Why he blinkedMilosevic may have capitulated, but there is little reason for exultation among the alliance By Johanna McGeary/TIME
If personal survival is your war aim, then surrender is always
an option. We will never know exactly when the decision took
root in the contrarian lobes of Slobodan Milosevic's brain. But
three weeks ago, his body language changed. For weeks, whenever
he received Russian special envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin, the
Serbian leader would loll arrogantly back in his seat and hold
forth, filling the room with his self-serving discourse. Since
launching a diplomatic shuttle on April 14, Chernomyrdin had
spent dozens of fruitless hours with Milosevic, most of them
listening. Then on May 19, the Russian detected a subtle shift.
During a seven-hour chat, Milosevic kept leaning forward, paying
attention, listening intently, as if hoping to hear something he
could latch on to.
Last Thursday he evidently did. Serbia's truculent,
unpredictable leader startled the world by abruptly accepting
all of NATO's demands, almost the exact terms he had rebuffed on
March 23 when he set off the air war. Now he had decided to stop
it. It took him just over six hours of businesslike
question-and-answer with the emissaries to make up his mind and
formally capitulate.
Such a relief. In a test of wills in which one side had all the
weapons but both underestimated the other's staying power,
Milosevic cracked first. The chilling spectacle of NATO slamming
20,000 bombs and missiles into Yugoslavia can come to a merciful
end. Bill Clinton proves--again--to be the luckiest President
alive. At nearly the exact moment that Clinton gathered the
Joint Chiefs to confront the unpalatable implications of a
ground war to salvage the stalemated air campaign, Milosevic
handed him victory.
Victory? The word is technically correct. The Serbs will be out
of Kosovo, NATO in. The alliance can be proud it hung together,
stuck to its demands and lost not a single soldier in combat--an
amazing, unprecedented zero. The West stood up against the
obscene barbarism of "ethnic cleansing," drawing moral lines for
the world. Serbia's war machine has been mutilated. Air power
vindicated itself.
But it would be wrong to exult. NATO miscalculated when it
entered the war and waged it with self-imposed limits. The armed
confrontation failed in its primary aim. Air strikes were
undertaken to save Kosovo's Albanians from Serbian wrath, but
the offensive that NATO launched gave Milosevic the opening to
rampage through the province. It took 72 days of death and
destruction to arrive back where the combatants had started: at
the original precarious prescription for safeguarding the
Kosovars. Except that now 855,000 of them have been expelled
from their wasted homeland, thousands have died, and untold
others have been subjected to atrocious crimes. No one can say
how many will dare to go back. If they don't, Milosevic will
have succeeded in his primary goal of cleansing as many
Albanians from his nation as he could.
The Serbian people have paid dearly in lost lives, lost jobs,
lost hope, yet the leader responsible still rules Yugoslavia, no
less prone to stir up trouble--though surely less able--than he
ever was. The West has acquired an unstable Kosovo protectorate
that will require intensive military and political care for
years to come, and an immense bill, in the billions of dollars,
to reconstruct the ravaged economies of Europe's Balkan quarter.
The truism is the same for this as for every war: the peace is
going to be harder to win.
First come the inherent perils of doing deals with Milosevic.
The very speed of his capitulation made everyone suspect a
trick. From Washington to Brussels, officials urged caution, but
the Pentagon privately believed the agreement was "the real
McCoy." Unwilling to be caught wrong, Washington insisted the
bombing would not actually stop until the Serbs have satisfied
NATO they are carrying out the stringent terms for withdrawal of
40,000-odd troops from Kosovo. NATO wants verifiable deeds, not
seductive words from a leader who has cheated on virtually every
agreement he has ever made. "We are looking for implementation,
implementation, implementation," said State Department spokesman
James Rubin. Belgrade passed a symbolic test Thursday night when
General Dragoljub Ojdanic, the Yugoslav army chief of staff,
personally called NATO commander General Wesley Clark to
"request" that alliance officers meet Serbian officers to
discuss cease-fire mechanics.
More telling will be their faithfulness in following through.
