Milosevic Will Not Give In": Primakov
PARIS, May. 02, 1999 -- (Agence France
Presse) Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic
will not give in to NATO air strikes, Russian
Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov said in an
interview published here Sunday.
He warned that 200,000 ground troops and
"many deaths" would be needed to make
Milosevic surrender after the "first real war" in
Europe since 1945.
Primakov told the correspondent of the French
Sunday paper Le Journal du Dimanche, writer
Marek Halter, that the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization's intervention in Yugoslavia was a
"tragic error."
Referring to chess, he said: "You know that
before moving a pawn you must predict all your
opponent's possible strategies. NATO did not
foresee Serbian resistance, or especially the
hundreds of thousands of refugees thrown on to
the roads when the bombing began."
"Slobodan Milosevic is carrying out his policy,
which is not mine, but I can tell you that he will
not surrender," Primakov added. "NATO will
have to send in 200,000 ground troops, and
even then the fighting will be tough, the first real
war in Europe since World War Two.
"It will cause many, many deaths and even more
refugees... without mentioning the destabilization
of the Balkans and at the end the failure of
Europe."
Primakov expressed regret that Russia had been
kept out of the Rambouillet conference which
produced an autonomy plan for the ethnic
Albanian majority in Serbia's province of
Kosovo.
Milosevic's refusal to allow NATO troops in to
oversee the implementation of the plan prompted
the air strikes and Serbia's expulsion of hundreds
of thousands of ethnic Albanians in a campaign of "ethnic cleansing."
The alliance had even succeeded where Milosevic had failed, by making
the political opposition to his regime disappear, Primakov said.
He added that Russia would be prepared to assist in protecting
population groups and enabling the Kosovars to return home, "but only in
the framework of the United Nations."
"Only the UN is authorized to engage in military action against one of its
members which does not respect the organization's charter or that of
human rights," Primakov said.
"One does not impose justice by war."
The Russian leader did not rule out a summit on the Balkans in Moscow
to end the crisis, "if Belgrade and the countries of NATO, as well as
Yugoslavia's neighbors, are willing." ( (c) 1999 Agence France Presse)
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