In a week, we'll know the course of the
war
By John Simpson in Belgrade
Blair pledges 50,000 men for invasion
IN the next seven days, we should have a better idea whether this war of
miscalculation will stretch out for months and involve an invasion and a fight to
the finish, or whether it will end fairly speedily with an unsatisfactory
compromise.
"If anything can be decided," said Viktor Chernomyrdin, the lugubrious
Russian negotiator, when he arrived here on Friday morning, "it will only be
next week." Jimmy Carter, who makes a better pundit than he did a president,
said on television the same day that Chernomyrdin would fail, and that
America would be drawn into an all-out war.
In this city, where common sense has faded to a moon-cast shadow, the
wackiest opinions flourish: the Russians will move in to save Serbia, Clinton
will fall, Italy and Greece will stop Nato invading, a secret weapon has
been/will be introduced to sweep Nato planes out of the sky.
By comparison with this sleep of reason, the suggestion that the International
War Crimes Tribunal indicted Slobodan Milosevic last Thursday on the
orders of the United States seemed almost rational. Slobodan Vuksanovic,
the embattled vice-president of the Democratic Party, said: "We think this
decision will possibly break or damage - or even destroy - the talks."
His own party leader, Zoran Djindjic, has been saying, from the relative safety
of Montenegro, that Milosevic should be tried for war crimes. This is not an
easy climate for opposition parties, and Vuksanovic likes to play it safe
whenever he gets the chance. A senior government official explained to me
that the decision by the War Crimes Tribunal was much more far-reaching
and complex than anyone had yet supposed.
The American arms industry was worried about losing its contracts now the
Cold War was over, so of course it had to make sure that this war would
drag on for a long time. No peace agreement could be allowed. The arms
people told Clinton; Clinton told the court. Well, it stands to reason.
This is a country of highly intelligent, educated people who have been under
somebody's thumb for a very long time. If it wasn't the Turks, it was the
Austrians; if it wasn't the Austrians, it was the European balance of power;
and finally it was Tito. This kind of history, observable in Iran, Iraq,
Argentina, Mexico, Greece and many other semi-colonised countries, always
seems to engender a belief in the hidden hand, the secret motive, the complex
version as opposed to the obvious one.
You or I might assume that Judge Louise Arbour instructed her advisers to
see whether it was legally possible to indict a serving president for the ethnic
cleansing and murder of people in his country; that her officials investigated,
and decided it was; and that she then issued the indictment.
No doubt she talked to Nato governments every step of the way: nothing
surprising about that, since they were providing her with the evidence her
court would require. But this is too simple for people here. They need to see
signs of a plot, of someone's manipulative fingers.
Instead, the real problem seems to be the old dichotomy: that the Western
powers can never quite decide whether to condemn Milosevic for all the
problems that have come upon the former Yugoslavia in the past 10 years (a
perfectly justifiable, if simplified, view), or to treat him as the only person who
can help them sort out the resulting problems. This dichotomy, between guilty
war-leader and essential diplomatic partner, remains as strong and as
unresolved as ever.
You see it most strongly in Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary. Few
politicians have been fiercer about Milosevic than Mr Cook. The adjectives
have flowed freely. In a Kipling poem about the Boer War there is an
apposite little phrase about "killing Kruger with your mouth".
And yet directly the International Tribunal agreed with Mr Cook and issued
its indictment, he seemed quite affronted at the idea that Nato shouldn't keep
on negotiating with Milosevic. "It would be irresponsible not to," he said
aggressively. This is the no man's land that Milosevic has inhabited
successfully and with great skill during the 1990s. He might have created the
mess in the first place, but no one else can clean it up properly. He knows it,
and Nato knows it.
All the same, Judge Arbour has sorted out one question comprehensively.
According to a senior official who might be expected to know, there has
scarcely been a negotiation during the present crisis at which the question of
Milosevic's future and that of his family has not come up in some way. His
survival in office and his freedom from prosecution have been two of his most
consistent demands.
Confined to my hotel room by an immobilised leg as straight and heavy in its
plaster cast as an artillery-piece, I am watching a lot of movies at present -
when, that is, there is electricity. In particular, I seem to be seeing a lot of films
about desperados who take hostages and pay the consequences. There's a
certain aptness to all this. The majority of people in this country feel like
prisoners at present, hideously vulnerable to an outside force that can strike
them at any time it chooses, according to a logic they cannot understand.
Will the negotiator succeed in releasing us against all the odds? Or will the
Swat team come in shooting? Viktor Chernomyrdin can be expected to give
us a clearer idea when he returns in the week.
John Simpson is World Affairs Editor of the BBC. His article appears by
agreement with BBC On-Line.
telegraph.co.uk
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