The Foreign Service Journal, December 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2020 57 Envoy Richard Holbrooke wanted to curtail my Amman assign- ment and send me to Sarajevo as the special envoy and coordina- tor for the Bosnian Federation. Things moved fast. I met withHolbrooke the next day. As the European Bureau’s assistant secretary in 1994-1995, he had been the driving force in U.S. efforts to end the Balkan crisis. In 1996 he was succeeded by John Kornblum, but hemaintained a small office in the department, eventually serving pro bono as “Special Envoy for the Balkans.” I was to work with Bosniak (BosnianMuslim) and Croat officials, senior military officers of the United Nations Inter- vention Force (IFOR) and European Union Special Envoy Carl Bildt in implementing the Dayton Agreement. I would be based at Embassy Sarajevo but report directly toWashington. Holbrooke expressed seri- ous concern about the viability of the shaky “Bosniak-Croat Federation” that had been cobbled together at Dayton. He described in detail the principal characters I would be dealing with. And for the next several weeks, I drank from a firehose of briefings and back- ground information about the Balkan wars, ex-communists reborn as nationalists, power- ful imams and bishops, and the deep-seated cultural tribalism in the region. Winston Churchill’s comment, “The Balkans produce more history than they can consume,” came to mind frequently. Sarajevo, August 1996 After a quick farewell return to Amman, I proceeded to Vienna and across the Alps by Embassy Vienna vehicle to Croatia. At Zagreb airport, I checked in at the NATO dispatch office for Nor- wegian Air Force C-130 flight to Sarajevo, where the airport was controlled by the French military. The terminal had been shelled repeatedly and was in ruins. An armored embassy van with a Bos- niak driver named Drac navigated at high speed along a four-lane street known locally as Sniper Alley. We passed block after block of shattered apartment buildings and burnt-out churches and mosques before pulling up at the Holiday Inn, a boxy, mustard- colored pile built for the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics. Across Sniper Alley loomed the functional, high-rise Bosnian Parliament building, a crumbling wreck that had been one of the first targets of Serb shelling in 1992. Like virtually every building in Sarajevo, the Holiday Inn had been shelled; but it continued to operate, thanks largely to its informal role as a convenient neutral ground for all parties. Until an alternative could be found, I would be living in a sparsely furnished room on the third floor. A single naked light bulb hung from the ceiling of my room. The elevators had not functioned in several years, so getting from the cavernous lobby to the upper floors meant navigat- ing an uneven, rubble-strewn concrete stairway. Somehow, a dedicated hotel staff continued to produce decent meals and copious drinks. Everyone who was anyone—embassy officials, NATO, United Nations, Euro- pean Union and Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe civilians and military, nongovernmental organization (NGO) representatives, demin- ing experts, journalists, Bosnian politicians of various ethnici- ties—gravitated to the Holiday Inn to drink, eat, haggle, compare notes and share gossip. The United States had recognized Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) as an independent sovereign state in August 1992, at the very beginning of the war. The first American ambassador, Victor Jackovich, presented his credentials to the newly constituted Government of B&H in June 1993, but due to the shelling and sniping, Embassy Sarajevo operated fromVienna for the first year. On July 4, 1994, as the war raged on, Ambassador Jackovich for- mally transferred operations to Sarajevo. A 10-minute walk from the Holiday Inn, U.S. Embassy Sarajevo had been the Parliamen- tarians’ Club back when B&H was a constituent republic of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). Today’s purpose- built U.S. embassy is several blocks away and looks out on the former Sniper Alley. Special Envoy Robert Beecroft arriving at the Presidency Building in Sarajevo for a meeting with President Alija Izetbegovic. COURTESYOFROBERTM.BEECROFT