NATO brass convened over the weekend with their Yugoslav
counterparts on the Macedonian border to map out a detailed end
to the hostilities and tell the Serbs to get cracking, brooking
neither prolonged negotiation nor trumped-up delay. Once that
meeting concludes satisfactorily, Belgrade has 48 hours to pull
air-defense missile batteries back 15 miles inside Serbia, and
seven days to roll all its tanks and troops home. NATO
reconnaissance planes will be watching vigilantly to determine
whether the withdrawal is "serious, complete, irreversible,"
said NATO spokesman Jamie Shea. "The dust on the tracks of those
Serbian forces moving out will be the test of whether we can
trust Milosevic." If Belgrade cooperates, a bombing halt was
possible as early as Sunday. If the Serbs hesitate or renege,
the bombing will go on with renewed vigor.
NATO too will have to accelerate smartly to march its 50,000
peacekeepers into Kosovo right behind the departing
Serbs--perhaps as early as Tuesday. A sizable British force is
on hand in Macedonia, and the leading edge of the American
contingent--2,000 Marines--is nearby in the Adriatic, but it
could take a month for all 7,000 G.I.s to deploy. The
peacekeepers need to move fast to prevent the armed and
independence-minded troops of the Kosovo Liberation Army from
swarming into the vacuum. Milosevic has shuffled off the problem
of "demilitarizing" the rebels to NATO, and it won't be easy.
"It is our expectation," insisted Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright, that the K.L.A. will cooperate and accept an agreement
that promises self-rule but does not give them independence or
even the future referendum promised at Rambouillet. Kosovar
cooperation was mistakenly taken for granted in those
negotiations too.
The war's brutalities make it inconceivable for many Albanian
refugees to accept even the most nominal Serbian sovereignty.
"It will be impossible for us to live together," says Rifat
Veseli, a young Kosovar arguing with his friends in tent C-71 at
Macedonia's Stenkovec camp. "How can Western leaders expect me
to wake up and say good day to a Serb?" While K.L.A. officials
are paying lip service to the deal, the likelihood of patching
together a political structure for real cohabitation is dim.
NATO has plenty more devilish details to iron out if the
settlement plan is to work. The two-page, 10-point agreement
left key issues unresolved, including sensitive questions of
command. For weeks Moscow not only insisted on participating in
the peace force but tried to place its troops in charge of
Kosovo's northern quadrant, where many Serbian holy sites lie.
Washington refused for fear that would effectively partition the
province. Now the diplomats are wrangling over just what role
the Russian troops will play and who will command them. Russia's
proud military men oppose the settlement, making it harder for
Moscow's troops to be tucked comfortably under NATO's "unified"
command.
The ambiguities over Kosovo's political structures are
especially ripe for the sort of chiseling Milosevic does so
well. But for the moment, the time had come to cut his losses.
It had been easy to ride out the first 30 days of air strikes,
when bad weather and alliance timidity limited the damage Serbia
suffered. But "he was feeling the pain" in the second month,
says a U.S. intelligence officer, as NATO racked up 350 attack
sorties every 24 hours. Bombs and missiles had blitzed much of
Serbia's heavy industry, energy sector and transport network.
Citizen morale crumbled under water shortages and power outages
as NATO hammered the country's electric grid. Protests broke
out in the smashed industrial cities of the south.
U.S. intelligence spotted Serbian soldiers in Kosovo steadily
slipping away from their posts. A K.L.A. offensive lured Serbian
tanks out of their hiding places, massing them into cannon
fodder for allied warplanes. Even the gruesome pictures of
Serbian civilians mauled by errant bombs failed to crack NATO
determination. Now Clinton was holding serious discussions about
ground troops, a possibility Milosevic thought had been safely
discarded. Perhaps most critical of all, the Hague war-crimes
tribunal finally indicted him on May 27, placing his very life
in jeopardy if he ever slipped from power. "He recognized he
wouldn't prevail," says a U.S. official, and began to put out
peace feelers.
