The New York Times

Friday, June 25, 1999

CAPITOL HILL

Holbrooke Defends Dealings With Milosevic but Admits Administration Errors

By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON -- Richard Holbrooke, whose Senate confirmation as chief U.S. diplomat at the United Nations is all but assured, Thursday defended his repeated dealings with President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia because "my job was not to make moral judgments."

"My highest goal here was to avoid war, bring peace," Holbrooke told lawmakers at his third and final confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "This isn't fun. This isn't bridge or tennis. This is tough slogging."

The hearing Thursday was intended to focus on Holbrooke's role in policy-making in the Balkans, where he has served for several years as President Clinton's chief envoy. And he spent much of the session outlining early mistakes by the Clinton administration that allowed ethnic hatreds in the region to flare into war.

But time and again, he was asked specifically about his close dealings with Milosevic, who was Holbrooke's chief interlocutor during years of negotiations in the Balkans and who was indicted last month by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.

Asked why he had agreed to continue dealing with the Serbian leader despite mounting evidence that Milosevic was the mastermind of a campaign of atrocities throughout the Balkans, Holbrooke suggested that he was left with few alternatives.

"We are neither friends nor partners," he said, insisting that he was forced into negotiations with Milosevic. "He was the recognized leader of the Serbs under international law," he said. "I've spent a great deal of time with President Slobodan Milosevic, during none of which, I would stress, he was indicted."

And now that Milosevic has been formally charged with war crimes, "he should face trial," Holbrooke said. "I can't conceive of the circumstances under which the kind of negotiations that I conducted, under instructions, would be conducted again."

He said the years of bloodshed in the Balkans were the fault of "the Serb leadership -- and that Serb leadership meant Slobodan Milosevic."

Holbrooke faced few hostile questions Thursday, and the likelihood of his Senate confirmation was made clear at the beginning of the hearing, when the panel's chairman, Jesse Helms of North Carolina, pointedly referred to Holbrooke as "ambassador" and added, "I don't hesitate to call you that, now."

The committee is expected to vote next week, possibly unanimously, to approve the nomination and to send it to the Senate floor for a final vote.

But it was Helms who directed the sharpest questions to the nominee at Thursday's hearings and who asked whether it had been a mistake for Holbrooke to reach a cease-fire agreement with Milosevic last October over Kosovo.

Critics of the agreement say it was doomed to fail because it allowed the bulk of Serb forces in the province to remain there and did not require the presence of armed NATO troops as cease-fire monitors. The deal collapsed earlier this year, leading to 11 weeks of NATO bombing of Serbia and the exodus of more than a million Albanians from Kosovo.

The Serbs who remained in Kosovo under the agreement, Helms said, were "the same forces who carried out the brutal ethnic cleansing and mass murder that we have witnessed."

He added, "I'm concerned that the fact that the United States felt obliged to go to war against Yugoslavia this past March was an obvious conclusion of doing business with Slobodan Milosevic."

Holbrooke defended the cease-fire agreement, insisting that he did not have the option of providing for ground troops to monitor the pact.

"I was not able to negotiate armed international security forces in Kosovo in October because it was not possible to do that under the instructions I was given," he said, suggesting that he had carried out Washington's instructions even though he strongly disagreed with them.

"I believe firmly and have stated repeatedly in public and private that Albanians and Serbs will not be able to live together in peace in Kosovo until they've had a period of time with international security forces to keep them from tearing each other to pieces."

Administration officials had said that they did not push for the presence of NATO ground troops in Kosovo last year both because of Clinton's and the Pentagon's long-standing reluctance to commit ground troops in any situation, and because Congress would have strongly opposed the move.

Holbrooke recalled Thursday that there "was a very clear sense of the Congress that, at that point, ground troops were not going to be possible, and that was my instruction."

Otherwise, Holbrooke defended the agreement as having saved the lives of many of the estimated 150,000 Albanians who had fled their homes and were then hiding from the Serbs in the countryside.

Without the cease-fire, "many of these people would have frozen to death or starved to death in the winter colds of the hills of central Kosovo," he said.

"Those people all returned," he continued. "Many of them were displaced again during March and April and May. But far fewer died as a result of our military action and what the Serbs did than would have died had they been left in the woods and forests over the winter."

In his testimony, Holbrooke provided an abbreviated history of American efforts to stem violence in the Balkans and acknowledged that earlier action by the Clinton administration would have saved countless lives.

"We made numerous mistakes," said Holbrooke, who was the American ambassador to Germany in the early years of the Clinton administration. "Had the United States responded vigorously and appropriately early in the crisis, we might have avoided three of the four wars that the Belgrade leadership has caused."

"By the time I became directly involved in the issue, at the end of 1994, three of the four wars had already taken place," he said. "The first one, in Slovenia, was a week long. The second one with Croatia was a mess beyond messes. And by the time I got involved, the war was raging out of control in Bosnia, where over 300,000 people were killed."