Summit lets Milosevic off the hook
By Christopher Lockwood, Diplomatic Editor, in Sarajevo
telegraph.co.uk, 30 Jul 99
War crimes QC agrees to act for Milosevic at Hague tribunal
A ROW between Russia and the Nato countries last night frustrated
attempts to put further pressure on Slobodan Milosevic to quit as
President of Yugoslavia.
Despite determined British-led efforts to secure a text insisting on
an end to the Milosevic regime before any aid can flow to Serbia,
the Sarajevo Declaration, to be published today at the long-awaited Balkan reconstruction summit, will merely "call on the people of Serbia to embrace democratic change". This is more than the Russians wanted but stops far short of what the EU hoped to see. "This is woolly even by the standards of international organisations," said one diplomat. So today's jamboree, the largest ever seen in Sarajevo, looks set to achieve
very little.
The Balkan government heads, who assembled in Sarajevo last
night to wait for the Western leaders to drop in today, have agreed
that they want two things: money to offset the impact on them of the
war over Kosovo and the destruction of the Serbian economy and a
promise of accelerated EU membership. But today they will get
neither.
On the eve of a summit meeting in the Bosnian capital that will bring
together 36 countries and a dozen international organisations in a
Stability Pact for the regeneration of the Balkans, argument raged
yesterday over the communique that will set down international plans
for south-east Europe."What the pact is not is a new Marshall Plan,"
said one senior Western diplomat. No fresh money for the Balkans
is available, plans for the reconstruction of Kosovo having
apparently exhausted the available funds. Instead, the pact deals
with the co-ordination of existing aid programmes.
This is coupled with wordy exhortations to the Balkan states to
democratise their politics, liberalise their economies and
"recognise their responsibility to develop a shared strategy for
stability and growth of the region". This tends to blunt the drive to
encourage the Serbs to overthrow Milosevic in order to gain access
to the Stability Pact's largesse. "It's all very well to say to the Serbs,
'If you don't get rid of Milosevic, you won't get the carrots'. But you
have to have some carrots," said one official.
Senior officials admit that the whole affair is a waste of time. "The
Germans dreamt up the thing, got Clinton to agree to it, and then
dumped it into the lap of the Finns," said one diplomat. "It's too soon
and too vague and the Bosnian government is such a shambles that
it doesn't deserve a summit." Because of the huge logistical
problems involved in getting VIPs in and out of Sarajevo, the summit
has been whittled down to a shade under three hours in total, most
of which will be taken up with set-piece speeches.
For want of anywhere else large enough to accommodate 30 heads
of government, hundreds of their officials and delegations from an
alphabet of international organisations, the organisers have settled
for the Zetra Olympic Stadium. Here, in 1984, Torvill and Dean
ice-danced their way to a gold medal and the summit table has
been set up on the very rink on which they won it.
The Stability Summit has, however, achieved one thing that the
Bosnian Serb army never quite managed: it has brought Sarajevo to
a standstill. Faced with the task of bringing more than 30 heads of
state into a city famous, above all, for assassination, a good third of
the 36,000 troops of the Nato-led Stabilisation Force in Bosnia are
now in Sarajevo to make sure that history does not repeat itself. |
