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

To: John Lacelle who wrote (4232)	4/17/1999 12:20:00 PM
From: goldsnow	Respond to of 17770

Russia Yugo Envoy To Brief Yeltsin On Plan 11:36 a.m. Apr 17, 1999 Eastern MOSCOW (Reuters) - Former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, Russia's special envoy on the Yugoslav crisis, will present President Boris Yeltsin Monday with proposals to resolve the conflict, Russian news agencies said Saturday. Chernomyrdin said resolving the conflict would be a difficult process but that he was ready next week to start foreign trips to try to achieve a diplomatic breakthrough. Chernomyrdin, who says Russia should keep a cool head with NATO despite anger over its bombings of fellow Slav and Orthodox state Serbia, was appointed last Wednesday. He has held meetings with Western diplomats and local experts on the crisis. Interfax news agency quoted Chernomyrdin as saying that Yeltsin had called a meeting on the Balkans' crisis for Monday and that the former prime minister would present concrete proposals then. The meeting would also be attended by Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov and Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov. Chernomyrdin was also quoted as saying that his first foreign trips to discuss the crisis would begin next week. He has also said he is ready to travel to Belgrade. ''It is a difficult process, everyone is saying that the question has to be resolved in a peaceful way and admit that mistakes have been made,'' Chernomyrdin was quoted as saying of his meetings with ambassadors from NATO countries. ''It is easy to begin, but stopping a barbaric process which destroys people is not so simple,'' Itar-Tass news agency quoted him as saying. He added that Russia was seen as the force which could help bring about peace in the region. He also said that he met Ivanov Saturday while Chernomyrdin's press service earlier said the ex-premier had held consultations with local experts as he geared up for possible visits to European capitals next week. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, whose country has unveiled a plan to end the Yugoslavia conflict, has said he is ready to meet Chernomyrdin soon to seek ways to end the crisis. Russia has strongly opposed NATO's strikes against Serbia but has vowed not to get dragged into a full-scale Balkan war. Chernomyrdin has said that Russia should pursue dialogue with the alliance and has also welcomed the German peace plan. Chernomyrdin Friday met Borislav Milosevic, the Yugoslav ambassador and brother to Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, as well as the ambassadors of France and the United States. Chernomyrdin also said he was not against Yugoslavia joining a union between Belarus and Russia, backed by Russia's State Duma lower house Friday. But he added that organizing such a union would take a lot of effort while the main thing was to stop the war. Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited.

To: John Lacelle who wrote (4232)	4/17/1999 12:42:00 PM
From: Les H	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17770

PERILS OF INDIFFERENCE -- AND OF ACTION April 14, 1999 WASHINGTON Clarence Page Chicago Tribune chicagotribune.com Events have an ironic way of overtaking the best-laid plans of the Clinton White House. More than a year ago First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton invited Elie Wiesel, the distinguished author and Holocaust survivor, to speak at the White House "Millennium Evenings" series. As she introduced Wiesel and President Clinton at the two-hour seminar Monday evening, Mrs. Clinton said she never could have imagined that the war in Kosovo would make Wiesel's topic, "The Perils of Indifference: Lessons Learned from a Violent Century," so relevant. As I listened, I was taken not only by the discussion's relevance but also by its irrelevance. Much was said about how the catastrophe in Kosovo illustrates the perils of indifference. Too little was said about the perils of action, specifically the actions taken by President Clinton and NATO that have made bad matters worse. Wiesel was the first to note a key difference between world reaction to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's "ethnic cleansing" of ethnic Albanians in the Kosovo region of his country and the war Adolf Hitler waged against the Jews. "This time," Wiesel said, "the world was not silent." Nor has the world been indifferent. Despite painful memories of our Vietnam debacle and the fevered harangues of isolationist naysayers, polls show most Americans want to help. We are a nation of compassionate people willing to make tremendous sacrifices for others, but only if we think our actions will do more good than harm. Unfortunately, when the United States and NATO took action, hoping bombs would force the Yugoslav president to back off, Milosevic's removal of ethnic Albanians speeded up and his political position in Yugoslavia was strengthened. Too much of the debate in Washington has focused on whether we should send ground troops to Kosovo, a risky venture in that tree-covered and mountainous region. History shows the Yugoslavian military might well do to the U.S. what it did to the German Wehrmacht during World War II, hand us an apparent victory in a day or two, then take to the hills for an endless guerrilla war. The Germans lost thousands of soldiers and never took Yugoslavia. As an alternative, some American leaders are proposing that we offer aid to the independence-minded Kosovo Liberation Army and let them take over the fight against Milosevic. But the extremist KLA, some of whom are murderous thugs, may not be the sort of army we want to support, either. Indifference at the end of the 20th Century is undermined by modern news media. But the media also encourage us to think in terms of solutions that are as quick and easy to digest as the 10-second sound bite or a network mini-series. "The Face of Evil" crows the cover of Newsweek, next to Milosevic's photo. But Milosevic is neither the beginning nor the end of Balkan problems. Nothing excuses Milosevic's bloody tyranny, but he is not the same sort of tyrant as Hitler. We make a mistake if we try to demonize Milosevic too much. Unlike Hitler, who wanted to wipe out the Jews, Milosevic's forced removal of ethnic Albanians has different roots. It grew, in part, out of his overreaction to the KLA's attacks against Serbs and even some fellow ethnic Albanians who were believed to be insufficiently committed to the KLA's cause. A realistic solution in Kosovo must show an appreciation for the complexities of a history that has a deeper presence in the lives of central Europeans than we Americans usually feel. Many Serbs regard their defeat by the Ottoman Turks in 1389 "as if it happened last week," observed Rep. Rod Blagojevich (D-Ill.), the House's only member of Serbian descent. From the House floor and in an op-ed in Tuesday's Washington Post, Blagojevich has called for a settlement that would partition Kosovo and would take four factors into account: - It must keep as many of Kosovo's sacred Orthodox cathedrals and historic places as possible within Serbia, properly appreciating the widely held Serbian view that Kosovo is the cradle of their civilization. - It should seek to place as many Albanian homes as possible within an area of self-rule contiguous to Albania. - It must include the Russians as part of the agreement, defusing Russian resentment of NATO bombing and taking advantage of close historic relations between Serbs and Russians. - Finally, the partition boundaries must be drawn not just along ethnic lines but along strategically defensible lines, assuring their long-term stability. Blagojevich does not have all the answers, but at least his formula contains an appreciation for history and its complexities, an appreciation too often missing in the Kosovo debate. History matters. Indifference holds many perils, but so does a failure to act with intelligence.