| |||||
|
Arts & Entertainment Books Comics Health & Body Media Mothers Who Think  NewsPeople Politics2000 Technology - Free Software Travel & Food  Columnists
Current News Click here to read the latest stories from the wires. - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon - - - - - - - - - - - - Recently in Salon News
Is it peace yet?
Milosevic plays the U.N. card
A refugee's escape from hell
Under the volcano
Three strikes and you're in - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
The beginning of the end
- - - - - - - - - - - -
June 4, 1999 |
The 11-week Kosovo crisis offered a grim portrait of the Balkans, where hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians flooded into neighboring Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro, while NATO bombs destroyed targets inside Serbia. Reports of mass killings, rape and torture were frequent, as were reports of accidental civilian bombing deaths (both Serbian and Albanian) caused by NATO's notoriously inaccurate aim and cartographically challenged intelligence information. The crisis seemed to crescendo with Milosevic's war-crimes indictment -- a dramatic move that may have accelerated peace negotiations.
Milosevic plays the U.N. card
Is it peace yet? The new peace deal, the second in a dark decade for the Balkans, calls for the withdrawal of Serbian troops from Kosovo, the return of the more than 855,000 Albanian refugees who have been forced from their homes and the deployment of a peacekeeping force of 50,000 into the region to enforce the pact. War has engulfed the former Yugoslavia since the beginning of the decade, stemming from religious and ethnic hatreds that are hundreds of years old. In this round, both NATO and Serbia had tremendous success dismantling their enemies. And the peacekeeping force that enters Yugoslavia must not only rebuild Kosovo hamlets levelled by the Serbian army but also the Serbian infrastructure laid to waste by NATO bombers. And that includes the hospitals, bridges, embassy and power grids destroyed by NATO bombs. The peacekeeping force will also have to manage relations between two neighbors living inside the same fence who would rather have nothing to do with each other. When Salon News asked Balkans experts to discuss Thursday's peace announcement, they understandably seemed a little weary. Arianna Huffington is a commentator and syndicated columnist. It's absurd to call this a victory or to talk about winners when an entire country is in ruins and Milosevic has achieved his ethnic cleansing. There are still enormous obstacles ahead before the refugees can be returned to their homes. Right now, there is nowhere for them to return to. The Kosovo region will have to be de-mined before anybody returns. A number of the innocent civilians we were there to protect, including children, ended up in the hospital to have their limbs amputated because of the cluster bombs we have been using, the anti-personnel bombs that leave hundreds of bomblets all over Kosovo. The first step is de-mining, then, of course, rebuilding. The expectation that suddenly the KLA is going to dissolve after we've just been arming it is ridiculous. A lot of them want to take revenge on their attackers. You can foresee a circumstance where NATO is fighting on the same side as the Serbs against the KLA. Remember, only a few months ago, we were calling them drug-dealing terrorists. The other thing that really demonstrates the frivolity and recklessness of the [Clinton] adminstration's policy is the fact that the two most objectionable clauses in the Rambouillet agreement are nowhere in the principles the G-8 handed to Milosevic. One was the referendum after three years and the other was that NATO forces would be free to go anywhere in Yugoslavia without being interfered with. Why do we think he would not have accepted this agreement before we started the bombing? Obviously, this will turn out to be another hollow victory because Milosevic will wind up surviving. Do you seriously think he will be arrested? Even the Serb leader in Bosnia and his general who were also indicted haven't been arrested. Eighty-nine were indicted by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, basically only one is doing a sentence. Their record isn't exactly great. Milosevic should have been indicted long ago -- the evidence was there to do so in 1995 after Srebrenica. The particular timing of this was a public relations exercise at a time when the poll numbers were going down dramatically. This provided more moral justification for what was being done at a time when the world was questioning the moral imperative of continuing the bombing. One reason we went in was to prevent the destabilizing of Europe. Now of course, that's exactly what happened -- Macedonia, Montenegro. The rise of anti-Americanism in Greece where I come from is phenomenally tragic. I've worked hard for many years to build respect for American values everywhere in Europe. Now the incredible rise of anti-Americanism is strengthening the anti-democracy hard-liners. America has always represented values like support for human rights, democracy and freedom. But when it behaves like a bully that shows no concern for the destruction of human life and causes collateral damage of schools and hospitals and the destruction of life in Serbia when we said we weren't against the Serb people, just Milosevic. Joseph Collins is a senior fellow in the political-military program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former Gulf War colonel. NATO is lucky to have gotten off with what it did. It's created a tremendous mess in Serbia in order to get what might have been gotten using other measures. Had we had a more robust position going in, bombing may not have been necessary. But we looked weak going in, and so Slobodan Milosevic decided that he would take a chance that we would lose the will to bomb or that the coalition would fracture early on. But this is not a vindication in any way. This is the sloppiest military operation of the last eight years by far, and that's another reason why we ought not to be crowing. We may look back on this day as a day of false jubilation. This peace enforcement mission is going to be tough. The commanders have an awful lot to contend with -- they have a devastated area, they have unexploded mines from one end of the country to the other, they have an aggrieved Albanian population perhaps looking for revenge, and they will undoubtedly have a Serb minority holding on for dear life, and then there's the issue of the KLA and what they're future is going to be. My guess is that this peace enforcement mission will be much more difficult than the one in Bosnia, that it will involve casualties and some limited fighting, and in the end it may look more like Somalia than it does like Bosnia. The deal apparently accomplishes nearly all of NATO's objectives, but there's an awful lot that still needs to be worked out. Among the things that need to be worked out are the exact composition and command and control of the peacekeeping force. There, you're not only negotiating with the opposite side, but you're also having a rather intense conversation inside the NATO alliance and with Russia. There's the issue of coordinating the withdrawal with the bombing cessation, which is a fairly complex technical problem. And then the third thing, which could end up being the largest problem, is the pulling and hauling that will go on between the EU, NATO, the U.S. and the United Nations Security Council. By virtue of all of this being passed over to the U.N. Security Council for resolution, the China factor is raised. If there's one nation in the world that's more Serbian than Serbia on the issue of sovereignty and on its feelings toward NATO, it's China. Whether the agreement holds depends on which Milosevic we're talking to. The first Milosevic, the one we see most frequently, is a guy who lies, cheats and steals as often as he can on nearly every issue. The other Milosevic, the Milosevic of the Dayton Accords, who is a guy who, when presented with overwhelming political force or fact, is capable of making rational judgments and carrying out agreements. One of the things that might have pushed Milosevic over the edge was the indictment. People said the indictment would make it difficult to negotiate with him, but they may have been wrong 180 degrees. It may have facilitated the agreement. I hope the refugees can return soon. I hope that because of the meager conditions they're living under, particularly in Macedonia, they'll be happy to jump on their tractors, bicycles or whatever they've got and go home and see what they can do.
| ||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
Next page |