Haris Imamović: Joe Lieberman and US-EU disagreements in Bosnia

Joe Lieberman has died. May he rest in peace. In our public, his death went almost unnoticed. The telegram of condolence was sent only by member of Presidency Željko Komšić. Speaker of the House of Representatives of BiH Denis Zvizdić made a brief statement on social networks, writing the deceased’s last name incorrectly (and correcting himself, after it was brought to his attention). Other member of Presidency Denis Bećirović has not said anything (up to this moment); same goes for the Minister of Foreign Affairs Elmedin Konaković.

The most read daily newspaper in the country brought the news under the headline: “Joe Lieberman has passed away: the ‘Hawk’ of American diplomacy and a staunch supporter of Israel.” There is not even a word in the article about his relationship with Bosnia and Herzegovina. Lieberman’s death was similarly reported by other portals, with the exception of Al Jazeera and Oslobođenje.

The reaction of our political and general public to the news of Senator Lieberman’s death is just one of many symptoms that we have lost our collective memory, as a necessary condition for the existence of a political community.

Joe Lieberman was one of the greatest friends of this country and Bosniaks, in the moments when we were fighting for bare survival. From the very beginning of the war in 1992, together with Senator Bob Dole, he was the most consistent and vocal supporter of lifting the arms embargo imposed on Bosnia at the beginning of the war.

Remembering Senator Lieberman is not only our debt to him, but also our debt to ourselves. Because understanding the political meaning of his fight in the Senate for Bosnia is extremely important for understanding our current situation, including the current conflict between the Biden administration and Brussels regarding technical changes to the Election Law. That is why I will remind you of several important moments in the exhaustive debates that took place in the Senate during 90s.

At the end of January 1994, during the debate on the State Department’s annual report, Lieberman and Dole asked the Senate for the umpteenth time to vote on lifting the embargo. Lieberman then said that he was proud to be one of the first proponents of this measure, and that the development of events from 1992 to 1994 showed that the world was witnessing “persistent diplomatic failures”, which are ultimately “the failure of Western civilization to stop aggression and genocide which is done to people in Bosnia because of their religion — just because they are Muslims”.

Fiercely opposing the conformist assessment that the war in Bosnia is just a continuation of the centuries-old ethnic conflict, Lieberman said that those who know Bosnia know that it is a multicultural society, where people of different religions have always lived together and found a form of coexistence.

He emphasized that the West’s strategic responsibility is to stop aggression in Europe, because the experience of the First and Second World Wars shows what consequences a passive relationship can lead to. “We have to send a message today [by lifting the embargo] to the American government, but also to open up space for hope for the people of Bosnia,” said Lieberman, a Democrat who defied the Democratic government.

During the said debate, Senator Dole said that America must take the lead. European negotiators David Owen and Thorvald Stoltenberg, he said, started to open ethnic division of Bosnia, thereby rewarding aggression. “Let’s finally admit it: Europeans never had a resolve to take on second-rate armed force run by Belgrade; The UN lacked will to use force even in limited ways to implement the so-called ‘safe heavens’ Security Council resolutions.” He added that “this is not just about Bosnia, but the international order.”

The then young senator John Kerry also agreed with Lieberman and Dole, saying that he had spoken with decision makers in London and Paris. “I was struck by the decision that seems is to have settled in Europe that this is somehow something that they cant really do anything about it. And that it doesnt represent vital interest of any kind.”

The senator at the time, now President Biden, joined the discussion, sharing the opinion of the aforementioned colleagues. “The perverse British and French argument that if lift embargo that we are gonna perpetuate the blodshed. They are idiots. And we are actiing collectively as a free world like cowards,” Biden said.

„Our failure as a nation to exert our leadership over Western alliance, to deal with the situation in Bosnia, has resluted in a crisis, and identity and rationale for NATO has diminished,” he said. He added that if NATO cannot stop the conflict in Europe, then the question arises: “What it can do?”

Despite everything, Lieberman, Dole, Kerry, Biden and a few more of their dissenters remained in the minority in the Senate. Their proposals were rejected. The Senate followed the policy of the Clinton administration.

Perhaps the marginality of the position of Bosnian friends in the Senate was best seen in July 1994, when the lifting of the embargo was discussed again.

Senator Sam Nunn said that he personally does not agree with the embargo, but that the UN Security Council six times, after Bosnia became independent, repeated its conclusion, with the American vote in favor, that the embargo should remain in force in all newly created states (which, by the way, should be taken into account by some commentators today who claim that the embargo was never imposed on Bosnia, but on the former Yugoslavia).

