The Foreign Service Journal, December 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2020 61 who could be blamed later if necessary. Bosnians of all ethnicities would have understood his gambit. I reported the conversation in detail to Washington, which chose not to press the matter further in diplomatic channels. I also had several pleasant conversations with the Grand Mufti of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mustafa Ceric, at his headquarters adjoining the beautiful Emperor’s Mosque, built in 1457 after the Ottoman conquest of Sarajevo, and facing the Miljacka River. Nearby is the so-called Latin Bridge over the Miljacka, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914. When speaking with Americans, Ceric regularly stressed what he considered two fundamental points concerning the future viability of B&H: 1) Bosniaks are both Muslims and Europeans, and see no contradiction between the two; 2) Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs coexisted peacefully for centuries, and the goal now was to reestablish an interreligious relationship of trust, tolerance and coexistence. In 2012 Ceric left his post as Grand Mufti, and later ran unsuccessfully to become the Bosniak member of the three- member co-presidency of B&H. He is now president of the World Bosniak Congress. … and the Croats The overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Croats are the least numerous of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s three “constituent peoples.” In 1997 Bosniak political and moral power and author- ity unquestionably rested with Izetbegovic, but no single Croat politician could claim similar authority over the Croat “nation.” While the country’s Bosniak population tends to concentrate in well-defined urban areas (e.g., Sarajevo, Tuzla, Gorazde, Zenica, Bihac), most Croats live in smaller settlements along the lengthy Bosnian-Croatian border, with other pockets in the country’s cen- ter, such as the mountain towns of Jajce and Fojnica. B&H Croat leaders, with encouragement and material support from Zagreb, had declared their own unrecognized statelet of “Herceg-Bosna” in 1991, with its de facto capital in West Mostar. (East Mostar remained under Bosniak control throughout the war.) Croat shelling in 1993 destroyed the historic 16th-century Stari Most , or “Old Bridge,” over the Neretva River between East and West Mostar—a graceful structure commissioned by Sulei- man the Magnificent in 1557. The bridge has been rebuilt by French engineers, using stones from the original quarry. Kresimir Zubak was president of Herceg-Bosna from1994 until theministate’s official disappearance in 1996. Zubak quickly became active in Bosnian politics, serving as the first president of the Federation and, from1996 to 1998, as the Croat member of the tripartite B&H presidency. My dealings with Zubak were civil and correct, but hardly warm. He was reserved, calculating and cau- tious, visiblymeasuring the impact on the Croat minority and his own political standing of anymove the internationals might be con- sidering. He also remained in close contact with Croatia’s President Tudjman in Zagreb, who strongly influenced Croat policy on both sides of the border.There would be no breakthroughs with Zubak. Jadranko Prlic was a more receptive Croat interlocutor. After serving early in the war as prime minister of Herceg-Bosna, he was Federation defense minister during “Operation Storm,” a tide- turning Croat-Bosniak offensive in mid-1995 that inflicted the first significant military defeat on Serb forces in B&H. He then became the first foreign minister of B&H, remaining in that post from 1996 until 2001. In 2013 the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia indicted Prlic for alleged war crimes against Bosniaks and sentenced him to 25 years in prison. The judgment was upheld by an appeals court in 2017. I also met several times with Franjo Komarica, the bishop of Banja Luka. He was an erudite and thoughtful man, and his distress at the expulsion of his parishioners from the Posavina region of R.S. was intense. By contrast, the Bishop of Mostar, Ratko Peric, rejected without explanation all requests for meet- ings with international officials. I eventually took advantage of a brief trip to Rome to convey my displeasure directly to a senior member of the Vatican Secretariat of State. He expressed aware- ness and disapproval of Bishop Peric’s behavior, as well as the Holy See’s reluctance to take action against him. He referred me to church officials in Zagreb, with whom I later had interesting and frank conversations. Too Much History Per Capita I returned to Washington at the end of August 1997, handing over the reins in Sarajevo to Ambassador Richard Kauzlarich. Washington did not appoint a successor as special envoy. The consensus seemed to be that Dayton had succeeded in establish- ing a new, if complex, political reality in B&H. At the time, I did not suspect that I would be returning to Sarajevo four years later as head of the largest OSCE operation in the world, with 800 civilian and military personnel, four regional centers and 24 field offices throughout the country. Along with two loyal and experienced deputies, French Ambassador Henri Zipper de Fabiani and Rus- sian Ambassador Viktor Tkachenko, I spent the period between 2001 and 2004 focusing on the conduct of elections, reform of the judicial system, education reform, media freedom and good governance in B&H. Today, ethnic politicians and their political parties in Bosnia and Herzegovina continue to dominate the political and eco-