a career Foreign Service officer who came out of retirement in the 1990s to help broker peace agreements, organize fair elections and set in place democratizing institutions in the fractious Balkans, died Jan. 18 at his home in Santa Rosa, Calif. He had Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a degenerative brain disorder.
In 1992, Mr. Frowick, a specialist on East-West security issues, was asked by acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger to go to the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia as the first head of mission for what was called the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe Spillover Monitor Mission. ("It was the longest title on a card I have ever had," he told an interviewer in 2003.) His objective was to keep Macedonia from being drawn into the war raging across the former Yugoslavia and to try to improve relations among Macedonian ethnic groups.
In 1995, after leaders of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia agreed to the Dayton Peace Accords, ending the war in Bosnia, President Clinton dispatched Mr. Frowick to Bosnia and Herzegovina as head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. His primary mission was to oversee on behalf of the international community the first post-war elections in that country at all levels of government. The mission was complex, ambitious and unprecedented.
"He was a true pioneer in terms of nation-building and democracy," said Edward P. Joseph, a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. "What you have to understand is that he had to invent some of these things that we now take for granted."
Mr. Frowick immediately encountered a knotty problem when Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal, stayed on as chief of the Serb ruling party. Mr. Frowick maintained that justice demanded that Karadzic step aside as head of his party and remove himself from politics; otherwise, he would strike Karadzic's party from the ballot. Several senior European and U.S. officials opposed the move as too risky, but Mr. Frowick prevailed.
"He recognized you couldn't have elections without strengthening democratic institutions," said David Foley, a State Department spokesman. Foley also recalled Mr. Frowick's definition of diplomacy: "the art of letting the other guy have your way."
In 1999, immediately after completing an assignment as the State Department's executive secretary for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's 50th anniversary celebration in Washington, Mr. Frowick was dispatched to Albania as charge d'affaires near the end of the war in Kosovo. At a time when Albania was trying to deal with more than a million refugees, he helped the small, impoverished nation get on its feet.
Two years later, Mr. Frowick returned to Macedonia to facilitate talks aimed at ending instability and violence instigated by Albanian extremists in northern and western Macedonia.
"He was the finest diplomat I've ever met and, frankly, the finest human being I've ever met, or will meet," Foley said. "He had amazing skills to get people to trust him, to believe him and to make compromises they wouldn't make for anyone else."
Robert Holmes Frowick was born in Des Moines and graduated in 1953 from Indiana University. After service as an Air Force pilot in Korea, he received a master's degree in 1957, also from Indiana University, and a second master's degree, in international relations, from Yale University in 1959.
