Tuesday, NATO tossed the explosive parcel right into the lap of the
Serbs. As they introduced the resolution for discussion at the U.N. Security
Council in New York, Western diplomats insisted on their chronology for peace:
First, the Serbs begin to withdraw, then the bombing stops. Only then would the
draft resolution agreed on Tuesday by the G-8 go to the Security Council.

The
bombers were already out over Belgrade and Kosovo as the Security Council began
its closed-door discussions, and with the negotiations with the Yugoslav military
resuming Tuesday evening in Macedonia, Wednesday would be the earliest time for
the resolution to be passed. With Russia signing on, no matter how reluctantly,
China is expected to go along, or, at worst abstain.

With the delay, it is left for Slobodan Milosevic to explain to his battered armed forces and
demoralized civilians why they are still suffering while he fails to execute the deal that he agreed to a week ago. His previous exit
strategies from Croatia and Bosnia have been equally tortuous and costly, but
this time it is his own disenchanted electorate that is suffering. NATO fully
expects its initial strategy of bombing Milosevic into submission will prevail.

Despite 12 hours of hard negotiations in Cologne, Germany, the resolution offers
little of substance to comfort either the Russians or the Serbs. As a symbolic
concession to them, the main text does not refer to NATO directly. But almost
like hypertext, it is dotted with references to other agreements — Rambouillet,
the G-8′s agreed principles and the agreement between Milosevic, Finnish
President Marrti Ahtisaari and Viktor Chernomyrdin last week.

Above all, it invokes Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, the crucial clause
authorizing the use of force because of a threat to international peace and
security. Even more galling, under pressure from Louise Arbour, the prosecutor of
the International Criminal Tribunal on the former Yugoslavia, it also enjoins all
parties — including NATO — to cooperate fully with the tribunal. Interestingly,
it calls for the demilitarization, not the disarmament, of the Kosovo Liberation Army and other
Albanian forces. The only thing the Serbs get out of it is an end to the bombing.

The United Nations will look after the civil side, which is charged with setting up an
autonomous administration and holding democratic elections in Kosovo. It does not
say what will happen when the Albanians vote overwhelmingly for parties wanting
independence, but that would be a separate issue. However, when the resolution
mentions the United Nations role, “pending a final settlement,” in developing “substantial
autonomy and self government” it refers to the Rambouillet accords. This
particular piece of hypertext, although fudged, was sold to the Albanians on the
basis of an implied promise of a referendum after three years.

The “security” presence “with substantial NATO participation” will report to U.N.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who will in turn report to the Security Council
– thus putting a thin blue veil of United Nations cover over what is otherwise
fundamentally a NATO operation.

Having NATO as the “security presence” will enforce the resolution’s demand that
the Yugoslavs “put an immediate and verifiable end to violence and repression in
Kosovo” and withdraw “all” their forces. Afterwards, some will be allowed back —
but certainly not for the role seemingly envisaged by the Serbian negotiators on the
Macedonian border, who want to check the papers of the returning refugees.

Since
Serbian forces made a point of confiscating the documents of the people they were
expelling, this is a transparently unacceptable attempt to legitimize the results
of the “ethnic cleansing.” Indeed, it was anticipated by the U.N. agencies, which are
already preparing I.D. cards for the refugees affected.

The Russian role in Kosovo remains unclear. By the time they have made up their
mind about the lines of command and started trundling in, NATO will have filled the vacuum, preempting the inevitable coziness and collaboration
between the Serbs and the Russians. Any last hopes Belgrade had of a de facto
partition are textually cleansed from this resolution.

To avoid the Bosnia-style impasse between the peacekeepers and the United
Nations, the U.N. special representative will only “coordinate closely with the
international security presence.” The implication is that there will be no U.N.
veto on the trigger finger. Even so, it will be important to have a special
representative who all sides feel they can trust.

An obvious choice would be Ahtisaari, the Finnish president who put the
squeeze on Milosevic in Belgrade. Officially his term as president is not up
until next year, but those who know him consider that his sights were always set
on the international arena, for which the presidency was just a launch pad.
Offered a prominent enough role, he could well resign his presidency early.

