Arkansan’s book tells of Bosnian war days
Diplomat scheduling visits to state
As a young intelligence officer, Jonesboro native James W. Pardew helped the United States wage war with Vietnam and battle communism in the shadow of the Iron Curtain. As a civilian, after the fall of the Soviet Union, he helped to pacify Bosnia, end bloodshed in Kosovo and prevent a civil war in Macedonia.
After the Dayton Peace Accords brought an end to hostilities in the former Yugoslavia, then-President Bill Clinton made Pardew the U.S. special representative for military stabilization in the Balkans.
In that role, he helped oversee efforts to train and equip defense forces in the newly created state of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
After Pardew proved his mettle in the former Yugoslavia, then-President George W. Bush tapped him to serve as U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria.
He wrapped up his public service at NATO, serving three years as a deputy assistant secretary-general for operations. That role ended in August 2008.
“I would never have imagined when I rolled out of Arkansas State with my wife in 1966 that my life would have developed the way it did,” he said in a recent interview.
(The school was known then as Arkansas State College and it became a university the next year.)
Over the years, he carefully chronicled his diplomatic activities, including his interactions with heads of state and international war criminals.
Now Pardew, 73, has written a book highlighting efforts by the United States and its allies to end Serbian aggression throughout the region.
Peacemakers: American Leadership and the End of Genocide in the Balkans is scheduled to be released Friday by University Press of Kentucky.
Pardew will be in Arkansas to promote the book in February.
He is scheduled to sign books at the Barnes and Noble in Turtle Creek Mall in Jonesboro from 1-4 p.m. Feb. 4.
On Feb. 5, he’ll speak at 7 p.m. at Arkansas State University and sign books afterward. The next day, he will speak at Nettleton High School. Pardew is a graduate of the Jonesboro high school.
Then he’ll be in Little Rock on Feb. 7 to speak at the Clinton School of Public Service.
Pardew says Peacemakers highlights a time when the United States was able to build successful international coalitions to achieve important objectives.
The greatest breakthrough occurred in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
About 100,000 Bosnians were killed between 1992 and 1995, according to Pardew. Nearly two-thirds of those were Bosnian Muslims.
Serbia used a euphemism — “ethnic cleansing” — to describe its genocidal campaign.
Eventually, several Serbian leaders would be charged with crimes against humanity.
The slaughter ended only after NATO intervened, bombing Bosnian Serb military targets until the Serbs agreed to lift their siege of Sarajevo, withdrawing heavy weapons and allowing the city’s airport to reopen.
As the secretary of defense representative to the U.S. Negotiating Team, Pardew worked closely with Richard Holbrooke, who led the effort.
Serbian aggression was also countered in Kosovo, resulting, eventually, in the creation of yet another sovereign state.
Both efforts saved lives and brought greater stability to the region, Pardew said.
“The U.S. engagement in the Balkans was a major foreign policy success,” he said. “It ended the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II. It ended the genocide and it was really the high point of American international influence since the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
That type of coalition building is less evident now that Donald Trump is president, he said.
“I think he’s a disaster,” Pardew said.
“His relationship with France, with Germany, with Great Britain [is] terrible. They don’t know how to react to his behavior. I don’t think foreign policy done by tweet is appropriate. I think it’s demeaning to the country. I think we’re becoming more isolated. Our leadership in the world is declining. Now, I believe all of this is reversible, but it’s shocking to me the direction of the U.S. foreign and national security policy today,” he said.
America needs to work with its allies, in part, because its armed forces and its finances are already stretched so thin, he said.
“I think people who like unilateralism aren’t aware of the cost of military engagement nor the dangers, and they’re not good at math. They’ve not looked at the size of the U.S. military and so forth,” he said. “Wars are easy to start, but once they start, it’s hard to control them.”
Pardew, who has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Arkansas State, took extensive notes throughout his time in the former Yugoslavia.
That allowed him to provide a close-up portrait of all the key players, including Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian president who was charged with war crimes, but died in 2006 in the Netherlands before a verdict could be rendered.
Pardew portrays Milosevic’s heavy drinking and his struggles with nicotine addiction as well as his ruthlessness.
He was “a man with so much blood on his hands,” Pardew said. “He was a genocidal thug. I never lost sight of that.”
Many Americans are unfamiliar with the Balkans, but they occupy prime European real estate, he said.
“The great powers in the history of Western civilization have been there at one time or another. I mean, Alexander the Great, the Greeks, the Romans, Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarians, the Nazis, the Soviet Union [and] the Russians have come through there,” he said.
The great civilizations “have all left their traces there,” he said. “And now that communism has gone away, it’s easy to get there and travel around.”
The region is better off today than it was two decades ago and there is still good will towards Americans, he said.
“I think a lot of the countries would like to see more U.S. engagement, continued U.S. engagement, because they still have problems to resolve,” he said.