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

Montenegro and elevating their Chargés to Ambassadors. By the time I left Belgrade, I
was one of the few remaining Chargé d’Affaires. This European rush to normalize
relations with Serbia and overlook the Kosovo issue was of course the biggest dread of
the Kosovar Albanians. I think it was partly because of this development that the
Albanians gave up hope that the international community would help them and moved
toward developing the Kosovo Liberation Army, which suddenly appeared on the scene
about two years later. This was when I was serving as the Deputy Assistant Secretary in
the Department, and it took the entire international community by surprise. Suddenly, the
Kosovar Albanians had an army which they had largely secretly put together. It was an
amazing feat but also reflected how bad our intelligence was on Kosovo because we were
still focusing almost exclusively on Bosnia. But I think I am getting too far ahead. I am
sure we will come back to Kosovo later.
Q: OK, so let’s go back to Bosnia pre-Dayton. What was the process of getting to
Dayton? How did the talks evolve?
PERINA: Well, we have to go back to the visits by Bob Frasure, the Deputy Assistant
Secretary who was handling Yugoslavia and whom I already mentioned. Bob started
coming out when it became clear that the policy of just delivering threatening demarches
to Milosevic was not working, and when Holbrooke became Assistant Secretary for
European Affairs and wanted to get more involved in resolving the conflict. Frasure came
out as sort of an advance party to meet with Milosevic and explore if there was any
common ground for negotiations that Holbrooke would then take over. He made several
visits, and in the end we drew up a broad list of principles by which we thought the
conflict could be resolved. The bottom line of these principles was that Bosnia had to
remain as a single federalist state, albeit Republika Srpska, a Serb entity with
considerable autonomy, could continue to exist within Bosnia. Milosevic agreed to this,
and it was the cue for Holbrooke to come in. Milosevic knew this. We had told him that if
talks at the Frasure level succeeded, then a higher level representative—understood to be
Holbrooke—would come to Belgrade. It was an incentive for Milosevic because he
wanted to get the U.S. involved, and he wanted to deal with the highest-level American
possible.
He was also at this time trying to clean up his image in other ways. For example, we had
a long-standing child custody dispute with Belgrade. An American mother was trying to
get her children back from a Serbian father who had absconded with them to Serbia after
he lost custody in U.S. divorce proceedings. For about five years the mother with the
Embassy’s help had been trying to get the children back, with the Serbs always claiming
that they did not know their whereabouts. One day shortly before Dayton, out of the blue,
Milosevic called me to say that the children had been found and could be returned to the
mother. We immediately picked them up and kept them in the Embassy until the mother
arrived, about 24 hours later, for a very dramatic and emotional reunion, since they
hardly had memory of her. I have no doubt that the Serbs had known for a long time
where the children were but Milosevic finally made the decision to return them when he
felt it would most bolster his image with the Americans.
76