FEAR OF LANDING

By Batic Bacevic

NIN, Belgrade, FR Yugoslavia, May 20 1999

At the end of the second month of bombing, the most powerful countries have again found themselves confronted with the old dilemma of whether to negotiate or to send ground troops to Kosovo.

The citizens of Yugoslavia with ill-disguised impatience are following developments regarding the new peace initiatives, suggestions and projects and the hyperproduction of new envoys, who for 57 days now have been seeking rapid and diplomatic solutions to the crisis. The Balkan school of graduate studies, in which world politicians of all calibres practice the art of negotiation on a sample of ten million people, obviously has an enormous number of students. Their number is exceeeded only by the number of destroyed bridges, incinerated buses and collateral victims.

One of the new peacemakers, the head of Greek diplomacy Jorgos Papandreu, hinted that a decision regarding peace and war might be reached on Wednesday, May 19, in Belgrade, but even the most good-natured people were not prepared to believe in the Greek optimism because they hae been actors for too long in an ancient tragedy. "The question of a possible end to air attacks on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia will most likely be addressed following negotiations between Russian special envoy Victor Chernomyrdin and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic," announced Russian diplomat Valentin Sergeyev. And while the Yugoslav functionaries awaited the Russian missionary, Victor Chernomyrdin, who first stopped in Helsinki for detailed consultations with the Finnish president and new peace envoy, Marti Ahtisaari, and the American deputy defense secretary, Strobe Talbott, in the proximity of the Albanian border American and British humanitarian workers with a slight excess of weaponry began to arrive at an accelerated pace. The news that the superstar of voodoo journalism, Christiane Amanpour, had set up shop in Albania did not exactly inspire confidence in pacificist efforts.

Hell on Earth

The first doubts in the viability of diplomatic initiatives were raised by humanitarian workers, who warned that the Albanian refugees could not wait for winter in their tents near Kukes, which led lucid analysts to conclude that the political solution to Balkan bloodshed would be some time in coming. The whole story regarding ground troops began with the discoveries of strictly independent media that British prime minister Tony Blair was somewhat frustrated due to the unwillingness of the White House to send its boys to Kosovo without the permission of the Belgrade government. The London "Times" subsequently reported that the Pentagon had warned President Clinton that he could not emerge as the victor in the military campaign unless ground troops were engaged, which in the days that followed was overenthusiastically denied by officials from many countries of the Atlantic pact. The denial itself had the primary purpose of introducing the landing of NATO as a serious possibility.

"They should know that hell is waiting for them here. The people and the army are determined to successfully defend Kosovo at all costs. The cost which we will extol is one which they cannot pay... Of course, we must also count on the fact that we, too, will sustain losses. But if they enter here, they should know that they cannot survive and that for days and for months they will die terrible deaths," responded General Nebojsa Pavkovic in an interview by the newspaper "Witness" which was carefully repeated by the world media agencies.

Between two diplomatic offensives, General Michael Short expressed regret because the politicians were creating so many obstacles for the officers. The operational head of the NATO action, in an interview by the "New York Times", clearly stated that while command structures should be directly attacked, civilian targets should by no means necessarily be avoided. "I think that if there is no electricity for the refrigerators, no gas for heating and cooking; if you can't go to work because a bridge is destroyed and the whole time you are wondering what else may be hit, the time will come when you will say that this must stop," declared the intellectually challenged general, while his colleagues put together a new humanitarian plan touchingly dubbed "Joint Guard."

According to this plan, as many as 40,000 ground troops, consisting of American, British, French, Italian and German brigades, are to be deployed in Kosovo. It will also be flexible enough to include the Russians and other countries which are not members of NATO.

The Italian Hook

The militaristic rucus in which military goals and the purpose of the entire operation changes from day to day has forced Italian, German and several other leaders to lodge serious objections. Only a few days after cluster bombs were inadvertantly dropped in the vicinity of Venice, which is, as the pragmatic Americans point out, sinking anyway, the Italian prime minister Massimo d'Alema sent a message that he does not like the fact that citizens of his country are catching bombs while fishing and dared to compose the first peace proposal since March 24.

