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UÇKHistory and Memory
Life: 1941 – 13 December 2010

Analytical profile · Diplomats

Richard Holbrooke

Richard Holbrooke was a US diplomat, known as the chief negotiator of the 1995 Dayton agreement on Bosnia. On Kosovo, he met KLA representatives in 1998 and in October of that year negotiated with Slobodan Milošević the agreement that led to a partial withdrawal of Serbian forces and the deployment of OSCE verifiers. In March 1999 he made the last diplomatic attempt in Belgrade before the NATO bombing began. He died in 2010.

Editorial status: Awaiting verificationDrafted from the cited sources; not yet fully reviewed by the editors.

Source basis

Academic monographs on the diplomacy of 1995–1999.

For many Kosovo Albanians, Dayton — which left Kosovo out — revealed the limits of the peaceful strategy [1]. Three years later, Holbrooke's meeting with KLA members was read as a sign that international actors were accepting the KLA as a political reality [2].

The October 1998 agreement temporarily averted air strikes but did not stop the conflict. Scholars debate whether it was a viable settlement or merely a postponement of the crisis [3].

Sources

  1. [1]Tim Judah. Kosovo: War and Revenge. Yale University Press, 2000. https://books.google.com/books/about/Kosovo.html?id=TDmwQgAACAAJ. Accessed 2026-09-16.
  2. [2]David L. Phillips. Liberating Kosovo: Coercive Diplomacy and U.S. Intervention. The MIT Press, 2012-07-20. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9590.001.0001. Accessed 2026-09-16.
  3. [3]Ivo H. Daalder, Michael E. O’Hanlon. Winning Ugly: NATO's War to Save Kosovo. Brookings Institution Press, 2001-10-01. https://www.brookings.edu/books/winning-ugly/. Accessed 2026-09-16.

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