What should happen next
By Noel Malcolm
'MILOSEVIC backs down", said the headlines. The BBC reporter said:
"Ordinary Serbs will be wondering why they had to endure 72 days of
bombing to sign a plan significantly worse than the one Milosevic had rejected
at the start." Robin Cook, meanwhile, was talking about Mr Milosevic's
forthcoming appearance at the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.
Defeat, incompetence, imminent arrest: anyone following the story in the
British media would conclude that the Yugoslav President was all washed up.
Apparently Milosevic has failed in the eyes of his people, who are about to
vent their fury on him, either for his climb-down, or for the pointless suffering
he has inflicted on them (or, indeed, for both).
Readers of the Serbian papers, however, will have gained a very different
impression. Politika, the leading Belgrade daily, ran a big, exultant headline:
"Confirmed: the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia, and the role of the UN." A long report from correspondents
round the world informed readers of the international community's heartfelt
gratitude to Mr Milosevic. (There was just one exception: "The British
Government has been to a large extent unhappy with this turn of events, and is
trying to justify its lonely war-mongering policy.")
Milosevic, in other words, is still in the game. He is not about to be
overthrown by the Serbian people, whose main sources of information (not
just Politika and the other papers, but also the state-run television and radio)
are under his control. Much of what they read and hear is pure propaganda,
of course. But when they are told that this deal is significantly better for
Belgrade than what was on offer in March, they are not being misled. On one
point after another - the involvement of the Russians, the promised
reintroduction of some Serbian forces to Kosovo, and above all the removal
of any suggestion of self-determination for the Kosovars - it is the West, not
Mr Milosevic, that has made concessions.
Does this mean that the master-strategist in Belgrade has triumphed once
again? "Triumph" is hardly the word for a ruler who has presided over the
wholesale destruction of his country's infrastructure; and on the fundamental
point at issue here - the return of refugees under some sort of international
protection - his aims have indeed been thwarted. And yet, so long as
Milosevic remains in the game, it is worth asking what strategy he may be still
pursuing.
Over the years Slobodan Milosevic has had not one strategy, but two or
three. His initial idea, when he rose to power in the late Eighties, was to take
over the entire structure of the Yugoslav federal state. It was a federation with
eight units, and four of them were susceptible to direct Serbian control. By
stirring up Serb nationalism over the Kosovo issue he turned himself into a
popular leader in Serbia itself, installed his supporters in Montenegro, and
reduced the former federal units of Kosovo and Vojvodina to little more than
votes in his own pocket.
With half the federation under his control, he needed to take over only one
more unit to get a built-in majority on the federal government. But his
nationalist campaign had alarmed and alienated the Slovenes and the Croats,
who were now heading for the door marked "Exit". The break-up of
Yugoslavia, of which Milosevic was himself the prime cause, marked the final
defeat of strategy number one.
By the time Slovenia and Croatia declared independence in 1991, however,
Milosevic was already hard at work on strategy number two. If he could not
control the whole of Yugoslavia, then his plan was to carve out a large new
Serbian state: this would include Serb-inhabited parts of Croatia and Bosnia,
plus many areas in between which happened to be populated by Croats or
Muslims. Hence the mass "cleansing" of northern Bosnia in 1992: the product
not of "ancient ethnic hatreds", but of modern political planning in Belgrade.
Yet by late 1995, after the collapse of Serb forces in Croatia and their
near-collapse in northern Bosnia, this scheme too had failed.
Since then, Milosevic's main strategy has not been particularly strategic: his
overwhelming concerns have been survival and power, aims he has pursued
with considerable tactical skill. He saw off the street protests of 1996 to
1997, waited for the opposition coalition to collapse, and co-opted his most
dangerous rival, the ultra-nationalist Vojislav Seselj, into the government.
At the back of his mind, however, some remnants of his grand geopolitical
schemes must still have been at work. There were two major items of
unfinished business. One was Kosovo, with its ever-expanding Albanian
population: for years, Serb nationalist intellectuals had been toying with the
idea of partition, as a way of keeping the most valuable part of the territory
(the northern half, where the mines and power stations are) and losing the
Albanians. Ten weeks ago, Milosevic decided that he could go one better -
getting rid of all the Albanians, and keeping all the land.
The other unfinished issue was Bosnia. Western promises to re-integrate the
two halves of that country had not been fulfilled. The American commander
who took over after Dayton, Admiral Leighton Smith, publicly declared that
he would not seek to arrest war criminals: the military doctrine which forbids
any risk to any American prevailed there, as it did more recently in the skies
over Kosovo. The old power-structures in the Serb-ruled half of Bosnia have
not been dismantled, and the political leadership there has alternated between
Milosevic's proxies and those of his rival-cum-deputy, Vojislav Seselj.
Milosevic's long-term strategy now must be to make the occupation of
Kosovo as troublesome as possible for the Nato powers; to use the presence
of Russian forces to prepare a de facto partition on the ground; and then to
offer to the West, as a way out of all its difficulties, a grand exchange, in
which the Kosovo Albanians get the southern half of their territory and Serbia
gets a large part of eastern Bosnia.
From the tough-talking comments of Robin Cook and Tony Blair, it appears
that Nato leaders are well aware of the dangers of creeping partition in
Kosovo (though they have not yet mentioned the obvious solution, which is to
disperse the Russian troops in the south). It would indeed be an act of
grotesque cruelty to tell the Albanians that they were free to return to their
homes, and then accept that in practice half of them would be permanently
prevented from doing so.
And yet that is exactly what has happened in Bosnia. If the West really wants
to close off Mr Milosevic's strategic options, it should seize the opportunity
now to clear out the extremist politicians and police chiefs in Republika
Srpska, the Serb-ruled half of Bosnia, who have obstructed the return of
refugees. The biggest source of confidence in Milosevic's mind today, as he
contemplates the developments of the next few years in Kosovo, must be his
knowledge of what has happened during the last few years in Bosnia. The
final remnants of his strategy will crumble into dust only when the West shows
that it really is committed to the integrity (and, ultimately, the
self-determination) of every one of the former federal units of Yugoslavia -
Bosnia and Kosovo included.
Dr Malcolm is the author of Kosovo, a Short History and Bosnia, a Short
History (Macmillan).
telegraph.co.uk
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