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Kosovo: Is This The Only Way? Editorial: Though the policies of Slobodan Milosevic are reprehensible, NATO's resort to bombing brings with it enormous risks and slim likelihood of decisive victory.  By Michael Lindemann Start Date: 3/25/99 Editorial Commentary: Bombs and cruise missiles are raining down on Serbian targets for a second straight night as this text is written. Enormous firepower, enormous cost in money and in lives, enormous risk to international stability -- all this is now brought to bear upon an intractable situation which, from the U.S. and NATO point of view, is essentially the doing of one man, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. It is possible that the U.S./NATO view of Milosevic is fairly accurate. In that view, Milosevic and his rubber-stamp parliament are guilty of policies as atrocious as any seen since the end of World War II. "Ethnic cleansing" has about it the ring, and the stench, of the Nazi holocaust. To appreciate its horror, we might compare it to an imaginary situation in which senior leaders of the Ku Klux Klan somehow captured both the presidency and the Congress of the United States, then proceeded with impunity to turn the nation's police and armed forces against any U.S. citizen not meeting the appropriate racial or ethnic standard. Mixed neighborhoods in every city would be systematically cleared of Blacks, Puerto Ricans, maybe even Irish Catholics. Their homes would be burned, their belongings confiscated. Men, women and children would all be force-marched to detention centers, perhaps given the choice of leaving the country forever, penniless, or remaining in labor camps. Many would be raped, beaten, or shot without provocation by soldiers of the ruling party, every action santioned by the government. Such systematic atrocities can hardly be imagined in the United States, nor -- we often say -- in any "civilized" nation. Yet these are evidently the policies of Slobodan Milosevic. It seems that he is able to inspire in his Serbian followers a pernicious brand of ethnic pride that feeds upon the suffering and extermination of undesirable humans. And so, he is as reviled by the West as he is by his many victims. The Albanian majority population of Kosovo province is only the latest ethnic group to feel the sting of Milosevic's disdain. If the Kosovar Albanians have had to endure any portion of the horror earlier visited upon the Muslims and Croats of Bosnia, then no reasonable human could dismiss their desire to break free of Milosevic's grip. But, of course, there is more than one side to every story. In this case, whatever atrocities may have occurred, Milosevic claims the right to handle an internal dispute -- a civil war, really -- by internal means. As such, he vehemently opposes foreign peacekeeping forces within the boundaries of Yugoslavia. Moreover, the whole Serbian people, not just Milosevic, are opposed to the secession of Kosovo under Albanian rule. To the Serbs, as one of Milosevic's deputies recently put it, Kosovo "is the heart and soul of our country. We must die to protect it." This sentiment dates back a thousand years, to the earliest days of Serbian national aspirations in the Balkans. Thus, Milosevic can count upon strong internal support for his policy of denying any opportunity for the Kosovar Albanians to proceed toward secession. In this light, the agreement forged in Rambouillet, which would grant Kosovo limited autonomy enforced by an international peacekeeping force, was entirely unacceptable to the Serbs, and will never be acceptable. Milosevic knows -- because the Albanian leadership has repeatedly said -- that Rambouillet was viewed by the Kosovars as an interim step toward independence. To the Serbs, independence is unthinkable; thus Rambouillet is pointless. When U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke made his "final appeal" to Milosevic to accept Rambouillet, it was (or should have been) a foregone conclusion that Milosevic would not budge. When he did not, NATO was left with no option -- so they said -- but to bomb. "Holbrooke came to tell us either [NATO peacekeeping] troops or bombing," Serbian President Milan Milutinovic told the Yugoslav parliament after Holbrooke's departure. "We are not accepting foreign military troops on our territory under any excuse and at any price, even at the price of bombing," said Gorica Gajevic, general-secretary of Milosevic's Socialist Party. The sentiment has been expressed in NATO circles that Milosevic needs a little bombing to show his people that he's done everything he can, before he caves in. This would now appear to be a naive view. It is possible that Milosevic will ask his people to endure a quite hideous pounding by NATO forces and never give in to the terms of Rambouillet. But there is now much more at stake than the future of Kosovo or Yugoslavia. The Russians have taken the moral high ground in this dispute. Boris Yeltsin has made it clear to the U.S. and to NATO that he will never agree to the present course of action. He has called the bombing "incomprehensible," and "naked aggression." More militant voices in the Russian Duma have even called for military intervention on the side of Serbia, though this is not likely to occur. In the world of the 21st century, relations between Russia and the West will be of crucial importance. Now, with bombs falling on the Serbian people, those relations are more strained than at any time since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Dimitri Simes, a Russian analyst and president of the private Nixon Center, says the rift with Russia is far more serious than the situation in the Balkans. "This... [has] far-reaching consequences for the U.S.-Russian relationship, for the international environment, for American foreign policy interests," he told the Associated Press. "We are sending a message to Russia that the United States is the enemy of the Russian people... In Russia, everyone is talking about American aggression." This comes at a time when Russia is in economic turmoil, facing its gravest domestic crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union. Russia desperately needs cooperative ties with the West, yet now feels morally and politically obliged to choose isolation and resistance instead. The risk in this situation can hardly be over-estimated. NATO is bombing Serbia to achieve an objective Serbia will not accept. The near-term result will likely be much death and destruction in Yugoslavia, and a continuing political stalemate. If Milosevic calls for further talks and the bombing stops, it will only be an effort to buy time. There can be no "change of heart." Even getting rid of Milosevic might not achieve the end sought by the Kosovar Albanians. Meanwhile, the entire region is destabilized. Russian relations with the West are at a crisis point. Given the march of events, and the predilections of power politics, this outcome may seem inevitable. But it is a graver tragedy than can be measured in the lost lives of Serbs or Kosovars or NATO troops. The current course is a dead-end, a no-win situation of monumental proportions. There must be another way, because this one is both hopeless and terribly dangerous.
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