Richard Holbrooke deserves much credit for the diplomatic breakthrough in Dayton, Ohio, that ended the fighting in Bosnia and Herzegovina. American political muscle and ability to fine-tune NATO's air strikes were crucial to the successful outcome. Yet in writing last week in TIME that "there are disturbing signs of backsliding from others" who signed the Dayton accords (read the European nations), Holbrooke is in danger of passing the buck over responsibility for the full implementation--and hence success or failure--of the peace agreement.

But the buck cannot be passed that easily. Yes, the military provisions have been implemented successfully so far, thanks in no small measure to U.S. military involvement. The guns have fallen silent, and the so-called inter-entity boundary lines are being respected. Yet the next phase--carrying out the civilian aspects of Dayton, particularly the return of refugees and the prosecution of war criminals--cannot be divorced from the military provisions and the conduct of the implementation force (ifor). These issues were always going to be the most difficult--particularly since neither President Tudjman of Croatia nor President Milosevic of Serbia has been ready to make the same commitment to imposing the Dayton wording over freedom of movement and war criminals as they did to the cease-fire and the pulling back of forces to the agreed lines on the Dayton map.

The choices the American military commanders--General Joulwan, the overall NATO commander, and Admiral Leighton Smith, the theater commander--must grapple with are very similar to those that confronted successive U.N. commanders. But the U.N., be it noted, had only 16,000 troops at a time of war, whereas ifor has 55,000 troops to maintain a peace.

Take the question of pursuing war criminals. There is no doubt that if NATO commanders were ready to seize Radovan Karadzic and General Mladic under the arrest orders issued by the Hague tribunal, that would clearly reduce the chances of the inter-entity boundary lines becoming permanent divisions, for their obstructionist tactics would cease. But it is not easy for U.S. commanders to authorize such action. They are still haunted by their decision to hunt down General Aidid in Somalia and believe that it was the failure of this policy that led to U.S. withdrawal.

Undoubtedly aware of such calculations, Karadzic has now moved to replace Rajko Kasagic as Prime Minister of the Republika Srpska. Kasagic, who refuses to step down, has constructively cooperated with the peace process and his authority must be upheld. That should be part of the Dayton military mission that some are so anxious to declare over and done with. It is an ominous sign that Karadzic feels confident enough to challenge a Bosnian Serb who obviously has the support of Milosevic. It is essential that NATO now call Karadzic's bluff and that he be made to fear arrest. Otherwise the September elections in Bosnia might not take place, and Dayton's civilian provisions will indeed be in trouble.

A lesson we should have learned from our experience in the former Yugoslavia since 1991 is that if we allow a word or comma to be changed in an all-party agreement, then it crumbles away as each party seeks advantage over the others. Dayton was necessarily a package deal, and we should nail down the signatories to every single commitment in it and recognize that the timetable is a crucial and integral part.

Richard Holbrooke's charge that some "important European officials are privately writing off Dayton's political provisions and preparing the ground for de facto partition next year" has been fully rebutted by one of his co-negotiators at Dayton, Pauline Neville-Jones, who led the British delegation. Writing in the Financial Times last week, she took Holbrooke to task for suggesting that Europe's implementation of the civilian provisions of the Dayton accord compared unfavorably with the success of the military operation under U.S. leadership because the Europeans had insisted on "messy, ineffective arrangements" for the civilian tasks. That spin on events, Ms. Neville-Jones insisted, is a "travesty of the negotiating history."

Holbrooke's allegations are reminiscent of the name-calling and finger-pointing across the Atlantic that did so much to destroy the peace agreement that Cyrus Vance and I helped craft in May 1993, which could have ensured that Bosnia and Herzegovina was truly a single, unified nation. Instead we--the international community--allowed Karadzic and Mladic to continue "ethnic cleansing" for a further 2 1/2 years, and increased the chances of an eventual partition.

The jury will stay out for the next few years on whether Bosnia and Herzegovina will become united, and all we can hope is that different voices will be heard in the torn country, ones that have been suppressed by war and its accompanying hatreds. Only new relationships established among the Bosnian peoples, albeit slowly and painfully--and with considerable European assistance--will unify rather than divide. There is no short-term fix available, and while economic help for reconstruction can provide some of the cement and the trial of some war criminals a necessary catharsis, only reconciliation can ultimately prevent partition.

1992-95.

Lord Owen was the European Union's chief negotiator on Bosnia in