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Thank you very much, Dean Perritt, and thank all of you for coming today.  I'm really honored to be here, but I feel I'm here under somewhat fraudulent pretenses because the Dean has asked me to talk to a law school about the role of law in Sarajevo and use it as an example of the larger issues and of course all the way out here this morning from New York, I kept trying to figure out how I can do that, since the exact opposite has been true.  This is an area where law broke down.  And it was not international law that brought peace to the region.  It was international diplomacy led by the United States and backed up--although not originally intended to be backed up--by air power.

So we have in Bosnia a situation which illustrates something quite different from the generality that you will get here at Kent.  But before we get to Bosnia, I want to say how honored I am to be here and how impressed I am by the work you have done to connect Kent with Bosnia, Dean Perritt's own activities at Villanova and here, which were very important.  The American Embassy and The International Community has been supporting you and commended you.  We're delighted you made that effort and I hope you will continue it.  Because in the end, the return of the rule of law--or in fact, installation of the rule of law--in Bosnia is essential.  This is a region of the world that really, when you think about it in broad historical sweep, has never seen international law.  Part of it was under the Ottoman Empire and part of it under Austro-Hungarian for centuries.  It was divided up in an absurd way in 1919 at Versailles.  And in the name of self-determination, I regret to say that the Big Four, led by our own President Woodrow Wilson, made some extraordinarily bad judgments about where the boundary lines in South Central Europe should be drawn.  Not only in Yugoslavia, but in Hungary, Romania and elsewhere.  Then, before the full impact of those mistakes could hit the world, along came Hitler.  You had another war, then came communism and you had 40 years of very strong control by Tito and then Tito died, the Soviet Union broke up, and the thing fell apart.  In most of Central and Eastern Europe, the new leaders appealed to  democracy to overthrow communism, but in Yugoslavia, a group of people who ranged from criminal to demagogic used nationalism--and by nationalism I don't mean what you study in history, I mean a virulent form of racism and that's what this is, bizarrely enough, racism against people who are physically indistinguishable from each other--a virulent form of extreme nationalism, and blew the place apart.

Then, the rule of  International Law completely failed.   In 1991, '92 and '93 the Europeans and the United States split apart on how to deal with it.  In 1991, the U.S. simply walked away from the problem, in one of the most unfortunate instances of American diplomacy ever and ironically in the immediate aftermath of two of the great successes of American  leadership: Desert Storm and the unification of Germany, both of which had been done brilliantly by the Bush Administration.  Then the very same people who had done these two things made a mistake in Yugoslavia which has haunted us ever since.  They just walked away from the problem.  Secretary of  State James Baker saying famously, "We don't have any dog in that fight."  Simultaneously, the European Union--or the European Community as it was then called--said that they could handle the problem without us.  In an equally unfortunate remark, the head of the European Community at the time, the Luxembourg Prime Minister, said "the hour of Europe has dawned."

Each side was equally misguided.  The end of the Cold War did not mean the end of America's involvement in Europe.  The United States was wrong and the Europeans could not handle a problem of these dimensions without the U.S.  But because of this mistake in 1991 and 1992, and because it was continued in the first two years of the Clinton Administration, we reached the summer of 1995 with anarchy on the ground.

Now,  Dean Perritt and I wanted to address what happened next from a somewhat peculiaristic point of view to you all, here at Kent.  And that is the role of the United Nations.

Now, normally  I talk about the American role and I will return to that in a minute because those of you in the room who are Americans should feel proud of the fact that--although it was belated and reluctant--when the United States stepped in, it was decisive.
 
But, I want to talk about the UN for a minute because those of you who are going to study international law should understand why the UN failed, how terribly serious that failure is and why we shouldn't give up on the UN, despite that failure, because the American political debate on the UN has been poisoned by the UN failure in Bosnia.  So let me the talk about the UN in a way that I have not in the year and a half since I left the government.  First of all, like Dean Perritt–and like,  I assume, most of you in this room--I believe in the UN.  We need the United Nations.  We need the U.S. to stay in the UN and the UN to stay in the U.S., as the cliché goes, and I am appalled by the fact that the Congress has put us $1 billion in arrears.  That's a shameful thing.  Ted Turner seems to be ready to make a contribution to reduce that--if you've read today's newspapers--and it is a pretty extraordinary thing he's done.  He's going to give one billion dollars to the UN over the next 10 years.  But it's not for administrative purposes.  He's made that clear and he's quite right.  That is our responsibility.  And one individual, no matter how generous or rich it looks, cannot make it up.  It's shameful that we've done this.