According to the proposal, NATO would cease bombing activity prior to the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo, but only if the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution authorizing the use of force in the event that Belgrade does not accept the implementation of the proposal. The Yugoslav ambassador in Moscow, Borislav Milosevic, declared that Belgrade would not accept a resolution on the basis of Article 7 of the United Nations Charter, which would open the door to the use of force, but would do so on the basis of Article 6, according to which the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia would need to authorize the arrival of peacekeeping troops. The Italian prime minister, in the Rome paper "Republic" declared that the air campaign "up to now has not achieved any of its expected results except for a continuous series of tragic events" but he also rejected the possibility of a unilateral end to the bombing. "If Clinton does not want to send troops, he must bring everything to an end with one brave move. Replace General Clark, say goodbye to Mrs. Albright, ask the loyal Blair to limit himself to Ireland in the future and call a Washington conference on the Balkans... in the spirit of the Berlin Congress of 1878," comments "Corriere dela Serra."

The Russian special envoy Victor Chernomyrdin on Monday [May 17] after a meeting with Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, concluded that the decisive stage in resolving the Kosovo conflict had begun. Aznar, also, declared that the subsequent days would be decisive, thus joining the army of heads of state who hoped "for peace as soon as the war ends." Nevertheless, general world opinion has crystallized into the conviction that peace would be concluded either by the end of June or much later than that, when people stopped paying attention to sirens, bombs and destruction. More serious analysts believe that it has been clear since mid-May that all Balkan questions are dependent on one simple question: do the leading members of NATO really want to resolve the problem of Kosovo or have they in the meanwhile decided to expand their humanitarian activities? Everything, therefore, is dependent on the desire of the West to negotiate with Yugoslav president Milosevic or not.

Chernomyrdin's proposals

The official media have, only ten days following the meeting of the Group of Eight in Petersberg, begun to relay the statements of the president of the federal government, the Yugoslavian United Left party and other institutions with whom they have concluded they can discuss the basic principles of that meeting. Even though the leader of the Radical Party and the vice president of the federal government Vojislav Seselj had advised citizens via Serbian Radio Television that they must endure and even published a list of domestic traitors, the very next day the Serbian Renewal Movement had responded sharply that he should defend Kosovo like he previously defended Krajina and advised citizens that the Radicals were something to be endured. Other segments of the establishment decided to wait for Chernomyrdin's proposal. The very decision to begin a campaign against opposition parties, which the government keeps insisting are only marginal and without any real support among the people, perhaps is an indicator that the three-party coalition is slowly bringing the state of war to a close and rejuvenating multiparty political life.

The Finnish roadmap

In an analysis, Reuters states that Belgrade has responded to all five conditions of the international community and that the problem now is that NATO officials, who after a seven week-long operation have nothing to show their financeers except increasing numbers of refugees and civilian victims, do not like the answers. That is why great efforts are being made in Washington and in London to slow down the diplomatic initiatives which might bring peace to Kosovo, but not NATO troops. Assistant defense secretary Strobe Talbott, according to the Paris "Le Monde", has requested that the chief negotiator be Marti Ahtisaari, because the White House was taken aback by the freedom in maneuvering which UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has allowed himself. Annan's sin was in naming Carl Bildt as his emissary, even though the latter had publicly criticized the NATO intervention and even published a list of unacceptable proposals for the resolution of the crisis. Another mistake was sending the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, who declared that NATO may be accountable for war crimes for the murder of civilians, to the Balkans. One Western diplomat equated the tossing of Ahtisaari into the equation with the earlier report of Helena Ranta regarding the alleged massacre in the village of Racak, after which no one was clear on what had happened in that village but both Serbs and Albanians were able to salvage favorable extracts.

The president of Uruguay, Jose Maria Sanginnoti, believes that the roots of the Kosovo crisis and of all future crises, which will doubtlessly arise according to the needs of the media and military industries, are to be found in the sad realization that the world leadership of today "runs too fast and thinks too slow." Local heroes, who are spending spring of the year of our Lord 1999 in various hidden places, should take comfort in the words of one of the greatest American writers of this century, Arthur Miller, who publicly lamented for the days of Roosevelt: "Clinton and Blair are too soft; they constantly change their statements instead of changing their strategy," said the writer, who long ago received the Pulitzer Prize for the work "A View from the Bridge."