Word: rifkind
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...past few weeks." The British were solidly behind air strikes until, as Defense Minister Michael Portillo said, "the threat to Sarajevo is lifted." Privately, London had been asking Washington to broker a local cease-fire around the Bosnian capital. Now that it is in place, Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind hopes for, if not steady progress, then at least "three steps forward and one step back...
...conference in London. Called in response to the Srebrenica and Zepa debacles, the conference seemed likely to be yet another windy session in which the U.S. and European diplomats would issue meaningless threats. The chairman of this conference, however, was to be Britain's newly appointed Foreign Minister Malcolm Rifkind, who had arrived in Washington on a regularly scheduled visit just as Srebrenica was falling...
...Rifkind and U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher spent the better part of two days together. They talked intensively about Bosnia and eventually agreed on a plan that would call for "substantial and decisive air strikes" if the Bosnian Serbs threatened the U.N. safe haven of Goradze. Once the conference was under way, it took 24 hours to convince the allies that the West had to change the way it did business. That effort eventually bore fruit in the form of several new moves, most of which were hammered out in a series of follow-up nato meetings in Brussels...
Right. But what did they say? And what did they mean? At the end of eight hours of discussion among foreign and defense ministers, British Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind emerged to deliver the official summary of the meeting. He issued the Serbs a warning, but an ambiguous one, declaring that any attack on Gorazde, the last remaining safe area in eastern Bosnia, "would be met with a substantial and decisive response." Precisely what that response would be was not spelled out. The U.S. had gone into the meeting calling for sweeping air attacks on the Serbs. France favored sending more...
...conference agreed to keep the U.N. Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in Bosnia as long as possible. The ministers also said they would use a new U.N. rapid-reaction force now taking shape to secure a land supply route into Sarajevo, where relief shipments have been cut off for weeks. But Rifkind warned that if the U.S. lifts the arms embargo against Bosnia, the situation would become too dangerous and "unprofor would have to withdraw...