On the other hand, the UN performance in Bosnia gave the opponents of the UN-- Senators Helms and people like that--a very easy whipping boy.  Because nothing could have been worse than the UN's performance in Bosnia.  At a daily cost of five million dollars, five million dollars a day, the UN saved some lives, got some food into people, but never did anything to stop the war.  You can argue that without the UN the Serbs would have collapsed the  Bosnian Muslims early, and it would have been over, and I would accept that argument.  You could argue that the UN saved a lot of lives and I would accept that argument.  But the United Nations sent a lightly armed peace keeping force into Bosnia to keep a peace in the middle of a war and you can't do that.  They used the wrong authority; they used chapter six instead of chapter seven.  The equipment was very light.  It wasn't heavy tanks.  They didn't have long range artillery.  They didn't have the right to defend themselves.  They had, for example, a notorious system to decide when to shoot back, called the "dual key system", whereby two keys had to be turned every time you wanted to use air strikes.  One key in the UN system and one key in the NATO system and the UN key was not only in the hands of the United Nations military, officers, which was  bad enough, but it went to the civilians  all the way back to the 38th floor of the UN Secretarial in New York.  With a six-hour time difference and the UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who wanted to be re-elected as Secretary-General and knew he only could do this with Russian support  and the Russian's didn't want us to do anything there.  He would use the six-hour delay and you could not reach him on the phone and night would fall, bad weather,  the moment would be lost.  I remember one unbelievable incident which just drove me to distraction in September of '94 where, after an outrageous Bosnian-Serb attack, Boutros Boutros-Ghali finally, after about eight hours of yelling, authorized NATO planes to attack the mortar tube that had fired the attack.  The mortar tube, not anything else; just that one mortar tube.  Now, you know mortar tubes--this big, this big around.  You can't find it, and it was crazy, and by the time he issued the order it was night in Bosnia and the next day it was ridiculous.

It was just a game and it was shameful.  And it did the UN great damage.  For those of you who thought the U.S. was unduly harsh to Boutros Boutros-Ghali last year when we stood alone against the world in giving him a second term, let me assure you that the only way to save the UN was to get rid of this man.  And that his successor Kofi Annan, a 30-year civil servant of the UN from Ghana is a spectacular improvement and the man who, by the way, helped us privately to make the bombing possible, even while working for Boutros-Ghali.  So, I'm extremely optimistic that under Kofi Annan we will have a more vigorous UN internationally and an internally reformed UN administratively.

And I hope that in turn the Congress will start giving it some money  because we can't keep saying to the UN that you've got to clean up your act and not give them the wherewithal to do it.

But I want to start, because we are at a law school, by stressing the fundamental flaw.  The whole thing was misbegotten, and if you believe, as I do, in the rule of law in international relations, you've got to ask yourself why the war could not be stopped until belatedly and reluctantly, but decisively, President Clinton sent a diplomatic team into the field, followed a week and a half later (almost by accident, I might add), by the heaviest  aerial attacks Europeans had seen since 1945.  And why that combination, which could only be done by the United States (couldn't be done by the Europeans and couldn't be done by the UN), turned the tide.  This is something that I think you all have to consider: which is how the international system could better respond.  NATO was formed in 1949 to combat the Soviet threat.  It was supposed only to sit in Germany and prevent  the Westward movement of the Red Army.  And yet here it was, in 1995, bombing in an area outside its own area.  And here it is in 1997, running a multi-national command on the ground in a country outside the NATO area, including non-NATO troops, including even Russian and Ukranian troops under American commanders--something no one thought would have been possible--and doing it very well.  It's a remarkable business.