The denouement was accelerated by inspired diplomacy that paired
the sympathetic Russian Chernomyrdin with the neutral Finnish
President, Martti Ahtisaari. Chernomyrdin had had no luck
penetrating the complex, impulsive, stubborn character of the
Serbian leader. But he concluded that you could, eventually, do
a deal with Milosevic if you could help him save face. Early in
May, at breakfast with Vice President Al Gore and Albright,
Chernomyrdin suggested he needed a negotiating partner with
stature in Europe but no connections to NATO. "If I have someone
from the West with me, I have a better chance of getting this
done," he said. "Mother Boss," as the Russian calls Albright,
immediately thought of the solid, no-nonsense Ahtisaari. Not
only did he have years of experience in international
negotiation and the cachet of Finland's assuming the presidency
of the European Union, but Washington was sure he would not sell
out the alliance's conditions.
Ahtisaari was a welcome addition to the team soon nicknamed
"hammer and anvil" in State Department circles. Chernomyrdin
didn't much cotton to his uncompromising American interlocutors,
and he shared the general Russian suspicion that NATO leaders,
particularly Clinton, were driven less by concern for Kosovars
than by the desire to show the rest of the world who is boss.
Washington worried that Chernomyrdin was soft-pedaling NATO's
demands in Belgrade, and wasn't sure he relayed back an accurate
reading of Milosevic's intentions.
The toughest negotiations over the peace plan took place between
the U.S. and Russia, quarreling over ways to bring the war to an
end. But Milosevic's change in body language encouraged
Chernomyrdin to plan another trip to Belgrade last week, even
with no hope of a bombing pause. Washington wanted Ahtisaari to
go along, figuring he could clearly convey NATO's demands, while
the Russian followed his own script, fudging on two that Moscow
opposed: all Serbian forces must be withdrawn and NATO had to
form the core of the peacekeeping force.
By Monday, Chernomyrdin surprised the State Department. Tired of
having each plan rejected by Milosevic or Clinton, he wanted to
go to Belgrade with a final take-it-or-leave-it document, every
word of which he and Ahtisaari would agree on. The Russian
shocked Washington again in the first hour of talks Tuesday with
Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. Chernomyrdin announced
Moscow acceded to the removal of all Serbian troops. Then he
proposed a style change: instead of referring generally to
NATO's demands, the document should spell out everything in
full, including footnotes specifying the mechanics of withdrawal.
Deciding on these kinds of details took hours. Talbott,
Chernomyrdin and Ahtisaari haggled on through the night over two
other issues--how fast the Serbs had to leave and how central
NATO would be to the peacekeeping force. Washington held out for
a swift timetable, and "Strobe just hammered to make sure the
document had NATO at the core," says a senior U.S. official.
When the exhausted diplomats reconvened Wednesday morning,
Ahtisaari threatened to pull out if there was no agreement, and
Chernomyrdin conceded. Now Moscow had sided with NATO, leaving
Milosevic isolated.
Compared with that marathon, the talks in Belgrade were swift
and matter-of-fact. On Wednesday night the envoys and Milosevic
talked for 4 1/2 hours. Chernomyrdin never veered as he read
from the prepared script. Ahtisaari went over it in detail,
explaining why each demand was not negotiable. "Can we make
improvements in the text?" Milosevic asked. "Absolutely not,"
Ahtisaari shot back. This was NATO's best offer, and not a comma
could be changed. Hoping to soften the Finn, Milosevic invited
him to dinner. "Let's not have dinner," answered Ahtisaari.
Instead, the Serbian leader should go back to his advisers and
consult them on accepting NATO's ultimatum.
In hindsight, Serbia's calculating boss had probably already
made up his mind to take the next offer. By 9:30 p.m. he
summoned his rubber-stamp parliament to a special session
Thursday morning to provide some political cover for his
capitulation. Lawmakers approved the deal overwhelmingly the
next day.
Milosevic has emerged with his skin intact, as well as his
uncanny knack for turning defeat into personal victory. NATO, he
felt, had flinched at the ground war needed to drive him from
power. He could brag how his "little nation" had stood up to the
world's most powerful military alliance and nurse Serbian
victimhood.
