the rest of Europe. But this
strategy should not be driven by artificial exit deadlines. We've come
far in the past five years; it simply makes no sense to give up
prematurely.
In three weeks, many of us will return to Ohio to commemorate Dayton's
five-year anniversary. Many of you in the room will be there and my
close friend and colleague Ambassador Miller, who is our spearhead on
this effort for the United States government will be there. Jacques
Klein, the UN representative and my old colleague in the US government
will be there. He's done so much for your country. And there will be
much to celebrate at Dayton in that city where the people prayed for
your country and held peace vigils and lit candles for Bosnia all
through the twenty-one days. And I hope that after November 11, that
your country will have rejected defeatism and hate and ethnic division
and you will give the world further reason for hope.
If you can accomplish as much in the next five years as you have since
Dayton, I think you will be well on your way to a Bosnia-Herzegovina
which will be whole, free and a full partner in Europe. I look forward
to returning here with my wife and family to celebrate that
achievement.
Thank you very much.
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