And one other thing for those of you who follow these things.  Partly for political reasons, vis à vis Congress, and also partly because of the mess we'd had with the UN, the U.S. government did something that was fairly rough but necessary vis à vis the UN when we signed the Dayton agreements.  First of all, when we negotiated the Dayton agreements we didn't let the UN come to Dayton. They wanted to have a representative there and I said I wouldn't have them in the compound, because they had made such a hash of things and their presence there only would have diluted our efforts.  I didn't feel good doing it, but...  We did allow the negotiators of Eastern Slavonia—a sliver of  Croatia up against the Serb border, not in Bosnia but just north of it.  We did let the UN negotiators of Eastern Slavonia finally come to the Dayton for one or two days to work on that issue, but they had nothing to do with the settlement.  And then when the Dayton agreement was signed there were no UN signatures on it.  Although, because the French had the signing ceremony in Paris at the Elysee Palace, they invited Boutros-Ghali, but not to sign it, to witness it.  When we signed the Dayton agreement and we sent the NATO forces, the Europeans wanted us to go the UN and get the authority and mandate of the UN Security Council to send the troops there and we had to make a very tough decision, and we said "no."  We did it  because we could not afford to put the United States commitment into a position where that conversation in the Security Counsel could put additional constraints on us.  In other words, if the U.S. was going to commit itself, we would have to commit ourselves unconstrained by the world body, which we all believe is so important.

Now, I go into this in some detail but I have not talked about this issue before in a public speech (although we spent a lot of time on this in Washington and still do).  I go into this in this some detail because I'm challenging all of you as you go through your theoretical studies about international law to understand the difference between the theory and the practice.

Of  course, I would prefer to have had a UN mandate.  I'm sure all of you students of history know that in June of 1950 we got a UN mandate to send our troops to Korea, clean and flat.  And the troops have been in Korea ever since, under the UN mandate, although we got it through a fluke.  The Russian representative stormed out of the Security Council instead of participating in the debate.  Thereby eliminating their ability to veto.  They never made that mistake again, although there is a very famous incident, when the Russian representative got up and stormed out of another meeting, and all the other Soviet satellites followed him and it turned out he was going to the mens room.

So, we had gone to the UN for authority in Korea, but we didn't go to the UN for authority in Bosnia.  In order to show that we weren't ignoring the UN, we went to them and we got them to pass a general resolution backing the effort without giving it authority, but not requiring us to report to them.  And then we gave the UN one task in Bosnia: the police—the International  Police Task Force.  And they have done a terrible job, and I intensely regret that we agreed to let them have the police, because the police have been part of the problem.  Now we have this terrible tragedy the day before yesterday where a helicopter went down with some very senior officials on it.  And most of those people were UN including several Americans, including the deputy head of the Police Task Force who we had recruited in order to deal with this problem.  So, the UN continues to have its problems and its tragedies in Bosnia.

Now I know that Dean Perritt said at the beginning that he wanted to talk about trade and collective security and I will get to that in a minute.  And I don't want to dwell exclusively on Bosnia.  But I want to challenge you to think about the real life dilemma.  You have a theory--the rule of law, the role of the UN; and you have a reality--a disaster in Bosnia which the UN can't deal with.  And the reality is also destroying the theory, but meanwhile, worse than that, the country is burning up.  And it's threatening to metastasize into its neighborhood, and destabilize Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, so you have to step in.  And we have got to find a better way to do this.  I'm not satisfied with where we are.  I don't like the fact---I'm not here today to boast that we ignored the UN--I'm here to lament the fact that we had to choose between dealing with the UN system and letting the war get worse or stopping the war and bypassing the UN system.  It's a real life dilemma and I use it,  I dwell on it at some length today to illustrate to you how the government really works.  The UN will never have a more supportive Administration than the Clinton Administration, and yet look at what we have done there.

Now, in regard to Bosnia itself, several people have already asked me, so I want to address the issue of where we are today.  The last month has been by-and-large the best month we've had since Dayton, in Bosnia--although there have been some difficulties.  But it's very hard to know that, from some of the coverage.  I, of  course, don't mean the Chicago Tribune [looking at Tribune publisher John Madigan in the audience].  I am referring to my own hometown paper, The New York Times, which has covered Bosnia very questionably in the last month.  The fact is that I would not at all be surprised or upset if the bulk of you in this room think the Dayton peace is in a lot of trouble because there's been a heightened tension, but the reverse is actually the case.  The people most obstructing the Dayton process, the Bosnian  Serbs of Pale, Mr. Karadzic, the indicted war criminal, who has not I regret to say been brought to justice, Mr. Krajisnik who was the general elected Co-President of all of Bosnia.  And that group of criminals and thugs in Pale have now had a split with their former protégée Mrs. Plavsic in the large Bosnian Serb city in the West--Banja Luka.  Now she's no saint.  She comes out of the organizing group in Pale that started this war.  Tanks were named after her during the war.  She was photographed with other war criminals.  But sometime in the last four  or five months she broke with Pale, crossed the Rubicon, and began defying them, with the encouragement of the United States.   Both Madeleine Albright and I made trips out there and we felt that it was worth giving her some backing, provided she committed herself to Dayton. By commitment to Dayton I mean--and I want to be very clear on this--a single country, a single multi-ethnic country, not as people like Henry Kissinger advocate, the partition of a  country by ethnic group.  That  can't work.  It's simply wrong and it would set off a chain reaction.

