The Foreign Service Journal, December 2020

60 DECEMBER 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL To complicate matters further, Dayton’s “constituent peoples” formula did a serious disservice to B&H citizens who do not fit the template. The Dayton Accords lump together Bosnia’s Jews, Roma, Hungarians, Italians, Slovenes, Montenegrins, Albanians, and so forth, as “others” ( ostali ). By deliberate omission, these “others” are ineligible to hold several high government offices, most importantly the three-headed B&H presidency. In 2009, two Bosnians—Dervo Sejdic, a Roma, and Jakob Finci, president of the Jewish community—challenged this in the European Court of Human Rights. The court ruled in their favor, but more than a decade later, the B&H Parlia- ment still has not agreed to constitutional reforms proposed in 2011 that would have rectified the situation. In designating Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs as the “most equal” inhabitants of B&H, the Dayton negotiators bowed to geopolitical reality. Bosnia’s Serbs and Croats could depend on the moral and material support of their ethnoreligious cousins next door in Serbia and Croatia. Bosniaks did not have this option. At Dayton, this basic fact was present in the flesh for all to see. The only party to the talks who actually came from B&H was the Bosniak represen- tative, Alija Izetbegovic. Two individuals who were not citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina represented their respective B&H “peoples” in the talks—President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia. In early 1997 Assistant Secretary Kornblum instructed me to seek a private meeting with the chair of the Federal Presidency, Alija Izetbegovic. I was to express Washington’s concern that a full year after the end of the war, an unspecified number of “foreign fighters” continued to live in remote villages inside the Federa- tion, some with their families. Most had traveled to B&H from the Middle East and North Africa in 1993 and 1994 and called themselves mujahideen. The presidency building in Sarajevo is a massive Austro- Hungarian structure that would not be out of place on the Ring in Vienna. My armored van pulled up to the portico, and Bosnian Protocol, which continued to operate in the best Austro-Hungarian tradition, escorted me to the president’s office. At the age of 71, Izetbegovic (1925-2003) had achieved legendary status as a hero or a villain, depending on one’s ethnic affiliation and political leanings. In 1970 he published an “Islamic Declaration,” which Yugoslav authorities quickly banned. He spent five years during the 1980s in a Yugoslav prison for “hostile activity inspired by Bosnian nationalism.” We had met before, but this was my first formal démarche to him. After welcoming me to his imposing office and shaking hands, he slumped down on a sofa and gestured for me to sit in a chair on the other side of the coffee table. He looked worn and tired, his rumpled brown suit too big for his shrunken frame; but his gaze was pierc- ing. We spoke English. An iconic photograph, taken at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on Nov. 21, 1995, shows President Izetbegovic, flanked by Serbia’s Milosevic, Croatia’s Tudjman and Secretary of State Warren Christopher initialing the Dayton document, which they formally signed in Paris three weeks later. I reminded Izetbegovic of that historic event and his commitment to Dayton, specifically to Article III, Paragraph 2 of Annex 1A: “all foreign Forces, including individual advisors, freedom fighters, trainers, volunteers, and personnel from neighboring and other States, shall be withdrawn from the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina.” I asked him how soon, and by what means, would foreign fighters still in B&H leave the country. Going beyond my instructions, I threw in a sweetener: As a co-signatory of Dayton, the United States would be prepared to facilitate their departure as necessary and appropriate. The president shrank further into the sofa, lost in thought. Finally, he looked up and shook his head: “I have a blood debt to these people. They came to the rescue of the Bosniaks when Europeans and Americans did not.” He assured me that he was aware of the commitment he had made at Dayton but would not take an active role in the apprehension or expulsion of foreign fighters from B&H. I took this to mean that he would not lift a finger himself but would not intervene to oppose efforts by other Dayton signatories, including the United States. It was a charac- teristically Balkan way of transferring responsibility to outsiders Bosnia and Herzegovina, according to the Dayton Agreement. Green shows Bosnian Serb territory, and pink shows Bosnian Federation territory. COURTESYOFROBERTM.BEECROFT