Daniel P. Serwer

The following is Daniel P. Serwer's biography from the United States Institute of Peace website:

Daniel P. Serwer is the Institute's director of Peace and Stability Operations and its Balkans Initiative. He coordinates the Institute's on-the-ground efforts in conflict zones, including nonviolent conflict strategies, facilitated dialogue, and postconflict reconstruction. He has worked on preventing interethnic and interreligious conflict in Iraq, and has been deeply engaged in facilitating dialogue between Kosovo Serbs and Albanians.

Serwer was a senior fellow at the Institute working on Balkan regional security in 1998–99 and before that was a minister-counselor at the Department of State, where he won six performance awards. As State Department director of European and Canadian analysis in 1996–97, he supervised the analysts who tracked Bosnia and Dayton implementation as well as the deterioration of the security situation in Albania and Kosovo. Serwer served from 1994 to 1996 as U.S. special envoy and coordinator for the Bosnian Federation, mediating between Croats and Muslims and negotiating the first agreement reached at the Dayton peace talks. From 1990 to 1993, he was deputy chief of mission and chargé d'affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Rome; as such, he led a major diplomatic mission through the end of the Cold War and the entire course of the Gulf War. Serwer is co-author of Institute publications on Iraq as well as Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, and Serbia. He received his Ph.D. in history from Princeton University.

Training Otpor youth

Serwer was involved in training the Otpor anti-Milosevic youth movement in Serbia. According to Jonathan Mowat, writing in Online Journal, after Otpor leader Srdja Popovic and US Army Col. Robert Helvey taught nonviolent resistance methods to Otpor activists, international support for Otpor began to appear:

That support, largely denied to the Serbian opposition before, now began to flow. Otpor and other dissident groups received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, affiliated with the U.S. government, and Otpor leaders sat down with Daniel Serwer, the program director for the Balkans at the U.S. Institute for Peace, whose story of having been tear-gassed during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration gave him special credibility in their eyes. The International Republican Institute, also financed by the U.S. government, channeled funding to the opposition and met with Otpor leaders several times. The U.S. Agency for International Development, the wellspring for most of this financing, was also the source of money that went for materials like t-shirts and stickers.

External Resouces

• Jonathan Mowat, "The new Gladio in action?: Ukrainian postmodern coup completes testing of new template", Online Journal, March 19, 2005. Contains descriptions of the operators behind the manipulation of Otpor, and who financed this.