The Trojan horse that 'started' a 79-day war
By Robert Fisk in Belgrade
independent.co.uk
26 November 1999
In the last days of the Paris peace talks on Yugoslavia last March, something extraordinary happened. The Serb delegation ? after agreeing to a political revolution in Kosovo ? was presented with a military appendix to the treaty which demanded the virtual Nato occupation of all Yugoslavia. The Serbs turned it down and Nato went to war. Yet 79 days later, Nato ? which had refused to contemplate a change in the military document ? lost all interest in the annexe and at the final dramatic meetings on the Macedonian border was content with a Nato force inside only Kosovo.
Official obfuscation and confusion has ever since surrounded this all-important, last-minute addition to the Paris "peace" agreement. Was it presented by the Americans to force President Slobodan Milosevic to reject the whole peace package and permit Nato to bomb Serbia? Nato sources claim the Serbs would anyway never have abided by the Kosovo political accords: in which case, why did the West negotiate with Belgrade in the first place?
Even the text of the military appendix was not known to journalists reporting the two sets of "peace" talks in Rambouillet and Paris. The Serbs say they denounced it at their last Paris press conference ? an ill-attended gathering at the Yugoslav Embassy at 11pm on 18 March. Although a summary of an early draft of the peace treaty was placed in the House of Commons library on 1 March, the full treaty and the military annexes together were not put in the library until 1 April ? the first day of the parliamentary recess and a week after Nato's bombing campaign began.
The full annexes demanded Nato rights of road, rail and
air passage across all of Yugoslavia, the use of radio
stations, even the waiving of any claims of damages
against Nato. For any state ? even one as grotesque as
Serbia ? this would have amounted to occupation. The
Foreign Minister of France, Hubert V‚drine, said the
military appendix was similar to that used by Nato when
it moved troops into Bosnia and that Nato forces needed
access to Kosovo through Belgrade. But he has never
explained why this supposedly essential part of the treaty
was abandoned once Nato troops moved into the
province.
Milan Komnenic, who was the Yugoslav Federal
Information minister and a member of Vuk Draskovic's
Serbian Renewal Movement (then in government but
soon to be in opposition), was in Paris during the talks
and has become preoccupied with the military annexe.
He is writing a book about the negotiations, The Trap of
Rambouillet. A tall, bespectacled figure with a
reputation for intelligence and integrity ? he admits
atrocities were carried out by Serbs ? he says he still
does not understand why the war started.
"We don't know when the Russians found out about
paragraphs six, seven and eight of the annexe," he said.
"Igor Ivanov [the Foreign Minister of Russia] claimed the
Russian side didn't know about the annexe at all. The
surprise is that besides the Americans, no one knew
about the annexe. We were given it one day before the
end of the Paris talks ? at 'a minute before midnight'.
Before that, we heard only rumours about the
implementation of the political agreement."
According to Mr Komnenic, the American negotiator
Christopher Hill and the Austrian diplomat at the talks,
Boris Petritsch, insisted on the annexe while the Russian
negotiator, Boris Mayorski ? who later refused to attend
the Kosovo Albanian signing of the "peace" agreement ?
abstained. "Hill and Petritsch were 'for' the annexe and
[Robin] Cook and V‚drine apparently agreed with a
version ? not identical to the final annexe ? which was
called an 'explanation' of the political agreement and
which said there could be no implementation with a Nato
presence only in Kosovo," Mr Komnenic said.
In January, the Hill plan was published without annexe B
in the Kosovo Albanian newspaper Koha Ditore, Mr
Komnenic says. "And Hill gave Mr Draskovic and
myself a copy of the plan in February ? calling for a
military presence in Kosovo but not in all of Yugoslavia.
Then in Paris, Hill put annexe B on the table ? one day
before the collapse. I don't even know if our side knew
till then about the annexe... But when we realised the
danger of war was threatening, we de facto accepted
the political agreement. It's clear the Americans were
surprised by our acceptance of the agreement. So they
were preparing their trap."
Since the military annexe became widely known,
Western leaders have either tried to explain it away as a
routine addendum to any peace implementation or an
essential mechanism to get Nato into Kosovo. Mr Cook
has adopted both tactics. Replying to Sir Peter Emery in
the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on 28 April ?
when the Nato bombardment had been going on for
more than a month while half the Albanian population of
Kosovo was being "ethnically cleansed" by the Serbs ?
Mr Cook said: "The proposal for a military presence in
Kosovo was one confined to Kosovo." This, he said,
would require a "force agreement" with the Yugoslav
government "that may [sic] be the text which has
appeared". The issue, he said, had never been raised by
the Serb delegation "which suggests to me that there is
something deeply false about the idea that this is now the
basis on which talks broke down". The idea that the
military annexe was the "casus belli" was a "canard".
Goran Matic, a minister in Mr Milosevic's government
and a close friend of the President, says that the
European Contact Group designed the political
framework for the Rambouillet talks and that at one
meeting the Russians refused to discuss the political and
military annexe. "Around the end of the second week of
March, our delegation received the paper which
contained the military annexe," Mr Matic said. "The
Contact Group had managed to present the paper
without the Russians. Our delegation, together with
Mayorski, decided to withdraw acceptance of the paper
because it wasn't produced by all the Contact Group.
For this reason, we said the paper was only 'informal'.
But the Americans were trying to 'legalise' the paper,
which wasn't acceptable to the Russians. Mayorski put in
a written objection. We were ready to accept the
political solution of the Kosovo problem and UN troops
to regulate the implementation ? but not Nato troops in
occupation. United Nations Security Council resolution
1244 [which ended the conflict] could have been
accepted before the bombing."
In any event, when Nato commanders met the Serbs for
the "military-technical agreement" at the end of the war ?
after thousands of Kosovo Albanians had been
murdered by Serb forces and as many as 1,500 civilians
killed by Nato bombs ? the supposedly crucial military
annexe was never mentioned. Miraculously, Nato ? with
40,000 troops to move into the province (10,000 more
than originally envisaged) ? no longer needed appendix
B. Not a single Nato soldier moved north of Kosovo
into the rest of Serbia.
What was the real purpose of Nato's last minute
demand? Was it a Trojan horse? To save the peace? Or
to sabotage it? |
