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Before the Belgrade bombing, momentum seemed to be building toward consensus on a postwar scenario for Kosovo. The U.S. had been pushing a plan that would give troops from Russia, a vociferous critic of NATO's attacks on Serbia, a future peacekeeping role. At the same time China, which has similarly opposed NATO's bombing, had recently begun to soften its rhetoric against the U.S.-led alliance. The West had hoped to secure China's approval, or at least avoid its veto, of any peacekeeping plan that might come before the U.N. Security Council. But the embassy attack--Beijing says three separate missiles hit the building, from "different angles"--puts everything in doubt. Just hours after the bombing, China called an emergency meeting of the Security Council in New York to protest the incident. NATO later admitted that it had mistakenly targeted the Chinese embassy, believing it to be a Yugoslav weapons depot. U.S. President Bill Clinton offered condolences and called the attack a "tragic mistake." For weeks, Yugoslavia has presented Beijing with a foreign-policy challenge. Fearful that NATO might someday extend its presumed right of intervention in another nation's affairs to cover China's policies toward Tibet or Taiwan, Beijing initially was fiercely critical. More recently China's stance had been softening, and Beijing had lifted a ban on domestic media reports of the flood of ethnic Albanian refugees being forced out of Kosovo. The Belgrade bombing appears to have pushed China back to an aggressive anti-NATO, and ultimately anti-American, stance. "Now China is directly involved despite its efforts not to get involved," concludes a Western analyst in Beijing. Some experts now wonder whether the bombing will have an adverse effect on Premier Zhu Rongji, who many Chinese believe made overly generous concessions to the U.S. in an effort to win American approval of China's entry to the World Trade Organization. One thing is certain: the West owes China big-time. Reported by Mia Turner/Beijing PAGE 1 | 2 |
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