COLUMN: Sympathy for the Devil?

From Michael Pereira's, "Vox," Fall '98 From Michael Pereira's, "Vox," Fall '98History should have taught us to deal more severely with dictators. Appeasement only abets the abuse of political power, condoning dangerous aspirations and legitimating perversity. Concession can be considered mute support for ill-conceived agendas, for frenzied nationalisms, torture, ethnic cleansing. Such is the reasoning behind the existence of NATO, the multinational peacekeeping force now poised to do battle with Serbian police and military forces under the control of Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic. Throughout the war in Bosnia -- tenuously ended in 1995 -- and through most of this year in the Serbian province of Kosovo, Milosevic's stop-go strategy has tested the limits of U.S. and NATO resolution. For about eight months, Serbian forces have been conducting a terror campaign in Kosovo against ethnic Albanians, who make up 90 percent of the population there. An estimated 280,000 refugees have fled from their homes to the mountains and are afraid to return for fear of Serbian police still lurking in their villages. As described by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan in a report released Tuesday, the drive against ethnic Albanians amounts to a collective punishment to teach them that the price of supporting the Kosovo Albanian paramilitary units is too high and will be even higher in the future. Kosovar Albanians want independence, yet Milosevic clings to the southern province with vicious tenacity. The conflict has persisted as long as it has because Milosevic has been able to capitalize on a lack of international resolution. Undaunted (or unconvinced) by NATO's empty posturing in June, he continued to overwhelm the ill-equipped Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), to burn villages, kill civilians and send refugees into the hills. Although the Clinton Administration, in conjunction with the United Nations Commissioner for Refugees, is planning to provide varied relief for the displaced population, the coming winter will bring devastation to the homeless. Along with appalling evidence of a September 26 massacre of ethnic Albanians in Gornje Obrinje, the season has emphasized the necessity for quick resolution of Kosovo's civil war (as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Henry Shelton calls it). Yet despite its seeming self-evidence, even at this stage in the game, resolution has been slow in the making. A UN Security Council resolution of two weeks ago ordered Milosevic to withdraw extra army and police sent to Kosovo to deal with the KLA and to send back to their barracks all military personnel normally stationed in the province. Monitoring the conflict has been difficult -- a result of land mines and roadblocks -- so whether or not he has complied with the UN demands is not certain. (Annan's report conveys a clear impression that the UN is not convinced by Milosevic's highly publicized pullback of Yugoslav troops.) What is certain, however, is Milosevic's record of broken promises and brinkmanship. He has bought time by aimless negotiation, reversals and outright lies. For instance, Richard Holbrooke, the American envoy, persuaded Milosevic in May to meet with Ibrahim Rugova, the top Albanian political leader in Kosovo. The two met and, as expected, nothing came of it. In return for the show of goodwill, Holbrooke recommended lifting a month-old foreign investment ban on Serbia. This was done, and shortly thereafter Milosevic stepped up his military operations in Kosovo. The United States was forced, once again, to reverse itself in response to Milosevic's predictable caprice. Most interesting and most disheartening about the conflict is the power dynamic, the direction of causality. A second-rate dictator sans legitimacy, sans credibility, with only a virulent nationalism backing up his far-fetched political agenda, still manages to exercise disproportionate influence on the policy-making of America and its allies. Do we believe that Milosevic will make a good-faith effort remove troops from the war-torn province because the UN Security Council resolved it to be so? No. But will we do anything about it? Maybe. What fuels his bravado in the face of international opposition is precisely this lack of consensus and resolve. Within the UN Security Council, Russia remains a dissenting voice in an otherwise unanimous censure of Milosevic. Russia has historic ties to Serbia, and Russian nationalists have been quick to side with their Orthodox brethren against what they perceive as unremitting western antagonism to Belgrade. The Primakov foreign policy apparatus has issued vague threats against any attack on Yugoslav forces (threats, as Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov knows, rendered impotent by the plight of the ruble). Though NATO does not require explicit authorization to use force, some allies would prefer the moral authority of the Security Council behind an advance. The duty devolves to the United States either to persuade the allies to act independently of the UN or to convince Russia not to invoke its veto. Yet even within the Administration there is no endgame consensus. Secretary of Defense William Cohen opposes placing American troops on the ground in Kosovo following diplomatic or military action, while Secretary of State Madeline Albright and others have not ruled out the use of ground troops. (By way of comparison: three years after the end of the Bosnian conflict, there are still some 33,000 NATO-led troops stationed there, including 7,700 Americans.) All along, Washington's approach to Kosovo has been halting and indecisive. While moving ahead with his artillery and tank offensive during the summer, Milosevic was careful not to let the conflict spill over into neighboring Albania and Macedonia. He placed mines to seal off the province's southern border, limiting the movement of arms and refugees. Thus he pandered to Washington's main fear, that Kosovo's guerrilla movement would encourage Albania and Macedonia's Albanian population to take up arms, potentially igniting another Balkan conflict. Washington does not support the independence of Kosovo, but would prefer an agreement in which the province was granted a level of autonomy slightly inferior to its pre-1989 position. This, finally, has been the main problem in formulating policy: the US is really on neither side of the conflict. Some, like Pat Buchanan, see specters of our own Civil War, allowed by Europe to run its course, and suggest a non-interventionist approach. Of course, the international system has changed enough since the mid-19th century to render any such comparison absurd. Others liken the present Balkan conflict to situations in the Horn of Africa, Ngorno-Karabakh and the Iraq-Kuwait border, other regions where ethnic and territorial disputes have resulted in long, bloody conflict. The Balkan region, however, is unique in its volatility. Throughout this century, the region has been host to the worst excesses of politics: the infamous assassination, Communism, ethnic conflict in the wake of Communism's forced cohesion. Without military force backing the repeated, incredible admonitions of our diplomats, the region may once again become the center of much broader disaster.