Newsday
July 14, 1997

Albright Taking Tougher Stance

By Roy Gutman. WASHINGTON BUREAU

Washington - Six weeks ago, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright staged a whirlwind visit to Bosnia and its neighbors that ended in the office of Biljana Plavsic, the beleaguered president of Republika Srpska.

Publicly, Albright berated Plavsic for the Serbs' failure to comply with the Dayton peace accords. But after private conversations with Albright, Plavsic signaled that she would be more moderate, setting the stage for a political confrontation with hardliners led by Radovan Karadzic, an indicted war criminal.

When she returned to Washington, Albright continued to push, this time, pressing President Bill Clinton to allow NATO troops to arrest indicted war criminals. The first step took place last week when British NATO forces seized one indicted war criminal in Prijedor and killed a second in a shoot-out.

Just as she has strengthened the backbone of Plavsic, Albright has toughened the stance of the Clinton administration and the U.S.-led NATO alliance. It seems hardly coincidental that her greatest diplomatic push is in East-Central Europe, the region where Albright was born and fled first from Nazism and later Communism.

"Central Europe is a microcosm of all the problems of the contemporary world," says Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Polish-born former national security adviser and longtime mentor to Albright. "It is a pretty good school, albeit an involuntary one, in world affairs."

Today Albright is back in Prague, her birthplace, to celebrate the event of a lifetime - NATO's decision to admit the Czech Republic. It is also a signal, together with the admission of Hungary and Poland, that the United States is back in East-Central Europe, this time with Albright spearheading policy.

The stop is bittersweet, for Albright will have occasion to confront her own family's past. Shortly after taking office, she learned from a Washington Post reporter that her family background is Jewish and that a number of relatives died in Nazi concentration camps. Albright's parents had raised her as a Roman Catholic and had not revealed her background to her.

Albright's hard-edged realism and her insistence that American force must be used to back up American principles have at least some of their roots in Prague, which only one year after her birth came under Nazi control as a result of the Munich pact signed by Britain, France and Germany.

Albright drew the connection between pre-World War II Czechoslovakia and modern-day Bosnia while at the United Nations, insisting that this time around, the dispute can be resolved if U.S. power is brought to bear.

" 'Every time I see what's going on in Bosnia, I'm brought back to what my father was going through in the abandonment of Czechoslovakia,' " Muhamed Sacirbey, the Bosnian ambassador, recalls her saying.

If she succeeds in her drive to have war criminals delivered to the Hague tribunal, it will be a double triumph, for Albright was the principal mover behind creation of the new institution. And throughout Clinton's first term, she argued forcefully for NATO intervention to halt the bloodshed. "She plays the seminal role in Balkan policy," said Thomas Pickering, Albright's undersecretary for political affairs.

Colin Powell, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in his memoirs that Albright "exploded" at a national security debate over the military's unwillingness to risk lives on what it saw as a mission impossible. "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" she asked. Powell could not believe his ears. "I thought I would have an aneurysm," he said.

Albright's low point may have been in June, 1995, when, partly at her prodding, NATO attacked Bosnian Serb positions and the Serbs took hundreds of UN troops hostage. Her finest hour, aides say, was in July and August, 1995, responding to Bosnian Serbs who seized the UN-declared "safe area" of Srebrenica, captured and executed the male population.

Albright used her vantage point at the United Nations to display CIA photos showing the mass graves and to demand a tougher policy. Behind the scenes, according to close aides, she forced the U.S. decisions on using air power, and NATO's intervention that September led to a ceasefire and the Dayton Peace Accords.

Not long after arriving at the State Department, Albright took up the gauntlet again. This time, utilizing her new authority, she launched a formal review of Bosnia policy. She named a hard-charging diplomat, Robert Gelbard, as special envoy for the Balkans and created a new position for her longtime UN legal adviser, David Scheffer - special ambassador for the prosecution of war crimes. The policy review concluded with a call for action - warning that war will resume in Bosnia when NATO forces leave in June, 1998, unless indicted war criminals in the Serb-controlled Republika Srpska entity are arrested and unless refugees expelled during the Serb "ethnic cleansing" campaign in 1992 are free to return to their homes.

After lining up America's NATO partners behind the get-tough approach, Albright several weeks ago toured the region to deliver the message forcefully to every major capital and every ethnic group. She had spent several formative childhood years in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, and pitched her message differently to each audience.

In Croatia, which desperately wants to be seen as part of the West and where the United States has considerable influence, she publicly berated President Franjo Tudjman for allowing ethnic Croat refugees to burn the houses of ethnic Serbs who wanted to return to the Krajina region they fled in 1995. She insisted on visiting one Serb family and, after hearing the official explanation, accused one of Tudjman's ministers of lying.

In Serbia, she announced she had extremely tough talks with President Slobodan Milosevic but revealed almost none of the contents. In Sarajevo, the battered capital of Bosnia, Albright, the mother of three, went out of her way to show her empathy for civilians who suffered during the 3 1/2 -year Serb siege. She spent about a half hour in a U.S.-rebuilt playground with a group of pre-school children who had grown up on the front line, hugged them and said, "I love you."

Her trip won admiration in many quarters, especially among those who are pressing hardest for democracy. Prince Alexander Karadjordjevo, heir to the Serbian throne, who now lives in London, summed up the view of the democratic opposition. He said Albright is "an extremely capable lady. I think she's to be commended for her efforts. There's really a change in pace."