When we started to support Mrs. Plavsic, we took a certain gamble, but she has seized the television stations in the West from Pale, so now they can no longer broadcast this racist, fascist propaganda that they been broadcasting for years, which is one of the primary reasons why people now hate each other so much.  This isn't a question of 600 years of ancient hatreds.

This is a question of media in the hands of the Yugoslav equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan and Josef Goebbels.  If you keep preaching that stuff long enough, people start believing it and they go out and kill their neighbors.  And, Mrs. Plavsic has closed down their access to sixty percent of the population, politically and in terms of the media.  That's a huge step forward, and so those of us following the problem carefully and involved in it think that this is a step forward.  Although as I said, a lot of the reporting has suggested that we have gotten drawn into a kind of a Somalian-style tar-baby--that is not my view.  I think we're in a much better situation than we were a few months ago--but we're not out of the woods.   Karadzic is still at-large, and Karadzic at liberty is Dayton deferred or denied.  The media is still broadcasting out of Pale.  In my view they should be closed down.  We have the authority to do so, and I'm hopeful it will happen soon, as I've warned Milosevic on my trip to Belgrade last month.  And there are plenty of other problems, not the least of which are the Croats in Bosnia who may pose the biggest threat overall in stability in the long run.  So, we're not out of the woods but we have made vast gains.  The war is over.  When we went to Dayton most people thought it would just be another one of those 34 cease fires that had taken place.  But the war never resumed.  Two years ago this week the war was raging.  It ended  on November 21, 1995, and never resumed.  And the only fighting since then, the only real fighting since then was some very minor stuff between Croats and Muslims and some rock throwing.  That's good news item number one.

Number two–No American and NATO deaths and no real casualties from combat.  A  couple of people were hurt by rocks the other day and several people have been hurt in automobile accidents. Somebody died picking up a land mine, but I think it was probable an intentional suicide to be frank about it.

But nobody thought when the U.S. deployed less than two years ago that we would go in casualty-free.  Everyone thought it was going to be UN all over again.  The UN suffered over a thousands casualties and we've suffered none.  That's because the US  and NATO are held in respect, because they don't have the stupid dual key system, because the people of Bosnia know the difference between NATO (which is the US) and the UN which doesn't have a definition.

Third, Sarajevo was unified under the Muslims.  Nobody, nobody thought that was possible and it happened and it's worked.  It was implemented in a rather sloppy way in March of last year.  Allowing the Serbs to burn the Serb parts of Sarajevo as they vacated was really unfortunate.  But, to be honest with you, it was our fault.  We could have easily prevented it.  Our military chose not to do anything and we left our fire trucks in the fire houses while the suburbs of Gerbaviza and Alija burned.  But, the fact is, despite that stupid...oh, I should be very specific about why they were burned, because it will tell you what really goes on in Bosnia.  The Bosnian Serbs, in Pale--the same thugs I mentioned earlier--put out on the radio and TV and distributed leaflets instructing the Sarajevo Serbs,  many of whom had lived there for centuries, to blow up their own apartments and get out.  Most of them wanted to stay.  But thugs from Pale came down into the Serbs' part of Sarajevo and drove those poor old people out.  There were 70,000 Sarajevo Serbs--about forty or fifty thousand had come in during the war.  They had to get out.  They had dispossessed Muslim, Croat and Jewish families.  But the other twenty or thirty thousand had lived there for centuries and the Serbs leadership in Pale forced them out.  So, it was very ugly for a week and I'm extraordinarily unhappy that we were so passive.

But, the fact is Sarajevo is unified today and there is no one in this room who would have thought it possible two years ago, and we did that too.  And, there has been the beginning of the knitting together of a single economic country again.  After all, you cannot disaggregate the economy of a country on ethnic grounds.  This is one economic unit.  This wasn't segregated by ethnicity, they all lived together.  And there's huge intermarriage; fifteen to twenty percent are intermarried.  Even at the height of the war, if I was going from Belgrade to Sarajevo, or Sarajevo to Belgrade, these guys who were killing each other would say, "If you see so-and-so say hello--he was my law professor," or , "so-and-so was my cousin."   I said "You're kidding, you're killing each other."  "Yeah, but he's my cousin."  So they can live together again.  And they're starting to slowly--despite the thuggery of the leaders.  And a lot of other positive things that have happened.

