When he lost to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 elections, Jimmy Carter was only 56. Too young for traditional political retirement and with a purpose in life still, he soon set out to make the most of his years ahead. He devoted himself to establishing The Carter Center and pursuing a number of causes including conflict resolution. Carter’s post-presidential life won him plaudits and the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize. In fact, he has been widely considered an exemplary former president. In the process, he reinvented himself and the post-presidency.
In pursuing conflict resolution, Carter opted for private peacemaking and, in the process, did away with established norms expected of former presidents. His private diplomacy included meeting and negotiating with unsavoury figures deemed unworthy of a former president’s imprimatur. In 1994 alone, Carter travelled to meet and negotiate with North Korea’s Kim Il Sung and Haiti’s Raoul Cedras. Negotiating with international pariahs led to criticisms of Carter for providing them with face-time and even a degree of legitimacy. Perhaps the most controversial of his private peacemaking efforts until and since then was his 1994 meeting with Bosnian Serb rebel leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic.
Shortly before Christmas of 1994, Carter made a more than 5,000-mile trip from the United States to the Bosnian Serb stronghold of Pale outside Sarajevo. He was welcomed by the who’s who of the rebel leadership. The purpose of his trip was to hammer out a ceasefire between the rebels and the Bosnian government in the midst of the winter. His meetings with Karadzic and Mladic raised eyebrows and were roundly criticised. The 39th American president met in 1994 with individuals that the US State Department had listed as war crimes suspects back in 1992. So what did Carter set out to do and why?
By the time of Carter’s trip, Bosnia had been at war for two and a half years with much of the country overrun by Bosnian Serb forces. The internationally recognized Bosnian government, having survived the initial onslaughts, was putting up serious resistance and had undertaken offensives aimed at recapturing occupied lands. The broad outlines of an international peace plan known as the Contact Group plan hashed out in the summer of 1994 was accepted by the Bosnian government and rejected by the Bosnian Serbs. The winter that year was to serve as a respite before major Bosnian government military operations were expected in the spring of the following year. It is against this backdrop that Carter travelled to Bosnia in December 1994 to reach a ceasefire.
Carter was approached by emissaries of the Bosnian Serb side who had visited the former president at Plains, Georgia with a request for his involvement. The Clinton administration was ambivalent about Carter’s trip and kept its distance without openly opposing it. The Bosnian government was concerned that this was Karadzic’s public relations ploy to get a former American president to visit him but was in no position to prevent it.
When he landed in Sarajevo, Carter got a firsthand sense of the Bosnian capital under siege which he recalls in his memoirs. Bosnian government officials, convinced that Carter was duped into making this trip, offered a lukewarm reception. By contrast, the mood at Pale the next day was jovial. No person of higher political stature and world fame had honoured this town with a visit. The negotiations produced an agreement on a four-month ceasefire.
All the actors involved went along with the ceasefire but for different reasons. The Pale Serbs turned out to be the main beneficiaries of Carter’s private diplomacy. Far more important than a temporary ceasefire was the opportunity to host a former POTUS in their stronghold and brief him on Serb grievances. Carter’s mere presence at Pale was a major publicity coup. This public relations success led Karadzic to exaggerate his own expectations of Carter’s potential future involvement. In fact, Karadzic sought to involve Carter in Bosnia in 1995 again but to no avail.
The Bosnian government was unhappy with Carter’s trip but did not want to derail his mission. In any case, seeking to make the most of a developing situation, Sarajevo demanded that the ceasefire be extended to the whole country and thereby relieve the northwestern besieged enclave of Bihac from further attacks.
Rather than achieve peace, the Carter ceasefire turned out to be just a respite in the war. The winter recess was a prelude to major fact-changing offensives launched by the Bosnian and Croatian armies in the summer of 1995 which helped pave the way to end the war. It was in November 1995 that the negotiations resulted in the Dayton Peace Accords.
Though Carter’s grasp of the Bosnian war was sketchy, his determination to play a peacemaker – a trait seen not infrequently in the former president – overcame any concerns that more seasoned peacemaking hands would have had. His initiative in Bosnia stands as another example of his post-presidential activism.
Yet, one tainted with controversy.
The image that most vividly captured the full controversy of Carter’s trip was a photograph of the former president and the Bosnian Serb leader. The photo-op of the two announcing the ceasefire in December 1994 at Pale was awkward. The former American president who had placed an emphasis on human rights in office and beyond was flanked by the “architect of the Bosnian genocide” – to borrow a description of Radovan Karadzic from American scholar of Bosnia, Robert J Donia.
Today, upon his passing aged 100 on December 29, the world is remembering former President Carter as a statesman and human rights advocate who remained committed to building peace.
But his trip to Pale, and meeting with Karadzic, immortalised in the photograph taken almost exactly 30 years ago, remains a major stain on his long and impactful post-presidential career.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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