ANALYSIS-China embassy hit is
major NATO setback
By Paul Taylor, Diplomatic Editor
LONDON, May 8 (Reuters) - NATO's accidental missile strike
on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade is a major diplomatic ''own
goal'' that will complicate efforts to find a political settlement to
the Kosovo war, analysts said on Saturday.
The blunder on Friday night, in which the official Yugoslav news agency Tanjug said four people
were killed and 20 wounded, seems certain to harden Chinese resistance to any U.N. Security
Council blessing of a role for the Western alliance in Kosovo.
It could hardly have been worse timed, just when the Group of Seven Western industrial powers
had got Russia, the other big critic of NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia, to sign up to a joint
statement setting out the terms for a political settlement.
''Clearly, this will encourage Russia and China to demand greater U.N. control on future events in
Kosovo and will increase pressure for a pause in the bombing,'' said Terence Taylor of the
International Institute for Strategic Studies.
''Things were just beginning to go better for NATO, with Russia signing on to a set of principles
including acceptance of an international armed force in Kosovo, in which NATO would clearly
have a big role, and a U.N. interim administration for the province. All this is now put in jeopardy,''
he said,
Following Thursday's Group of Eight nations agreement in Bonn, securing China's acquiescence
had been the next priority for the West before putting a resolution on Kosovo to the U.N. Security
Council in a bid to complete Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's isolation.
Instead, Western powers were forced to apologise for NATO's error at a middle-of-the-night
emergency Security Council session called by an outraged Beijing, and to rebuff pressure to
suspend the air war against Yugoslavia.
China, which has deep-seated fears about possible U.S. intervention in what it regards as its own
internal affairs, notably concerning Tibet and Taiwan, may be tempted to use its Security Council
veto to assuage anger over the attack, which it branded ''barbaric.''
Russia sent mixed signals, cancelling a trip by Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov to Britain to continue
work on a political solution in Kosovo, but going ahead with a visit by its Balkan peace envoy,
Viktor Chernomyrdin, to NATO ally Germany.
Western officials voiced confidence that Moscow would not go back on its agreement to the basic
principles for a settlement, but acknowledged that Russia might try to exploit NATO's
embarrassment to drive a harder bargain in the Security Council.
The embassy strike, in which NATO admitted on Saturday it had targeted the wrong building, was
a propaganda windfall for Milosevic and may undermine Western public support for continuing the
bombing.
It recalled the U.S. bombing of a Baghdad air raid shelter crowded with civilians during the 1991
Gulf War and the 1996 Israeli shelling of Lebanese civilians sheltering in a U.N. outpost at Qana, in
which more than 100 died.
The Baghdad bunker strike, gruesome images of which were relayed around the world by satellite
television, did not alter the course of the war to drive Iraqi troops out of Kuwait.
But the Qana massacre did hasten a ceasefire in southern Lebanon with international monitoring
which Israel had sought to avoid, and many analysts believe it caused the election defeat of Israeli
Prime Minister Shimon Peres a few weeks later.
Outrage over the Chinese embassy may blow over after a few days, although the diplomatic
consequences may be more severe.
Previous NATO errors that caused far more deaths, including the accidental bombing of a convoy
of ethnic Albanian refugees, a civilian train and a civilian bus on bridges, barely dented Western
public backing for the air war launched on March 24.
Most Western voters were more horrified by the flood of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanian
refugees driven from their homes by Serb forces amid reports of mass executions, rape and the
systematic seizure of property and identity documents.
And most accepted their governments' assurances that NATO was doing its best to avoid civilian
casualties but could not totally rule out such accidents.
The deliberate bombing of Serbian state television headquarters, killing 10 people, caused greater
unease in the West.
The Chinese embassy strike could be more damaging, partly because of the international
ramifications of hitting a third country diplomatic mission and partly because of the accumulation of
stray missiles and bombs over 45 days.
On Friday, Western television stations showed harrowing pictures of civilians struck in the southern
city of Nis when a NATO cluster bomb went astray, killing 15 civilians and wounding 70 in a
market, a hospital and nearby homes.
British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, defending the decision to carry on the bombing, told BBC
radio that ''only a dozen'' out of 5,000 NATO sorties dropping ammunition on Yugoslavia had
gone off target.
If the refugees were to be returned to Albania, the bombing had to continue until Milosevic yielded,
he declared.
Public acceptance of such statements on the home front will now be put to its most severe test so
far.
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