Kosovo has become an "ego" war where Clinton and Blair are now more interested in political cover for their monumental screw up than in finding a durable solution to the crisis.
I believe that the NATO coalition will crack at some point, (though may be not publicly) :
when Milosevic is done in Kosovo, just a matter of days now, he will have the Russians exert tremendous pressure on the French and the German to push for a political settlement. This already seems to be in the cards.
(While not reported in the US press, the French foreign Minister, Hubert Vedrine is actively engaged in discussions with his Russian counterpart on a political solution to the Kososvo crisis.)
This "Kosovo Nato thing" was a disaster from the very start, and Blair trumpeting this week end that he had "no choice" and that "we are going to win" is Clintonian bullshit rhetoric.
By all available measures, we have lost, and the Neo-socialists (Clinton in the lead) have proved to be a bunch of stupid and reckless amateurs when it comes to military operations.
The following article is a must read :
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Local experts issue Kosovo warning
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
April 4, 1999 Bill Zlatos
To Serbs, Kosovo is a province with magnificent monasteries and a blood-stained battlefield. To ethnic Albanians, it's the birthplace of their national movement.
The land is so dear to the history of both groups that neither will give it up easily. And that history, combined with what local experts call misguided American foreign policy, will make it difficult to find a solution acceptable to the two sides and the Clinton administration.
As NATO strikes against Serbia continued, academicians at two Pittsburgh universities who specialize in the Balkans discussed the centuries-old conflict and possible outcomes.
"I'm not looking at anything that's got a happy ending," said Robert Hayden, director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.
Hayden returned March 24 from Paris, where he was to have been part of a nine-member team in a private peace mission organized by former Yugoslav Prime Minister Milan Panic. The impending NATO attack scuttled their mission.
Since then, Hayden has been a leading critic of the bombing, calling it an "error of the magnitude of the Bay of Pigs or the British-French invasion of the Suez Canal in 1956."
Hayden said if support becomes divided among NATO members for continued bombings the disagreement eventually could lead to the demise of the organization.
If the U.S. invades Serbia, it would launch a catastrophic chain of events, he said.
Hayden doesn't expect the bombing to end soon.
"We're talking about people stupid enough to lead NATO over a cliff," he said. "I'm not optimistic about their becoming smart enough to pull back."
Steven Majstorovic, assistant professor of political science at Duquesne University, said America can win the conflict at a cost of 1 million Serbian lives.
"The Serbs will fight to the end over Kosovo," he said. "Civilians will fight. Women will fight. Priests will fight. When they run out of guns, they'll use pitchforks."
Kosovo's mystique is rooted in its history. The region is rich in medieval monasteries and churches of the Serbian Orthodox faith, and the seat of that church, in fact, is in Pec, in northwest Kosovo.
The most sacred date on the Serb calendar is June 28, 1389. That's when the Ottoman Turks defeated a Christian army led by Serbian Prince Lazar, beginning five centuries of Turkish domination and an influx of Albanians into the region.
The land where that battle occurred is as dear to Serbs as Gettysburg and the Alamo are to Americans, Majstorovic said.
In 1873, the Ottoman Empire was decaying and the Albanian national movement was founded in the town of Prizre in southern Kosovo. This event explains Albanian attachment to the region, he said.
The Serbs regained Kosovo in 1912. Dennison Rusinow, professor of Balkan studies at Pitt, said, "The Serbs called Kosovo 'our Jerusalem,' meaning a place where we started and belong and have a right to go back to. But when they go back there, it's full of Albanians."
More Serbs resettled there and in 1945 Kosovo became an autonomous province of Serbia within Tito-led Yugoslavia.
Rusinow said the autonomy actually was fictitious until 1968, when Tito upgraded Kosovo to virtually a seventh province of the nation. After that, the Kosovar Albanian communists pressured the Serbs to leave.
Tito died in 1980. Slobodan Milosevic eventually rose to power, and in 1989 he wiped out Kosovo's autonomy by closing its parliament and reimposing direct rule from Belgrade.
The ethnic Albanians resisted passively at first, but eventually began fighting Serb rule. By last summer, the Kosovo Liberation Army controlled 40 percent of the area.
The Serbs, in response, launched an offensive that alarmed the world.
Ninety percent of Kosovo's residents are ethnic Albanians, and 10 percent are Serbs. Of the ethnic Albanians, 90 percent are Muslim and 10 percent are Roman Catholic.
Majstorovic contends the proportion of Albanians in Kosovo might be swelled by Gypsies and Turks forced to claim Albanian heritage.
The wisest move, Hayden said, would be for NATO to stop the bombing and begin serious diplomacy. So far, he said, American diplomacy has consisted of making Milosevic an offer he couldn't accept.
Hayden and Majstorovic agreed that an offer must be made to partition Kosovo.
Majstorovic believes the Serbs would accept taking over the northern third of Kosovo, and leaving the southern two-thirds to the ethnic Albanians. That plan would give the Serbs the 1389 battlefield and sites that are of religious importance to them.
He said the Kosovars probably would accept such a partition, but the United States would discourage them from accepting it.
"We hate Milosevic, and have demonized the Serbs so badly that an equitable peace plan is out of the question for U.S. policy," Majstorovic said.
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