The embargo, as Senator Nunn will say, is a mistake, but it must be respected as an international obligation, because its unilateral lifting, through a decision of the US Senate, and not through the Security Council, would lead to enormous implications. For example will anyone be obliged to respect the sanctions imposed on Iran, Iraq, Libya, or can they unilaterally violate them?

Lieberman said that the embargo against the aggressors (Iran, Iraq, Libya) cannot be compared with the embargo against the victim, i.e. Bosnia.

Nunn’s argument was repeated in their discussion by several other senators, and Nancy Kaseebaum said that lifting the embargo, without the agreement of the French and English, could lead to a “serious drift betwen our NATO allies”.

The leader of the democratic majority in the Senate, George Mitchell, then openly said that relations with Western Europe and Russia are more important for America than the fate of Bosnia. Once again, the proposal to lift the embargo was rejected. The majority in the senate was anti-Bosnian.

A year later, there was a big change, and on July 26, 1995, the Senate finally adopted the proposal of Lieberman and Dole.

Debating with Senators Christopher Dodd and Thomas Daschle, who claimed that lifting the embargo, without the agreement of London and Paris, would lead to the disintegration of NATO, Lieberman said that it was simply time for the Clinton administration to change its policy. Time denied her.

As he reminded, Washington followed the policy of Paris and London from the beginning of the war, which did not lead to peace. On the contrary, the situation was getting worse. “Senator Dole and I were talking — if you don’t lift the embargo, they will take the UN staff hostage and attack the protected zones. And that happened,” Lieberman pointed out, after the fall of Srebrenica.

He added that it is unacceptable that NATO, as the strongest military alliance in the world, has to seek approval from bureaucrats in the UN to retaliate against attacks on its rapid action forces, which were deployed in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Dole backed him up, telling Dodd and Daschle, „I dont think the world will collapse if we do the right thing. NATO is gonna collapse? Our allies will gonna leave us? We are the leaders of the free world. We havent acted like that in this instance, but we are.“

The Senate voted to lift the embargo. Clinton, worried about the reaction of the Europeans, vetoed the decision. But, after that, his administration intensified its efforts, and a month later there were airstrikes on Serbian positions, and not long after that, the Dayton Agreement was concluded. The embargo was lifted, and the US government implemented a program to arm the Federation military, through the Equip and Train program.

It was a political victory, championed by Lieberman, Dole, Biden, John Kerry, John McCain and others. At the same time, based on the position they profiled in the case of Bosnia, they will become leading names in American foreign policy in the years that followed, while their rivals (Mitchell, Dodd, Daschle, Nunn, Kassebaum…) are forgotten.

The Bosnian war was the reason for re-defining America’s role in the world, as well as the purpose of NATO itself, in the post-Cold War world. The question of lifting the embargo was a question: should the will of the American institutions be above the resolutions of the UN Security Council, i.e. the remaining global centers of power?

As the current adviser to the US Secretary of State, Derek Chollet, writes in his book about Dayton, if the war in Bosnia had continued, NATO would have proved meaningless, which would have called into question its expansion, which, as Chollet emphasizes, was the highest priority of Clinton’s foreign policy.

When NATO troops were deployed in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1996, President Clinton for the first time issued an invitation to former members of the Warsaw Pact and former Soviet republics to join NATO. It was the higher geopolitical purpose of the American intervention in Bosnia, which Biden, Lieberman, Dole and others recognized before the White House itself.

If in the case of Bosnia, there was still a dilemma about the purpose of NATO, and whether the American will should be above the will of the UN, in the case of Kosovo there was no longer any dilemma. Even the French and British agreed with Lieberman, Biden, McCain, etc., who were no longer a minority, but a dominant voice in the Senate. Clinton followed them now, without hesitation.

NATO intervened against the Milosevic regime, preventing genocide, and in addition to the moral dimension, the intervention again had a geopolitical dimension. When 1999 intervention started, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic joined NATO. (It is interesting that the previously mentioned Senator Nunn as well as 94–97 chief of DoD William Perry, who were against unilateral American actions in Bosnia, were also against the expansion of NATO to the East.)

