HEADLINERS

By Kevin Fedarko

RICHARD HOLBROOKE Infuriating but effective, he bullied the Balkan bosses into signing a fragile peace in Bosnia

DURING THE THREE YEARS BEFORE AMERICA'S policy toward Bosnia became inextricably linked with the name of Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton Administration seemed to be basing its actions on Bismarck's famous comment that the Balkans are not "worth the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier." In July 1995, however, the Bosnian Serbs seized Srebrenica, a U.N.-designated "safe haven," and set about massacring several thousand of its men and boys. This atrocity, only the latest of many, stirred Bill Clinton into belated action. The President recognized that dithering and long-distance hand wringing over Bosnia didn't work (especially with an election coming up). And Holbrooke, 54, who was already serving as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, was just the man, Clinton decided, to lead a more assertive American approach.

Holbrooke was, in some ways, an obvious choice. He, after all, had called inaction over Bosnia "the greatest collective failure of the West since the 1930s." Moreover, he had spent three decades, first in the State Department, then on Wall Street, honing his skills as a diplomat and a dealmaker. Still, some found it surprising that he should be picked for this critical assignment. Over the years, he had won a reputation for fierce ambition and abrasive self-promotion. His ego and aggressiveness, it was said, did not suit the delicate job of constructing a Balkan peace settlement. As one colleague put it, Holbrooke is like "a bull who takes his own china shop with him."

In the end, however, the very qualities that aroused such antipathy among Holbrooke's rivals in Washington equipped him ideally for browbeating the men who were running the Bosnian war--Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and Alija Izetbegovic, the President of Bosnia and Herzegovina. At times the ruthless Balkan bosses--especially Milosevic--probably saw something of themselves reflected in Holbrooke. He stroked their egos, he laughed at their jokes, he drank their plum brandy--Milosevic praised his skill as a "bulls------ artist." But Holbrooke was also tough. Once, when Izetbegovic was hesitating over a cease-fire agreement, he barked, "Don't play craps with your destiny. You'd better be ready to live with the consequences if you make the wrong gamble."

Holbrooke's appetite for both work and publicity seemed limitless. At night, following 12-hour negotiating sessions, he could often be found roaming the corridors of his hotel in bare feet, hoping to buttonhole an aide into conversation or a reporter into doing yet another story on him. After Croatia's army overran the Serb-held region of Krajina in early August, he shuttled feverishly from one Balkan capital to another. He was pulled up short on Aug. 19 when three aides, including Robert Frasure, who prepared the way for Holbrooke's diplomacy, were killed in a road accident near Sarajevo, but that tragedy only made Holbrooke more determined. When the Bosnian Serbs lobbed a shell into a Sarajevo market on Aug. 28, they triggered a massive NATO bombardment, and in the ensuing weeks, Holbrooke relentlessly bullied his interlocutors toward the bargaining table. Finally, they sat down to talk peace in Dayton, Ohio, last month. The reason everyone quit fighting, it was joked, was that this was "the only way to get Holbrooke to go home."

The treaty signed in Paris last week hardly deserves a standing ovation. Bosnia's awkward division fails to compensate the war's victims and could sow the seeds of the new state's future dismemberment. But while the plan may not be perfect, it is bold, imaginative and offers perhaps the best peace one could hope for in Bosnia's far from perfect world. That seems somehow fitting, if only in the sense that the deal's virtues and its flaws suggest the character of the man who did so much to craft it.

--By Kevin Fedarko