Peace Journey: The Struggle for Peace in Bosnia by Carl Bildt Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25 in UK
What makes a nice Swede like Carl Bildt want to get involved in a horrible place like Bosnia? He was the EU's peace negotiator in ex-Yugoslavia in 1995 and then - from January the following year until June of 1997 - "High Representative of the International Community in Bosnia". Note that title: not "representative" but "High Representative" - like Britain's former "High Commissioner" in Palestine or France's former "Haut Commissaire" in Lebanon and Syria. Bosnia was not a protectorate, Mr Bildt tells us. But that, you keep feeling as you read through his book, is exactly what Bosnia has become.
Discover that Radovan Karadjic is still running the Serb parliament, and what do you do? Threaten to arrest him for war crimes. Find out that Slobodan Milosovic is making secret agreements with the Bosnian Serbs behind your back, and what do you do? Threaten Serbia with further sanctions. Find out that Alija Izetbegovic is demanding new conditions over the Bosnian presidency, and what do you do? Tell him that you'll sneak on him to the Americans who'll be angry because they want to withdraw their troops in a year's time.
But just reading through Bildt's efforts to stitch up the wounds of the Bosnian war, it's easy to see why the Balkans sometimes need a protectorate. When, after days of arguing with the three members of Bosnia's elected "presidency" (a Muslim, a Serb and a Croat), our loyal Swede persuaded all of them to meet in a grotty suburban hotel, it turned out that Izetbegovic didn't want to be first to enter the conference room:
This was clearly unnacceptable to his potential colleagues, who therefore stubbornly stayed in their rooms . . . We ran back and forth along the corridor, trying to find a solution. The only way was to get everyone out in the corridor at the same time and then move them as simultaneously as possible into the conference room.
Everyone accepted this, on condition that we could ensure . . . that there would be no cheating. Certainly, we said, and arranged for the security guard to knock on the three doors at the same time. And - wonder of wonders! - they walked out into the same corridor, in the same building, in the same city, and all at the same time.
It's easy to understand why Carl Bildt felt unloved. "I was quite brazenly referred to . . . as a persistent and probably well-paid agent of the Muslim cause," he complains (note that word "brazen", a classic "High Commissioner" term). And when the press ignored Bildt's arrival in Sarajevo in September, 1996, but then hailed US envoy Richard Holbrooke's landing at Sarajevo airport as "the first landing of any person of importance," poor Carl is very upset, sniffing that "well, all was a matter of definition".
If our favourite Swede is self-regarding, he's also prone to the usual cliches. This book is littered with "key players" and "key actors" and "core issues". Over Yugoslavia, "the storm clouds gathered". Abandoning Bosnia would be "a recipe for disaster". So would bombing without a political strategy. "The wind would have to be taken out of the sails" of Bosnian nationalists, says our High Representative. Over Knin, where "the hounds of war" were in danger of winning, "all hell broke loose". And - wait for it - a Serb war criminal obsessed with Ustashe atrocities in the second World War "imbibed this Serb fear with his mother's milk". Is there some computer, I wonder, that churns this stuff out?
But this is also a very revealing book and one that should be read by every would-be peacekeeper in Ireland. Its account of the gutlessness of US foreign policy in the Balkans and Washington's infantile response to even the mildest of problems, is truly frightening. Again and again, Bildt - whom the Americans did not want to have any military control - finds that his hard work in nation-building is undone by the US administration. Izetbegovic, it quickly becomes apparent, enjoyed greater support in Congress than did Clinton - and could use his Washington contacts to undermine Bildt. After the Dayton peace agreement, Bildt discovered that the maps containing the final withdrawal lines had been quietly altered by the Americans in favour of the Muslims.
The US military, anxious to leave Bosnia without casualties, had so strong a role in the American political system that it could - and did - stymie Washington. When Bildt demanded that troops from the Nato Implementation Force (IFOR) ensure Serb withdrawals from Sarajevo, the overall US commander, Admiral Leighton Smith, "was not inclined to take a decision on the matter". It was clear, Bildt writes, "that IFOR was prepared to do everything possible to avoid fulfilling its duties in this respect" and was "shunning any kind of responsibility for order and security like the plague". When Admiral Smith's men kept away from the Serb "capital" of Pale in case they were forced to arrest Karadjic for war crimes, Bildt concluded that IFOR was more afraid of Karadjic than Karadjic was of IFOR.
US Secretary of State Warren Christopher either avoided decisions or pleaded with Bildt to pretend that the Bosnian crisis was being solved and to soft-pedal the need to arrest Karadjic. Vice President Al Gore instructed Bildt to "accentuate the positive" and avoid mentioning problems in public. "The American media wanted American solutions," Bildt concluded. And after emphasising to all the Bosnian protagonists that NATO's military commitment was long-term, US Defence Secretary William Cohen - perhaps the dumbest member of Clinton's administration - unravelled all Bildt's work by turning up in Tuzla to tell his troops that "if the people of Bosnia wanted to start another war there was not much the US could or intended to do about it". When the Americans demanded deadlines for success, Bildt asked his US counterparts - a small cheer from this reviewer as he read these words - when Washington planned to reveal its deadlines for peace in the Middle East.
There are occasional revelations; the attempt, for instance, to blow up the Pope with twenty-two land mines during his visit to Sarajevo. But even more disturbing is the consistent intransigence of the Muslim side in the Bosnian war. Izetbegovic's "incoherent and unforgiving" speech at the UN and his government's involvement in the "cleansing" of Serbs from Sarajevo after Dayton proved an unhappy contrast to the prepared ness of the postwar Serbs of Banja Luka to participate in the Bosnian state. Karadjic, of course, is regarded as a "force of evil", though Bildt was clearly fascinated by Milosovic, whose gargantuan negotiating dinners - with their endless supply of "splendid Montenegran wines" - are a feature of this book.
Indeed, Milosovic was chatting away over the booze to Bildt at the very moment when Sreb renica's menfolk were being slaughtered in their thousands by the thugs of Ratko Mladic who lived - so Bildt concluded after his first meeting five days before the massacre - "in a narrow, medieval world of injustices, revenge and continual struggles". Russian foreign minister Andrej Kozyrev was the only person Bildt met who feared what would happen to Srebrenica if it was attacked.
There are some intriguing attendant lords: British General Rupert Smith, for example, accusing Milosovic of mistreating a tree in whose shade he was sitting, and that "natural centre of gravity" in Belgrade, British ambassador Ivor Roberts, dutifully forwarding Milosovic's reactions to Bildt. Former Garda commissioner Peter Fitzgerald makes a brief appearance, creating the international police task force for Bosnia.
Bildt rails against the "lap-top" generals and "merchants of rhetoric" whose policy papers suggested that you could ban fear in Bosnia, and agrees with one of his military colleagues that demands for action in Bosnia increased in proportion to the distance from the Balkans at which the demands were made. Bildt believes the UN mission was far from unsuccessful. It ran the largest and longest airlift in history into Sarajevo and may, ultimately, have saved the Bosnian state. But the ideal of a nation-state fitted badly with the realities of a region in which multinational empires had created diverse settlements.
Having to start his Sarajevo office in a scruffy flat without telephones - Bildt had to plead to draw cash from a Brussels bank to pay the rent - our dogged Swede knows all about realities. The critically important lesson, he writes, "was how easy it was to start a war, and how difficult it is to conclude a peace". But there are a few misconceptions. A further division of Bosnia could presage renewed conflict, he says. So, too, would a further division of Yugoslavia. So goodbye to Kosovo's hopes of independence. Sorry, Carl, you're too late.
Robert Fisk is Middle East Correspondent of the London Independent