Inching Forward: The New York Agreement and a Ceasefire

Abstract

While President Clinton’s senior advisors debated battlefield traffic lights and State Department bureaucrats prepared for a possible settlement, the shuttle team’s diplomats led several intense days of negotiations on two continents to put the finishing touches on the “further agreed principles” they had begun to develop. Bosnian Foreign Minister Sacirbey arrived in Washington for talks on September 22, while Owen, Hill, and Pardew traveled to Belgrade the weekend of September 23–24 to meet with Milosevic and the Bosnian Serbs. The Americans hoped that between these two visits, they would be able to finalize the draft principles in time for another foreign ministers event scheduled during the September 26 Contact Group meeting in New York City—which, like the Geneva meeting, they hoped would be another major step toward a peace agreement.