ambassador rudolf v. perina - Association for Diplomatic Studies and ...

Milosevic did agree to take some action, he would portray it as almost a favor to us and a
demonstration of how he also wanted to end the fighting in Bosnia. Again, during one of
the Srebrenica demarches after the city fell, he said he would do his best to prevent any
reprisals and that he would call Mladic. He picked up the phone and asked somebody to
get Mladic for him. I remember he left the room for about ten minutes and then came
back and said, “I talked to Mladic. He’s crazy but I conveyed your warning to him.” This
was typical. For the most part, he didn’t defend Mladic or the other Bosnian Serbs. He
would tell me Mladic was crazy but that he tried to convince him to stay calm and not
overreact. During Srebrenica, he said that Mladic promised him that he would not harm
the people of Srebrenica. But whether he actually called Mladic or did not call Mladic, I
have no idea. I suspect he did not. It was probably all political theater to appease us and
make himself look like a good guy who shared our concerns. Unfortunately, we now
know that Mladic did do terrible things to the people of Srebrenica.
Q: Did we ever answer, “Well, okay. If you have no control, these aren’t your people,
then you obviously have no objection to our going in and bombing the hell out of them?”
PERINA: I don’t think we ever put it in those terms but it was certainly implied that we
would use military force if needed. But we did not want to let Milosevic off the hook by
accepting his argument that he wasn’t responsible. Part of the difficulty with our policy,
and why it was a difficult line to maintain, was that we were trying to maintain that
Bosnia was a fully independent country in which Serbia had no right to intervene and yet
at the same time asking Milosevic to intervene by restraining Mladic and the Bosnian
Serbs. There is a bit of a contradiction there, not a full contradiction but a bit. He
exploited this a lot with this position of “Why do you come to me?”
Q: When you got back to the Embassy and sat with your colleagues, did you feel
Milosevic was really running the show in Bosnia or did you think that he was perhaps
complicit but not in control of the Bosnian Serbs?
PERINA: To be very honest, I did not know. I don’t think Washington really knew but
our best guess was that it was a mixture of the two. In certain ways Milosevic was
certainly helping the Bosnian Serbs. Serbia provided military support, financial support,
logistical support and so on. Some of this came through government channels but also a
lot came from private groups and militias that sprang up, like Arkan’s “Tigers.” So how
much influence this gave Milosevic over the Bosnian Serbs, or how long they could have
continued to fight without Serbian support, is very difficult to gauge. Milosevic was
complicit but can one say he was responsible for specific actions, like the slaughter of the
Muslim men after the fall of Srebrenica? Did he know about that? Did he concur with
that? I don’t know. We don’t know. Very frankly even later when he was on trial in The
Hague and I was interviewed in The Hague by the prosecutors, it was clear that they also
did not have a smoking gun on this. Certainly Milosevic bears much responsibility for the
war as a whole because of his actions in starting the conflict but to what degree he
exercised control over specific actions after the conflict started is a very difficult
question.
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