He is supported by Madeleine Albright, who persuaded him to take up the role of
negotiator — even though he had turned down a similar request from his former
colleague Annan. The secretary of state, never especially enamored of the
United Nations, was reputed to be unhappy with Annan’s choice of Swedish
conservative Carl Bildt as one of his representatives during the war. She thought
that Bildt had been altogether too conciliatory to the Serbs during his time in
Bosnia and turned to Ahtisaari to bypass him, and the United Nations as well.

However, some people with long memories at the United Nations wonder about
Ahtisaari’s suitability for the job. While his oversight of the end of the South
African presence in Namibia is billed as a great success, it was a little less
triumphant for several hundred Namibian members of SWAPO, who crossed the border
from Angola to come to vote. The South Africans (Apartheid variety) panicked
Ahtisaari into letting the murderous “koevoet” anti-guerrilla troops out of their
barracks. They lived down to their reputation by taking very few prisoners and leaving
a lot of corpses. The Kosovars should watch him carefully.

However, with all those caveats, looking at the strength of the resolution, and
the determination of the NATO forces, it is a complete defeat for Milosevic. The
Serbian population of Kosovo, like that of the Krajina, will probably, and wisely,
take the road back to Serbia. And in five years, there will be an independent
Kosova.

It is not as if the United Nations is on his side. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has yet to condemn the NATO bombing. Last month, a U.N. tribunal indicted Milosevic and his associates as war criminals, while the U.N.’s World Court has thrown out Belgrade’s lawsuit against NATO. Not only has the U.N. Security Council issued more than 50 resolutions against his regime in the last decade, Mary Robinson, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, has also blasted the genocide in Kosovo. Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator, returned from a visit there to tell the Security Council that there was a “rampage of killing, burning, looting, forced expulsion, violence, vendetta and terror.” He concluded that nothing Belgrade had said “could account for, explain or justify the extent and magnitude of the brutal treatment of civilians.” The U.N. Fund For Population Activities has released a report detailing extensive raping of Kosovar women by the Serbian forces. The list of condemnatory U.N. reports is as long as the refugee trails out of the devastated province.

If, despite all this, Milosevic entertains such warm feelings toward the United Nations, he is, clearly, seriously short of friends. But that is the secret. He only needs one friend on the Security Council with a veto, and he actually has two — Russia and China. He probably entertains fond memories of his relationship with the U.N. peacekeepers in Bosnia and Croatia, who, almost to the end, were politely obliging to the Serbian forces. In particular, he will remember the performance of the Russian contingent in Eastern Slavonia, where Col. Victor Loginov dealt so generously with the Serbian military that he joined the indicted Serbian war criminal Arkan as an advisor.

Conversely, the Kosovars, though they appreciate the indictment, the reports and the help of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, have only to cast their minds back to the U.N. monitors who stood next to the Serbian batteries and counted the shells as they fell on Sarajevo, year after year. They think of Srebrenica and the 7,000 men who were never seen again after the Serbs took them from under the complacent noses of the U.N. troops.

That is why debates over the number of Serbian forces to be withdrawn from Kosovo and the composition and control of the incoming international forces remain the most contentious, and vague, components of the new proposed peace plan. The first issue seems to have been settled. All the Serbian forces will leave and then “hundreds” of them will be allowed back to do some symbolic flag showing on the borders and in their “holy” sites.

As for the second issue, there will certainly be a U.N. presence among the new peacekeepers, which will allow Milosevic’s powerful friends on the Security Council to do his bidding. Of course, Milosevic, a master manipulator of symbols, is sensitive to the symbolic distinction of surrendering to the world organization rather than NATO, which allows for some face-saving. But more importantly, Milosevic is sending his big brothers, Russia and China, to stand up to the schoolyard bullies — Great Britain and the United States — who’ve been picking on him. Turning control back over to the United Nations allows Russia and China to jerk the strings in the Security Council. Though the United Nations’ role in controlling the new international troops will not be as prominent as it was in Bosnia, some degree of power will be taken out of NATO’s hands and shifted back to the Security Council.

But the Serbs who do remain in Kosovo should be glad that NATO will not condone traditional U.N. peacekeepers in Kosovo. There will be a lot of very angry Albanians returning, with a culture only a generation removed from the blood feud as a means of settling disputes, and U.N. peacekeepers do not have a good track record of stepping into such skirmishes.

The best the Serbs can hope for is a “franchise” operation, where the Security Council authorizes a force to take over the province. On first reports, the Serbs seem to have dropped their objections to the presence of “combatant” NATO troops in the force, hoping that they would be balanced against an independently controlled Russian contingent. That is perhaps the one element still to be finalized before the bombs stop falling.

Milosevic’s ultimate goal, which Moscow shares, is a partitioned Kosovo, in which the Serbian sector — which includes the monasteries and the mines and industry — would be protected by Russian troops. The Serb Academy, whose poisonously nationalist ideology provided the fuel that set Yugoslavia on fire 10 years ago, proposed a similar solution several years back. But the Russians couldn’t afford the bus fare to Kosovo on their own. Depending on how Russian troops are deployed under the new agreement, the international community could, in effect, be paying the bill for the de facto partition of Kosovo, guaranteeing that the Kosovars would never return to the “Serbian sector” from which they have been forced. The British have explicitly ruled out anything that looks like a Russian-policed partition and legitimization of so-called ethnic cleansing, but stay tuned.

On the American side, President Clinton will clearly welcome any opportunity to end an air war that is rapidly losing public support. But as the primaries start rolling, the Al Gore campaign cannot afford a peace that leaves significant parts of Kosovo uninhabitable by Albanians. If the British hold the line, it will be difficult for the White House to fudge the issue.

Kofi Annan, who was in charge of peacekeeping for the tail end of the Bosnian War, is well aware of the political perils of such a large-scale operation and has shown no eagerness to have micromanagement by the U.N. secretariat. On the other hand, he has been concerned about the marginalization of the United Nations during the air war. He did not oppose military action, and indeed he said at the beginning that it had to be considered when diplomacy failed. His concern is rather that the veto is reducing the United Nations to League of Nations levels of impotence when such clear crimes against humanity take place in the future.

In the end the United Nations will almost certainly mandate the major elements of command and control to NATO, albeit with a fig leaf, in U.N. blue, draped tastefully over the parts most likely to be offensive to the Russians and Chinese. And if the Serbian military surrenders to a U.N. official rather than a NATO general, no one in Washington or Brussels will mind.

I have a long record of calling for intervention against Milosevic. I argued for action by the West back when the Serbian tyrant was only practicing — shelling cities like Vukovar into rubble, dragging hospital patients from their beds and shooting them, minor stuff like that. I had berated the United Nations and the West for their acquiescent complicity in Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing of Bosnia — as well as the genocide in Rwanda. And because they did not stop him earlier, it means that ground troops will almost certainly be needed to stop Milosevic, who is almost certainly going to be belatedly indicted by the War Crimes Tribunal Thursday.

His career shows that he will make any sacrifices, of Albanians, Bosnians or Serbs, to get his ends. In 1989, he had begun the break-up of Yugoslavia by withdrawing the autonomy of Kosovo and imposing a form of apartheid on the Albanian majority. With amazing forbearance, the Kosovars practiced passive resistance, encouraged by looking at what happened to the Bosnians, and by promises from the United States that they would be looked after.

In the meantime, Milosevic had started and lost one war in Slovenia and another in Croatia, and had caused the deaths of a quarter of a million people in the inconclusive Bosnian war. As the United Nations watched and the United States shouted but did nothing, he had ethnically cleansed whole swathes of Bosnia and Croatia, and connived as his “own” Serbs were in turn swept out of the Krajna. Eleven cease-fires were agreed to and then broken as “negotiations” continued. In short, I am more concerned about deliberate genocide in Kosovo than NATO accidents. And I do not think that negotiations will do more than give him a breathing space for his next atrocity.

This was not a view shared by my friends on the California left, it seems, with the honorable exception of the L.A. Weekly’s Harold Meyerson, who dragged himself from his sick bed to make his point. To be fair, many in the audience were unpleasantly surprised at the company they found themselves keeping. Trotskyists and Serbian nationalists heckled and booed in two-part harmony during my presentation, demonstrating Belgrade-style freedom of speech. In comradely contrast, the California left was happy to cheer the Cato Institute’s Christopher Layne, Republican Arianna Huffington and an assortment of rabid Serbs in the common cause of ignoring genocide in a faraway country about which, it soon became obvious, so many of them knew so little.

The stars of the show were Huffington, Rev. Jesse Jackson and California state Sen. (and former Chicago Seven defendant) Tom Hayden, strange bedfellows who were worth the price of admission. I watched Hayden as several speakers lamented the plight of the Palestinians, whose suffering, of course, has never merited NATO intervention against Israel. Hayden didn’t squirm, even though he’s still remembered for a visit he made with his former spouse, Jane Fonda, to Ariel Sharon’s army as it bombed Beirut and provided cover for the massacres of Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila. At least Hayden is consistent: Ariel Sharon, of course, also supports the Serbs.

Hayden seemed shocked to find that, unlike his beloved Irish Republican Army, the KLA is not made up of saints. Hayden supports Irish nationalism in expelling the British from the North, but he cannot sympathize with Kosovar Albanians. He calls Kosovo “the spiritual soul of Serbia,” not caring that it is currently inconveniently populated by Albanians, who before Milosevic’s recent moves against them made up 90 percent of the country.

The KLA has another big strike against it where Hayden is concerned: Its members are Muslims. A Turk must have jumped out the woodpile once and frightened the young Hayden. He referred to five centuries of war between Orthodox Christianity and Islam, and implied that the KLA was some sort of proto-Taliban. It is lucky for the Vietnamese that they were Buddhist Communists and not Muslim Communists, or Senator Tom might not have been there for them.

In comparison, Jesse Jackson, clad in a black safari suit, won my admiration by saying that what is happening in Kosovo is genocide and if bombing would stop it, he would support it. The applause was somewhat underwhelming, but the Serbian nationalists had the good sense not to jeopardize their new chumminess with California’s liberals by booing him for his suggestion that the “Kosovoreans,” as he called them, were having a bad time. He insisted on three points — an end to the ethnic cleansing, a return of the refugees to Kosovo and a multilateral peacekeeping force — which are precisely NATO’s conditions for ending the bombing.

But even Jesse had an American’s fuzziness with history as he justified his belief that you can negotiate peace with serial mass murderers. He insisted that the “peacemakers” ended slavery — which hardly does justice to either the “terrorist” John Brown or all those guys at Gettysburg. But then, he never claimed to be an expert. When a Toronto Globe reporter took him to task for shaking hands with Arkan at the Belgrade Hyatt earlier this month, Jesse wanted to know exactly who Arkan was and what he did. Told that he murdered people, wholesale, and had been indicted as a war criminal, he replied, “I’m just an American. I didn’t know anything about that.” If only the rest of the war opponents had his modesty and honesty!

Arianna Huffington, of course, has never been known for modesty. Or consistency. I didn’t hear the die-hard Republican express any retrospective regret for her party’s various invasions of Grenada and Panama or incursions into Nicaragua. But she did criticize her fellow Republicans for caring more that President Clinton had oral sex on Easter Sunday than that NATO bombed Belgrade during Orthodox Easter. Of course, one hesitates to ascribe tribal motives to Huffington (nee Stassinopoulos), but there is the Greek Orthodox connection. She did not seem the slightest bit upset that instead of eating their Easter eggs, good Orthodox Serbs carried on killing and dispossessing Albanians during the holiday. As far I can remember her only mention of Kosovars was when she quipped about the array of NATO mistakes, “What’s next? a Kosovar in a pear tree?” No mention of the Kosovars dead in the ditches or shivering in the muddy fields of Macedonia.

