ABSTRACT
As in the Gorazde case, policy was in a state of flux, or evolution, when the market-place bombing occurred. Although the Clinton administration had briefly entertained the idea of greater involvement in Bosnia in early 1993, policy-makers had quickly decided to maintain a distance from the diplomatic and military response to the crisis. According to Warren Christopher (1998: 347) Clinton had been reading books on Balkan history that portrayed the region as trapped in an unbreakable circle of violence (for example, see Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts). The siege of Sarajevo continued however and Bosnia, as a US political issue, never went away. In January 1994 NATO leaders met to try to thrash out a consensus on how to deal with the conflict. More than a week prior to the mortar bombing, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé had pressurised Secretary of State Warren Christopher ‘for a new US effort to bring pressure on the Muslims to settle’ (Drew 1994: 410). The diplomacy also became public in a potentially embarrassing, at least for the Clinton administration, fashion. On 25 January the New York Times ran a front-page article, headlined ‘US Rejects Plea to Act in Bosnia’ (Sciolino 1994), detailing Juppé’s criticisms of US policy. Juppé declared:
If the Americans do not convince the Bosnian Muslims that they must stop fighting and that there is no chance that the United States would come to their rescue, then the United States will give them incentives to pursue the fighting on the ground. It would be a catastrophe. And we say to our American friends that they will be responsible for this.