Everything changes after the invasion of Iraq, which Lieberman, Biden, Dole and “other Bosnian hawks” supported. France and Germany refused to participate in the invasion, and then Chancellor Schroeder and President Chirac met Putin in Saint Petersburg in April 2003 to express their disapproval of the Anglo-American invasion, which was carried out without the consent of the UN Security Council. .

In the years that followed, skepticism towards interventionism, as advocated by Lieberman, Biden and others in the case of Bosnia and Kosovo, and later Iraq, grew more and more. Libya appeared to be the latest flare-up of interventionism; Syria has shown that the world, in which the Americans and NATO will not interfere, is not better, but worse. With the Trump administration, isolationism and anti-interventionism have peaked.

Everything changed once again, fundamentally, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In Ukraine, Biden is implementing the policy he advocated in the Senate in the 90s, in the case of Bosnia. But, as then, he is facing enormous resistance, above all in Congress.

Aware of the aforementioned divisions within American politics, which have been identical since the debate on the UN embargo imposed on Bosnia, in the fall of 2022, in the address of the member of the BiH Presidency, Šefik Džaferović, before the UN General Assembly, I wrote that, as in the case of Bosnia, the UN system it is not able to stop the war in Ukraine either, and that the Security Council, as a body responsible for the protection of international peace and security, is not able to fulfill its obligations prescribed by the UN Charter.

It was actually the argument that Lieberman, Dole, Biden and others put forward regarding Bosnia, explaining that the resolution of the UN Security Council cannot override the right to self-defense, which is guaranteed by the UN Charter (Article 51) to any attacked the country; that is, the right of the USA to help the attacked country, if it is in their interest.

The mentioned part of the address was reported by the Associated Press and the Washington Post, which was a surprise to me, but I understood why they did it.

Since the war in Iraq, after which there was a withdrawal of NATO forces from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the role of the OHR was gradually reduced, the European Union has been getting closer to Russia and distanced itself from American interventionism. The biggest supporter of the anti-interventionist policy in Bosnia and Herzegovina was Angela Merkel.

In 2007, the Minister of Foreign Affairs in her government, and today the German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, wrote: “Russia is an irreplaceable partner of strategic importance for the EU. A pan-European peace order and a permanent solution to important security problems, from the Balkans to the Middle East, can only be achieved with Russia, by no means without it or against it.”

The aforementioned period of the European-Russian alliance (against OHR and American interventionism) was marked by the political strengthening of Milorad Dodik and his secessionist project in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It seemed that with the war in Ukraine, the Europeans were moving away from the Russians and moving closer to America again (which is the geopolitical higher purpose of that war).

I was among those who rejoiced at such an outcome, on a global level, because I believed that international relations would necessarily spill over into the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Especially, after German Foreign Minister Annaelena Baerbock, varying Steinmeier’s words, said that European security interests cannot be realized in cooperation with Russia.

When Russia ceased to be a member of the PIC, and the OHR began to intervene again at the American instigation, I believed that better times were coming for our country. That things in Bosnia and Herzegovina will not change so easily was also shown by the case of technical changes to the Election Law, which was passed by the OHR, with the support of Washington, and with the opposition of Brussels and Moscow. The only bright fact is the distancing of Berlin and The Hague from the announcement of the European Commission, which indicates that the bureaucrats do not reflect any EU consensus on the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

By supporting Schmidt’s intervention in Republika Srpska, and by shutting down the accounts of the holders of the Dodik regime, the Biden administration poked a finger in the eye of the secessionists and showed its determination to deal with them. The difference between the current and previous crises is that the Americans entered this one knowingly. They were not introduced, against their will, as in 2019 in the discussion about the ANP, or in 2021 when Inzko independently proclaimed his law.

A little less than a year left in Biden’s first term represents a historic chance for this country to finally get rid of Dodik. I don’t know if we will succeed, but we never had a better chance.

That is why Bosniak and pro-Bosnian parties must side with the Americans, coordinate moves with them, and not follow the ignorant commentators who said that “Schmidt’s decision came at the wrong time”. The American clash with Dodik is much more important for this country than the opening of negotiations with the EU, and the Troika must not, in collusion with head of EU in Sarajevo, work against the USA, as it did, going to Laktasi, thus delaying and almost preventing the escalation between Americans and Dodik.

Likewise, the SDA should unequivocally decide not to accept Dodik’s invitation to form a new government (which we have not seen yet from SDA leaders). It is necessary for all pro-Bosnian forces to stand by the Americans, Germans, Dutch and British, against Dodik and those circles in the international community that have the same position in BiH as Moscow.