The next round of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) expansion is due in Fall 2002 at the Prague Summit of the NATO members’ heads of state. Not surprisingly, the debate over candidates is already in full swing. However, almost all of the debate has focused on the so-called Vilnius Nine—Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia—named after the Lithuanian capital where their leaders met last year to begin lobbying their cases.

Three European states—Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), and Yugoslavia—were not invited to Vilnius. At the time, they had not met the internal stability requirements to participate. Consequently, they are generally overlooked in the present discussions. Since then, however, all three have voted into office new Western-leaning governments, one for the first time, and thus they deserve a closer look either as candidates for NATO membership or as countries where NATO can play an enhanced stabilizing role.

Croatia was recently included in the Partnership for Peace (PfP) program, the antechamber for eventual NATO candidacy. This is a significant boost for the region’s basic security. The advancement of Western security policy in the region should not stop there, however. Croatia should move on to the next stage, not only because it deserves to, but also for the benefit of regional security.

Only two European states now remain without a formal relationship to NATO: BiH and Yugoslavia. BiH presents both a challenge and an opportunity to NATO. With more than 20,000 NATO troops in the country, the Western alliance should seriously consider how it can use those troops and its substantial influence to permanently stabilize BiH, thereby obtaining a long-desired exit for itself. Given the recent political developments in Belgrade, a similar opportunity for advancing Western interests may lie in Yugoslavia as well, for the first time in a decade.

Croatia

Croatia’s recent inclusion in the PfP program is long overdue. Since we often speak of NATO membership as a reward, the delay here is curious, as perhaps no new state deserves this honor more than Croatia. Since the breakup of the Warsaw Pact, Croatia has done more to benefit Western interests than any other new democracy. The smooth transformation of Zagreb politics from one-party monolith to multi-party government was indeed a welcome harbinger for democratization in the region, but Croatia’s positive role in the region predates the January 2000 elections.

To begin, Croatia saved BiH. In the summer of 1995 its military operations, named Operation Storm, ended a carnage Europe had not seen since World War II—a humanitarian catastrophe for which the West could not muster an appropriate response. The Western capitals often unfairly take credit for this turnaround; in fact, the peace in BiH came only once the Croatian Army (HV) had established a new balance of power in the region by its summer operations. Everything that followed, from the first exercise of NATO air power to the Dayton-Paris peace agreement, was a filling-in of a diplomatic puzzle.

“All along, the United States and its allies have been looking for a force—other than themselves—that could check Serbian and Bosnian Serb adventurism and produce a military balance on which realistic settlement could be built. Maybe such a force is now emerging: Croatia,” wrote The Washington Post three days before Operation Storm commenced. At the end of the operation the Post added, “The Croatians argue they are not the problem but the solution; they claim to have created a new regional ‘balance’ on which ‘proper’ peace talks with the Serbs can begin. This line has been enthusiastically adopted by the American government, which is under pressure to show that the quiet political support it extended to Croatia had a legitimate purpose of promoting a negotiation in Bosnia.”

Richard Holbrooke, the main US diplomatic broker in Dayton, makes a rather unflattering reference to the HV in his peace negotiations diary as “junkyard dogs,” typical to his style, but he adds that Zagreb had Washington’s unsaid support in its endeavors in BiH out of desperation, as the only alternative to the risk-averse West.

One military analyst at the time noted that the turnaround in Bosnia was 80 percent the doing of the HV, 15 percent of the Bosnian Croat militia (the HVO), and 5 percent of the Bosnian Muslim militia (the ABiH). Interestingly, Britain’s leading commentator, Martin Wollacott, later concluded in The Washington Times that the Croatian military victories in 1995 changed the fortunes for BiH, while the Western diplomatic initiative that followed only protected the Serbs.

Controversies

Croatia’s positive role that year has been overshadowed by the often confusing and unpopular policies of its past government, led by Franjo Tudjman. However, the recent political changes in Zagreb allow for a reconsideration of Croatia’s role without having to refer to its previous leaders’ style of governing and understanding of democracy.

Croatia’s positive role has also been overshadowed by two recent decisions in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY): Blaskic and Kordic, in which Croatia was found to have been involved as an aggressor in BiH in 1993. These decisions, however, are unlikely to stand the test of time, and should be reversed. The ICTY judges disregarded the case law on this issue, which required “command and control” of a country’s forces in foreign territory. The decision also included a spurious argument that, while Croatia’s own forces were neither present nor involved in fighting in central Bosnia, its forces stationed further south in Herzegovina—forces that were securing the isolated Croatian cities of Dubrovnik and Split—relieved the Bosnian Croat militia from fighting the Bosnian Serb militia, thus allowing these forces to engage the Bosnian Muslim militia in central Bosnia.

In fact, the ICTY does not even have the mandate to decide on the question of international conflict, which is the domain of the International Court of Justice. The decisions in the two cases say more about ICTY than about the conflict in BiH. The ICTY appears to be more focused on creating new international criminal law, often far different from present international and any domestic law, rather than on dispensing justice and promoting truth and reconciliation in BiH.