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

PERINA: I would not ascribe it to anti-Serbism as such. It was a policy decision. Of
course, there was a lot of pressure from the Hague Tribunal because they wanted
Karadzic and Mladic badly. But mainly people feared that Karadzic and Mladic would be
leaders and rallying points for Serb resistance to Dayton as long as they were free. This
exaggerated their importance and underestimated the deeper and more complex roots of
Serb nationalism. Somehow we often think that problems can be solved just by getting
rid of people at the top. It is a bit like thinking that Iraq would flourish if we could just
get rid of Saddam Hussein or that getting rid of Bin Laden will resolve the problem of
terrorism.
Q: And of course, the Kosovo issue was still on the table.
PERINA: Exactly, and that was much more important. The sanctions linked to Kosovo
were fully justified and in retrospect perhaps should even have been stronger. But by
adding the Mladic and Karadzic conditionality we gave some Serbs the impression that
the bar was so high and linked to so many issues that the West just did not want to
normalize relations with Serbia. So why even try? But as for Kosovo, it was still
relatively quiet in my time. The real crisis came after I left. But we were amazed to
suddenly see the Kosovo Liberation Army appear out of nowhere. Our intelligence
agencies had totally missed picking this up. A lot of the money came from Albanians in
Western Europe, and we were just not focused on them.
Q: Getting back to your position as DAS, how did John Kornblum use you?
PERINA: Well Kornblum was also involved in Dayton implementation. There was a
huge amount to do in that area. He did a lot of the overseas travel and was out of
Washington very often. So as the Senior DAS, I ran the entire Bureau when he was gone.
I was basically his back-up on almost everything. This was both good and bad. I did
everything, but I also did nothing in the sense that there was no specific portfolio for
which I alone was responsible.
Q: You also had this arrangement where Strobe Talbott was running the former Soviet
Union. How did that fit in?
PERINA: That’s right. This was the period when the former Soviet Union was not within
the European Bureau. It had been broken off and put into the Office of Newly-
Independent States (NIS) at the start of the Clinton Administration because it was a
region that Strobe Talbott wanted to have for himself. By the time I became DAS, Strobe
was the Deputy Secretary and no-longer the head of the NIS office but he still supervised
it directly. So it did not fall under the European Bureau, and I never worked on the
former Soviet Union in this period. Later, at the start of the Bush Administration, it was
put back into the European Bureau.
Q: Were there coordination problems because of this?
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