On the negative side of the ledger–-and here the UN is again, and the international community is again critically involved–-the number one failure has been the very small number of refugees who have been able to return to their homes if they are in the minority area.  About one-third of all the refugees have gone home, but very few of those have gone to minority areas.   That's a real problem.

The second failure is the one I mentioned already; the failure to get Karadzic arrested.  We have to.

The third failure has been that the joint institutions which were accredited at Dayton, are running about one year behind schedule; maybe nine months behind schedule now with the recent acceleration.  And so you can see that the problems have been on the civilian implementation side.  But the military has--the NATO forces have--resolutely refused to help implement the civilian side.   So you can see a very critical interaction here.

Now why does all this matter to all of us and how does it relate to the alleged theme of my talk as stated  on the posters as I came in this wonderful building today?  Well, first of all, it matters to us because the United States cannot be a global economic power without also exercising moral and political and strategic leadership.  We can't simply be a Japan, a great economic force without a foreign policy.  We must stand for something in the world beyond our economic interests.  Our economic interests are very strong.  You'll all recall that at one point the Bush Administration tried to justify Desert Storm by saying, "we are fighting for jobs."  President Clinton has talked often about a foreign policy that creates jobs and that's fine.  I agree with that and I spent a lot of my time as Assistant Secretary of State in Europe and most of my time as ambassador in Germany promoting American business.

But we have to stand for other things--the rule of law, moral values backed up by political leadership and, on rare occasions, but sometimes it's inevitable and unavoidable, we have to threaten to use force and, on the rarest of occasions, we have to use it.  Very tough decision because you're putting young American men and women into harm's way.  But there are times it has to be done.

If we don't do it, then the Congress, for example Senator Hutchinson, who has launched this tremendous attack against the Administration's continuing deployment in Bosnia, has said that--I'm talking about Kaye Baley Hutchinson from Texas--she has said that we shouldn't have any troops anywhere unless our actual survival is at risk.  I've debated this with her in hearings in the Armed Services Committee and I respectfully don't agree.  You have to understand that small encroachments and small intimidations can lead to big wars.  And that if you don't deal with problems early they can metastasize and escalate into very large ones.  I know that--we all know that--was the lesson in the Thirties.  We all know that lesson was correctly learned in the Forties in the Truman period.  This is a more amorphous period.  We don't' have a clear threat from Hitler or Tokyo or Moscow.  The threat now is generic instability.  The threat now is tribalism or ethnicity--or an even more complicated series of issues--transborder issues like international crime, laundered money, environmental problems that don't respect borders.  A whole slew of unresolved problems left over and a whole slew of new problems that come with the brave new world of the Internet.

America must take the lead.  We need international regimes.  We need structures that have teeth and enforcement.  The WTO (the World Trade Organization) is supposed to do that.  And we need to be ready to work within them when we don't like their outcomes.  I don't like the fact that we'll create an organization and refuse to be a part of it.  I'm very unhappy with what happened in Oslo this week on the land mines as I'm sure most of you are.  I think if General Schwarzkopf supports something, that ought to give us enough cover to step up to the plate.  To be sure there were problems with the Land Mine Treaty and Korea is a special case, but I think we ought to try to ban these weapons, these instruments.

We can't just say that because we're the most powerful nation we make all the rules.  We have to show the kind of leadership that we showed in the Forties.  For the most part, I think you all in this room can be proud of the United States in the last 2 years.  We are leading the effort to bring three new nations into NATO which extends stability in the Europe Eastward by three more countries.  What we did in Bosnia speaks for itself.    In Asia and the Pacific--which is actually my real area of background, but not the subject of the talk today--we are doing a lot of things.  Like in Korea, a design to reduce tensions and bring an international regime there.  But we need to do more.  And what concerns me most--one of the reasons I am pleased to be out here in the heartland today--is the sense which you really feel in Congress,  of  turning away from the world in the post-Cold War era, strategically and politically, just at a point when you can't afford to do that.

Our economy is more global than ever before.  I used to come to Chicago in the Eighties and there was almost no international trade of great interest, even here in this great city.  There was some, but outside of Chicago, the rest of this area had none.  But today Chicago needs international trade just as much as New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles.

