Jenonne Walker, who served as special assistant to US President Bill Clinton and as senior director for Europe on the National Security Council from 1993 to 1995, speaks about US foreign policy leading up to the genocide in Srebrenica.
Transcript
The Clinton administration’s policy, with which I was engaged the first 19 months or so of the administration, evolved over time. Washington, the cabinet ministers in Washington directly concerned, were deeply divided. I can speak mostly of course from the perspective of my boss, Tony Lake, who was the national security advisor. He and I, and many others in the administration, from the very beginning thought that serious force should be used against the Serbian aggressors, the attackers who were shelling civilian centers.
We were also very deeply aware that we weren’t willing to put our troops at risk along with our NATO allies who were in UNPROFOR. And so we were deferential to their views that airstrikes would endanger their troops, perhaps cause them to leave and end the humanitarian mission, which we respected. So, this led to limitations and contradictions of our policies, even a lack of coherence for a long time.
Through a series of accidents we got engaged in the dual key decision—which meant NATO could not act without UN agreement—and we had a series, as the world knows, of what were called “pinprick bombings,” little bitty bombings that didn’t really bother the Serbs. We were moving toward a decision, I think—by this time I was out of government, I was in Czech language training getting ready to go to Prague as the American ambassador—but I was still talking to people in the administration.
My sense is we were moving toward telling the world, our allies, and the UN system that we would act alone if they wouldn’t agree to [a] more serious resistant response to Serbian aggression. All this came together with the massacre at Srebrenica, of course. By that time people didn’t need much more persuasion from us, and serious military action was taken.