1. “We are a sad orphan without a friend....

2. “We are just a mouse in the claws of a few cats at play.”

3. Radovan Karadžić, 17th Bosnian Serb Assembly Session, July 1992

After the Serb takeover of much of Bosnia in spring 1992, Karadžić increasingly became engaged in diplomatic activities. This chapter deals with his successes and failures as a negotiator from war’s beginning until the final Serb rejection of the Vance-Owen Peace Plan (VOPP) in May 1993. He relished his role as chief negotiator for the Bosnian Serbs and proved adept both at winning key concessions and at denying international negotiators grounds for taking military action. But as the war dragged on, he became more transparently duplicitous and alienated many of his interlocutors. Plain-spoken and often blunt, he practiced few diplomatic niceties. He expressed blustery confidence in himself and his cause, and he contemptuously rejected the criticism of others. But along with bravado, he evidenced vulnerability and paranoia on occasion during the negotiations. Toward the end of the war he became marginalized personally, even as international leaders reluctantly acquiesced to many demands of the Bosnian Serb nationalists.

Karadžić and the Peacemakers: “Acquiesce and Ignore”

During the forty-four months of armed conflict, a rotating cast of international facilitators stepped up to sponsor talks and propose peace plans to the Bosnian belligerents. At one time or another, the UN, the EC, the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia, the Contact Group (the United States, Russia, Germany, France, and Britain), and the United States itself assumed the lead; each held, for a time, primary responsibility for facilitating negotiations with the three adversaries. With the support of the UN, the United States, and leading European states, each facilitator sought to maintain harmony among the other international actors. In contrast to the international actors, the three Bosnian nationalist contenders were in the position of supplicants. They were constantly pressured to accept draft peace plans and were relegated to reacting to proposals presented to them. Their own initiatives were ignored or spurned by the internationals, and they rarely negotiated directly among themselves outside the framework of internationally-supervised talks.