And so I am deeply concerned that those of you vote and know your members of Congress.  Make clear to them that a great nation is strong enough to do both things--strengthen our domestic economy, deal with our desperately urgent domestic problems (race, above all, urban decay, drugs and the other obvious issues), and also continue to lead internationally.

Thank you very much.

[Applause]

[Audience questions.]

One question I would like to start with is –-  I would like you to say a little more about the relationship between American leadership and sometimes unilateral American action and the need for some sort of multi-lateral framework, which you suggest is important as well.

I really tried to address that by going into such details about this one, almost never reported issue of whether Dayton and the NATO-led force would go into the Security Counsel.  I deliberately chose that issue--I don't think an article was ever written on it-- because we spend a lot of time on it, and it illustrates the problem.  There is no simple answer.  The better the UN is, the more ready we'd be to go into these arrangements.  Somalia casts an incredible shadow over this issue in the most sensitive area, which is the area of the use of force and particularly deployments involving Americans.  Senator Hutchinson, and others, have tapped a very rich vein of American neoisolationism by their attitude.  Now, on non-strategic issues, which are less glamorous and less dramatic but maybe in the long term more important.  We're having the same problems, we saw it in Oslo this week on the land mine issue, where essentially the Joint Chiefs of Staff just put up so much resistance to the Land Mine Treaty, joined by conservative opponents, that the White House concluded that even if we signed it we would never get it ratified.  Senator Helms is very clear on this.  He doesn't often praise the President, but he was full of praise yesterday.  Which will tell you what the issue was.  So another problem is when you get to things like the CFC Treaty on Environmental, the Green House Effect, the ozone layer, the WTA.   All across the board.  The Helms-Burton amendment, which is essentially  a way of extending our ability, telling foreign companies that if they do things in Cuba we will take action against there American assets, which has created an enormous storm all over Europe and Asia.  On every one of issues the U.S. is gearing towards a kind of unilateralism, which we didn't have in the Forties, Fifties and Sixties.  This is a new breed of people on "the Hill".  The Republicans are not--it's not the Nixon/Bush/Kissinger era of internationalist Republicans, it's a much...the Gingrich Republicans are much more locally-based type.  John Casich of Ohio is a perfect example of this.  Ironically his grandparents are from Croatia, but as far as he's concerned Bosnia is off the chart and he's leading--leading the efforts to put an absolute  cut-off day on our troops in Bosnia.  So we're talking here about a fundamental dilemma.

Now, what's the answer to it?  Well, it starts with Presidential leadership and it must have bi-partisan support.  And there are some people--Senator Dole, who John Madigan and I talked to about the same issues last weekend at a conference.
Dole is very supportive of this, but Dole is the last of the World War II veterans.  That's why he was so supportive.  Because he sees the world through this prism of having lived through this era. I'm worried about the new generation.  We've got to find a way to reach them, and I hope that the people in this room will play a role in that.

Where was the failure of law?  I mean, I see it as a major failure of  the diplomacy involved in the European political process and a  breakdown was characterized.  But where should the lawyers have been stepping in, at that point?

First of all, we have to be very careful what we're talking about here, lawyers or law.  It happens that most of the Secretaries of State, including Baker, Christopher, most of them, with the exception of Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger, all have been lawyers.  They very much took a--and I don't mean to use the word pejoratively--they took very legalistic approaches to the issues.

Sometimes it's with the International War Crimes Tribunal, which I  haven't mentioned yet, and really should return to in a minute because it is a very important and positive component.  This is very good.

In the battle over Yugoslavia, the U.S. government and the Europeans took the position that the borders of Yugoslavia shouldn't be changed.  That was partly political, partly strategic, and partly international law.  And you will recall that the Bush Administration made the same decision in Iraq at the end of Desert Storm.  Iraq was ready to split into two or three parts and each time--whether it was strategic, political, or law, or a combination of all three--they didn't want to change boundaries, because of what that would do to other boundaries.  In the case of Yugoslavia that was a disaster for exactly the reasons you cite.  And I believe very much that the fact that lawyers were doing this was important.  They brought the wrong orientation to this.

