War and Peace in the Former Yugoslavia

This book argues that the efforts of international mediators to stop the war in Bosnia were deliberately thwarted by the factions, who chose war over peace. Major powers backed clients among the warring parties, and prolonged the war, instead of helping to bring it to an end. NATO sat on the fence when it could have helped bring peace, leading to two more years of war. When the USA finally engaged in the search for peace it did so for domestic political reasons, trampled on the very moral precepts it had used to kill off earlier peace plans, used the building-blocks of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia, without acknowledgement, to draft the Dayton documents, and ended up with a plan that was inferior by far to the earlier Vance-Owen or Stoltenberg-Owen plans. Thoroughly documented, this book will long be discussed by diplomatic historians of the conflict.