If anything, the fitful start to Operation Task Force Eagle served to reinforce the most critical fact of the mission. As one American officer put it, “As difficult as this is, at least we are entering a country that’s at peace. Can you imagine what a bitch this would have been ff we had to shoot our way in?” As American troops fanned out through the so-called Posavina corridor, some of the most bitterly contested territory in Bosnia, Serb and Bosnian Muslim forces on both sides of the front line met them with waves and quizzical smiles, not gunfire. “If you come in peace,” said Serb Sgt. Marinko Srdic to a young American in the First Armored Division’s First Brigade, “you won’t need the fiak jacket or your helmet.”
Even without hostile fire, there were enough problems last week to illustrate just how daunting a mission the United States and NATO have taken on. At peace, Bosnia remains a country strewn with land mines–literally and figuratively. The commanding officer in the American sector in Tuzla, Maj. Gen. William Nash, acknowledged that the midweek snowfall had made NATO’s efforts to locate and remove the thousands of mines buried in the rock-hard Bosnian earth “a slow, tedious affair.” Scores of mines – some identified, some not – lay within inches on both sides of route “Arizona,” the paved road U.S. troops are using to head south from Croatia into Bosnia.
To their chagrin, the Americans also learned quickly that there is more than bad weather and mine clearing to worry about in Bosnia. Nash had to wade straight into the first American-generated political firestorm of the young mission. One of his subordinates, Col. Gregory Fontenot, commander of the First Armored Division’s First Brigade, was quoted in The Wall Street Journal calling Croats “racist” and telling two African-American soldiers under his command that they could be killed in Bosnia “just because of the color of their skin.”
The remarks infuriated Croatian leaders in Zagreb, Nash’s direct military superiors–and Clinton administration officials in Washington. “If he’s being quoted accurately,” said one, “he’s guilty of very very bad judgment.” Nash himself was supposed to travel north to see Fontenot, but the wings of his helicopter couldn’t be de-iced in time for him to go. Instead he dispatched a subordinate, who gave Fontenot “a major-league talking-to,” as one source put it. Nonetheless, the high command was privately hopeful the controversy would die. The army regards Fontenot as perhaps the ablest field commander in the First Armored Division. “We want him here,” said one senior officer.
The episode showed that the politics of Operation Task Force Eagle will be at least as difficult as the mechanics. In the wake of “peacekeeping” disasters like Beirut and Somalia, the American forces are rolling into Bosnia locked and cocked – a posture Fontenot described as “I'11 kick your s–t if you f–k with me.” The attitude has bemused the locals and drawn scorn from America’s NATO partners, who believe that for now, no one is likely to test the IFOR troops. “There’s no need for this ‘in your face’ stuff,” said one British officer last week. The American contingent, for its part, does not much care what the others think. Nash has let it be known that at some point, he does expect to be tested, and that when that day comes, the response will be withering.
All the Bosnian factions nurse lingering dissatisfaction with the Dayton peace plan. Last week the Bosnian Serbs in Sarajevo formally requested the first alteration of the treaty. They asked U.S. Navy Adm. Leighton Smith, NATO’s senior officer in Bosnia, for a delay of up to one year in the reunification of Sarajevo, which will put them under Bosnian Muslim rule. The request outraged Bosnian Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic, who immediately filed a protest with NATO. Smith, as commander of the Bosnian peacekeeping mission, does have the latitude to modify some of Dayton’s terms, but this will be an excruciating decision. NATO knows that the Serb-held suburbs around Sarajevo could yet explode. And any modification would undoubtedly lead the other factions to ask for changes in the parts of the treaty they don’t like–particularly some of the bitter transfers of land that are yet to come. At the weekend, Smith still had not decided what to do.
The risks in rebuking the Serbs were plain. So far, however tenuously, peace does seem to be taking hold in Bosnia. A Serb general who met with Nash last week told him that the Serb side was well aware of the firepower NATO was bringing-and that as a result, trouble was unlikely. NATO officials say all sides of the conflict are abiding by the terms set in Dayton. Last week the Serbs met their first deadline by pulling back from the front line in divided Sarajevo. French soldiers now patrol streets where they would have been shot just two months ago. As a reward to the Serbs’ political sponsor, President Slobodan Milosevic, the Clinton administration last week finally lifted the economic sanctions that had been strangling Belgrade.
Whether and in what way Sarajevo’s Serbs might rebel if Smith dismisses their request is not at all clear. That they might, however, shows how delicate a peace operation this is. For the First Armored Division and all the IFOR troops, Bosnia is a new, unfamiliar world. Snow and uncooperative rivers could yet turn into the least of their worries.
