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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: George Papadopoulos who wrote (17141)	10/8/2000 7:00:41 AM
From: Tom Clarke	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

Analysis: Fall of Milosevic filled with irony By MARTIN SIEFF, UPI Senior News Analyst WASHINGTON, Oct. 5 (UPI)-- Publicly, the U.S. government is celebrating the fall of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic as a great triumph. And it looks certain to give Vice President Al Gore a welcome boost as a timely foreign policy achievement during the U.S. presidential election campaign. But the fall of Milosevic is filled with ironies and new problems for the U.S. government. And privately, many senior U.S. officials have for years regarded the possible victory of Vojislav Kostunica, the man who toppled Milosevic, as a cause for despair rather than rejoicing. A year ago, a U.S. official for a quasi-governmental organization working in Belgrade told UPI, on condition of anonymity: "From our point of view, Kostunica's victory would be the worst possible outcome. He would be determined to hold on to the territories seized by Milosevic. But unlike Milosevic, he would enjoy strong popular support for perhaps several years in power. It could be very difficult for us." Indeed, Kostunica's rise has proven to be far from welcome to the Clinton administration, especially to Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright. The U.S. government poured millions of dollars into the Yugoslav opposition to Milosevic over the past five years. Robert Hayden, director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, said in a statement Thursday, "Since Milosevic made it impossible for the opposition to have any kind of access to internal funding, they had to turn to outside sources." However, this allowed Milosevic to portray the fractious, divided opposition to the Serbian people as tools of the United States, who would allow the nation to be dismembered and left at the mercy of its ancient enemies if they took power. However, this tactic did not work against Kostunica. He was the one prominent figure who did not accept any U.S. money. "I know .. Vojislav Kostunica. He's a constitutional lawyer, a Serbian patriot, a democrat. ... He's untainted by dealings with either the Milosevic regime or the Clinton administration," Hayden said. To the puzzlement and then chagrin of U.S. officials, this only served to make him the one credible alternative to Milosevic in the eyes of the Serbian people. Albright has spearheaded the efforts to make an example of Milosevic by having him handed over to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, capital of the Netherlands, and tried there as a war criminal. But Kostunica implacably opposed having Milosevic or any other prominent Serb tried as a war criminal, no matter how terrible was their conduct during the last nine years of conflict in the fragmented former communist federal state. He also regularly denounced the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia last year as "criminal." This also gave him a popularity credibility all the U.S.-backed opposition figures who did not criticize the bombing lacked. Stephen Zunes, associate professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, said Thursday in a statement, "Change in Eastern Europe has come not from the armed force of NATO but from large-scale nonviolent action of the subjugated peoples themselves. .. If anything, NATO's bombing last year may have set back the growing anti-Milosevic movement." Marjorie Cohn, associate professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, Calif., agreed that Kostunica's strong stance against the bombing had contributed greatly to his credibility and popularity in Serbia as a leader who would try and defend them from being subjugated by the NATO alliance, led by the United States. She told Washington's Institute for Public Accuracy on Thursday, "Many people in Yugoslavia oppose Milosevic but they also despise NATO, which subjected them to a ruthless 11-week bombing campaign (in 1999). .. The long term question is who will run Yugoslavia once Milosevic is ousted -- Kostunica or NATO?" Kostunica also flatly opposed granting Kosovo province, with its more than 90 percent Albanian Muslim majority, any independence from Orthodox Christian Serbia. In many respects, Kostunica's triumph presents the Clinton administration -- and its successor, whether Vice President Al Gore or Texas Gov. George W Bush -- with a far trickier problem than Milosevic did. U.S. leaders, Republican and Democrat alike, were used to attacking Milosevic as if not a Hitler, then at least a Saddam Hussein figure. They made clear they hoped that a pro-American opposition candidate would eventually succeed him and agree to U.S.-mediated solutions to Bosnia and Kosovo. But Kostunica is not pro-American. He is as virulent a critic of recent U.S. policies as Milosevic himself. And he has said he is determined to not to give an inch on the Kosovo issue. Yet he had nothing to do with Serbian ethnic cleansing activities in Kosovo or any previous acts of aggression, mass murder or ethnic cleansing in the 1991-95 Bosnia conflict. He even opposed the operation of the International Court of Justice in The Hague that U.S. officials now believe is essential to serve as a deterrent to any future European leaders who might contemplate such massive state crimes. From Washington's point of view, a Kostunica victory leaves Serbia under the control of a tough, implacable nationalist for another political cycle and many more years to come. It would derail U.S. hopes of negotiating a broad settlement to Yugoslav issues on Washington's terms. And it would even remove whatever optimism remained before that Milosevic was the only obstacle to the desired U.S. outcome because he was standing in the way of the democratic aspirations of his own people. From the Clinton administration's point of view, the trouble with Kostunica is precisely that he does appear to accurately express the democratic aspirations of the Serbian people. The only trouble is that they are not the aspirations that the Clinton administration would like them to be. vny.com