Yet even if there is no real political opposition to challenge
him now, he cannot rest easy. He will try to put a worth-it-all
face on defeat by claiming this peace agreement is more
favorable than the Rambouillet plan, since it gives Serbia
uncontested sovereignty over Kosovo. But with no troops there to
enforce it, his legal ownership is a sham. And he was forced to
swallow the humiliation of admitting foreign soldiers onto
Yugoslav soil. The ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party voted
against a deal it denounced as a total sellout. Party leader and
Deputy Prime Minister Vojislav Seselj, idol of the hard-liners,
could quit the government. Ultimately, Milosevic will have to
deal with the dawning realization among his suffering citizenry
that after he let Serbia be ruined, he handed over Kosovo. "He
betrayed us with war," said Croatian Serb Dragan Miljanic, 62,
idling in a Belgrade street. "Milosevic only cares for his own
skin."
This war has burned nearly everyone it touched. Washington's
uneasy relations with China and Russia have been poisoned.
Beijing will take a long while to get over the insult of errant
bombs dropping on its Belgrade embassy, and lingering resentment
could hamper the peace plan as it moves into the U.N. Security
Council. Washington feels heartened that it managed to draw an
angry Russia back to NATO's side. Moscow, says a senior French
official, "made a difficult and courageous choice" in choosing
pragmatic cooperation with the West over emotional solidarity
with Serbia. Though Chernomyrdin is reviled at home for
kowtowing to the West, Russian diplomacy gained considerable
credibility in allied capitals, where officials hope the process
will strengthen wavering ties. But there is still a lot of fence
mending to be done. Russians in the policy elite and on the
street now regard the alliance as a sinister force bent on
aggression: "Who is next after Yugoslavia?" is not just a
rhetorical question.
The West can claim no victory worth the name until the Kosovars
go home. In Bosnia, despite four years of NATO policing, the
vast majority of Muslim refugees have not returned. If even a
portion of exiled Kosovars, some scattered from New Jersey to
Australia, refuse to go back, Milosevic again gets away with the
evil practice of ethnic cleansing. The fighting may stop, but
that is insufficient to make ethnic Albanians feel secure as
long as he reigns in Belgrade. Kosovo is a wasteland where many
who return will find nothing but dead relatives, mass graves,
destroyed homes, slaughtered livestock, poisoned wells and a
hard life. The West has promised billions to reconstruct the
province, most of it put up by Europe. "The costs will be
staggering," says a senior Washington official. "Whatever
estimate there is now, triple that." But before the exiles can
even think of leaving their camps, the alliance needs to build
shelters for millions and prepare to feed the population for at
least a year.
The West cannot ignore the fact that ordinary Serbs are
collateral victims too. NATO estimates its bombs killed 5,000
and wounded an additional 10,000. Serbia lies in rubble, about
500,000 have lost their jobs, and wages have been officially
reduced to 1,000 dinars ($60) a month. There are no sources of
revenue to pay out pensions or army salaries. To repair
shattered rail lines, bombed-out roads and sunken bridges alone
will cost about $1 billion. The country's four largest
industrial sites are totally destroyed; nine more are severely
damaged. Two oil refineries went up in black acrid smoke, along
with most of the fuel-storage facilities, leaving Serbia having
to import high-priced refined fuel. Without foreign cash, says
Belgrade economist Mladjan Dinkic, a return to pre-Milosevic
prosperity would take 41 years.
While an indicted war criminal presides in Belgrade, Serbs can
expect no money from international investment or mini-Marshall
plans. "There is no question of dealing with Milosevic," said
British Prime Minister Tony Blair. "There is no place for Serbia
in the true family of nations while he remains in office."
As the generals buckled down to finetune the peace plan, the
world kept its fingers crossed that the bombs would soon stop
falling. But in the capitals of the NATO alliance, two words
haunt political leaders: Saddam Hussein. Just like the war in
the Persian Gulf, this one has come to a halt but not a
conclusion. As long as Slobodan Milosevic hangs on to power,
there will be no permanent peace for the Balkans.
--Reported by Jay Branegan, Mark Thompson and Douglas
Waller/Washington, Dejan Anastasijevic/Vienna, James L. Graff/
Cologne, Paul Quinn-Judge/Moscow and Gillian Sandford/Belgrade
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Cover Date: June 14, 1999
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