Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

The first and best opportunity for drawing the line occurred during the winter of 1990 to 1991, when it became clear that Yugoslavia was hurtling toward disintegration. Senior Bush administration officials later expressed regret that they failed to intervene decisively at this point. 16One possible course of action would have been for the United States to have convened a pan-European congress to devise and impose a set of ground rules for Yugoslavia’s breakup, including guarantees for the protection of ethnic minorities. Without strong American leadership, the Europeans were unable to reach a common approach. The Germans had political, historical, and economic ties to Croatia and Slovenia, which were part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. Britain and France, by contrast, had historical ties to Serbia. The divisions between Western governments sent a series of confusing signals to Yugoslav leaders.

The next opportunity for decisive action came in the fall of 1991, when the JNA was laying siege to the towns of Vukovar and Dubrovnik. Dubrovnik, in particular, could have been easily defended by NATO ships patrolling the Adriatic. An architectural jewel on Croatia’s Dalmatian coast, it had a six-hundred-year history of resisting foreign invaders. In October 1991 Serb gunners in the mountains above Dubrovnik began raining shells and wire-guided rockets down on the walled city. The NATO supreme commander, General John Galvin, later told Congress that his warships would have had little difficulty taking out the Serb artillery. “We could have sent the U.S. Sixth Fleet… into the Adriatic, and with very little military action, we could have shown the determination of Western nations that this did not get out of hand,” he testified. 17

Another opportunity to prevent the war from spreading occurred several weeks later, when Bosnian leaders begged Western governments to send a few hundred peacekeepers to prevent the war between Serbia and Croatia from engulfing their republic. Although U.S. officials listened sympathetically to the pleas of Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović, they did nothing. The United States was not prepared to act unilaterally. The United Nations took the view that Bosnia was still at peace and therefore not in need of peacekeepers. United Nations envoy Cyrus Vance believed it would be “premature” to send peacekeepers to Bosnia. 18Instead the United Nations imposed an arms embargo against all six former Yugoslav republics, a course of action that directly benefited the Serbs, already armed to the teeth.

During 1991 the Bush administration made only one serious effort to prevent the coming catastrophe in Yugoslavia, and it ended in disaster. On June 21 Baker made a one-day visit to Belgrade to urge the squabbling Yugoslav politicians to resolve their differences peacefully. He used the occasion to warn Yugoslav leaders of the “dangers of disintegration” and announce that Washington would not recognize any republic that attempted to secede from the federation. Within five days of his departure both Croatia and Slovenia had declared independence. Although Baker spoke out against the use of force by the federal government, Milošević interpreted his endorsement of a united Yugoslavia as a green light for sending in the army to crush the secessionist movements. He issued secret orders to the Yugoslav army to defend Serb-occupied territories in both Croatia and Bosnia. 19

The failed attempt at diplomacy left Baker deeply discouraged. He returned to Washington convinced that the United States “did not have a dog in that fight,” as he later put it. After listening to the leaders of Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia, he complained that it was difficult to get past the fifteenth century. His assessment was shared by the president, who, like many people in Washington, had trouble sorting out the bewildering complexity of Balkan politics. Bush would listen to his foreign policy experts with a distracted expression on his face and then remark, “Tell me again what this is all about.” 20

The lack of interest on the part of Bush and Baker meant that Yugoslavia was a low priority for the administration. Responsibility for handling the crisis was shifted to Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, who had the reputation of being “Balkan experts,” having served in the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade. Supported by the Pentagon, both men concluded that American interests were best served by keeping out of what was essentially a European crisis. “The Europeans kept on telling us that this was a problem on their own doorstep, and they would like to take the lead,” Scowcroft said later. “We were happy to let them do so.” 21

The State Department did its best to distance itself from the crisis. In October, the Yugoslav ambassador to Washington had a long talk with Eagleburger about the “new mood of isolationism” in America. Reporting back to Belgrade, he quoted Eagleburger as saying that the end of the Cold War had greatly reduced Yugoslavia’s strategic importance. The United States no longer felt any need to engage itself vigorously in places like Yugoslavia as a counterweight to Soviet expansionism. 22

Yugoslav leaders observed the disarray in Western capitals and drew the appropriate conclusions. It was clear that the West, led by the United States, lacked the stomach to get involved in a Balkan imbroglio. In the spring of 1991 Milošević had sent the Yugoslav defense minister on a secret mission to Moscow to find out whether the Soviet Union would help Yugoslavia resist a Western military intervention. The Russians replied that the question did not arise. According to their intelligence sources, the West had absolutely no intention of intervening in Yugoslavia whatever the circumstances. 23

The Serbian leaders knew that they could act with virtual impunity.

THE SNOW WAS FALLING lightly when the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus reached Brezhnev’s old hunting lodge in the Belorussian forest. It was a perfect winter day: The air was cold and crisp. The president of Belarus, Stanislav Shushkevich, sought to play the genial host by suggesting a walk through the pine trees or even a spot of hunting, but no one took up his offer. The other leaders were much too nervous and excited to think of recreation. They had gathered at this out-of-the-way hunting lodge to bury the Soviet Union.

Close to the Polish border, the Byelovezhsky nature reserve was a perfect spot for a secret assignation. The nearest city of any size, Brest-Litovsk, was fifty miles away. The hunting lodge was guarded by special troops, who had sealed off all the approach roads. The press corps had been left behind in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. Gorbachev was spending the weekend at his dacha outside Moscow, fretting that the leaders of the three Slavic republics had left him out of their discussions. Neither he nor anybody else in Moscow had any inkling of the events taking place deep in the forest.

By the time the republican leaders gathered in Byelovezhsky Forest, the power of the central government had diminished dramatically. Scarcely a day went by without news of some fresh snub to Gorbachev. In early November the Soviet president flew to Madrid to meet his friend George Bush; he returned home to discover that no fewer than seventy federal ministries had been abolished by the republics. Without consulting Gorbachev, the Russian government under Boris Yeltsin had decided to stop paying taxes to the central treasury and take control of oil and gas deposits on Russian territory. By late November some commentators were already comparing Gorbachev’s power with that of the queen of England.

But the most serious blows to Gorbachev’s authority were still to come. On December 1 presidential elections were held in Ukraine, the Soviet Union’s second most populous and powerful republic after Russia, together with a referendum on independence. Ukrainians voted in favor of independence by a margin of nearly nine to one. They chose a former Communist ideologist, Leonid Kravchuk, as Ukraine’s first president. Eager to establish his nationalist credentials, he announced that he saw no future for the Soviet Union. “Gorbachev’s ability to interfere after the referendum will be reduced to zero,” he told reporters as he cast his ballot. “You can’t oppose a movement of millions of people.” 24