Let's go back to this incident.  On June 21, 1991, Baker went to Belgrade.  He spent the entire day there.   He was between Berlin and the Mideast.  He was doing a brilliant negotiation with the Russians on Germany.  And he's on his way to the Middle East and he  stops at Belgrade for a day.  He has eleven meetings.  He sees all the key players.  Most of them still around--Milosevic , Izetbegovic, Tudjmen, Karadzic, Gligorov, the President of Macedonia, Koocon--the guy who is about the take Slovenia out of Yugoslavia--and so on.  He sees them all.  And he tells them all two things.  One is, "We believe that Yugoslavia should remain a single country."  Now that was based very heavily on international law criteria, but also judgment that they ought to hang together.  Secondly, "We are not going to involved."  Now the result of that is that Milosevic decides that the U.S. has given him a green light--and he even uses the analogy--to do what Lincoln did in 1861: keep the country together by force.  Forty-eight hours after Baker leaves the country, the first war begins.  Forty-eight hours.  The Yugoslav invasion of Slovenia--that war only lasted a week.  At that point the U.S. totally withdraws from the field and the Europeans say its their problem.  That's not a legal judgment, that's a political judgment, but boy, is it wrong.  At that precise point we should have been negotiating.  We and the Europeans should have been  negotiating a velvet divorce.  Like Czechoslovakia.  A divorce which would have allowed the country to rearrange its borders, work out something like a mini-European Community.  Figured out what to do about Bosnia, which would have been the toughest problem.

All these people, every one of these people has told me, even Milosevic, that nobody expected this war to break out.   It just sort of happened.   It happened because the West turned away, led by the U.S.  And the Europeans didn't know what to do.  The Europeans were so trapped by their other boundary problems throughout Europe; Corsica, Northern Ireland, Cyprus, the Hungarian minority in Slovakia.  That's where international law comes in, taking it one degree of separation.  But they couldn't deal with Yugoslavia because of the effect everywhere else.  And so the first of the three wars exploded.  It only lasted a week.  It was a short war.  Slovenia was allowed to leave.

Then the Serbs really went wild and they went into Croatia and that's when the real ethnic cleansing began.  Once that war raged for a while and they had a cease-fire arranged by the UN, which really was a cover for ethnic-cleansing, then Bosnia exploded.  And then you have the fourth war; the Croats against the Moslems.  So you had four wars in one year, triggered by this set of decisions.  I can't say how much of this was international law, how much of it was just bad judgment.  But there was a theory behind the European and American policies, and it was based not just on not getting involved, but also on very bad theories of how to apply international law, starting with the fact that they didn't want to change international boundaries.

So I leave it to you to do case studies.  But the international law component of this was,   in my view, a negative factor.  You can get arguments on this, but I am just  telling you where I come out on it.   I spent a lot of time with these lawyers on this and they have never been helpful.  Except on the war crimes issue, they have been terrific on war crimes.  And I said earlier,  Justice Goldstone, the South African jurist who Mandela sent to the Hague, and his successor Louise Arbor, the Canadian judge, really have been critical.  And a lot of people thought that war crimes tribunal was just cosmetics, just for show.  But I can tell you, if it hadn't been for Goldstone we would have had Karadzic and Mladic in Dayton.   This was a way of keeping them out and keeping them out of the process.   And we haven't had a situation like this since Nuremberg.  I think we ought to have a permanent war crimes tribunal.   I don't understand why Pol Pot never has been indicted and other obvious war criminals in Rwanda and elsewhere.  But this thing that's happening in the Hague is incredibly important and I would recommend you do some serious case studies with it.

I would like to ask you to comment on the point of view that the real reason we are in the former Yugoslavia is that we want to get a dynamic presence in Central Europe and not because of ethnic cleansing, or even economic reasons.  It seems that there are so many other parts of the world, such as Turkey and the Kurds where this ethnic cleansing has been going on for much longer periods of time ...  and you do not seem to be paying attention to what goes on there.

Well, first of all,  I think we are paying attention to those areas.  But I would respectfully question the premise of your question , or  comment.  The United States doesn't want to be in Yugoslavia.   I said repeatedly we went in belatedly and reluctantly, at the last possible minute after the rape of Srebrenica.  The worst war crime in Europe since 1945 and the American public doesn't want to spend two billion dollars a year there, and they don't want to stay there, and they don't want to put people at risk.  The United States has 100,000 troops in Europe, 70,000 of them in Germany.  The Europeans all want us to stay in Germany as a stabilizing factor, but this isn't a part of the world we want to stay in.  So I would just respectively disagree with your premise.

Thank you very much.

[Applause]

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