- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

News

A good war?
Human rights groups battle over whether NATO's Kosovo mission can be defended on humanitarian grounds.
By Tamara Straus
[05/19/99]

Israel's political make-over
Experts discuss Ehud Barak's sweeping victory.
By Daryl Lindsey
[05/19/99]

Fireworks over Rabin Square
At the site of a tragic assassination, Barak supporters celebrate a return to the peace process
By Flore de Preneuf
[05/18/99]

From Bibi to Barak
One town's shift shows why Israelis voted for change.
By Flore de Preneuf
[05/18/99]

"Hardball" strikes out
Chris Matthews mistakenly identifies a Clinton friend on the air as the "jogger" who frightened Kathleen Willey.

[05/18/99]

Complete archives for News

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Serbian hard-liner Vojislav Seselj, in his Tuesday interview with the Belgrade paper Blic, laid out strikingly similar terms: "There won't be any concessions with regard to our state sovereignty and territorial integrity. No member of our public is opposed to the option of giving maximum autonomy to the Albanian national minority. But any detachment (of Kosovo) from Serbia is out of the question. Second, we're prepared to accept a U.N. observer [or] verifying mission ... But it must be a civilian mission. Any peaceful solution without a clause providing for total compensation for the damage suffered by Yugoslavia in this war is unthinkable. We'll certainly succeed in getting part of the damages."

Seselj then noted that Milosevic would be unlikely to simply agree to the terms he rejected in Rambouillet, France -- before three months of NATO airstrikes devastated much of the Serbian infrastructure. And he asked a rhetorical question that NATO member countries and Kosovar Albanian deportees could just as easily be asking themselves: "Why did we go to war and suffer this enormous damage? To accept something we'd rejected before the outbreak of war? That is out of the question."

But in fact, by pulling into negotiations a NATO reluctant to deploy ground troops to Kosovo without a peace agreement, a NATO losing its confidence that it can achieve victory from the air alone, a NATO preoccupied with providing life support for almost a million Kosovar refugees, Milosevic may in fact get more for Serbia than he would have if he had signed the Rambouillet peace agreement back in March. In addition, he has forced NATO and Russia to identify the "basic minimum" upon which both could agree -- not a NATO force, but merely an "international" force. And the legal status of Kosovo itself has not been seriously questioned. The international community is still united behind the idea of autonomy, but not independence, for Kosovo.

Concretely, that means Milosevic may get better terms than were on the table at Rambouillet: U.N. troops, instead of an international force led by NATO, which is widely considered more intimidating; and a promise by international powers to pay billions to rebuild Serbia -- the country NATO has just spent billions of dollars destroying.

And political analyst Bratislav Grubacic says Milosevic has gotten himself and Serbian nationalists something more: a Kosovo that will never have as many Albanians as it did before the war.

"Serbian authorities do not expect that most of the Kosovo Albanians will ever come back," Grubacic says. "Those who do not have Serbian identity papers anymore won't come back. Those who sympathized with the Kosovo Liberation Army probably won't come back. Authorities and analysts believe that not more than half of the Kosovo Albanians will return." And no one yet knows how many ethnic Albanians have been killed by Serbian forces during the war.

After pausing on his mobile phone in Belgrade, Grubacic adds: "Milosevic has succeeded in creating a new ethnic balance in Serbia."
salon.com | May 19, 1999

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon