Russia's Kosovo Move Result Of US
Bungling
WASHINGTON, Jun 13, 1999 -- (Agence France
Presse) By mistake or by design, the United States
and NATO made a string of moves on Kosovo that
Moscow perceived as threatening, resulting in
Russia's dramatic preemptive deployment in
Kosovo and confrontation with NATO troops,
experts here said.
"Washington, out of its ignorance, is treating the
Russians like dirt," said George Kenney, a former
State Department desk officer on the Balkans who
resigned his post in 1992 in protest over US policy
in the region.
"The Russians are showing that you really can't do
that," he said, referring to the run by about 200 Russian troops into Kosovo
where they seized the airport in the capital Pristina on Saturday before
NATO peacekeeping contingents began arriving in the province.
"NATO and Washington have not even begun to grasp that it's not about
Slavic brotherhood," Kenney explained. "It's about Russian concerns that
NATO is a police force unto itself going around wherever it wants, possibly
into Russia's neighborhood."
The seeds of renewed mistrust between the Cold War rivals were sown well
before the current Kosovo crisis. NATO, for instance, has already reneged
on its pledge -- offered when Moscow conceded to German reunification in
1989 -- not to expand.
But Washington's insistence on launching the NATO air war in Serbia
without securing prior UN approval, its rebuff of pleas for a temporary halt
to bombing during peace talks and refusal to allow a Russian peacekeeping
role except under NATO command have radically compounded Moscow's
anxiety.
And this, policy experts concur, runs directly counter to larger US and
western security interests.
"The Russians now feel that they are in implicit confrontation with NATO,"
said John Steinbruner, director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings
Institution, a prestigious Washington policy think tank.
"Both Russia and the United States are running standard Cold War deterrent
operations against each other" with the knowledge that despite Russia's
current weaknesses it remains a major nuclear power, he said.
"NATO has a major problem with Russia," Steinbruner explained. "The
Russians are telling themselves that they are under severe pressure and they
have to evoke their nuclear capability to fend it off."
Washington rejects suggestions that US policy makers have in any way
mishandled Russia during the Kosovo crisis and insists that all short- and
long-term implications for ties with Moscow were considered beforehand.
"Ultimately, the course we took was what we firmly believed was in the best
interest of the United States, including taking into account our relationship
with Russia," explained Mike Hammer, a National Security Council
spokesman.
Many experts, however, differ.
Part of the tension that has arisen from Washington's dealing with Moscow,
can be attributed to simple ignorance among top US policy makers of
Russia's minimal needs, they say, for recognition as a major power.
Launching a NATO offensive in Europe, for example, without at least a
token gesture towards securing some form of international assent from
outside the alliance, was short-sighted, experts assert.
But more importantly, the United States and NATO have telegraphed,
through rhetoric and deeds, a message to the Kremlin that Russia's interests
would be minimalized or disregarded entirely if at odds with alliance plans in
the Balkans.
Defense Secretary William Cohen underscored that message again
Saturday, describing Russia's military presence in Kosovo as "insignificant"
and suggesting that the United States would, in essence, ignore it.
"They want to treat them as the poor relations and have them on their terms,"
said Bill Hartung, senior researcher at the New York-based World Policy
Institute, a school for international social and political research.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin "met the alliance more than half way, even
though the United States never accepted or took seriously the demands of
the Russians for a pause in the bombing.
"There's a much deeper suspicion in Russia of US motives than there was
prior to the war and I think its harder for the pro-western elite's in Russia to
explain it away now," Hartung said. ((c) 1999 Agence France Presse)
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