The rest of the teach-in showed the bizarre range of jejune arguments against NATO intervention. The Serb Voters’ Alliance’s Bill Doric did not refer to the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo at all. He seemed to be suggesting that since Serbian-Americans had won lots of Medals of Honor, any suggestion that what Belgrade was doing was wrong was the equivalent of anti-Semitism. A Serbian doctor was so deeply overcome at the damage to the ozone layer caused by NATO bombing that she could not remember that over a million people had been thrown from their homes by Milosevic. Cluster bombs dropped by NATO are wrong, while Serbian land mines all around the border are, well, unmentioned.

The speakers who did mention nasty things happening in Kosovo often did so to make the point that reports about them were exaggerated. They seemed more outraged by comparisons between the Holocaust and the Kosovar refugees’ suffering than they are by the suffering itself. “It’s raining, and people are uncomfortable,” acknowledged Richard Walden of Operation USA, “but it’s not as bad as it was in Rwanda.” Saul Landau, rejoicing in the almost self-parodying title of Hugh O. La Bounty Chair of Applied Interdisciplinary Knowledge at Californian State Polytechnic University, Pomona, at least admitted he was “bothered” by what Milosevic was doing. Bothered? The verb is intriguing. Landau seemed “bothered” about genocide, but incensed that Belgraders can’t watch their racist government’s propaganda on TV because of cruel NATO bombers.

And this being Los Angeles, some of the speakers threatened to hit the Democrats where it hurts — in their campaign coffers — to retaliate for their stand against genocide. Lila Garrett, the president of Southern California Americans for Democratic Action, recounted how she had told House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt that she would raise no money for Democratic candidates until they had repudiated the president over NATO’s war. She had presumably raised money all through Clinton’s bombing of Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan, and kept it up while he scrapped welfare, signed NAFTA and presided over a hecatomb of death-row inmates. But now that he had been trapped into waging war on a government committing genocide, she had qualms of conscience.

As I left, happy to have been the most booed and heckled speaker, I worried about this nation’s political health. These people, on the left and right, really had not noticed the war in the Balkans for the last nine years. It was so easy for them to throw slogans at the issue, and dust off their arguments about Vietnam, but no one grappled with the moral and geopolitical issue at hand: how to stop someone from killing and exiling a whole people.

I’m surprised to find myself at odds with many former allies, and allied with the likes of Madeleine Albright, whose successful attempt to stop intervention to curb the genocide in Rwanda, for instance, I bitterly criticized. But at least the Clinton administration is redeeming itself slightly with its comparative courage on Kosovo. I don’t foresee such redemption for those who, once again, are willfully looking away from Milosevic’s murderous Balkan master plan.

Now all those countries have elected social-democratic or Labor governments, and the world is finally taking steps to stop Milosevic. If not for the leftward move in Europe, Madeleine Albright would stamp her feet, the U.S. would act scary, the Serbs would act scared, the Kosovars would be sold down the river and Clinton would declare diplomatic victory.

Leftists in Europe and the U.S. are opposed to Clinton’s handling of the conflict but for different reasons. Many Europeans, particularly Britains, think the prolonged NATO bombing is a Clintonian evasion of the need for ground troops to finish the job. Meanwhile the American left wrings its hands about Kosovar Albanians, but opposes all armed intervention to help them. In Thursday’s New York Times, a coalition of peace groups led by the California Peace Action Education Fund took out a full-page ad decrying the bombing of Belgrade.

While a small minority of reflexively anti-American European liberals and leftists still see the New World Order looming in the dust of the NATO bombing, others see that Clinton has been dragged into this by allies who actually meant it when they said that the Serbs had gone too far this time.

Since NATO runs on consensus, the new European leftist governments were instrumental in dragging stragglers toward a military response once diplomacy failed. Their socialism may be attenuated in this era of global capital, but they have enough of an ideological core left to do the right thing, without waiting for focus groups to digest the latest CNN clips of refugees. And they have made it clear that their idea of doing the right thing means getting Milosevic out of Kosovo, if not out of office.

One can see the contrast between the right and left in the United Kingdom when looking at the positions of Douglas Hurd, the British Tory and former Foreign Secretary and Robin Cook, his Labor successor. Hurd famously dismissed ending the arms embargo for the Bosnians because it would “simply level the killing fields.” Hurd cared about level cricket fields, of course, but as long as it was only Balkan people on the killing fields, why bother? In contrast to their conservative predecessors — and indeed in stark contrast to President Clinton — shortly after taking office the British Labor government ensured that its troops involved in NATO peacekeeping forces in Bosnia actively pursued indicted war criminals, even at the risk of sustaining British casualties.

