The Contact Group on (and in)Bosnia

Abstract

In the spring of 1994 a new actor appeared on the scene in international efforts to mediate the conflict in Bosnia. The Contact Group on Bosnia took up where the Europe Union (EU), the Conference (now Organization) on Security and Co-operation in Europe, and the United Nations had failed in bringing the warring parties to the negotiating table. It differed from previous mediation efforts in that it provided a deliberately informal framework for mediation. Thus, it necessarily benefited from the outset from a more flexible and confidential mode of operation. Nevertheless Contact Group mediation stalled just a few months after it began, when its peace plan was rejected by the Bosnian Serbs, and a stalemate lasting more than a year ensued. The process was reinvigorated only after the United States showed a unilateral commitment to conflict resolution.This article is concerned with the role played in the Bosnian peace process by the Contact Group from its creation in April 1994 to the conclusion of the Dayton peace talks in November 1995. A discussion of Contact Group activity throughout the period is followed by an investigation of the reasons behind, and the effectiveness of, its mediation. While collective mediation through the Group had certain advantages, it also brought with it costs, associated in particular with the problems faced by the Group in striving to maintain unity. The collective mediation role was supported by a second role, that of managing relations between the key international actors involved in Balkan diplomacy and establishing their positions in the post-cold war international order. The strength of commitment of Contact Group members to ensuring the appearance of public unity was at least as important as the conflict mediation role, perhaps more so.A Brief History of the Contact GroupThe Contact Group was established in April 1994, amid renewed international concern about Bosnia following the shelling of the Sarajevo marketplace, to try to revive the international peace process which had stalled a year earlier. It was composed of diplomatic representatives of five states -- France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States -- who have met regularly at both ministerial and official levels since 1994 and have assumed co-ordination of European Union, Russian, and United States diplomatic initiatives in the former Yugoslavia.The initiative for the Group originated in discussions between the co-chairmen of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia (ICFY), David Owen and Thorvald Stoltenberg, and United States representatives at a time when the Americans were showing a greater willingness to be fully involved in brokering peace in the region. The United States had mooted proximity talks on a territorial settlement in Bosnia, with the direct involvement of the United States and the Russian Federation, to reinforce and possibly substitute for EU-United Nations mediation attempts, which were increasingly seen as inadequate. But some means was needed to facilitate this approach.(f.1) There appears to have been broad agreement between the ICFY co-chairs and the United States that an appropriate framework would be a small confidential negotiating group which would include the United States and Russia, but which would also comprise the United Kingdom, France, and Germany as the three key West European actors in the Balkans. The Contact Group came into being on 19 April 1994 as a loose co-ordinating committee of representatives of each of the five states plus two representatives of the ICFY co-chairmen. One week later, the Group held its first ministerial meeting in London.The Contact Group focussed initially on two key issues. First, it had to draw up a territorial map as a basis for political settlement of the Bosnian conflict. Second, in an attempt to break the existing ties between Slobodan Milosevic's Serbian government in Belgrade and Radovan Karadzic's Bosnian Serbs in Pale, it developed the concept of a clear link between Serbian government compliance with a settlement to the conflict and the suspension of sanctions against Serbia. …