Authors

Alex Cruikshanks¹;  ¹ Unaffiliated (most recently: University of East Anglia), UK

Discussion

Over the course of spring and summer 1992, Portuguese diplomat Jose Cutileiro chaired a series of negotiations among the major political leaders in Bosnia-Herzegovina in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to reach an agreement to avoid Yugoslavia’s central republic sliding into war. In the years since, a popular mythology has developed around the talks: that on 18 March 1992, Cutileiro had reached a miraculous peace agreement to avert the war that had been signed by all parties, only to be cruelly snatched away by Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović renouncing his signature a few days later.

Almost none of this myth is accurate: Cutileiro had not reached anything that approached a final agreement; the participating parties had not signed anything; and while they would all explicitly pursue goals which explicitly contradicted the principles laid down by Cutileiro, they all continued to state their willingness to abide by those principles for several months after. Indeed, at the time relatively little significance was attached to the events of 18 March: it was just one more round of talks in negotiations which had already been going on for several weeks and, contrary to claims of any final agreement having been reached, were already scheduled to continue for several more.

The scholarly literature has, to its credit, made a clear effort to refute this myth. Most notably, both Josip Glaurdić in his book ‘The Hour of Europe’ and Robert Donia in his biography of Bosnian Serb nationalist leader Radovan Karadžić have discussed the myth’s inaccuracies and shown how it was developed later, pushed by both European mediators to explain their perceived failure and by Karadžić and the Serb nationalists to justify their violent campaigns.

However, neither Glaurdić nor Donia dwell significantly on the development on the Cutileiro talks themselves, and so only tell half the story. A deeper examination of the talks on a week-by-week basis reveals a surprisingly dynamic process, in which the fortunes of the participating delegations swung wildly back and forth. Just days before 18 March, it had been Izetbegović who had seemed triumphant, on the brink of securing a more favourable agreement, and the subject of praise by mediators for being constructive and forthcoming, while Karadžić and the Serb nationalists seemed chastened and diplomatically isolated. This marked the high point of a series of modest victories by Izetbegović and his Bosniak nationalist SDA party over the preceding weeks of negotiations, successfully pushing back against European proposals which has been even more favourable to Karadžić than previously thought. This paper seeks to reexamine the events of February-March 1992 on their own terms, and to reinterpret the events of 18 March as a somewhat abrupt change in direction of the Cutileiro negotiations, the discursive consequences of which would ultimately go far beyond what anyone anticipated at the time.