108 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL staffing was skeletal—only a handful of Americans and a few local Bosnians. The Americans slept in the building, our cots next to our desks. Our neighbors were strategically advantageous: on one side, the headquarters of the UN force (UNPROFOR, the UN Protection Force); on the other, the Bosnian ministry liaising with international partners. A few other resolute countries had placed diplomatic missions in the city, notably the British, French, and Turks. Our collective task was to maintain links with Bosnian authorities and try, as best we could, to “show the flag” as a boost to popular morale. Under normal circumstances, diplomats pursue the defined policy of their governments; in this case, we embodied it, with more emphasis on a defined presence than policy. Foreign diplomats came to admire the spirit of the Sarajevans who remained in the city and who, after three years of surviving the harrowing siege, had extended their natural sardonic attitude to cover not just life but death: “If you run, you hit the sniper’s bullet. If you walk, it hits you.” At the embassy in Sarajevo, we had only a partial grasp of events in eastern Bosnia. The siege of Sarajevo kept us pinned down. Our movements were restricted and our contacts limited. But we had a premonition of the outcome as shown by my reporting cables, declassified in 2007. We viewed the Bosnian Serbs under General Mladić, driving on Srebrenica, as “implacable.” e My first call as chargé was on the Bosnian prime minister, Haris Silajdžić. The full thrust of the attack on Srebrenica was not yet known. We had a wide-ranging talk about international views of Bosnia at war. Silajdžić had a radio link with the Srebrenica mayor and good contacts with the outside world, including with Senator Bob Dole (R-Kan.) in Washington. As the attack on Srebrenica mounted, he would first call me in and then tell the media that he had, in our talk, underlined the urgency of international action. He tried to rouse the world’s conscience. e The terrible truth, the realization that Mladić had ordered mass executions, dawned over the days following July 11. The fear in Sarajevo concerning the fate of Srebrenica had a specific edge. The capital city was also a UN “safe area”— it, too, a threatened enclave. The nightmare was that Mladić would rub out all the Bosniak enclaves starting with Srebrenica and then, for his next act of ethnic cleansing, focus his ferocity on Sarajevo. Indeed, one of the other eastern enclaves, Žepa, fell later in July. Only Sarajevo and Goražde survived until the peace settlement forged by Richard Holbrooke at Dayton in November. In the July 10 message (Sarajevo 315), I characterized the “panic-driven” reaction of Bosnian officials to Mladić’s advance on Srebrenica, citing Silajdžić’s call for urgent international assistance. The prime minister even invoked the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, saying Bosnia might have no other option but to invite friendly countries to send in arms and volunteers to join his fight against “fascism.” My concluding comment reflected the mood of Bosnian officials, “who seem horrified by the prospect of a catastrophic ending to the [Srebrenica] enclave and worried that the international response would be too little, too late.” e At the embassy we gathered in dark spirits for the evening news on July 11. Earlier that day Mladić had entered Srebrenica and then the village of Potočari, on the northeastern edge of the enclave. As we sat glued to the television, the Bosniak staff members turned ashen at the sight of Mladić patting the head of a Bosniak boy and promising lenient treatment. They were not fooled. They knew Mladić was the Grim Reaper. My reporting on the day Srebrenica fell was equally somber. An excerpt from the cable (Sarajevo 324) appeared in Samantha Power’s book on genocides in the 20th century, A Problem from Hell. She includes my comment: “No consensus has formed among government and diplomatic contacts here as to the ultimate Serb military strategy, but most think it is interactive—that is, the BSA [Bosnian Serb Army] probes resistance and pushes until it locates opportunity. GOBH [Government of Bosnia and Herzegovina] officials now fear the Serb aim in Srebrenica is to ‘expel and occupy,’ the former being pursued with brutality. … Another contact summed up the Serbs’ objective: ‘They want it all.’” “All” included Sarajevo. That explains the heightened desperation, verging on panic, in the Bosnian government during July 1995. As it turned out, the war had Under normal circumstances, diplomats pursue the defined policy of their governments; in this case, we embodied it, with more emphasis on a defined presence than policy.
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