Frank Mc Closkey - Efforts To Bring Peace To The Balkans

Efforts To Bring Peace To The Balkans

While on a fact-finding mission to Croatia during the Croatian War of Independence, McCloskey was one of the first outsiders to arrive in the Croatian village of Voćin within hours after the Voćin massacre in 1991. After witnessing the atrocities in Voćin (McCloskey was the first to use the word genocide to describe the activities in the disintegrating Yugoslavia), McCloskey made the issue of bringing peace to the Balkans his primary issue, even though his stance on the war in the Balkans put him at odds with members of his own party, including the Clinton White House.

On a Sunday morning in December 1991, McCloskey got into a car and drove to Voćin and surrounding villages, where Vojislav Seselj's withdrawing Chetniks had murdered 53 people, most of them elderly men and women . McCloskey had a close look at every mangled body. Some of them had been shot in head, others had been burned to death, and at least one had been dismembered with a chainsaw. The next morning McCloskey held a press conference at the Hotel Intercontinental in Zagreb. There were only a small number of American reporters, and about the only coverage of note was in USA Today. Mark Dalmish, the CNN reporter in Zagreb refused to attend McCloskey’s press conference because he didn’t want to give the Congressman a "soapbox." But the story was big in Europe, especially in Germany. During the press conference McCloskey called the massacre at Voćin, and all the others that had happened in Croatia, genocide. He was the first to put it in that context and like a lot of other things McCloskey said and did, the reference to genocide caused considerable consternation at the State Department. In fact, State did not decide to call these murders genocide until much later, after the deaths of a quarter million people in three countries.

It was after Voćin that McCloskey became an outspoken critic of the Serbian campaign and of his colleagues in Washington who continued to insist the conflict in Croatia was only a "civil war", and something in which the U.S. had no business interfering. McCloskey went immediately to Belgrade and accused Slobodan Milosevic of war crimes to his face. After that he went back to Washington, contacting State Department officials at the highest levels to which he had access. He gave Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger a complete briefing, and wondered why nothing was done. When the same Serbian units that conducted the massacres in Croatia began to spread their grim work around Bosnia-Herzegovina, McCloskey went to have a look for himself.

In 1992, after returning from his first trip to Mostar in Bosnia as a guest of the Croation American Association, McCloskey held a press conference at the Foreign Press Bureau at Hotel Split. In the presence of a State Department representative, a U.S. Marine Corps officer, and members of the international press corps, McCloskey called for U.S. led NATO air strikes against Serbian positions in Bosnia-Herzegovina as a way of ending the war.

When it became clear to him that support would not be forthcoming from either his party or Administration leaders, McCloskey broke with the mainstream Democratic party and made history by looking Warren Christopher in the eye during a hearing on the Balkans and demanding the Secretary of State's resignation for his conduct of policy toward Bosnia-Herzegovina.

In December 1993, at the request of Gojko Susak, then Croatian Minister of Defense, McCloskey went to Geneva and helped broker an uneasy peace between Croats and Muslims fighting each other in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Once again, McCloskey was the first, but this time the State Department followed his lead and the peace became permanent. Sadly, when the Washington Agreement was actually signed between Croats and Muslims in 1994, McCloskey was not invited. Undaunted, he elbowed his way into the Old Executive Office Building to witness the ceremony, and said afterwards President Clinton had grudgingly acknowledged his presence.

Part of the reason for his distance from his fellow Democrat may have had to do with the fact that McCloskey had handed President Clinton his very first foreign policy defeat. But that particular battle was the beginning of a movement in Congress that transformed the British-backed Clinton policy toward the Balkans. By continually drawing attention to "ethnic cleansing" in the villages and towns of ex-Yugoslavia, McCloskey managed to gain the support of a majority of Democrats who, on every issue but this one, remained loyal to the Administration's position on non-intervention.

McCloskey brokered a broad coalition of Democrats and Republicans who had listened to his daily calls from the floor of the U.S. House of representatives to stop the genocide. They backed legislation called the McCloskey-Gilman amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1995 (HR 4301, 104th Congress), which was intended to lift the arms embargo first against Bosnia and then Croatia. Despite tough opposition, the McCloskey-Gilman amendment passed the House of Representatives 244-178 on June 9, 1994. In the U.S. Senate, a similar bill was sponsored by Bob Dole and Joe Lieberman. It was defeated by a 50-50 vote on July 1, 1994 (Senate Amendment 1851 to S. 2182, 104th Congress). In 1995, after McCloskey was out of Congress, both houses of the 105th Congress passed a bill to lift the U.S. arms embargo on Bosnia by veto-proof, two-thirds majorities. President Clinton did veto the legislation in August 1995 while Congress was out of session. By the time Congress had returned, Clinton had launched a diplomatic initiative that would result in the Dayton Peace Accords.

During his tenure in Congress, McCloskey made many trips to Bosnia, and spent his post-Congressional years working to bring peace and stability to Bosnia and the Balkans. Samantha Power recounted these efforts in her 2002 book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide .