26 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Mood on the Yugoslav Desk By Bilha Brayant It had become a very difficult place to work [in 1994]. All of us on the Yugoslav desk were very, very unhappy that after all our hard work, we couldn’t stop the bloodshed. We were faced daily with reports describing in detail the massacres of innocent people that occurred in many places. I remember reading about 16 or 17 Bosnians who got on a train for Sarajevo and never arrived there. Later their bodies were found in a mass grave. We had to read the reports about the terrible rapes and just horrible situations—a young Muslim woman in Sarajevo who was raped by Serbs not being able to tell her parents about it [so as] not to bring shame on the family. And with all of that going on, we sat there and wrote platitudes. We are the most powerful nation in the world. If we had said to Milosevic, “Stop it. If not, we will drop a bomb in the middle of Belgrade”—just say it, “Don’t do it.” But we kept saying we would not get involved. Milosevic is a bully, and we all knew he was a bully. You have to use different tactics with a bully, and yet we treated him like a normal man. Bilha Brayant, a career member of the U.S. Foreign Service, served as a Yugoslav desk officer in 1994. The Mount Igman Tragedy: Ending the War Becomes a Priority By Craig Dunkerley Thinking back to that moment: For many of us who had been working on European issues, Srebrenica seemed to demonstrate in the most painful way the hollowness of the international community’s efforts up to that point simply to stop the killing in Bosnia. Within the U.S. government, there was also a realization in this general period that NATO—and that would mean the U.S. in a big way—would be in fact very much on the hook if things really got threatening with the UN peacekeeping effort in the former Yugoslavia. There had been an earlier commitment to use U.S. troops as part of a larger NATO operation if the UN peacekeepers needed to be extracted under difficult conditions—something that seemed not unlikely given the course of events in early 1995. All this gave force to an evolving realization in Washington of just how seriously U.S. interests might be damaged if things continued in the current direction. It underscored for some the need for a new course. This was the context of the Bosnian issue when I first returned to the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs (EUR) ranks. Events struck as a rush. Just as I was arriving, the administration was beginning a new round of diplomatic efforts. Holbrooke was undertaking the first leg of what would eventually become his constant “shuttle diplomacy” with the parties of the region. This trip was, of course, cut short by the tragic accident on Mount Igman in mid-August when key members of his team—Bob Frasure of EUR, together with Nelson Drew of the National Security Council staff and Joe Kruzel of the Pentagon—were killed when their armored personnel carrier went off a dangerous mountainside road. I remember very clearly going out to Andrews [Air Force Base] with so many colleagues from the State Department to meet the return of their bodies and then attending the set of memorial services for the three at Arlington [National] Cemetery. As Holbrooke has described in his own writings, that tragedy, in turn, set in motion a number of high-level decisions that began to mark a major shift in U.S. course. That was certainly the sense for those of us working at the EUR Bureau level at the time, [during] those August/September days; in contrast with the preceding two years or so, we now had passed a major policy turning point. Craig Dunkerley, a career member of the U.S. Foreign Service, served as director of the Office of European Security and Political Affairs from 1995 to 1997. This map shows Bosnia and Herzegovina as per the Dayton Accords, with the Inter-Entity Boundary Line demarcating the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina on the one hand and Republika Srpska on the other. CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
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