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

To: nuke44 who wrote (7940)	5/11/1999 8:12:00 PM
From: goldsnow	Respond to of 17770

ANALYSIS-China wields Kosovo clout after bombing 07:26 a.m. May 11, 1999 Eastern By Paul Eckert BEIJING, May 11 (Reuters) - Calm has returned to China's streets, angry masses have been demobilised and their communist rulers have turned to the serious matter of milking the NATO bombing of their Belgrade embassy for all it is worth. China has made it plain it sees the coming weeks as payback time: state media call for ''small favours on the economic side'' to compensate for the death and destruction in Belgrade, and Beijing demands ever more fulsome Western apologies. ''Chinese diplomacy has always been a matter of finding where your advantages lie and using them to the fullest,'' said an Asian diplomat. China has already harnessed what central bank governor Dai Xianglong calls ''hatred-sparked patriotic zeal'' to take a seat at the table in fresh diplomatic efforts to end the Kosovo crisis. ''The Chinese view of being a major power is it likes to be consulted on global issues and it was clear that before the eruption last weekend, China was annoyed that it was not consulted on Kosovo,'' said a Western diplomat. Beijing is now a key stop in shuttle diplomacy over Kosovo after the bombing and state-inspired protests in which smirking Chinese riot police shepherded angry protesters as they smashed NATO embassy windows and threatened foreigners. The result of Chinese fury over its three citizens killed and more than 20 wounded in NATO's mistaken bombing of its Belgrade mission is that it has gone from ''pouting on the sidelines'' to a key role in the search for a solution, the Western diplomat said. Russian special envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin left Beijing on Tuesday after a brief visit and indicated that China had not changed its stance on the Yugoslavia crisis. ''The main principle is to stop the bombing and that is the main position,'' he said of talks with President Jiang Zemin. Chernomyrdin will be followed on Wednesday by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who agreed to leave behind a big business delegation and scale his mission down to a brief working visit which will focus almost solely on Kosovo. Aides said Schroeder would urge China not to veto a plan by the Group of Eight -- seven major Western powers and Russia. The plan calls for Belgrade's forces to quit Kosovo and for an international presence to be set up to protect ethnic Albanians. Jean-Pierre Cabestan, director of the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China, said China might ''bargain much more strongly over its approval or abstention'' of the G8 plan. ''The best the NATO countries and Russia may hope for from China is abstention,'' he said. China is a veto-holding permanent member of the U.N. Security Council but has largely fumed on the sidelines since NATO skirted the United Nations and began attacking Yugoslavia in March. But there are doubts China can ever be seen as an honest broker after months of state media coverage of the Kosovo crisis which helped whip up violent anti-NATO protests at the weekend. ''The trouble with China's position on the Kosovo crisis to date is that it stuck too closely to Slobodan Milosevic's views with official media playing Milosevic's game without reservation,'' Cabestan said of the Yugoslav president, seen by NATO as the architect of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. But now Russia has distanced itself from Milosevic and taken a position closer to the Western powers, ''China will have to moderate its view if it really wants to play a role and be a more positive actor in the resolution of the Kosovo crisis,'' he said. Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited.