Electronic Telegraph
5/9/99 John Simpson
ISSUE 1444
Sunday 9 May 1999
Hearts and minds are not won like this
By John Simpson
THE bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was a political disaster that has long been waiting to happen. This was already clear in the noise and confusion of the bombing's immediate aftermath. The embassy staff were shepherded out of the building, their faces covered with dust or blackened by smoke, while the firemen began searching the shattered structure. A shocked Chinese official began making a list to see if anyone else might be still left inside.
The question the bemused onlookers asked was: how on earth could a bomb or a missile be so misguided as to hit a building set on its own in parkland in the middle of a large residential district?
Gleefully, President Milosevic's officials had their answer ready. It is not true, they say, that Nato tries to avoid civilian casualties; on the contrary, Nato is deliberately seeking civilian casualties. This is, the Serbian propaganda system insists, a deliberate campaign of genocide: an accusation that carries a certain irony here, of course.
Nevertheless, Nato's record in terms of civilian casualties has not been good. Official figures are hard to come by (true to its communist roots, the Belgrade government is reluctant to tell people too much, for fear of stirring them up), but the best estimate is that around 480 non-combatants have died in the 47 days of the bombing campaign: 10 civilian deaths every day.
The problem of bombs and missiles that go astray has seemed less serious than it is, because international attention is fixed on Belgrade, and this city has got off more lightly than Novi Sad or Nis - Serbia's second and third largest cities. It is as though the Nato planners have been holding off because the national and international media are based in Belgrade. Fewer and more careful attacks mean less chance of disaster.
Here, with only a few exceptions, the bombing has been carried out with remarkable precision. None of us staying in the Hyatt Hotel is likely to forget the whistling sound of the cruise missile that flew low over our roof two weeks ago and took out the radio mast on top of the Usce building opposite. The mast was about 10ft across at its base.
In Novi Sad and Nis, and several other places across Serbia and Kosovo where there are no foreign journalists, heavier bombing has brought more accidents. On Friday, cluster bombs intended to destroy the airfield at Nis went astray and hit the marketplace and hospital.
These bombs explode in the air and hurl shards of shrapnel over a wide radius. Used against human beings, cluster bombs are some of the most savage weapons of modern warfare - and Nato planes launched two of them into a busy town centre in broad daylight.
The result was deeply shocking. The Serbian propaganda machine has belatedly got into its stride now, and is now quite good at assembling groups of journalists, both foreign and local, and ferrying them to the scene of such disasters. The journalists and cameramen arrived in Nis within a few hours, and found the bodies still lying in the streets where they had fallen.
Saying sorry afterwards doesn't work. The contrast is simply too great between the horrific scenes of people cut in two by pieces of shrapnel eight inches across or stumbling dazed and half-blinded out of a burning embassy, and a neatly dressed official spokesman at a briefing in Brussels hurrying through a two-line pro-forma apology the following day. Every war nowadays is a hearts-and-minds campaign; and hearts and minds are not won in this fashion.
President Milosevic knows this very well, and he uses each new horror with great skill. Nato is making a mistake to think that the harder he is hit, the more his will to continue is sapped. On the contrary: the harder he is hit, the more likely something is to go wrong, and the more he benefits.
It may be painful for the Nato governments, and particularly the British and Americans, to accept it, but it is starting to look as though Milosevic is going to survive.
A ND the simple fact of surviving will be enough to give him victory. Tony Blair may still be too affected by his trip to the refugee camps to consider the possibility, but Bill Clinton is a lot more supple when it comes to morality. He can spot a winner when he sees one, and he knows what to do.
Last Thursday, at an open-air press conference in Germany, he electrified everyone in Yugoslavia by making it clear he could do a deal with Milosevic still in power. At a stroke, all the moral rhetoric from London about the need for Yugoslavia to get a new leader looked disturbingly out of date.
Maybe it won't come to this; though the pilot who thought the Chinese embassy was something altogether different has done his level best to ensure it will. Maybe Milosevic will realise all the harm and suffering he has caused, and decide to pack his bags for exile in Greece; though the decision to declare him a war criminal early in the conflict is scarcely an inducement. Maybe President Clinton really does mean to go on to the bitter end. Maybe.
At the moment, though, a negotiated settlement sponsored by the Russians seems a more likely possibility. Milosevic instinctively identifies the word "negotiation" with weakness. He is probably the best political negotiator now operating, and the past decade has shown that, when you negotiate with him, you have to do it twice - once to get a deal, and once to get him to do what he already promised he would do.
In the run-up to the talks, Nato will no doubt ratchet up the bombing, so it will look as though it has won. Anyone who suggests otherwise will find that nameless civil servants are whispering in Whitehall that he or she is naive, or pro-Serbian.
But Milosevic has shown conclusively what everyone except President Clinton and Madeleine Albright already knew: that you can't win wars by air strikes alone - you have to get your boots dirty. One of the big problems of the modern world is that the United States isn't prepared to get its boots dirty, and hasn't yet realised that you can't be a superpower if you daren't fight wars.
From the moment it becomes clear that negotiations are on their way, any further bombing will become purely cosmetic: which will no doubt be a great comfort to those poor unfortunates who will still be killed by pilot errors. In the end, Nato will declare a great victory, meaning that it has managed to get through without actually breaking apart. And when the smoke clears, there will be Slobodan Milosevic, shaking hands with everyone.
Maybe it is just a bad dream, and Milosevic will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by imagining that he can refuse to compromise at the key moment. But don't count on it.
I've got a depressing feeling that this past week of bloody, unnecessary horrors, military blunders and political manoeuvring has fixed the outcome.
John Simpson is World Affairs Editor of the BBC. |