It does help that European leaders generally have more popular support for military action than their American counterpart. That includes a greater acceptance that military involvement may lead to casualties. Europeans did not have to wait for “Saving Private Ryan” to restore a collective memory of World War II. Many of them remember that pandering to bloodthirsty dictators only postpones and prolongs the time of reckoning. Blair evoked those memories last week when he said that the Kosovar Albanians “are the victims of the most appalling acts of barbarism and cruelty Europe has seen since World War II. We teach our children never to forget what happened in that war. We must not allow ourselves to become desensitized to accept what is happening in Kosovo today.”

In that vein, many Europeans calculate how much blood would have been saved if NATO had acted resolutely against Milosevic when the genocide against the Bosnians began in the early 1990s. And despite the best efforts of British conservatives, it is difficult to be isolationist in Europe. Britain and France declared war in 1939 on behalf of Poland, and most British and French still remember with some gratitude the belated arrival of American forces after 1941.

The Rambouillet talks, people forget, were about Milosevic’s cynical breach of the pledges he had made last October, which were the result of negotiations, of course, and which had been enshrined in a binding Security Council resolution — the latest of more than 50 against him. After promising to move troops out, he moved in some 20,000 more and killed more than 2,000 people, making hundreds of thousands of others homeless, and incidentally, chased unarmed Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe monitors away when they tried to investigate the massacres. Only after its bluff was called did NATO take action. If NATO had been serious about its threats, ground forces would already have been introduced.

At the recent NATO summit in Washington, Tony Blair put pressure on fellow NATO allies to toughen up the response and move toward ground troops. (Blair once denounced me to a meeting of Labor Party parliamentary candidates as a “wild man from Liverpool, badmouthing President Clinton,” after I had told him in 1992 that Clinton would sell his grandmother on the streets to gain office. I feel doubly vindicated, since Blair is now implying that he thinks his chum Bill is too wobbly for words.)

The handwringers on both sides of the Atlantic call for NATO to stop the bombing and, almost as an afterthought, for Milosevic to cease and desist from his campaign against the Kosovars. They overlook the fact that the bombing began precisely because the Serbs wouldn’t stop killing, even as the OSCE monitors looked on.

Laughably, the harder left on both sides regard Serbia as some form of beleaguered workers’ state facing off against global imperialism. Some are outright apologists for Serb atrocities. At the New York Socialist Scholars Conference this year, one or two referred approvingly to Milosevic’s socialist credentials. Others have suddenly become big fans of the United Nations, insisting that NATO should have waited for U.N. endorsement of action against Yugoslavia, even though most of them opposed the United Nations when the Security Council endorsed the Gulf War.

In the New York Times ad taken out by the CPAEF, the group listed a possible violation of the U.N. Charter as one of their top ten reasons to stop the bombing of Yugoslavia. They also pointed to the “double standard” the bombing represents, pointing out the “brutal war” NATO member Turkey has been waging against its Kurdish population.

Of course, loony-left voices are much stronger within the American left, which has been pushed to the margins of American political discourse because of its failure to develop a successful mass electoral movement. Its members occupy their time with bizarre and quixotic causes: Mumia Abu Jamal — his trial may have been a travesty, but his icon status within the American left makes no sense — and support of Milosevic.

In Europe there is a genuine mass democratic left, with solid achievements in securing universal access to health care, education and social benefits. It has had power and responsibility, and so avoids the twin perils of what passes for the American left: Clinton’s covert Republicanism vs. half-witted impotent sloganeering.

The European left is far from perfect. Tony Blair has learned too much from his American “Third Way” cousin when it comes to domestic politics. The British government’s arms deals with Indonesia show it is not above reproach. But in comparison to the current American left, even New Labor looks radical and refreshing. And there is no doubt for whom the Kosovars would vote at the moment.