In an interview with the magazine Dani, 3 August 2001, Galbraith says:
It’s still not entirely clear how it came about that the Croat forces halted their advance before Banja Luka. Your testimony could throw additional light on the circumstances under which the operation was called off.
That was one of the absolutely key moments in the war. Even now I can’t tell you whether we did the right thing. Perhaps we did, perhaps we didn’t...
What was your problem?
I’ll tell you what my problem was at the time, and how I look at things today. It was September and Holbrooke had arrived with his team. Ordinarily we two would first have gone directly to Tudjman and talked with him for an hour, an hour and a half, before joining his ministers. We were waiting outside Tudjman’s office, Holbrooke had come in from Belgrade , with instructions from the Secretary of State to tell Tudjman not to take Banja Luka , and he asked me what I thought about it.
Was he in two minds too?
It was my impression that Holbrooke didn’t think he had to obey his instructions, since on previous occasions he hadn’t obeyed them either. And he asked me. People on the inside will tell you that I was a hawk, that I called for military intervention and favoured a military solution. But at that moment I too had certain doubts. My doubts related to two things: one was the refugee population from western Bosnia and the Krajina which was in the area, as well as the local population, since I had already seen the Croats in action. It’s true that the city was in the hands of people whom I consider fascists, but there were normal people there too, women and children, innocent people. I was worried about the potential consequences of the 400,000-strong wave of refugees that would have passed through the Posavina corridor and Brcko, and the humanitarian catastrophe it would have produced. On the other hand, I was afraid we might replace one problem by another.
In other words, if Tudjman took Banja Luka would he give it up?
I’d often heard him talking about how Banja Luka had traditionally been oriented towards Zagreb , and I know what that meant: when we divide up Bosnia , Banja Luka will be in Croatia . I think Holbrooke was influenced by the fact that Milosevic had told him that in Banja Luka there were Serbs representing an alternative leadership to Pale. We discussed this and both came to the conclusion that we should tell Tudjman to halt. Holbrooke told him that. It was a very hard decision, and if we’d felt only slightly differently it would have been different. Sometimes history is made not by big, carefully pondered strategic decisions, but precisely like this.
How does it strike you from today’s perspective?
The reason for allowing Croatia to take Banja Luka was that it would have meant the total collapse of the Bosnian Serbs and the fascist principles they espoused. It would have been far easier to reconstruct the country in the conditions of a total Serb defeat than it is at present. And we did think about this at the time. But even today I don’t know the right answer. The peace would have been far more stable if the Croatian Army had taken Banja Luka .
In other words, you regret your decision?
Not necessarily. The other side of the coin is the question of how many more people would have died. I don’t know what the price is. I only know these are hard decisions that cannot be avoided. We had the responsibility for taking that decision and I think we took it on the basis of the best possible assessment we could make at the time. During the past six years I’ve thought about it every day.
http://www.bhdani.com/arhiva/217/intervju.shtml
Bilo je, valjda, vazno "To End A War"...
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