With the Vance-Owen Peace Plan relegated to the dustbin of history, Bosnian Serb leaders revived their nationalist project in the summer and autumn of 1993. Karadžić was heartened by international concessions in further negotiations following Serb rejection of the VOPP. He remained personally popular among Serbs and firmly in charge of the RS government, but he began to encounter challenges from other Serbs who found him personally abrasive or found his policy decisions ill-considered. For the first time, his personal standing began to diverge from the movement he had created and led. His relationship with Milošević deteriorated further, he quarreled with Mladić over control of the army, and he watched the assembly become increasingly independent. Unlike his measured responses to earlier challenges¸ he turned arrogant, self-obsessed, and increasingly isolated in the face of criticism and opposition. In late 1993 he began to become his own worst enemy, just as the Bosnian Serb nationalist movement experienced significant successes in achieving its goals. This chapter examines the slowly developing crisis that beset his diplomatic quest for permanent acceptance of Bosnian Serb territorial gains.

Union of Three Republics: The Plan Even a Serb Could Love

Although international diplomats had threatened Karadžić with grave consequences if the Bosnian Serbs rejected the VOPP, the rejection triggered not retaliation but additional concessions to the Serb side. Only days after the assembly’s final rejection, international negotiators revisited their proposals in hopes of tailoring them to win Bosnian Serb approval. On August 21, 1993, they unveiled a proposal called the “Union of Three Republics” (also known as the Owen-Stoltenberg Plan, crediting Vance’s replacement, Thorwald Stoltenberg), that gave the Bosnian Serb nationalists most of what they sought. The new proposal “gave the Serbs their own contiguous area for a republic within a Union of Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Owen wrote, acknowledging that negotiators had reoriented their efforts to bring the Bosnian Serbs on board. The Union of Three Republics was a peace plan that even a Serb could love.